The latest releases reviewed.
CLINT EASTWOOD: THE COLLECTION ****
Eight films from the enduring iconic actor-turned-director are featured in this new box set, all drawn from the 1968-75 period, after he achieved international fame in Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy.
The set includes three of the five movies in which Eastwood starred for director Don Siegel: the gritty culture clash thriller, Coogan's Bluff (1968), in which he plays an Arizona sheriff in New York to extradite a criminal; Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), an uneven Mexican-set western, as a mercenary coming to the rescue of a bogus nun (Shirley MacLaine); and a riveting drama of simmering sexual tension, The Beguiled (1971), as a wounded soldier recuperating at a girls' school during the American Civil War.
Siegel, who was his mentor, has a cameo role in Play Misty for Me (1971), Eastwood's tense, impressive directing debut in which he played a late-night DJ stalked by a fan (Jesssica Walter). The set also includes the next three films Eastwood directed: High Plains Drifter (1973), a western in which he played an emblematic role as an avenging stranger in town; Breezy (1973), in which widower William Holden falls for the much younger Kay Lenz; and The Eiger Sanction (1975), a thriller in which Eastwood did all his own climbing as a retired mountaineer called back into action.
Completing the set is Joe Kidd (1972), a lively western scripted by Elmore Leonard and directed by John Sturges, in which Eastwood takes on bounty hunters led by Robert Duvall. MD
A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS ***
Directed by Dito Montiel. Starring Robert Downey Jr, Rosario Dawson, Shia LaBeouf, Chazz Palminteri, Dianne Wiest, Eric Roberts 16 cert
A writer returns home to Queens and broods upon his past. Actor/ socialite Dito Montiel has tweaked the facts in his autobiography and turned it into a beautifully photographed film of undeniable class. It's also certainly pretentious and overwrought but, buoyed by an excellent performance from LaBoeuf, grips throughout.
GHOST RIDER **
Directed by Mark Steven Johnson. Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Peter Fonda, Wes Bentley, Sam Elliott 12 cert
Cage glowers woodenly as an emissary of Satan - once a stunt motorbike rider, now a fiery skeleton - in this dreary adaptation of an obscure Marvel comic book. The enterprise has the weary, third-hand look of a video for some 1980s goth band. As you might expect, the two-disc edition is packed with all the usual rubbish. The featurettes on the original comic are endurable.
FREEDOM WRITERS **
Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Starring Hilary Swank, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Glenn, Imelda Staunton 12 cert
Oh no, not another film in which a Hollywood big shot draws inner- city youths away from violence by teaching them an improving activity. This time round Hilary Swank plays a middle-class teacher who believes that reading Anne Frank and writing journals will redeem her pupils. Well made, but preposterously naive. DC
OUTLAW **
Directed by Nick Love. Starring Sean Bean, Danny Dyer, Bob Hoskins 18 cert
Frustrated with the criminal justice system and police corruption in Blair's Britain, six men decide to take the law into their own hands. The violence is graphic in Love's provocative, disturbing film, which raises morally complex issues without adequately addressing them.
NORBIT *
Directed by Brian Robbins. Starring Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Terry Crews, Clifton Powell, Cuba Gooding Jr 15 cert
This horrible, horrible film - alternately boring and offensive - finds Murphy playing a nerd, his hugely fat, insanely jealous wife, and a Chinese-American gentleman with an unfortunate line in racial putdowns. You'd expect such an enterprise to, at least, offer guilty pleasures. You'd be wrong. Forget torture porn; this stuff is the real danger to society.
MATERIAL GIRLS *
Directed by Martha Collidge. Starring Hilary Duff, Haylie Duff, Anjelica Huston, Lukas Haas, Maria Conchita Alonso PG cert
A Duff movie in more ways than one, this witless piffle features Hilary and Haley as Bel-Air airheads whose pampered lives are shattered when the company they inherited is threatened by a rumour campaign and they are reduced to using public transport and staying with their Colombian maid.
