As courtroom dramas go, Suspect (1987) has plenty to commend it-not least the genuine, mounting suspense, well-drawn characters who really make you care about the outcome, great use of Washington locations and excellent performances. As Kathleen Riley, the public defender with the thankless task of helping a homeless mute Vietnam veteran to face a particularly nasty murder charge, Cher provides a complex character study: loneliness, danger, long hours in a gruelling profession and patronising judges have so far failed to snuff out her basic ideals. She is well-matched by Dennis Quaid's charming rogue lobbyist Eddie Sanger who compromises her professional integrity from the juror's bench but ultimately proves an invaluable ally, and Liam Neeson who evokes real pathos as the accused man. Frazier fans should note an altogether darker side of John Mahoney, who plays the psychiatrist's father in the sitcom, in his performance as the presiding judge. With its literate script, Suspect is a high quality film which comprises multiple layers of plot and character. Like all really good mysteries, it stands repeated viewing. On the DVD: Alongside the usual filmographies for the main actors and director Peter Yates, and trailers for other Columbia Tristar releases, this DVD has an extremely useful and incisive Director's Commentary. No intrusive self-indulgent pondering here: Yates talks gently and lucidly about all the key elements of filmmaking. He speaks with real respect and affection about his actors. Most interesting of all, he has some salient points to make about the way films are processed for DVD and video release, like lightening them so that suspense scenes in which darkness plays a key part are diluted. [+]

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.

In Witness Protection lifelong Mafia hood Bobby "Bats" Batton (Tom Sizemore) wakes up one night to discover a price on his head and nowhere to go but to the cops, under protection as a federal witness. Based on the article "The Invisible Family" by Robert Sabbag, this HBO film drops us into the volatile period between lives as Bats takes his family off the streets and into a federal bunker where they begin shaping their new identities. Surrounded by surveillance cameras and locked in an apartment that feels like a fancy prison block, the formerly prosperous family starts to suffocate and self-destruct while it becomes clear just what a "readjustment of expectations" really means. Sizemore is excellent as the hot-headed gangster paralysed by helplessness, but Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is especially moving as the once-hopeful wife who buckles as her husband's secrets and lies are revealed. It's an interesting dynamic: the swaggering goodfella forced into a working-class life elicits little sympathy, but the toll on the family torn apart by recriminations, blame and frustration is affecting and powerful. They're undergoing a crash course in family therapy with federal official Forest Whitaker as their tough-love crisis counsellor. While the screenplay at times feels contrived, the drama is always potent. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

Pandora couldn't resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let's just say in Mulholland Drive David Lynch indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, "a love story in the city of dreams", Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film's first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. -Fionn Meade David Lynch's Lost Highway is one of the most puzzled-over movies of the 1990s. But there are no straight answers. This film is "about" a lot of things: obsession, the impossible notion of owning a partner, why tailgating is wrong. Beyond that, it's about nothing more than enjoying just how sensually delicious everything looks and sounds on Lynch's Highway. -Paul Tonks Eraserhead is a horror movie unlike any other. A fuzzy-haired young man, trapped in his apartment, has a series of nightmarish experiences, among which is a scene in which his head is used to make the rubbers that fit on the ends of pencils. -Nikki Disney.

Clint Eastwood (making his very assured directorial debut) is a poetry-spouting stud-muffin DJ stalked by a maniacally amorous fan after a misguided one-night stand in this enjoyably schlocky, undeniably effective film about good intentions gone murderously wacky. Although many of the very 1970s trappings presented here may ultimately be too dated to be taken seriously (including a highly self-indulgent jazz number and a hilariously gooey seduction number between Eastwood and Donna Mills), the core premise of infatuation taken out of bounds remains uncomfortably plausible-and was influential enough to be appropriated by one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. (Here's a hint-it starred Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, and a very unfortunate bunny rabbit. ) A well-staged and occasionally very frightening thriller worth watching for Jessica Walter's peerlessly unhinged performance alone. Frequent Eastwood collaborator Don Siegel (director of Dirty Harry, Coogan's Bluff and The Beguiled, to name but a few) has a nice cameo as Murphy, the moustachioed, chess-playing bartender. -Andrew Wright, Amazon. com.

An entry in the recent rash of crooks-falling-out cynical crime-comedy noirs, Four Dogs Playing Poker opens with a robbery at a wedding in Buenos Aires. Five friends pose as staff and guests to penetrate the secret collector's vault of lecherous father-of-the-bride George Lazenby and walk away with a valuable dancing-girl statue. Back in Los Angeles, the team are visited by their sponsor, hefty guest-star crook Forrest Whitaker, who tells them there's a question as to whether the statue is on the ship that's supposed to be smuggling it into the country. If it doesn't show up they'll have to cough up a million dollars between them or get killed. To underline the point and in the first of many "it-just-doesn't-make-sense" plot turns, Whitaker has his men shoot Tim Curry, organiser of the gang, in the leg and then, to show that trying to leave town is a bad idea, has him hung up dead in a meat locker with his feet chain sawed off (offscreen) by the comedy British double-act thugs. An unbelievably complicated scheme is hatched between the surviving four, two couples, whereby they each take out insurance policies that benefit the rest and pick cards and safety-deposit box-keys that identify one of them as the designated murderer and another as a victim. Naturally, suspicions simmer (one character, when asked if she distrusts her friends, replies "all my friends are thieves") and triple-crosses are hatched. The prolific Olivia Williams, in Lulu wig and American accent, emerges as the star, walking a knife-edge between imperilled heroine and cynical manipulator but she is ably supported by druggie, computer savvy Daniel London, hunky bartender Balthazar Getty and jittery insurance functionary Stacy Edwards. Familiar, if watchable. -Kim Newman.

Ever since this convoluted thriller dazzled audiences and critics in 1995 and won an Oscar for Christopher McQuarrie's twisting screenplay, The Usual Suspects has continued to divide movie lovers into opposite camps. While a lot of people take great pleasure from the movie's now-famous central mystery (namely, "Who is Keyser Söze?"), others aren't so easily impressed by a movie that's too enamoured of its own cleverness to make much sense. After all, what are we to make of a final scene that renders the entire movie obsolete? Half the fun of The Usual Suspects is the debate it provokes and the sheer pleasure of watching its dynamic cast in action, led (or should we say, mislead) by Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey as the club-footed con man who recounts the saga of enigmatic Hungarian mobster Keyser Söze. Spacey's in a band of thieves that includes Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, and Benicio Del Toro, all gathered in a plot to steal a large shipment of cocaine. The story is told in flashback as a twisted plot being described by Spacey's character to an investigating detective (Chazz Palmintieri), and The Usual Suspects is enjoyable for the way it keeps the viewer guessing right up to its surprise ending. Whether that ending will enhance or extinguish the pleasure is up to each viewer to decide. Even if it ultimately makes little or no sense at all, this is a funny and fiendish thriller, guaranteed to entertain even its vocal detractors. -Jeff Shannon Bryan Singer's film noir The Usual Suspects casts a mesmerising spell, with the plot luring the viewer into ever-deeper and darker places. According to director, Singer, the premise for the film evolved from a magazine article. What does the phrase "usual suspects" actually mean, who are they and what happens when you probe their identity? Here, they are five expert criminals and a crippled con man in a line-up. [+]

This 1997 thriller For Hire ponders the question of what terrible things a person might be persuaded to do, given the right circumstances and the right price. Rob Lowe plays Mitch, a Chicago cab driver trying to make it as an actor, married to the pregnant Faye. Among his clients are bestselling writer Lou Weber (Joe Mantegna), who befriends Mitch and confides in him that a drug dealer is trying to kill him. Over the next few days, Mitch begins to suffer severe stomach pains, collapsing in Weber's apartment after a fare and is diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. With only a short time to live, he decides to take up Weber's offer to rub out his drug dealer stalker for $50,000, a nest egg for his family after he's gone. A not entirely unpredictable twist follows, hinted at by the Lucifer-like beard sported by Mantegna and the film alights only briefly to meditate on the potential for evil in all of us before resuming its journey along conventional, though certainly passable Hollywood thriller lines. An intriguing precept-it's just a slight shame that neither the players nor director's hearts seem really to be in this movie. On the DVD: Features a trailer. -David Stubbs.