Philippe Le Guay's Night Shift (aka Trois Huit) shows that bullying doesn't just happen at school, it can affect people in the workplace. Pierre (Gerald Laroche) is the new guy on the night shift. He's a good-natured family man, with a seemingly idyllic life, reflected by the secluded beauty of his home. This is starkly countered by the bleak French industrial setting of the bottle factory where he works. From the very beginning, Pierre is picked on by Fred (Marc Barbe), a boorish amateur boxer, who seems threatened by Pierre's popularity among their fellow workmates. At first, Fred's acts are put down as jovial, though aggressive, behaviour. As these acts grow more violent, both mentally and physically, they begin to affect the way Pierre perceives and is perceived by his wife, Carole (Luce Mouchel) and their 12-year-old son, Victor (Bastien Le Roy). Their increasingly complex relationship makes for compelling watching. Pierre's son begins to see Fred as a stronger father figure, and it's this that forces the normally reserved Pierre to stand up to his bully. The cinematography really helps to frame the action. [+]

In He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not the adorable Audrey Tautou from Amelie plays the central role in a deceptive story of a rather unusual romance. It would spoil the film's clever design to reveal what happens halfway through, so let's just say that Tautou is cast as a winsome girl in the sunny town of Bordeaux whose relationship with a married doctor has more layers than first it seems. Samuel LeBihan, from Brotherhood of the Wolf, plays the doctor, but it's the casting of cutie-pie Tautou that sets up the movie's gradually sinister undertow. Director Laetitia Colombani's inventive structure plays a satisfyingly tricky game with the audience, and may have some viewers going back to the beginning to make sure they saw what they thought they saw. Just don't go in expecting Amelie, Deuxième Partie and you should find this an ingenious little number. -Robert Horton.

Despite rave reviews as one of the most stylish and intelligent detective pictures in a number of years, this 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel never found a mass audience. Too bad, because Carl Franklin's film is nearly perfect in every way, from its rich, shadowy look to its depiction of life in post-World War II black America (LA-style) to the acting of Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle and others. Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an aircraft factory worker who is laid off only to find his true calling: as a private eye, albeit an unlicensed one. Hired to find a missing woman, he becomes entangled in a complex but satisfying case involving sex, corruption, racism and of course money. Top-notch from top to bottom-and Cheadle is dangerously funny as Easy's best friend, a killer named Mouse. -Marshall Fine Despite rave reviews as one of the most stylish and intelligent detective pictures in a number of years, this 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel never found a mass audience. Too bad, because Carl Franklin's film is nearly perfect in every way, from its rich, shadowy look to its depiction of life in post-World War II black America (LA-style) to the acting of Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle and others. Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an aircraft factory worker who is laid off only to find his true calling: as a private eye, albeit an unlicensed one. Hired to find a missing woman, he becomes entangled in a complex but satisfying case involving sex, corruption, racism and, of course, money. Devil In A Blue Dress is top-notch from top to bottom-and Cheadle is dangerously funny as Easy's best friend, a killer named Mouse. [+]

Directed with a cool remove by Dominic Sena, Kalifornia falls somewhere between Badlands and Natural Born Killers. David Duchovny is a blocked author with a fascination for outlaw killers who hatches a plan to road trip through America's mass-murder landmarks to finish his book. He enlists the help of his frustrated photographer girlfriend Michelle Forbes, who desperately wants to leave the East Coast for LA, and they advertise for riding partners. Luckily for them, they wind up with a veteran killer, the greasy trailer-park ex-con Brad Pitt, who decides to skip parole with his cowering child-woman girlfriend Juliette Lewis. Duchovny is enamoured by gun-toting Pitt's recklessness and lawless disregard for, well, everything-simultaneously terrified and thrilled by Pitt's brutal beating of a barfly. Meanwhile, Pitt's leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. Pitt brings a ferocious magnetism to his part, but it's still hard to buy genial Duchovny's odd attraction; Juliette Lewis conveys a terrifying sense of victimization with her poor dumb creature. Despite the film's best efforts, it never really plumbs the psyche of Pitt's simmering psycho-he's just plain bad, you know-but it does fashion an effective little thriller out of the tensions brewing in the restless quartet. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

The original 1962 version of Cape Fear is directed by J Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) in a deliberately Hitchcockian manner, and stars Robert Mitchum as a creepy ex-con angry at the attorney (Gregory Peck) whom he believes is responsible for his incarceration. After Mitchum makes clear his plans to harm Peck's family, a fascinating game of crisscrossing ethics and morality takes place. Superior to Martin Scorsese's punishing 1991 remake, which seems trapped in its explicitness, Thompson's film accomplishes a lot with a more economical and telling use of violence. The result is a rich character study that explores the nature of guilt. Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake dabbles a bit in some fascinating psychological crosscurrents between its characters, but it finally trades in all that rich material for extensive and gratuitous violence. Robert De Niro plays a serial rapist released from prison after 14 years. Angry because his appalled attorney (Nick Nolte) made it easy for him to be convicted, this monster is out to hurt Nolte's character through his wife (Jessica Lange) and daughter (Juliette Lewis). The themes of interlocking guilt and anger between these people suggests a smart film in the making. But the final act, set on a boat with De Niro's vengeful pervert attacking Nolte and the two women, takes a more unfortunate direction. The stars of the original film, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, each make a cameo appearance. [+]

A welcome second volume of classics from the Master of Suspense, this seven-disc Hitchcock Collection box-set consists of the following: The Birds: Based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story, The Birds (1963) is Hitchcock at his most terrifying, as the residents of a small town are attacked by thousands of apparently homicidal birds. Marnie: Tippi Hedren and newly Bonded Sean Connery star in this excellent 1964 thriller, which finds a calculating thief who robs her employers pursued by a her new boss, who is desperate to unlock her secrets Torn Curtain: This 1966 spy thriller, pairing Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, finds Newman as a world-famous physicist intent on defecting to East Berlin in order to obtain funding for his latest project. Topaz: Based on the Leon Uris novel, Hitch's 51st film, made in 1969, concerns a CIA agent who learns of Russian missiles in Cuba. With the aid of a French agent, they negotiate a plethora of corruption and murder. Frenzy: This critically acclaimed 1972 film was Hitch's first British-made film for more than 20 years. A classic Hitch story of an innocent man accused of being the "necktie murderer"-a vicious sex criminal terrorising London-he eludes the authorities and seeks the real killer. Family Plot: Hitchcock's final film, made in 1976, is a blackly funny mix of murder, theft and kidnapping as a cab-driver and a psychic team up to find a dead man-not actually dead-in exchange for a $10,000 reward. Bonus Disc-Vertigo: An irreducible masterpiece, this 1958 double-identity thriller finds Hitch serving aces, as Jimmy Stewart's detective is drawn in to a complex plot when the girl he loves apparently falls to her death. On the DVD: Like the first volume, this is an equally impressive package that will satisfy the rotund fright-master's fans. Along with the standard selection of trailers, production notes and picture galleries, each disc houses an impressive "making of" documentary, each expertly detailing Hitch's meticulous work. [+]

Made in 1997 and directed by Kjell Sundvall, The Last Contract is based around the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986, who was shot while walking home from the cinema. Palmer's murderer or murderers were never caught and his mysterious assassination has been largely forgotten by the world. This speculative and fictional thriller suggests that Palme was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy, with even the Americans tacitly and indirectly involved, worried as they were about Palme's ambitions to turn Scandinavia into a nuclear-free zone. Mikael Persbrandt plays Roger Nyman, a Swedish police officer transferred to the Fraud Squad who discovers that an assassin responsible for a killing in Johannesburg is now contracted to kill Palme. However, his superiors take him off the case when he presents them with his findings and tries to follow up the case alone. Fearful, isolated, enraged and increasingly estranged from his family, he contrasts sharply with Michael Kitchen's suave but coolly lethal British contract killer. Though Palme's fate is foreknown, The Last Contract nonetheless succeeds in pulling you into its maelstrom of intrigue until virtually the final frame. -David Stubbs.

Alfred Hitchcock himself called this 1934 British edition of his famous kidnapping story "the work of a talented amateur", while his 1956 Hollywood remake was the consummate act of a professional director. Be that as it may, this earlier movie still has its intense admirers who prefer it over the Jimmy Stewart-Doris Day version, and for some sound reasons. Tighter, wittier, more visually outrageous (back-screen projections of Swiss mountains, a whirly-facsimile of a fainting spell), the film even has a female protagonist (Edna Best in the mom part) unafraid to go after the bad guys herself with a gun. (Did Doris Day do that that? Uh-uh. ) While the 1956 film has an intriguing undercurrent of unspoken tensions in nuclear family politics, the 1934 original has a crisp air of British optimism glummed up a bit when a married couple (Best and Leslie Banks) witness the murder of a spy and discover their daughter stolen away by the culprits. The chase leads to London and ultimately to the site of one of Hitch's most extraordinary pieces of suspense (though on this count, it must be said, the later version is superior). Take away distracting comparisons to the remake, and this Man Who Knew Too Much is a milestone in Hitchcock's early career. Peter Lorre makes his British debut as a scarred, scary villain. -Tom Keogh.