DIRECT TO VIDEO
Talk about casting against type in Nick Of Time (15), Johnny Depp plays Gene Watson, a softspoken, bespectacled accountant dressed in a suit and tie. Arriving in Los Angeles with his six year old daughter, Watson falls for a scam by terrorists led by Christopher Walken who kidnap the child and threaten to kill her unless Watson carries out a killing for them - the assassination of, the state governor (Marsha Mason).
He has 74 minutes in which to do it, and in the style of High, Noon, director John Badham plays out the movie in real time. In an attempt to heighten the tension, the camera regularly cuts away to different time pieces to remind us that the clock is ticking, but Badham fails to build any sustained tension and the screenplay is compromised by its lapses in logic. Nevertheless, Depp and Walken are such interesting actors that they cannot fail to inject life into the movie.
The marginalised young character at the centre of the English thriller, The Innocent Sleep (15) is a homeless Liverpudlian (expressively played by Rupert Graves) who witnesses a murder beneath Tower Bridge in London. Inspired by the murder of the Italian banker Roberto Calvi, this initially involving drama soon slackens its hold as contrivance piles upon coincidence and a chain smoking American journalist (Annabella Sciorra) gets on the case. First time director Scott Mitchell makes good use of the wide screen and of the various, London locations.
Philip Ridley follows his very promising debut, The Reflecting Skin, with the handsomely composed but ultimately overwrought The Passion Of Darkly Noon (18), in which Brendan Fraser plays an enigmatic Bible quoting stranger named Darkly Noon who turns up in an idyllic woodland setting and is taken in by caring Ashley Judd, a woman involved with a mute coffin maker played by Viggo Mortensen. While much of the visual imagery is striking, the movie is overloaded with often trite symbolism, and Fraser is gratingly mannered in the title role.
However, Fraser has nothing on the voraciously scenery chewing cast of The Grotesque (18), John Paul Davidson's daft movie based on Patrick McGrath's comedy of errors novel set among people with very odd names in late 1940s rural England. In a thin variation on Pasolini's Theorem, Sting plays the sexually versatile and deviously manipulative butler, Fledge, who enters the employment of Sir Hugo Coal (Alan Bates) and wrecks the lives of the entire household. Ham rarely, has been sliced so thickly on screen as in this over-heated farrago.
CINEMA TO VIDEO
Tim Robbins tackles the theme of capital punishment with integrity, intelligence and power in the riveting and unsentimental drama, Dead Man Walking (15), which features memorable performances from Sean Penn as a convicted killer on death row and Susan Sarandon as the humanitarian nun who becomes his penfriend, and then his spiritual adviser in the days leading up to his scheduled execution by lethal injection. Sarandon deservedly won the best actress Oscar in March for her superb performance.
Emma Thompson, a former Oscar winner as best actress, took this year's best adapted screenplay Oscar for Sense And Sensibility (U). Ang Lee's immensely entertaining film of Jane Austen's novel is impeccably adapted by Thompson, who is joined in the fine cast by Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Kate Winslet, Elizabeth Spriggs and Greg Wise.
Marking an auspicious film directing debut for Robert Lepage, the French-Canadian production Le Confessional (15) opens in as Alfred Hitchcock is shooting I Confess in Quebec City and shortly before the births of the movie's narrator, Pierre (Lothaire Bluteau), and his adopted brother, Marc (Patrick Goyette). As the film jumps forward to 1989, Pierre has returned after three years in China to attend his father's funeral and he discovers that Marc is working as a prostitute in the city. What follows is a quest for identity which plays like a detective story, complete with, Hitchcockian red herrings, as the movie cuts seamlessly between past and present.
Claude Sautet's Nelly & M. Arnaud (PG) reunites him with Emmanuelle Beart, the luminous star of his Un Coeur En Hiver, for another subtle and bittersweet exploration of sexual attraction and unrequited love. Beart plays the eponymous Nelly who moves out on her layabout husband (Charles Berling), takes on the job of typing the memoirs of M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault), a man in his mid sixties who falls for her, and becomes involved with a charming publisher (Jean Hugues Anglade).
The pick of the new comedy releases on video is Denise Calls Up (15), Hal Salwen's cleverly structured and skilfully sustained US comedy of communication breakdowns in a hi tech world where seven characters, most of them good friends, talk to each other all the time on the phone, but never actually meet. At no point in the movie does Salwen allow any two characters to speak face to face on screen.
From Dumb And Dumber directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly comes Kingpin (12), a comedy which is intent on offending and deals with hustlers on the US bowling circuit. The more ludicrous the story is, the funnier the film, although much of the humour is outrageously crude. Woody Harrelson, Randy Quaid, Vanessa Angel and a scene stealing Bill Murray head the cast.
Phil Silvers was sublime playing the scheming Ernie Bilko on television, but Steve Martin's best efforts can't match him in the merely mildly amusing cinema version of Sgt Bilko (PG) directed by Jonathan Lynn.
VIDEOS TO BUY
Delightful entertainment for all ages and well worth watching several times, Babe is a commendable addition to any video library. New widescreen releases worth noting are Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, Sense And Sensibility, Leaving Las Vegas, Nixon and Lawrence Of Arabia. While we wonder if Quentin Tarantino will ever make another movie, his first two features, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are now available on a double bill tape. And in the week when the new Peter Greenaway picture opens here, four of his earlier movies go on retail release - Drowning By Numbers, Prospero's Books, The Baby Of Macon and The Cook, The Thief His Wife And Her Lover.
