The Crimson Rivers is an openly acknowledged French attempt to make a big Hollywood-style serial-killer thriller. Jean-Ronin(1997)-Reno is Niemans, who while investigating the case of a horrifically mutilated body finds himself partnered with Kerkerian, a younger detective played by Vincent Cassell, (La Haine). Set in beautiful mountain country and shot in CinemaScope by Thierry Arbogast (Leon), it looks fabulous. Kassovitz packs the frame with stylish flourishes from a breathtaking helicopter shot in homage to The Shining (1980), to a lavish stairwell tracking shot inspired by Vertigo (1958). With a sumptuously layered score and some superbly achieved special effects The Crimson Rivers has all the expensive sheen of the American movies it imitates. Unfortunately it also proves Europeans can make films as technically accomplished but ludicrously plotted as Hollywood can: for what begins as a tense and unsettling police procedural, mutates into an action movie where the details make no sense. Even the Boys From Brazil inspired plot is ludicrous. Demonstrating Kassovitz has seen plenty of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento movies, The Crimson Rivers entertains despite its own absurdity, and should see the director following Luc Besson to Hollywood to make even bigger and dumber blockbusters. On the DVD: Despite not being labelled a special edition this two disc set is one of the most impressive releases on DVD this year; all the more remarkable for being a French film barely seen in UK cinemas. The 2. [+]

A medical horror movie from Germany, Anatomy is every bit as slick as its Hollywood equivalents (most notably Coma) but cuts a lot deeper thanks to its connections with a Gothic past. Brilliant medical student Paula Haller (Franka Potente) is accepted into a prestigious summer anatomy course at Heidelberg University and gradually learns that many of her teachers and classmates are members of the Antihippocratic League. This secret society carries out unethical vivisection experiments on live human specimens and has been active in the medical profession since the 16th century with a special peak during the Third Reich. Director-writer Stefan Ruzowitsky plays some distinctive and personal games as the heroine uncovers the conspiracy, then learns that her own family is intimately connected with the League. In gruesome but delicate horror scenes, kidnapped human specimens awake anaesthetised to the sound of easy-listening music as masked students dissect them alive to create the impressive, grotesque and beautifully preserved cutaway specimens used in the anatomy classes. Potente, the star of Run, Lola Run, has a very different role as the serious but passionate heroine and her character is affected by the revelations of the plot in a way that deepens the movie beyond the terrific suspense mechanisms of its lady-in-peril climax, in which Paula's medical knowledge and personal grit enable her to fight back. A great moment has the heroine forced to instruct her non-medical student boyfriend (Sebastian Blomberg) how to administer a simple but crucial intravenous injection to save her life, while the plausible villain turns out to be a renegade even by the standards of his secret society. On the DVD: An extremely high-quality DVD, this offers a pristine widescreen transfer (1:2. 35) of the film (enhanced for 16:9 TVs); soundtracks in German, Spanish and English with optional subtitles in English, German and a dozen other languages; a full-length commentary in German by Ruzovitsky, with English subtitles; a couple of deleted scenes, with director commentary; on-set interviews with the cast and crew and a snippets of behind-the-scenes footage; a music video by co-star Anna Loos, shot on the set of the film; trailers; filmographies; and a neat animated menu. -Kim Newman.

Adapted from Andrew Klavan's bestselling suspense novel, Don't Say a Word is a suitable companion to director Gary Fleder's earlier hit Kiss the Girls, with solid performances serving a plot that begins promisingly. The tension starts when the daughter of a top-notch New York psychiatrist (Michael Douglas) is kidnapped by a bitter ex-con (Sean Bean) with an old score to settle. Aided by an unwitting colleague (Oliver Platt), Douglas can save his daughter by extracting crucial information from a traumatised patient (Brittany Murphy), while his bedridden wife (Famke Janssen) and a tenacious detective (Jennifer Esposito) do their part to solve the mystery. Fleder pushes all the routine buttons with effectively sombre style and Don't Say a Word will satisfy anyone with a preference for high-anxiety thrillers. Even as it grows increasingly conventional, it's still entertaining without being particularly original. As a by-the-book programmer, it's just right for rainy-day viewing. -Jeff Shannon.

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. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we've become enthralled by the film's two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", Lynch's best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. -Fionn Meade.

Written and directed by Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I), this fast-moving potboiler finds its creator getting about as far from Withnail's fine wines and London and Lake District settings as it's possible to get, and into the world of bloody homicides, narrative red herrings and emotionally damaged policemen. John Berlin (Andy Garcia) is a big-city cop and, yes, that means he drinks a lot of coffee and has a terrible personal life (in this case, signified by a wife who just can't stop cheating on him). Leaving town to visit his understanding brother-in law and fellow detective Freddy Ross (Lance Henriksen), he promptly finds himself embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer with a grisly modus operandi for murdering blind women. As you might expect, it's not long before he's bumbling his way into a number of confrontations with the hick cops around him and an affair with Helena (Uma Thurman), the blind room-mate of one of the killer's victims. Slick and pacey, Jennifer 8 throws out so many plot that it eventually winds up falling over them in its haste to get to the overblown climax. Nothing here makes a great deal of sense and yet, despite its inherent cosmic silliness, Robinson handles the suspense-and-relief routine with a flashy aplomb, and the cast do well in the face of the material's shortcomings. (John Malkovich's brief appearance is a redemptive highlight, even if you do have to wait almost 90 minutes for it). -Danny Leigh.

An experimental film masquerading as a standard Hollywood thriller. The plot of Rope is simple and based on a successful stage play: two young men (John Dall and Farley Granger) commit murder, more or less as an intellectual exercise. They hide the body in their large apartment, then throw a dinner party. Will the body be discovered? Director Alfred Hitchcock, fascinated by the possibilities of the long-take style, decided to shoot this story as though it were happening in one long, uninterrupted shot. Since the camera can only hold one 10-minute reel at a time, Hitchcock had to be creative when it came time to change reels, disguising the switches as the camera passed behind someone's back or moved behind a lamp. In later years Hitchcock wrote off the approach as misguided, and Rope may not be one of Hitchcock's top movies, but it's still a nail-biter. They don't call him the Master of Suspense for nothing. James Stewart, as a suspicious professor, marks his first starring role for Hitchcock, a collaboration that would lead to the masterpieces Rear Window and Vertigo. -Robert Horton, Amazon. com.

This smart, tautly directed thriller from Wolfgang Petersen is about the cat-and-mouse games between a Secret Service agent named Horrigan (Clint Eastwood) and the brilliant, psychopathic assassin (John Malkovich) who's itching to get the President in his cross hairs. In the Line of Fire's back-story-Horrigan is haunted by his inability to prevent John Kennedy's assassination (Eastwood is computer-generated into archival footage)-is more than a little hokey, but the plotting itself is smartly, even ingeniously, constructed. Petersen manages a vice-like grip on the tension and Eastwood even gets to deliver an ever-more-timely lecture on the diminished nature of the office of President. Eastwood's as gruff and as infuriating to the by-the-book Powers That Be as ever and Malkovich oozes delightful menace. Rene Russo capably co-stars as a colleague with whom Horrigan gets friendly. -David Kronke.

In the heist thriller The Score director Frank Oz partners Robert De Niro with hotshot upstart Edward Norton and heavyweight legend Marlon Brando. De Niro plays a weary thief tempted by wily old associate Brando into, yes, one last job-a plan to steal a priceless sceptre from Montreal's Customs House. You'd have to be determinedly grumpy not to get half a kick out of Brando, De Niro and Norton-more than holding his own-coolly bouncing off one another in a Method paradise. Brando may be enormous and breathing heavily with every move, but his technique is as agile as it ever was; he still seems spontaneously clever. Oz doesn't have the most crackling visual style in the world: the film is far too smooth for tension and keeps tapping Howard Shore's music score to do most of the work in that department. The divine Angela Bassett is once again totally wasted in a 10-minute throwaway role as De Niro's girlfriend. The Score isn't anything new, and there isn't a single surprise, but if you're into this sort of thing you will respond to its polished familiarity. -Steve Wiecking, Amazon. com On the DVD: The Score on DVD offers a limited but interesting set of special features, from the 12-minute making of featurette-concentrating on the most enjoyable aspect of the film, the actors-to additional footage which shows De Niro and Brando's love of improvisation. Frank Oz and cinematographer Rob Hahn provide an insight into the intricacies of filmmaking in their commentary. [+]

The Yards fulfils the promise of writer-director James Gray's debut film, Little Odessa, proving that Gray is a mature storyteller who attracts good actors and elicits their best work. Inspired by the experiences of his own father, he sets The Yards inside the corrupt workings of the New York City railway system, in which men such as Frank Olchin (James Caan) maintain their dominance by sabotaging the work of their competitors. Mark Wahlberg is well cast as Leo Handler, who serves jail time for a crime he didn't commit and returns home to a warm welcome from his ailing mother (Ellen Burstyn), his aunt Kitty (and Frank's wife, played by Faye Dunaway), and cousin Erica (Charlize Theron). He's also welcomed by his friend Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), who does most of Uncle Frank's dirty work and brings the needy Leo into his lucrative fold. Things go from bad to worse, and Leo's suspected in the killing of a railway official and the beating of a city patrolman. On the run, he uncovers the political machinations that keep Uncle Frank in power, and The Yards unfolds as a compelling tale of family, twisted loyalties, and the quest for truth. There's stellar work from everyone involved, but if The Yards has one major flaw, it's that Gray directs with a solemnity that's almost off-putting, as if a moment of levity would violate his story's integrity. Visually the movie invites comparison to The Godfather, and it boasts much of that film's moral complexity and depth of character, but it's too self-consciously heavy, and that compromises its overall impact. Still, this is good work from a talented director whose future films will be watched with interest. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. [+]

Claude Chabrol's nervy and nasty little 2001 thriller Merci Pour le Chocolat is based on Charlotte Armstrong's novel The Chocolate Cobweb. In Chabrol's hands it becomes a vehicle of considerable power for the unsettling, disturbed qualities of actress Isabelle Huppert, who has been one of his most important muses over the years (their other collaborations include La Cérémonie and Rien ne va Plus). Huppert plays Mika, the owner of a Swiss chocolate factory, now married to a world-class concert pianist (Jacques Dutronc) and with a stepson who is obsessive about making the family's drinking chocolate every day. As the clues unravel, it soon becomes clear that Mika is damaged goods. When Dutronc acquires a piano student (Anna Mougalis) in curious circumstances, Mika is forced to escalate her secret agenda. Huppert is fascinating throughout and the film is sinewy and, for the most part, rather clever, evoking shades of Hitchcock and Clouzot. Liszt's Les Funérailles is the ominous leitmotif, worked on by Dutronc and his protégé, and the Lausanne setting creates an other-worldliness which seems almost sterile. Only at the end does the picture dwindle into an almost Strindbergian inertia as Mika's motivation seems to evaporate in a rather unsatisfactory way. Until then it is spellbinding. -Piers Ford.

Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) is a lawyer with a wife and family whose happily normal life is turned upside down after a chance meeting with a college buddy (Jason Lee) at a lingerie shop. Unbeknownst to the lawyer, he's just been burdened with a videotape of a congressman's assassination. Hot on the tail of this tape is a ruthless group of National Security Agents commanded by a belligerently ambitious fed named Reynolds (Jon Voight). Using surveillance from satellites, bugs and other sophisticated snooping devices, the NSA infiltrates every facet of Dean's existence, tracing each physical and digital footprint he leaves. Driven by acute paranoia, Dean enlists the help of a clandestine former NSA operative named Brill (Gene Hackman) and Enemy of the State kicks into high-intensity hyperdrive. Teaming up once again with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Top Gun director Tony Scott demonstrates his glossy style with clever cinematography and breakneck pacing. Will Smith proves that there's more to his success than a brash sense of humour, giving a versatile performance that plausibly illustrates a man cracking under the strain of paranoid turmoil. Hackman steals the show by essentially reprising his role from The Conversation-just imagine his memorable character Harry Caul some 20 years later. Most of all, the film's depiction of high-tech surveillance is highly convincing and dramatically compelling, making this a cautionary tale with more substance than you'd normally expect from a Scott-Bruckheimer action extravaganza. -Jeremy Storey.

Based on Thomas Harris's novel, Jonathan Demme's terrifying adaptation of Silence of the Lambs contains only a couple of genuinely shocking moments (one involving an autopsy, the other a prison break). The rest of the film is a splatter-free visual and psychological descent into the hell of madness, redeemed astonishingly by an unlikely connection between a monster and a haunted young woman. Anthony Hopkins is extraordinary as the cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter, virtually entombed in a subterranean prison for the criminally insane. At the behest of the FBI, agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) approaches Lecter, requesting his insights into the identity and methods of a serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). In exchange, Lecter demands the right to penetrate Starling's most painful memories, creating a bizarre but palpable intimacy that liberates them both under separate but equally horrific circumstances. Demme, a filmmaker with a uniquely populist vision (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild), also spent his early years making pulp for Roger Corman (Caged Heat) and he hasn't forgotten the significance of tone, atmosphere and the unsettling nature of a crudely effective close-up. Much of the film, in fact, consists of actors staring straight into the camera (usually from Clarice's point of view), making every bridge between one set of eyes to another seem terribly dangerous. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com On the DVD: On disc one, the film itself looks clinically sharp in a faultless widescreen (1. 85:1) anamorphic transfer, while the Dolby 5. [+]

One of the most ambitious animated films to come out of Japan (or anywhere, for that matter), Perfect Blue is an adult psycho-thriller that uses the freedom of the animated image to create the subjective reality of a young actress haunted by the ghost of her past identity. Mima is a singer who leaves her teeny-bop trio to become an actress in a violent television series, a career move that angers her fans, who prefer to see her as the pert, squeaky-clean pop idol. Plagued by self-doubt and tormented by humiliating compromises, she begins to be stalked, in her waking and sleeping moments, by an accusing alter ego who claims to be "the real Mima", until she collapses into madness as her co-workers are brutally slain around her. Director Satoshi Kon, adapting the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, shows us the world from her schizophrenic perspective: days blur, dreams cross over into the waking world, the TV show blends into her real life, until her life merges with her part and she can't separate the ghosts from the real-life stalkers. Though the pat ending sweeps the psychosis and anxiety away with nary an emotional scar, it remains a smart, stylish thriller and one of the most intelligent and compelling uses of animation in recent years. Though tame by the extreme standards of "adult anime", there is nudity and a few sexually provocative scenes, and the animation is detailed and stylised (if somewhat stiff and jerky by Disney standards). -Sean Axmaker.

Just Cause is a film that relies on phony plot twists and steals openly from any other thriller that it can remember. If there was a drinking game requiring players to drink during every cinematic "homage", you'd be tanked after its first 45 minutes. Take one case of racial injustice, place it in an exotic, exquisitely photographed location (the Florida Everglades), and bring in an outsider, played by a bankable star, to save the day. Make sure nothing appears as it seems. Add a couple of plot twists, some over-the-top character actors (Ed Harris, shamelessly riffing on Hannibal Lecter), stir, and serve. The big name in this case is Sean Connery, who plays a Harvard law professor summoned to the swamps by an apparently innocent death row inmate (Blair Underwood), who swears he didn't rape and kill that 11-year-old girl. He says he confessed because maverick psycho-cop Tanny Brown (Laurence Fishburne) made him play a solo game of Russian roulette. He says his Serial-killer neighbour on death row (Harris) committed the crime. Connery buys it, the audience buys it, and how could they not? Director Arne Glimcher (who made the lacklustre Mambo Kings) coerces everyone with simplistic plot manipulations. Characters are given no depth, and the actors are pawns moved about like pieces on a Cluedo gameboard. [+]

Fifteen Minutes partners Robert De Niro and Saving Private Ryan's Edward Burns in a thriller satire on America's "reality TV" industry. De Niro plays celebrity detective Eddie Fleming, who must reluctantly work with arson investigator Jordy Warsaw (Burns) when a grisly fire is discovered to conceal a murder. This is the work of Emil (Karel Roden) and Oleg (Oleg Taktarov), East European psychos bent on a maniacal spree of killings. All of these are videotaped by Emil, who renames himself after his hero Frank Capra, in a perverse tribute to the US of A, where "no one is responsible for what they do!". Soon the duo decide to sell their footage to Kelsey Grammer's creepily shameless frontline TV journalist. As a pair of loons whose scariness is just the right side of cardboard villainy, Roden and Taktarov steal the movie as well as their camcorder. However, the central theme of voyeurism and video murder was dealt with far more effectively in the 1992 Belgian movie Man Bites Dog and, while the action tears along in explosive fashion, it does so at the expense of both plausibility and the anti-media satire, which seems hitched crudely onto the bumper of what is essentially a satisfying but conventional blockbuster thriller. -David Stubbs.

Val Kilmer stars in The Ghost and the Darkness as Lt Col John Patterson, a 19th-century Irish engineer drafted by Britain's railroad bosses to build a trestle bridge over an African river, thus expanding the empire a tiny bit more. In Tsavo, Patterson is instantly hailed for killing a man-eating lion that had been making life hell for native workers. But morale sinks when two more unstoppable big cats devour more men and destroy the project. Along comes an, expatriate American hunter (Michael Douglas) to help Patterson face the almost preternatural powers of the two killers. The script by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) is based on fact, though the film owes more to Steven Spielberg (specifically to Jaws) than history. There are also suggestive echoes of Kipling and Conrad in the material and characters, and there are hints of emotional complexity and psychological nuance that make one wish this could have been a great film instead of a merely fun one. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

A teen-themed entry in the long-established Psycho-Bitch-from-Hell sub-genre of Hollywood thriller, Wicked affords current high school princess Julia Stiles an opportunity to stop smiling and play a manipulative, disturbed, alienated girl who is also the number one suspect in the “did she or didn't she batter Mum to death with a heavy tragedy mask” mystery. Set in one of those hideous American "gated communities", a pastel suburban enclave with round-the-clock security and enough adulteries to keep a soap going for a year, the film is subtler than stablemates like The Crush and Teacher's Pet, with a more convoluted plot and enough suspects to put the outcome in doubt. However it's still a by-the-numbers mix of soap and suspense. Stiles crosses her eyes and pouts a lot, making tastefully incestuous moves on her weakling father (an aptly hollow William R Moses), but she's not really well cast in a role Christina Ricci could have played in her sleep a few years ago. The best supporting performance comes from Michael Parks as a drawling cop brought into the community by the killing of the strident mother (Chelsea Field), who lingers to watch the fall-out as Stiles replaces Mum as the homemaker only to be sidelined in favour of the au pair who needs a green-card marriage. When the battering and stabbing starts, the film is surprisingly explicit, splattering several distinct types of stage blood around the designer living caricature home. On the DVD: the picture is an anamorphic 1. 85:1 print, with Dolby Digital surround-sound. The minimal extras include trailers, filmographies for very few of the principals, and a neat menu. -Kim Newman.