Imagine being a hunter leading highly-trained bloodhounds in pursuit of a killer... and the trail leads directly to you! Starring Academy award winners Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman 'No Way Out' is a mesmerising look at Washington power. Capturing a well deserved four stars from critic Roger Ebert this taut and stylish thriller is fast-paced and powerful - a perfect nailbiter. In a fit of rage Secretary of Defense David Brice (Hackman) murders his mistress. To keep a lid on the
A Werewolf terrorizes the small city where lives Marty Coslaw - a paralytic boy his uncle and his sister.
In the modern horror thriller A Quiet Place, a family of four must navigate their lives in silence after mysterious creatures that hunt by sound threatens their survival. If they hear you, they hunt you.
With the original conspiracy plot arc fallen into a muddle of loose ends no-one could possibly fathom, once-hungry lead actors on the verge of big screen careers and making demands for more time off or shots at writing and directing, and the initial wish list of monsters-of-the-week long exhausted, it's a miracle The X Files is still making its airdates, let alone managing something pretty good every other show and something outstanding at least once every four episodes. Season seven opens with a dreary two-parter ("Sixth Extinction" and "Amor Fati") and winds up with the traditional incomprehensible cliffhanger ("Requiem"), but along the way includes a clutch of shows that may not match the originality of earlier seasons but still effortlessly equal any other fantasy-horror-sf on American television. Highlights in this clutch: "Hungry", a brain-eating mutant story told from the point of view of a monster who tries to control his appetite by going to eating disorder self-help groups; "The Goldberg Variation", a crime comedy about a weaselly little man who has the gift of incredible good luck, which means Wile E Coyote-style doom for anyone who crosses him; "The Amazing Maleeni", guest-starring Ricky Jay in a rare non-fantastic crime story about a feud between stage magicians that turns out to be a cover for a heist; "X-Cops", a brilliant skit on the US TV docusoap Cops with Mulder and Scully caught on camera as they track an apparent werewolf in Los Angeles (season-best acting from David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson); "Theef", a complex revenge drama with gaunt Billy Drago as a hillbilly medicine man stalking a slick doctor; "Brand X", a horror comic tale of corruption in the tobacco industry; "Hollywood AD" (written and directed by Duchovny), in which Tea Leoni and Garry Shandling are cast as Scully and Mulder in a crass movie version of a real-life X file; and "Je Souhaite", a deadpan comedy about a wry, cynical genie at the mercy of trailer trash masters who haven't an idea what to wish for. Among the disasters are: "Fight Club", a grossly laboured comedy; "All Things", Gillian Anderson's riotously pretentious religious-themed writing-directing debut; "En Ami", written and understood by William B Davis, the cigarette-smoking villain; and the very silly "First Person Shooter", the lamest killer video-game plot imaginable courtesy of distinguished guest writer William Gibson. Still essential, despite the occasional pits, but yet again you go away thinking that the next season had better come up with some answers. --Kim Newman
Silver Bullet is a generic, by-the-numbers Stephen King film with a Stephen King screenplay adapted from an earlier novella. Back in the innocent days of 1976--the age of innocence gets later every year--the town of Tarker's Fall finds itself in the grip of mass hysteria when something starts tearing people apart. Only a crippled child Martie (Corey Haim) works out the truth, which is that the new pastor is a werewolf. Eventually he manages to convince his supercilious sister Janey and his unreliable drunk Uncle Red (Gary Busey) and there is the usual confrontation involving a silver bullet melted down from the children's religious jewellery; the title also refers to the boy's motorised wheelchair. The film neglects interesting possibilities--the lynch-mob mentality that takes over the town fizzles after the major vigilantes are killed, the pastor tries to justify the killings to himself--in favour of stock ultra-violent confrontations and extended metamorphoses; its major strength is a familiar King theme, the helplessness of being a child in a world full of people who will not listen to you. On the DVD: The DVD comes with a director's commentary by Daniel Attias and dubbed versions in German, French and Italian. The soundtrack has Dolby sound which brings out the stylised fairy-tale elements in the score and the widescreen picture is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic ratio. The sometimes muddy-looking night-scenes are balanced by brisk pastoral daylight scenes that have their own innocence. --Roz Kaveney
It has become traditional for The X-Files to kick off each new season with a humourless conspiracy two-parter, and Season 9 is no exception: in The X Files: Nothing Important Happened Today David Duchovnys Mulder is gone, along with everything in his apartment, and Gillian Andersons Scully is mostly at home with her perhaps-telekinetic baby, which leaves the bulk of the investigation to promising new characters Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Reyes (Annabeth Gish).The A-plot features Lucy Lawless as a water-breathing terminatrix who could be an alien, a government experiment or a mermaid without it making any difference, but too much time is spent on impossible-to-follow subplots about internal FBI politics and everyones intricate backstory (if ever a release needed a "previously..." prologue, this is it). Usually, the series gets over these heart-sinking openers and livens up a bit, but this time theres a feeling that this is the end of the line for a thoroughly battered premise.Chris Carter joins Gene Roddenberry in the exclusive category of producer-creators who turn in the worst scripts for their own shows, and all the strengths of The X-Files (shivers, wit, provocative ideas) are missing in action here as the engine grinds on empty.On the DVD: The X-Files: Nothing Important Happened Today on disc arrives with two three-minute filler featurettes, focusing on Gishs character and the making of this show. The good news is that this anamorphic widescreen release is the best The X-Files has ever looked in a television format, showing that however dramatically exhausted it might be, the show remains technically impressive. --Kim Newman
As with earlier releases, The X-Files: Providence splices together two episodes, "Provenance" and "Providence", into a pseudo-movie. Again, the results fall way below the series average as the long-dead alien conspiracy business is flogged, with a lot of running around and ominous rumbling still not adding up to anything like an actual story. FBI agent Neal McDonaugh (of Minority Report) inexplicably survives a flaming motorcycle crash, leaving behind brass rubbings taken from an alien spaceship, then shows up and tries to murder Scully's psychokinetic baby, who is promptly kidnapped by a UFO cult. In Part 2, Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Reyes (Annabeth Gish) fend off enemies and friends within the bureau as they track down the cultists, who are having trouble with a spaceship they've dug up, and a typical pointless climax has things happen without the characters doing anything to contribute. Even at this late, post-Duchovny stage in the game, The X-Files has turned out some fine stand-alone episodes, but these dreary wallowings go a long way towards explaining why only diehards are still watching. After the child says "I made this" at the end of the credits, it's becoming very hard not to shout "well, clean it up then". On the DVD: The X-Files: Providence, as with Nothing Important Happened Today, arrives in a great-looking anamorphic widescreen transfer. There are two slight promotional "featurettes"--three-minute clips/talking heads promos focusing on the episode "Providence" and actor Cary Elwes' character. --Kim Newman
The hit video game roars to life with amazing special effects and spectacular action sequences. In 2007 New Angeles is ravaged by earthquakes tidal waves and vicious gang wars. The evil tycoon Koga Shuko (Terminator 2's Robert Patrick) is obsessed with finding both halves of the Double Dragon a talisman which will give him awesome mystical powers. Teenaged brothers Jimmy and Billy (Mark Dacascos Scott Wolf) wind up with the missing half thrusting them into the adventure of their lives. Marian (Alyssa Milano) and her vigilante Power Corps help them summon all of their courage resourcefulness and martial-arts skills to stop the villain's evil plan. This high octane action spectacular crackles with the energy and humour of its heroes: buckle your seatbelt and enjoy the ride!
Star Trek V left us nowhere to go but up, and with the return of Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer, this sixth instalment restored the movie series to its classic blend of space opera, intelligent plotting and engaging interaction of stalwart heroes and menacing villains. Borrowing its subtitle (and several lines of dialogue) from Shakespeare, the movie finds Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) and his fellow Enterprise crew members on a diplomatic mission to negotiate peace with the revered Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner). When the high-ranking Klingon and several officers are ruthlessly murdered, blame is placed on Kirk and crew. The subsequent investigation, which sees Spock taking on the mantle of Sherlock Holmes, uncovers an assassination plot masterminded by the nefarious Klingon General Chang (Christopher Plummer) in an effort to disrupt a historic peace summit. As this political plot unfolds, Star Trek VI takes on a sharp-edged tone, with Kirk and Spock confronting their opposing views of diplomacy and testing their bonds of loyalty when a Vulcan officer is revealed to be a traitor. With a dramatic depth befitting what was to be the final movie mission of the original Enterprise crew, this film took the veteran cast out in respectably high style, with the torch being passed to the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the following movie, Star Trek: Generations. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
The sixth series of The X-Files picks up after the events of the big-screen movie. So it is that "The Beginning" attempts to fit the film into the TV chronology before moving on to tackle plot points left dangling from series five's "The End" (note the guard asleep at the nuclear power plant console is named Homer!). Between story arc threads are several pleasing one-off excursions: time travel to a Bermuda Triangle boatload of Nazis ("Triangle"); further temporal escapades akin to Groundhog Day ("Monday"); a demonic baby case featuring genre stalwart Bruce Campbell ("Terms of Endearment"); and "The Dreamland, Parts 1 and 2", in which David Duchovny gets to play someone else via personality switching. Back in the conspiracy scheme of things, Mulder chases "S.R. 819", a Senate resolution tying conspiracies together; "Two Fathers" and "One Son" indicates that the abductee experiments are intended to cure the black oil disease; and the year finishes with "BioGenesis", in which a beach-buried UFO has Scully and the audience wondering if we are from Mars. --Paul Tonks
Love doesn't have to last a lifetime. A Cincinnati college student breaks off his engagement to his wealthy fiance after he falls in love with a backwoods Kentucky girl he meets at a party. She claims to be 20 years old but he learns that she's actually just 16 and already married. Available for the first time on DVD!
In Season 4 of The X-Files, Scully is a bit upset by her on-off terminal cancer and Mulder is supposed to shoot himself in the season finale (did anyone believe that?), but in episode after episode the characters still plod dutifully around atrocity sites tossing off wry witticisms in that bland investigative demeanour out of fashion among TV cops since Dragnet. Perhaps the best achievement of this season is "Home", the most unpleasant horror story ever presented on prime-time US TV. It's not a comfortable show--confronted with this ghastly parade of incest, inbreeding, infanticide and mutilation, you'd think M & S would drop the jokes for once--but shows a willingness to expand the envelope. By contrast, ventures into golem, reincarnation, witchcraft and Invisible Man territory throw up run-of-the-mill body counts, spotlighting another recurrent problem. For heroes, M & S rarely do anything positive: they work out what is happening after all the killer's intended victims have been snuffed ("Kaddish"), let the monster get away ("Sanguinarium") and cause tragedies ("The Field Where I Died"). No wonder they're stuck in the FBI basement where they can do the least damage. The series has settled enough to play variations on earlier hits: following the liver vampire, we have a melanin vampire ("Teliko") and a cancer vampire ("Leonard Betts"), and return engagements for the oily contact lens aliens and the weasely ex-Agent Krycek ("Tunguska"/"Terma"). Occasional detours into send-up or post-modernism are indulged, yielding both the season's best episode ("Small Potatoes") and its most disappointing ("Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man"). "Small Potatoes", with the mimic mutant who tries out Mulder's life and realises what a loser he is (how many other pin-up series heroes get answerphone messages from their favourite phone-sex lines?), works as a genuine sci-fi mystery--for once featuring a mutant who doesn't have to kill people to live--and as character insight. --Kim Newman
In Witness Protection lifelong Mafia hood Bobby "Bats" Batton (Tom Sizemore) wakes up one night to discover a price on his head and nowhere to go but to the cops, under protection as a federal witness. Based on the article "The Invisible Family" by Robert Sabbag, this HBO film drops us into the volatile period between lives as Bats takes his family off the streets and into a federal bunker where they begin shaping their new identities. Surrounded by surveillance cameras and locked in an apartment that feels like a fancy prison block, the formerly prosperous family starts to suffocate and self-destruct while it becomes clear just what a "readjustment of expectations" really means. Sizemore is excellent as the hot-headed gangster paralysed by helplessness, but Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is especially moving as the once-hopeful wife who buckles as her husband's secrets and lies are revealed. It's an interesting dynamic: the swaggering goodfella forced into a working-class life elicits little sympathy, but the toll on the family torn apart by recriminations, blame and frustration is affecting and powerful. They're undergoing a crash course in family therapy with federal official Forest Whitaker as their tough-love crisis counsellor. While the screenplay at times feels contrived, the drama is always potent. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com
Love doesn't have to last a lifetime. A Cincinnati college student breaks off his engagement to his wealthy fianc''e after he falls in love with a backwoods Kentucky girl he meets at a party. She claims to be 20 years old but he learns that she's actually just 16 and already married.
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