Tag: b

Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich

  By

★★½
“Probably just about the best of the series to date. Take that as you will.”

After the abomination that was Part 2, I’d filed the third entry under ‘watch whenever I have time’, until a spirited debate on its merits (or otherwise) broke out on over oun our GWG forums. That got this one fast-tracked, and I am here to pronounce the official word is… it’s alright, I s’pose. Malthe has improved markedly since she took over the role from Kristanna Loken. In #2, she was little more than a clothes-horse, but now possesses some genuine charisma, though in terms of fighting skills, still leaves a good chunk to be desired. The makers, apparently realizing this, offer distraction in the way of ample cleavage shots, and some gratuitous nudity – which, if your luck is like mine, is exactly when your wife will walk in. Admittedly, telling her I was going to be watching Schindler’s List was probably a mistake, in hindsight…

As you can likely surmise from the title, this takes place in World War II – if you’re playing along at home, that’s three different centuries for the movies now, so I guess the next one will have to be ‘Bloodrayne in Space’ [Uwe, send payment for this idea to the PO Box, please]. During an attack on a train taking ‘undesirables’ to the death camps, Rayne sinks her fangs into the local Kommandant (Pare). However, she doesn’t kill him, and with the help of the local resistance, has to clean up the resulting mess, before Der Kommandant and his mad doctor (Howard) can get to Berlin and turn Hitler into Der VampireFuehrer.

The main problem is that runs only about 70 minutes before the very slow end-credit crawl, and feels like a good hour is missing somehow, as the storyline leaps about, and rushes through a finale that seems completely unsatisfying and badly under-written. The result is a movie where the individual scenes are decent enough, yet you reach the end and find yourself thinking, “Is that it?” and wondering if you had dozed off someehere in the middle. The sense of unfulfilled expectations are likely down to this. If the movie is certainly a clear upgrade on its immediate predecessor, it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise. Still, I’d like to see what Malthe can do in a less apparently-hurried production.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Star: Natassia Malthe, Michael Pare, Brendan Fletcher, Clint Howard

The Breakout

  By

★★★½
“Really, DVD company? “Ultimate chick fighting”? Sheesh.”

S’funny what you stumble across on Netflix, at the end of a long chain of “See also…” recommendations came this, which according to the Amazon listing, this was “the first ever all women’s Mixed Martial Arts fight card.” Which it isn’t. I can state this for a fact, because we already reviewed Hook ‘n’ Shoot: Revolution, from almost five years prior to this night in Minnesota. This has similar strengths and weaknesses: there are clearly a number of talented women fighters, but it’s hard to put together a card without mismatches.

The most obvious one here is a main event which pitted Megumi Fujii against local fighter Cody Welchlin. Fujii was a perfect 10-0, while Welchlin had exactly one fight on her record. I read online Welchlin was a late replacement, and if so credit is due for taking on one of the top fighters in the world at two weeks notice. However, the result was exactly as you’d expect, and over inside three minutes [Fujii has subsequently become only the second MMA fighter of either sex to start her career going 22-0 – and the consensus is, the sole defeat on her record was a highly-dubious loss]. The penultimate fight between another local, Kelly Kobold and Adrienna Jenkins, was more even, with both fighters having double-digits victories. But Kobold charged in from the get-go, and never let up, even raining up punches when Jenkins was above her, and those blows resulted in a verbal submission at 3:26 in the first round.

Three minutes was about the average length of the bouts; Ginele Marquez got a rear naked choke on her opponent Liz Posener at the 3:16 mark in her bout. Marquez had Gina Carano in her corner: Carano is not just one of the top fighters in women’s MMA, she’s also the star of the upcoming Stephen Soderbergh flick Haywire. Was quite surprised the production didn’t mention her presence at all, as they did speak to some of the male MMA artists present, such as Jens Pulver [who was Jenkins’ fiancé]. Erin Toughill, another noted name, was also involved, doing colour work round the cage, and the production came over as generally slick and professional.

The shortest match of the night – lasting exactly one minute – was a bit unfortunate, as Shayna Baszler actually broke the arm of her opponent, Samantha Anderson. She was applying a submission hold on the arm, but it seemed that Baszler fell forward, resulting in the pressure being made much worse, and resulting in a clean break of her humerus. Ouch. The opening contest [on the DVD – there was an amateur fight not included for some reason] was the only one that lasted longer than one five minute round, with Marissa Inhofer beating Kirsty Bushnell. As well as being the brother of another MMA figher [Nick Inhofer was on The Ultimate Fighter 3] Inhofer was a roller-derby girl, and seemed to have brought a large contingent of her team-mates with her.

I can’t claim to be an expert in MMA, but as noted, the ‘Ultimate Chick Fighting!’ tag on the DVD sleeve does the women involved a disservice. As one of the commentators pointed out, “Pain doesn’t discriminate,” and it was also noted that it’s harder for women, since they typically have to hold down a full-time job, as well as fit in the rigourous training required. Respect is definitely in order. However, at the point of this event (March 2007), there still seems to be a lack of depth in the talent pool, which leaves a card like this short of truly successful.

Star: Megumi Fujii, Kelly Kobald, Adrienna Jenkins, Cody Welchlin

Backyard

  By

★★★
“The film that could only have been made in Mexico, where female life is cheap…”

The US border is all that separates El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, but the two cities’ ways of life are worlds apart. On the Mexican side, the bodies of women turn up, almost every week: sexually assaulted, with signs of torture and/or body parts missing. The police barely bother to investigate; the victims tend to be far from home, low-paid workers in the factories which drive Juarez’s employment. Into this comes police captain Blanca Bravo (de la Reguera), who vows to track down the perpetrators. But doing so pits her against the multinationals who could do without the bad publicity; against her commander, who says to her face that “women make good nurses, but lousy police officers”; and state politicians, who are uneasy about exactly what she might uncover.

This is based on a very unpleasant reality, also covered in the Jennifer Lopez movie, Bordertown, but one senses that was sanitized for American palates. This doesn’t soft-pedal anything: the brutality, corruption, sexism and poverty depicted makes for pretty challenging viewing. You may recognize de la Reguera from her role as the nun in Nacho Libre, but this is right at the other end of its portrayal of Mexico: barely controlled anarchy where, if you pick the right person, it’s possible to get away with murder. This is personified by the story, running parallel to Blanco, of a young women, who arrived in Juarez to seek work, and her eventual fate. While harrowing, this angle doesn’t shed much extra light on proceedings, and probably dilutes the film’s focus.

The central performance, however, is solid, with Blanco portrayed as someone willing to put everything she has – her career, or even her life – on the line, to protect those who have little or no protection in the eyes of the law. If the film has little to offer in the way of surprises (especially if you’re a fan of Dexter, you’ll be able to spot the psychopath a long way off!), and nor does it offer much in the way of resolution, it’s a decent, if grim, look at a world just a couple of hours drive from where I’m writing this in Arizona. And it’s a world I’d rather keep at arm’s length if possible.

Dir: Carlos Carrera
Star: Ana de la Reguera, Asur Zagada, Marco Pèrez, Alejandro Calva

Blood: The Last Vampire (live-action)

  By

★★★
“Half-human, half-demon takes on her own kind. Haven’t we seen this before?”

The animated version was one of the first reviews I wrote for the site, and I didn’t like it much – the fifty-minute running time allowed for hardly any development of scenario or characters at all. The feature fares a good bit better in these departments, though suffers from some horrendous editing styles and a couple of monsters which appear to have strayed in from a Playstation game (and I am not talking Playstation 3 here, either). The basic plot is retained. Saya (Gianna) is a half-demon with a grudge, intent on taking out Onigen (Koyuki), the one responsible for the death of her father. Working under the loose guidance of The Council, she is inserted into a school on an American air-force base in 1970 Japan. American girl Alice (Miller) has been added; Saya rescues her, and the two end up on the run, pursued both by Onigen and more regular forces.

This wasn’t as bad as the reviews led me to expect, and Gianna goes a good job of capturing the permanently-peeved expression of Saya. There are certainly lots of fights, with Corey Yuen doing his usual solid work, though the cutting of these early on, renders them almost incomprehensible. Seriously: you have almost no idea who is doing what to who. However, that seems to change in the second half; there’s a very solid battle in the forest between Saya, her mentor, and an endless horde of minions, and the final battle between the heroine and Onigen certainly doesn’t lack for spectacularity…er, -ness. Or something.

Going against this, Alice’s presence seems no more than a sop to the international market, because she serves little or no purpose to the film otherwise. There’s also a thoroughly unsatisfactory sequence where Saya fights a flying monster on a truck, perched precariously in a gorge: it’s both incoherent and very badly-rendered, a combination that would shame a SciFi original movie. That said, it kept me entertained and awake, which is more than some films (coughSnowbloodcough) have been able to do this month. If Gianna wants another stab at an action heroine flick, I wouldn’t object.

Dir: Chris Nahon
Star: Gianna, Allison Miller, Liam Cunningham, Koyuki

Big Bad Mama

  By

★★½
“Doesn’t live up to its reputation as a cult classic, beyond Dickinson’s charisma.”

With B-movie entrepreneur Roger Corman getting honoured at the Oscars earlier this month, it seems appropriate to pop on one of his classic productions, starring Dickinson, who was just about to become a star in one of the first shows with a female law-enforcement lead, Police Woman. The truth is, however, that this doesn’t have much more to offer beyond Dickinson: while she holds the film together with her steely resolve, and proves that sexy doesn’t stop at 40, the rest of it offers nothing as substantial. It’s a basic enough plot: she plays Wilma McClatchie, a single mom bringing up her two teenage daughters in Depression-era rural America. They fall into a life of crime, in part because they happen to be trying to cash a fraudulent check in a bank when it gets robbed by Fred Diller (Skerritt). They also team up with gentleman con-artist William Baxter (Shatner), but things go awry when they pull of their last big heist, kidnapping the daughter of a millionaire.

However, it just doesn’t really feature much development, of storyline or characters, and there’s never much tension or interest generated by proceedings. The approach seems to be to get the actresses to take their clothes off in lieu of the movie developing, and there’s a fair bit of nudity, not least from Wilma’s daughters. That’s a bit uncomfortable, since neither look old enough to be smoking, never mind stripping – but I’m pleased to report, both were of age during filming. While there’s no doubt that Dickinson is impressive when cutting loose with a submachine-gun or blazin’ away at the cops in the final showdown (pausing only to dress, in the movie’s most infamous scene), it’s no Bonnie and Clyde. It’s probably not even a Bloody Mama, made by Corman at the start of the decade. Much like the sequel, which we covered back in 2006, Dickinson is largely the sole point of (non-exploitative) interest; whether that’s enough to sustain your attention, is something only you will know. It fell fractionally short of enough for me.

Dir: Steve Carver
Star: Angie Dickinson, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner, Susan Sennett

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

  By

★★★

Director Edel is probably best known in the West for the embarrassing Body of Evidence, though would rather be remembered for the much better, if incredibly depressing, Last Exit to Brooklyn. This is certainly nearer to the latter, depicting the rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army Faction, the terrorist gang whose actions sent Germany into a state of nervous anxiety in the late 70’s. They started off at the end of the sixties, when Europe was in a state of political flux, but became more radical, engaging in bank robberies to fund their activities and then escalating to bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. The leaders were eventually caught – and I trust this isn’t much of a spoiler – dying mysterious deaths in jail, officially called suicide, but suspected by some as being extra-judicial execution.

It’s a generally interesting, but also flawed, approach to the subject matter, because it tries too hard to be even-handed, both humanizing the group, while also being sympathetic to the establishment they sought to bring down. It’s hard to do this, while still generating much emotion, because the viewer is left not really knowing for whom they should “root”. In addition, former journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Gedeck – the picture, above, is the real Meinhof) is initially the focus of the movie’s attention, but the way things unfold (and I’m manfully avoiding any spoilers there) mean that things inevitably have to shift away from her in the latter stages. The movie also faces the inevitable problem of any film based on actual events: reality rarely, if ever, follows a three-act structure, and as a result, either the facts or the drama have to suffer – here, it seems to be the drama, with the story not so much building to a climax as petering out.

That said, the performances are good, particularly Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, who has been described as the intellectual head of the RAF. What makes it suitable for inclusion here is the way that both Meinhof and Ennslin are depicted as the driving forces, the engine-room of the Red Army Faction. Andreas Baader (Bleibtreu – who was also the ineffectual boyfriend in Run Lola Run) is depicted as a hot-head, and something of a hypocrite, with a taste for fast cars. It’s clear that Ensslin and Meinhof are the ones that run the group – Baader was, in fact, a high-school dropout and one of the few RAF members who did not attend university. I have vague memories of hearing reports about the group as I grew up; while it was good to have the large blanks in my knowledge filled in, this felt more like a Discovery Channel re-enactment of the RAF’s history, rather than offering anything truly cinematic.

Dir: Uli Edel
Star: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Nadja Uhl

Bitch Slap

  By

★★★★
“Smack my bitch up.”

There are some films which I like, and where if you don’t agree with me, you are an idiot – such as Shaun of the Dead. However, there are movies where I can see, understand and accept why people dislike them, even if I may strongly disagree. Bitch Slap would be one of the latter. Looking at the the IMDb ballot results, the top number of voters have given it one out of ten. However, the next-most have given it 10/10. Between them, those two extremes represent more than 40% of the total votes. Much the same thing – albeit to a somewhat less rabidly-partisan degree – happened here in GwG Towers.

Chris has a certain firmness of opinion. When she has made up her mind about something, it’s pretty hard to get her to change it. She will purse her lips, fold her arms and stick to her guns. You could argue whether this strong will is a character quality or a flaw, but it certainly led to her early exit from Bitch Slap. Here’s an approximate timeline of the comments from the seat on the couch next to me:

  • 5 minutes: “Would you rather watch this alone?”
  • 5:30 minutes: “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather watch this alone?
  • 10 minutes: “Is this a porno?”
  • 20 minutes: “Could this get any more stereotypical?”

It was not long after this – I think it was when the lesbian canoodling started – she suddenly remembered she had a vitally-important task to perform elsewhere. Judging by the sounds emanating from our office, that task appeared to involve Facebook poker.

Of course, to me, complaining about the film being stereotypical is missing the point. It’s supposed to be a frothy melange of cliches, thrown into the cinematic melting-pot and the heat turned up to ‘High’. The opening credit sequence, with its clips of “bad girls” such as Tura Satana and Christina Lindberg, gives you some idea of what to expect, and it hardly pauses thereafter, growing increasingly more breathlessly frenetic. Not often have I seen a movie suffering from a more chronic case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Diso… Ooh, look! Shiny, pretty things!

Speaking of which, it centers on three women, with about as divergent personalities as it’s possible to imagine. There’s Hel (Cummings), a con-artist with a secret identity; the psychotic Camero (Olivio), who starts off the movie insane, yet somehow manages to get even more loopy as things progress; and, finally, Trixie (Voth), the “innocent” one, whom you’re not quite sure about. The heroic trio end up out in the desert, with Gage (Hurst) tied up in their trunk, seeking… Well, part of the plot revolves around that issue, so I’ll leave that out of the summary. From there, the story of how they reached that point is told in flashback, and event also unfold moving forward, as they try to locate their obscure object of desire before the infamous, deadly “Pinky” shows up.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Others are after the same prize, such as Hot Wire and his GoGo Yubari clone (Japanese, schoolgirl, killer yo-yo), Kinki (Minae Noji). There’s also a good deal of tension, sexual and otherwise, between the three heroines: are any of them quite what they seem? I imagine my usage of the phrase “secret identity” above might have given some of the game away there. It hardly counts as a spoiler either, to say that it all ends (eventually) in a brawl between Camaro and Hel, in the middle of a desolate wasteland, which has become steadily more wasted and bullet-ridden over the course of the movie.

The Laydeez of Bitch Slap

Director Jacobson certainly has a solid pedigree in the action-heroine world, at least at the televisual end of the spectrum. His resume includes episodes of La Femme Nikita, Cleopatra 2525, Xena: Warrior Princess and She Spies, a good number of which have a similarly self-parodying approach to their subject matter as seen here. However, while the excess is somewhat greater, this only really extends to some potty-mouth lines and digital blood. Despite all the tension and canoodling mentioned earlier, Cummings shows a lot more skin for Jaconson as the hero’s wife in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. If you’re going for camp excess, as appears to be the case, you need to be a good deal more…well, excessive.

The main weak link is the leads, who don’t have the chops – physical or acting – to pull this off. I to wonder whether it might have been a good deal better if stunt co-ordinator Zoe Bell, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor had been the stars of the film, rather than merely cameos. They have all previously shown the necessary combination of martial ability and screen presence necessary for the parts here. Not that the actresses here are “bad”: however, when you’re spitting out Satana-esque lines like, “Ram this in your clambake, bitch cake!” you’d better have the F-sized volume of charismatic fire-power to pull them off, and they fall short of the level needed for this to achieve classic status (Olivo probably comes closest to the necessary level of conviction, spitting our her dialogue with a perpetual sneer).

Having got those criticisms out of the way, the rest of the film is very solid entertainment – providing, as noted above, you can get your brain lined-up with what it’s trying to do (and if you can’t, which is understandable, it’s basically unsalvageable). Alcohol will probably help the neurons go in the correct direction, as will an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop culture, and tolerance for trash at an industrial concentration. The litmus test is probably the slow-motion water-fight which breaks out among the three laydeez early on: if you greet that with a smirk of guilty pleasure (as charged, m’lud), rather than, oh, bailing for the Facebook poker lobby, you’ll probably be fine.

Jacobsen also does a good job with the visual style, providing a perfect match for the lurid, frenetic approach of the script and character. There’s a lot of green screen work, which lends proceeding a hyperreal feeling, and the pace means that there’s hardly a dull moment. Not sure the storyline makes a great deal of sense, I admit, and it feels as overstuffed as a giant bean burrito (you know the kind, the ones you regret buying about one-third of the way through, but just can’t stop yourself from finishing). The fractured plotline has been compared to Tarantino, but personally, there’s a good deal less annoying self-indulgence than Quentin usually inflicts on the audience: for example, Camero doesn’t bring things to a grinding halt, just to witter on about comic-books.

All told, it’s refreshing to see something which is so avowedly politically-incorrect, and proud of it. The film is at its best when wallowing in the gutter, unashamedly down and dirty, and with a broad grin upon its face – credit to all those involved for having the guts not give a damn about the nay-sayers and one-voters. It’s not going to trouble the more-evolved areas of your brain very much, and will tug on the heartstrings even less, but for the times when you don’t want anything more than the cinematic equivalent of a one-night stand, this will certainly do the job perfectly well. Certainly the most full-on, and arguably the best, of the genre to come out of Hollywood in the past five years.

Dir: Rick Jacobson
Star: Julia Voth, America Olivo, Erin Cummings, Michael Hurst

"Certainly the most full-on, and arguably the best, of the genre to come out of Hollywood in the past five years."

Black Magic M-66

  By

★★★½
“Aliens meets The Terminator in a brisk, head-on collision.”

Shirow has certainly done his fair share of anime works that are regarded as classics – his best-known creation is probably Appleseed. This is from relatively early in his career; indeed, coming out in 1991 made it one of the first anime to be ‘properly’ distributed in the West [and, by that, I mean subtitled and not cut down for a child audience]. It centers on the titular pair of military androids, who are released after their transport craft goes down in the middle of a forest. The army cordon off the area, which draws the attention of Sybel (Sakakibara), a reporter, unwilling to let anything stand in the way of her story. She witnesses a hellacious fire-fight in which one ‘droid is destroyed, while the other escapes, and discovers the goal for the android is to kill the inventor’s young grand-daughter, Ferris. As the only person who knows the current location of the daughter, it’s up to her to save the child.

Barely half the length of an average movie, this fairly gallops along, towards an extended climax in a high-rise block, where Sybel is the only thing left standing between the relentless robot and its target. This is when the film is at is best, with action sequences that wouldn’t shame most Hollywood action movies. Less successful – in fact, basically absent (admittedly, no real surprise given the running time) – is any real effort at developing the characters. We know Sybel is focused, because she leaves her apartment with her camera, yet forgets to put on clothes. That’s about the extent of it, and she is the best-served of anyone in the film; Ferris, for instance, does little but squeal in an irritating manner. It’s also a product of its time: originally made in 1987, animation has changed radically in the more than two decades since, and the style now looks somewhat clunky, especially when it tries to simulate camera movement.

Still, the storyline holds up nicely, and given America’s fondness for remaking Japanese genre films, one wonders why they haven’t bothered to mine the animation vaults further [though Speed Racer probably acts as a good counter-argument!]. It’d certainly be very easy to see this as a James Cameron movie.

Dir: Masamune Shirow
Star (voice): Yoshiko Sakakibara, Shinji Ogawa, Yû Mizushima, Chisa Yokoyama

Bloodrayne II: Deliverance

  By

★
“Ah, this is why people hate Uwe Boll.”

Look, I speak as one of the few people on the planet who found the original Bloodrayne other than unwatchable dreck. So when I say that the sequel is a soporific, poorly-constructed, badly-executed waste of time and effort for all concerned, including the viewer – for God’s sake, listen to me. There is simply no rhyme or reason present here, right from the setting which goes from Middle Ages Europe to the Wild West without any credible explanation. Billy the Kids (Ward) is a vampire, kidnapping the local kids, in some kind of half-baked plot device that makes no sense, involving him waiting for the railroad to reach town, to spread his curse. I guess going to a town that already has trains would be too much work. Rayne has to round up a posse to take on Billy and his blood-sucking cronies. Y’know? For the kids….

Malthe is not an adequate replacement for Kristanna Loken. While there are some settings in which she would make an appropriate Rayne, this isn’t it. I can do no better than reproduce goatdog’s limerick on this issue:
She’s entirely too soft-spoken.
She pales next to Kristanna Loken.
She’s not half as pretty,
her accent is shitty,
and her ass-kicking skills appear broken.
Beyond that, even my usually forgiving nature kept stumbling into holes of logic. For instance, Rayne’s posse is mostly there because she blackmailed or threatened them, yet this apprarently creates immediate loyalty, to the point they are prepared to die on behalf of a cause they know basically nothing about. Similarly, there’s a newspaper reporter (Coppola): his third scene explains his presence, yet mostly makes you wonder exactly what he was doing in his first two scenes. The film doesn’t even have consistency of vampire lore: can they, or can they not, be killed with regular bullets? The film says no, but then…

It’s not just a bad vampire movie. Probably worse, it’s a bad Western. Overall, it’s just bad: I generally have more time for Boll than most people [National Treasure was much, much worse than House of the Dead], but even I cannot defend this on any level. The original had a lunatic sensibility, heaving everything at the screen it could find: it may not have made much sense, but you did remember it. The sooner I can forget this, the better-off I will be.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Star: Natassia Malthe, Zack Ward, Michael Pare, Chris Coppola

The Brave One

  By

★★★½
“Death Wish with female angst.”

Erica (Foster) has a very comfortable life: nice job as a radio host, imminent marriage to a doctor. This is suddenly destroyed in minutes, when she and her fiance (Andrews) are brutally attacked: he is killed, and she is left a nervous wreck, who sees a threat in every shadow on the city streets. A move to Kansas, while probably better for all concerned, would not be so cinematically or narratively interesting: instead, she buys a black-market gun for protection. A chance encounter on the subway unleashes her inner Bernhard Goetz and before you know it, she’s sweeping the scum off the streets, up to and including the crime lord whom even Detective Mercer (Howard) cannot touch, while simultaneously documenting the city’s reaction to her exploits on the airwaves. This brings her into contact with Mercer, since he is also investigating the vigilante slayings; his suspicions in this area gradually turn towards his new friend.

There’s obviously, more than an element of Death Wish here, though the heroine here is motivated, at least in part, by more than revenge. Foster is solid, as you’d expect – her character is an interesting parallel [or, in some ways contrast] to those she played in Silence of the Lambs and The Accused, and is hardly Charles Bronson. Jordan cranks up the psychological instability with more dutch angles than any film since Battlefield Earth, but the film is generally restrained, avoiding the more lurid angles, though it possesses a more than pessimistic opinion of the justice system. One does sense more could have been done with the media aspects: the resultant feeding frenzy, with the killer becoming a heroic figure to some, is only brushed against, and nothing much is made of the fact that her attackers videotape their crime. However, it’s still a credible slice of urban paranoia and disfunctionality. In many ways, its closest cousin is, perhaps surprisingly, The Dark Knight: to obtain closure, Erica has to decide, just like Bruce Wayne, how far into the abyss she is prepared to descend…

Dir: Neil Jordan
Star: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveeen Andrews, Mary Steenburgen