Here comes The Day After Tomorrow, the latest blockbuster from Roland Emmerich, auteur behind Godzilla, Independence Day etc., though this time without his usual producing partner Dean Devlin.

While this doesn’t depart too far from his formula of blowing up historic landmarks and making vague patriotic statements, it manages to keep a solemn enough mood to at least make a stab at being a serious thriller. The science still sounds like gibberish, but the cast (including Dennis Quaid and Ian Holm) keep an admirably straight face and the effects are terrific, particularly an eerie flooded New York.

While the product placement isn’t as obvious as in, say, I Robot, there’s a particularly jarring scene involving a televised football game which has to be seen to be believed. And the old disaster movie cliché of the seriously ill child lives on here, although minus an accompanying singing nun. Regardless, it takes a lot of nerve to make a movie this daft and keep a straight face, and it’s much better than I expected.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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Jamie Foxx seems to be the flavour of the moment but his cabbie character is given too many stupid lines to make him sympathetic, and I can’t be alone in wanting the bad guy to win. Still, it’s Michael Mann, so it’s all perfectly composed and lit (even if it is in orange), and the music is used perfectly especially in the unlikely climax. It’s been widely praised by the same critics who didn’t like Mann’s earlier work, but for me it lacks the scope and ambition of say Manhunter or Heat, although it’s still a pleasure to be treated as an intelligent viewer for a change.

The 2-disk version contains an hour or so of documentaries and an unadvertised commentary by Mann.

Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars
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Stamp has a lot of fun as a cockney criminal, who is released from jail after nine years (where he has mysteriously picked up a lot of fashion tips and a Californian suntan) and who is determined to reduce the cast of former stars and TV actors until he either gets justice, or the audience loses sympathy. It’s essentially a remake of
the Get Carter/Point Blank/Payback story (bloke travels through alien landscape, narrowing his eyes and looking obsessed), but told in Soderbergh’s usual relaxed way.

So… what was the point Steve? Are we supposed to identify with Stamp’s obsessions, or is he a nut who can’t let the past go? I’m yet to come across anything resembling a committed viewpoint in any of Soderbergh’s movies, or indeed any action scene which even looks like it’s been thought through properly. What’s the point of a relaxed thriller?

If you think I’m being a bit unkind (and Soderbergh admits to the last failing on his DVD commentary), then I’ll admit that there are a few incidental pleasures involved. The movie has a fairly clean visual and aural style. The footage of Stamp as a young man is taken from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, and is integrated pretty well, without adding anything to the plot. Stamp’s ‘Cockney’ accent is the funniest since Dick Van Dyke, and Stamp has less excuse (he comes from Stepney, not West Plains Missouri). Note to US screenwriters: he refers several times to the fact that his daughter ‘wrote him’ in jail. We say ‘wrote TO him’ over here.

It’s little details like this that Soderberg is otherwise pretty good on; the background characters are always quirkier than his main ones, as if he’s afraid to make a fool of himself or anyone else important.However it’s another intensely bland dish served up by the director, who is fast becoming a critics’ darling without actually making any movies which make any money. If you’re a Soderbergh fan, get in touch, I’d love to know if his movies are supposed to be thrillers (and if you’re going to say his movies are all about character rather than plot, don’t bother). For everyone else, their main memory of The Limey will probably be as the movie where Peter Fonda had a really nice house. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Or hot. Anything but tepid.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
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However there’s a big and fairly clever twist at the end of the movie, which puts everything you’ve seen into a different perspective, and which obviously helped to attract the big names and money. It’s also another fine performance from Pruitt Taylor Vince, who turns up just when you thought you’d misread the credits.

In total, it’s a bit tasteless and the occasionally heartless tone leaves a strange taste in a big-budget studio movie, but the ending will have most viewers talking and is
well worth watching for anyone used to horror movies.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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Director Mark Goldblatt is better known as the editor of action movies such as Terminators 1 & 2 and Armageddon. Anchor Bay have spent considerable time doing justice to this zombie movie which became moderately popular during the strange early days of home video.

Dead Heat stars the great Treat Williams and stand-up comic Joe Piscopo, and it’s a buddy cop story with the novelty that one of the cops is a zombie – he really should have known it was coming, as he’s called Roger Mortis. It’s one of Vincent Price’s last movies, and the supporting cast also includes Darren McGavin. The highlight is a scene in a Chinese butchers where our heroes have to fend off attacks by various joints of meat.

Every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, and like the cop, maybe things like this are best left to memory. Having said that, it’s a very good DVD, with all manner of extras, and it’s cheap, so you could do a lot worse.

Rating: 2.8 out of 5 stars
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It kicks off as a standard Western in Arizona, and you can spot Jim Davis (later to star on TV in Dallas) as one of the assorted cowpokes. I’m not quite sure why but Butch Cassidy is renamed ‘Butch Curry’ here, although the titular hero and the Wild Bunch don’t escape that easily.

Back to the plot: Jesse’s brother Hank (eh?) takes a bullet and is taken to a monastery in Arizona, where he is looked after by Frankenstein’s daughter Maria and her elderly assistant, who have moved from Europe to take advantage of the regular Arizona lightning and supply of cheap Mexicans.

At one point Maria confesses during the movie to being Frankenstein’s grand-daughter, presumably that idea was forgotten in case the title became even more cumbersome.

Keep up. Hank becomes Igor with the help of cheap effects, including what looks very like a cycling helmet, and the big finish eventually limps into view when the posse catches up with the outlaws.

I got to see this legendary mess courtesy of a DVD release supported by Joe Bob Briggs>. If you aren’t familiar with Briggs, he’s the world’s foremost drive-in movie critic, and this is the first of a new series featuring his commentary tracks. The movie is awful, as if you couldn’t guess from the title and my review, but no-one’s buying it for that. Briggs’ commentary is both funny and informative, and I’m looking forward to future releases from the guy from Grapevine, Texas.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
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The presence of two recognisable faces in Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku, and the high production values, tend to work against the directors efforts to mislead the viewers expectations. The grotesque family are made up by FX veteran Stan Winston, and it all passes the time quite amiably, without ever working up the same tension as the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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2004 saw a one of the periodic mini-booms that are meant to persuade us that the Western isn’t dead, just sleeping it off round the campfire. Galloping close behind (OK I’ll stop now) Costner’s terrific Open Range was The Missing, the latest in little Ronnie Howard’s attempts to prove he’s a real grown-up director.

Again he largely succeeds, and there are some very nasty moments here courtesy of Eric Schweig’s malevolent shaman, who murders Cate Blanchett’s boyfriend and kidnaps her daughter for the slave trade. Tommy Lee Jones turns up looking suitably haggard as Blanchett’s father, and they give chase while rebuilding their relationship.

If Open Range was Unforgiven, as many critics alleged, then this is The Searchers. In any other month this might have seemed like a great movie, but it lacks the emotional punch of Costner’s movie; I got the suspicion that a modern set of values was being imposed on a previous age, and that the moral dilemmas at the heart of the movie were set in a bit of a false context.

The stars are as good as you’d expect, and Val Kilmer pops up in disguise for a very odd cameo which doesn’t add much to the plot. I suspect I’ll have to watch it again in a non-Western year to judge its true value.

By the way, Eidson’s a fine writer, and his earlier western St. Agnes Stand is overdue for filming.

Rating: 3.3 out of 5 stars
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Arlington Road opened in the UK in March 1999, ahead of its US release. It was a nice change to get to see a movie before the internet word-of-mouth ruins any surprises.

After a loud and stylish opening, and opening titles which are very reminiscent of the TV series Millennium, we are landed with a familiar situation: Spielberg-like suburbs, and sympathetic central characters who gradually reveal their flaws over the next two hours. The plot, at least as far as I can describe it without giving much away, hinges on whether the steadily mounting evidence amassed by the ‘hero’ is a clear pointer to his neighbours’ involvement in some anti-government plot. Alternatively, it could be that he is becoming unhinged by the pressure of his work and the recent loss of his wife.

We’re given a choice of which one to believe, and director Mark Pellington and writer Ehren Kruger manage to juggle the twists and turns of the plot very well until they have to reveal their hand in the last twenty minutes or so.

However if you’re like me you’ll be going to see the actors. Jeff Bridges has long been a favourite of mine, and yet again he creates a believable and complex character with apparently no effort. He does affect another strange vocal style, though not on the same scale as Starman or The Vanishing; in this one he seems to be breaking in a new set of teeth.

He’s given a few problems by the writer as well. As is often the case, the central character is given too much background in order to keep the other characters mysterious. So Bridges is saddled with a career teaching American History, as well as a wife killed the previous year in a terrorist-related incident while working for the FBI. There is some sort of plot logic behind this, which I won’t reveal, but it means we are presented with some very unlikely incidents, not to mention a bad case of flashbacks.

Bridges’ scenes with his university class are particularly clumsy. He gets to rant about nothing specific for endless paragraphs, while we all wonder exactly what curriculum he is meant to be following. Our confusion is shared by his class, who sit with open mouths and furrowed brows. (I couldn’t nail these scenes for a day or two, then I realised where I’d seen this stuff before: Dick Solomon’s class in Third Rock from the Sun.) Of course it’s supposed to be a way of giving him some character depth while not getting in the way of the plot, but it’s not convincing, and actually feels like a political lecture by a third-rate analyst.

Another problem for Bridges is that he finds out early in the movie that something is apparently wrong, and has to spend over an hour looking increasingly worried as more details are revealed. And there are only so many worried faces that anyone can pull. He goes over the edge into modern-Pacino territory in the later stages, possibly because there’s nowhere else to go. Or maybe it’s the strain of being subjected to a few cinematic clichés, along the lines of old newspaper clippings, photos from old school books and the new contender, use of vague criteria in web search engines.

Robbins has a more straightforward part to play, and his role is to wheel out the honest and slightly simple Tim Robbins personality that we all know and love from other movies, but at least he resists the temptation to ham it up. It’s not dissimilar to Keaton’s role in Pacific Heights but fortunately without the melodramatic lighting. If you want full-scale nuttiness from Arlington Road, Joan Cusack’s portrayal of Robbins’ wife as a smiling loon fits the bill, although I did wonder what this couple were doing married to each other.

While these are all terrific performances by any standards, they will probably go unnoticed, as the memorable thing about Arlington Road is the finale. The UK advertising campaign emphasised the twist ending to a point where I expected something much more surprising (along the lines of Sean Connery turning up as King Arthur maybe), but all the same it’s a shock to see a movie with big stars and a reasonable budget end in this way. The actors were very brave to accept parts in this movie, and I fully expect it to cause a bit of a storm if it ever gets a US release, even if there’s nothing here that can’t be found in Garth Brooks videos.

Visually it’s a bit patchy. Some scenes are composed and lit like a TV movie, then all of a sudden Pellington seems to realise he’s got some budget left over, and goes for something much more ambitious. In particular there’s a shot of Bridges sitting in the dark which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Overall it’s a brave and unusual movie, with too many faults to be a classic. Lots of people will hate it, but it’s certainly not easily forgettable.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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Benicio Del Toro mumbles like Stallone and Tommy Lee Jones plays Richard Crenna. And the characters use knives instead of guns. Not quite sure why the strong cast and William Friedkin (who does a commentary track on the DVD) were attracted to this, as it doesn’t say much new, but it passes the time amiably enough. Del Toro and Jones are great as you might expect, even if the latter is about 10 years past this sort of role. Connie Nielsen looks as good as usual and it’s a mystery why she never became a bigger star.

The knife fights are probably not for the squeamish.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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