What is it about director Richard Donner that Mel Gibson enjoys so much that he's appeared in five of Donner's films? Is it the on-set pranks? Could it be the big-budget perks and $20 million paychecks? Or is it just a well-stocked catering table? Whatever the case, the Lethal Weapon star and director teamed up again, along with fellow superstar Julia Roberts, for this typically glossy, entertaining but ultimately hokey thriller. Gibson plays New York cab driver Jerry Fletcher, whose wacky belief in conspiracies finally hits on a coincidental truth involving an evil figure named Jonas (Patrick Stewart) and a secret program of government-funded mind control. Roberts plays the Justice Department attorney who finally believes in Jerry's paranoid ramblings. With a plot (from LA Confidential co-writer Brian Helgeland) that's a lot of fun as long as you don't think about it too critically, Conspiracy Theory benefits immeasurably from the charisma of its high-magnitude stars. -Jeff Shannon.

Out of Sight was one of the best movies of 1998 but ironically this superior crime comedy was a box-office disappointment. Fortunately the movie can enjoy a long life on home video and DVD, where it can be savoured by anyone who missed its original release. Making one of his strongest films since his 1989 debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape and his recent hit Erin Brockovich, director Steven Soderbergh pays tribute to the signature wit and intricacy of Elmore Leonard's novel, brilliantly adapted by Scott Frank, the gifted screenwriter who previously adapted Leonard's Get Shorty. The movie is primarily a showcase for the talent and chemistry of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, respectively playing a career bank robber who has escaped from jail and the federal agent who falls for his charms while tracking him down. Soderbergh directs with confident visual flair, shifting timelines (à la Pulp Fiction) to weave together subplots and maintain vivid focus on Leonard's splendid characters and smooth-as-silk dialogue. While the sexy repartée between Clooney and Lopez recalls the vintage interplay of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Ving Rhames and Steve Zahn add ample comic relief as Clooney's accomplices. Dennis Farina is memorable as Lopez's father and Albert Brooks is almost unrecognisable as a Wall Street crook whose mansion-and a cache of uncut diamonds-provides the setting for the film's climactic caper. As orchestrated by Soderbergh, the film offers a feast of plot twists and surprises but it never loses track of its delightful characters and the clever wit that brings them so vividly to life. -Jeff Shannon.

Just what the world needs, another riff on that post-Psycho horror cliché: the slasher movie. In this version, which considerably dumbs down the Lois Duncan book, the bad guy chases naughty teenagers with a hook, all the while dressed as a dark version of the Gorton's fisherman. They seem to have killed someone in a car accident while out partying, and a price must be paid. Nothing new is added to the genre by I Know What You Did Last Summer, though it would be unfair not to note that this does have some scary moments. That is about all it has, because as much as this wanted to be another Scream, it hasn't the heart or the script. It does, however, have the requisite cast of small-screen stars (including Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt and Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar) to have snagged box-office success, spawning a sequel. -Rochelle O'Gorman.

A potboiler featuring a demented caretaker and a seemingly hapless suburban family, this is The Nanny of the 1990s. However, it is much more predictable than that 1965 Bette Davis psychodrama, and more graphic. It works only because Rebecca De Mornay makes us intensely uncomfortable as the disturbed au pair who wants to take care of much more than her employer's well-being. Annabella Sciorra plays the perfect mother of a flawless family. Her obstetrician, however, is less than wonderful, having enjoyed her examination much more than he should have. When she files sexual harassment charges against the repugnant doctor, he loses face-literally-after shooting himself in the head. Several months later, an ideal nanny shows up at her home. You guessed it-she's the doc's widow. The movie follows a tried and trusted formula, with the audience in on everything. However, the story does surprise us in intense and intimate ways. [+]

One Hour Photo marks Robin Williams' third film running as the bad guy, following on from Insomnia and the straight-to-video (in the UK) Death to Smoochy. It's also his most chilling role to date. Playing "photo guy" Sy Parrish, obsessed by the seemingly perfect family who are his most regular customers, he paints a desperate image of a lonely, fanatical man whose only comfort lies in imagining himself a part of the lives of the wealthy, happy Yorkins family (headed by Connie Nielsen). Devastated by being fired from his job at the processing lab, and making a shocking discovery on his exit, he descends into psychosis. Director and screenwriter Mark Romanek, previously best known for his Nine Inch Nails and Madonna music videos, has made a stylish, distinctive entry into the world of mainstream movies; the film combines an ever-intensifying sense of menace with some unconventional shocks that never descend into clichés. Refreshingly, the film is presented from Parrish's point of view rather than the Yorkins', and it's a real (if disquieting) treat to see Williams ditch his usual bumbling buffoon character and get another meaty role to sink his teeth into. Eschewing the formulas and devices of the standard thriller with bleak effectiveness, One Hour Photo is a far more intelligent proposition than most of its peers-though it may be a disappointment to those expecting visceral thrills. On the DVD: One Hour Photo's beautifully austere photography and skilful use of colour translates excellently to the DVD's anamorphic widescreen format. The stylish menu screens have a photo-processing theme with stills and film footage; the extras comprise an informative and often amusing commentary from Romanek and Williams, a 25-minute Sundance Channel "Anatomy of a Scene" feature, a 12-minute Cinemax featurette, and an in-depth and entertaining half-hour interview with director and star from New York's acclaimed Charlie Rose show. The film is presented in Dolby Digital 5. [+]

"Belief gets us there", explains nun Linda Hunt to grieving widower Kevin Costner in Dragonfly. Costner plays an emergency room doctor whose ordered world is startled by "messages" from his dead wife. She's talking about the journey from life to death, but it describes the doctor's road from fact to faith equally well as he puzzles out the otherworldly events of his life. Costner's mourning comes off less lost and sad than simply emotionless and inert, but he finds good support from Kathy Bates as his sassy neighbour. Her appearances, along with a few startling horror-movie-type shocks, energise a film otherwise shrouded in loss, grief, and the hushed mood of supernatural spookiness. It's like a fusing of Ghost, The Sixth Sense, and The Mothman Prophecies, a New Age melodrama in a sentimental key that works through a rather contrived mystic mystery to a glowing climax. This is less a ghost story than a modern twist on the old-fashioned miracle. -Sean Axmaker.

After a foolproof scam turns sour, Jimmy the Saint (a soulful but miscast Andy Garcia, who mainly acts with his hair) and his hard-bitten crew must put their various sordid affairs in order before facing their final bloody curtain call. It's not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, but Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead is a terminally wise-ass (and extremely violent) caper flick, and is still one of the better post-Tarantino crime opuses, with some sharp dialogue, a scenery-chewing Christopher Walken (as a paraplegic archcriminal) and unhinged performances by Treat Williams and the obsequious Steve Buscemi that must be seen to be (dis)believed. Neophyte scripter Scott Rosenberg would later pen hipper-than-thou scripts for Beautiful Girls, Con Air and Armageddon, while director Gary Fleder moved on to the somewhat more reputable Kiss the Girls. The tongue-twisting title is from a Warren Zevon song. -Andrew Wright.

Just about acceptable as an in-flight movie, High Crimes is a tad weak for the big-screen, though its amiable stars and typical plotting offer the comforts of familiarity for home viewing. Ashley Judd plays a high-end lawyer who specialises in brilliant defence of the guilty, while Morgan Freeman is a broken-down ex-drunk who specialises in court martials ("military justice is to justice what military music is to music"). When Judd's handyman husband (Jim Caviezel) is arrested by the FBI and indicted for a massacre carried out in El Salvador while he was serving as a marine, Judd gets over the fact that he has concealed his entire past and even his real name and rallies to fight the case, even if it means going up against the shadowy masters of a conspiracy to cover up what actually happened. The movie rattles through all the clichés: bugs in phones; cars that cruise ominously by; staged road accidents; night-time intrusions; mystery men who hand out clues in the supermarket; dubious polygraph results; appearing and disappearing witnesses; smugly brutal generals, brilliantly made points of law; fights in the interview room; multiple revelations; a media circus and a final tussle in a darkened, deserted house. Judd, one of the best screen actresses of her generation, needs to pick better scripts since her commitment to rubbish only makes her look silly, but Freeman has done enough of these walk-through parts to get by on charisma and the odd smart line. On the DVD: High Crimes on disc comes with a gaggle of featurettes: a chat with the author of the original novel, Joseph Finder, some making-of puffery about staging stunts and the working relationship of the stars, and interesting little bits with the technical advisors about the court martial system and how to beat a polygraph. Franklin contributes a commentary track with a lot of enthusiasm, which is a little more pleased with the end product than most viewers will be. -Kim Newman.

Workplace dramas seem to have become a French speciality, and Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips ("Sur mes levres") proves a worthy follow-up to such notable predecessors in the genre as Human Resources and Time Out ("L'Emploi du temps"). The film also nods towards Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and Hitchcock's Rear Window, but it's none the worse for that. Carla, our anti-heroine (Emmanuelle Devos), is an ugly duckling working as a secretary for a construction company in suburban Paris. Dowdy and all-but deaf, she's exploited and put upon by her male coworkers. When her boss lets her hire an assistant she bizarrely chooses Paul (Vincent Cassel), a scruffy and none-too-bright ex-con. But an odd symbiosis grows up between this pair of losers; the combination of his petty-criminal skills and her lip-reading abilities has certain potentials. As A Self-Made Hero, his previous movie, showed, Audiard doesn't go in for lovable characters. Carla is no long-suffering saint and Paul is frankly sleazy, but this just makes their interaction all the more intriguing. Devos, glowering malevolently beneath her dark brows, and Cassel with his greasy hair and ratty moustache, turn in relishably truculent and un-starry performances, and Audiard deftly manages the transition from office comedy to gangland heist thriller with no grinding of gears. By the end the plot starts to strain belief, but it scarcely matters. [+]

Kiss the Girls is a thriller about a collaboration between two serial killers, and, coming after The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, it feels like a pale attempt to cash in on the success of those earlier, better films. That's a pity, because this film certainly has its strengths-particularly in the central performances of Morgan Freeman as a forensic detective and Ashley Judd as a would-be victim who escaped from one of the killers. Director Gary Fleder demonstrates visual flair and maintains an involving undercurrent of tension, but as this adaptation of James Patterson's novel approaches its climax, familiar elements combine to form a chronic case of thriller déjà vu. It's altogether competent filmmaking in the service of a moribund story of competing psychopaths, and by the time the serial killers reach the home stretch of their twisted contest, the movie's dangerously close to Freddy Kruger territory, with a finale that could've been borrowed from any one of dozens of similar thrillers. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

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.

Among Stanley Kubrick's early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick's eye. With a dry narration we're introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it's being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it. On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that's been dug up as an extra. -Paul Tonks.

An effective exercise in "confined cinema", Panic Room is a finely crafted thriller that ultimately transcends the thinness of its premise. David Koepp's screenplay is basically Wait Until Dark on steroids, so director David Fincher (Seven, The Game) compensates with elaborate CGI-assisted camera moves, jazzing up his visuals. A relocated New York divorcée (Jodie Foster) and her diabetic daughter (Kristen Stewart) fight for their lives against a trio of tenacious burglars (Jared Leto, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam) in their new Manhattan townhouse. They're safe in a customised, impenetrable "panic room", but the burglars want what's in the room's safe, so mother and daughter (and Koepp and Fincher) must find clever ways to turn the tables and persevere. Suspense and intelligence are admirably maintained, with Foster (who replaced the then-injured Nicole Kidman) relying on her Silence of the Lambs resourcefulness. It's not as viscerally satisfying as Fincher's previous thrillers, but Panic Room definitely holds the viewer's attention. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Judged entirely on its own merits, Jaws 2 isn't a bad film. It even has some passably scary moments (Brody discovering a charred body in the waves; the swimming boy racing the shark back to his dinghy). But it's absolutely impossible to judge this movie on its own merits. Despite being given a great big Panavision camera to play with director Jeannot Szwarc can't hide his TV-movie origins, nor can the script, both of which spend far too long landlocked with the bickering inhabitants of Amity Island. Where the original film boldly set out to sea with Robert Shaw's Ahab-like Quint, in a misplaced desire to attract a teenage audience this movie dwells at interminable length on the courting rituals of the local youth; where Spielberg's original is a masterpiece of pacing and carefully timed tension-building, Jaws 2 sags terribly whenever the plastic shark swims out of sight. Roy Scheider comes off best, reprising his role as Chief Brody, while Lorraine Gary's role as his wife is expanded (she must be a glutton for punishment: she also starred in Jaws 4: The Revenge). Taken as a sequel Jaws 2 is inferior in every way; taken as an unassuming TV movie it's a respectable, workmanlike effort; but looking forward at what was to follow, it begins to look like a minor masterpiece. -Mark Walker.

Despite copious swearing and a corporate rock soundtrack, The Hole might, more appropriately, have begun with a title sequence of silhouettes cavorting in front of a fiery backdrop; it owes far more to Tales of the Unexpected than the slick US teen movies (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty) it tries so hard to imitate. This British horror flick displays the same cheap production values as the 1970's series, but rather than staying within the confines of a half-hour TV slot, The Hole stretches its thin, but promising, premise over 90 minutes. Based on Guy Burt's novel, the story follows three rich kids from an exclusive English boarding school who avoid their school field trip by hiding out in an underground bunker. Liz (a suitably embarrassed Thora Birch) tags along for the ride in the hope that she may consummate her crush on Mike Steel (Desmond Harrington), the school's resident American hipster. They are then left imprisoned, which should be the cue for The Breakfast Club Goes Insane but isn't, as director Nick Hamm eschews the straightforward in favour of clumsy flashbacks and contrived plot twists, robbing the film of any tension or shock and turning it into a tiresome stretch in the company of four very disagreeable stereotypes. The Hole is a witless movie, entirely lacking the self-referential humour and technical skill of its better American counterparts. If you want classic British horror, try Peeping Tom or The Wicker Man instead. The Hole is a movie that may be set deep underground, but ultimately it's a very shallow experience. On the DVD: the extras add nothing to this movie. The theatrical trailer and widescreen 2. [+]

The Net, the first of Hollywood's big cyber-thrillers of the mid-1990s, was also the most successful, thanks in large part to the natural appeal of star Sandra Bullock. Still riding high from Speed and While You Were Sleeping, Bullock plays a computer expert victimised by sinister cyber-forces who steal her identity for reasons unknown. It's a clever combination of high-tech paranoia and Hitchcockian references (including Jeremy Northam as a romantic stranger named Devlin, after Cary Grant in Notorious). Film historians may look back someday on films like this-Roger Ebert calls them "hacksploitation"-to see what they reveal about our society's reaction to the increasing role of technology in our lives, just as we now study the fears of Communism and the atom bomb reflected in films of the 1950s. Dennis Miller and Diane Baker co-star. -Jim Emerson, Amazon. com.

A thinking person's thriller, Spy Game employs dense plotting without sacrificing the kinetic momentum that is director Tony Scott's trademark. The film has the byzantine scope of a novel, focusing on veteran CIA operative Nathan Muir (Robert Redford), whose protégé Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is scheduled for execution in a Chinese prison. It's Muir's last day before retiring (cliché alert!), and Bishop is being deliberately sacrificed by oily CIA officials to ensure healthy trade with China. Muir has 24 hours to rescue Bishop and his perfunctory love interest (Catherine McCormack), and Spy Game connects the mentor's end-run strategy to flashbacks of his student's exploits in Berlin, Beirut and beyond. Ambitious but emotionally bland-and not as exciting as Scott's Enemy of the State-Spy Game offers pass-the-torch humour between leather-faced Redford and pretty boy Pitt, and although their dialogue is occasionally limp, the movie compensates with efficient style and substance. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his own 1934 spy thriller is an exciting event in its own right, with several justifiably famous sequences. James Stewart and Doris Day play American tourists who discover more than they wanted to know about an assassination plot. When their son is kidnapped to keep them quiet, they are caught between concern for him and the terrible secret they hold. When asked about the difference between this version of the story and the one he made 22 years earlier, Hitchcock always said the first was the work of a talented amateur while the second was the act of a seasoned professional. Indeed, several extraordinary moments in this update represent consummate film-making, particularly a relentlessly exciting Albert Hall scene, with a blaring symphony, an assassin's gun, and Doris Day's scream. Along with Hitchcock's other films from the mid-1950s to 1960 (including Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho), The Man Who Knew Too Much is the work of a master in his prime. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.