THE GREEN ZONE

Director: Paul Greengrass; Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Jason Isaacs, Brendon Gleason, Amy Ryan

The posters deliberately make you think this is a continuation of the Bourne Trilogy and with Damon in the lead and Greengrass (who did the last two Bourne films) directing, in some ways it is. But whilst the Trilogy is without equal as an action series, Green Zone is a much more complex shoot-em-up. Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, posted to Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction that provided the justification for the US and Britain going to war. Miller is as tough as Bourne, obstinate and determined and it’s that determination that puts him in harm’s way as both Iraqis and some of his own side want him dead.

Greengrass is comfortable with political shenanigans – he started out years ago in current affairs, making World In Action documentaries – and used as a starting point Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s mind-boggling “Imperial Life In The Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone”. But he doesn’t allow the politics to get in the way of the action.

What’s clever, however, is that Damon’s character is a believer – he’s not there to rock the boat. But Damon is superb at capturing Miller’s growing sense of disbelief about the corruption, incompetence and malevolence he sees in the Green Zone (the secure area in Baghdad occupied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, in case you didn’t know) .

Soon he’s pitted against Jason Isaacs badass soldier - and nobody plays villains better than the man who stole the show from Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”. Brendon Gleeson, simply one of the finest actors around, is brilliant as an ambiguous CIA man. Amy Ryan plays a disappointingly cardboard cut-out journalist.

Intelligent action movies don’t come along that often so grab this whilst you can.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Director: Martin Scorsese; Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Elias Koteas

Dennis Lehane’s novels have been served well by Hollywood. Eastwood made a decent fist of “Mystic River” and Ben Affleck’s brilliant direction of “Gone Baby Gone” even overcame his decision to cast his runty, irritating brother as the tough-guy lead. Scorsese, though, is the icing on the cake.

Like Clint Eastwood, Scorsese is having a late flurry of creative activity, although he has overall been more consistent in his output. I don’t agree he’s America’s greatest living director, as many claim – he’s been too narrowly focused for that and is pretty rubbish with female characters – but he’s been loosening up nicely.

In “Shutter Island” he returns to the Gothic sensibility of his remake of Cape Fear. It’s 1954 and US marshall DiCaprio is sent to an offshore lunatic asylum for the criminally insane with his sidekick Ruffalo. They are there to investigate the disappearance of a murderess from her cell but DiCaprio also wants to confront Elias Koteas, an arsonist he thinks killed his wife (Williams). If that weren’t plot enough, when the two cops meet psychiatrists Kingsleyand Von Sydow they become suspicious that unethical medical experiments are being carried out on the island.

Di Caprio, who has replaced De Niro as the Scorsese muse, does haunted tough guy well. And the tricksy plot in the novel mostly makes its way to the screen. Which means that the set-up for the first seventy minutes is overturned comprehensively in the rest of the film.

Ruffalo I’ve never got. He’s one of those actors , who seems to do well without any discernible talent or charisma , that makes you think there’s some secret society at work ensuring these people have jobs. Chaz Palmienteri, Joe Mantegna and Danny Aiello are in the same boat (or society?). I jest, of course, you lawyers. These fine actors all have won their success entirely on their acting chops, I’m sure. Shame they leave those chops at home when they make movies.

Scorsese, of course, likes to reference other films even more than Tarantino. So here there’s Hollywood B horror galore. Flashbacks of DiCaprio’s war, images of death and madness are stylised but effective. Scorsese screened two Hitchcock films for his crew and cast – “39 Steps” and “The Wrong Man”. I can’t say why because it would be a shame to give the plot away but when you see it, you’ll know. But watch out for homages too to British director Michael Powell’s “Black Narcissus”. (Scorsese’s regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, married Powell late in his life.)

Scary, suspenseful, twisty and atmospheric. Go see it.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Director: Niels Arden Opley; Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace.

Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is going to be made into a Hollywood film, possibly starring BAFTA award-winner Kristen Stewart as kooky Lisbeth Salander. But in the meantime here is the two year old, two and a half hour, Swedish film version of the mega-selling first part of the Millennium trilogy, with Noomi Rapace as Salander and Michael Nyqvist as the journalist Blomkvist.

I’ve long been bemused by the popularity of the source material, which I found indigestible and trite, even whilst it was dealing with important and shameful aspects of Sweden’s history. Salander, the pierced and tattooed wild child-cum-ace private investigator/hacker was for me wholly unbelievable. But I know there are around 23 million people in the world who disagree with me and bought into the story of the punk hacker teaming up with a disgraced journo (Blomkvist) to solve a decades old crime.

The source novel is 500 pages long so there’s a lot to pack into the film, even at its extended running length. (The film is actually a condensation of two 90 minute TV movies. The other two parts of the trilogy have also been made into two 2-part TV movies in Sweden.) For that reason (and because it would be difficult to put on screen) much of Larsson’s comments on the misogyny and corruptness of Swedish society are lost. And, whilst the fascist crimes hidden in Sweden’s past are brought forward here, the concluding part of the film is all a bit of a rush.

The film is more whodunnit than thriller and both it and the source material owe something to Chandler (the rich man summoning the journalist to his big house to discover the truth about a past crime is, essentially, the start of “The Big Sleep”) and bits of Agatha Christie – neither of which is a bad thing.

Thanks to actress Noomi Rapace’s blistering performance, the complex, contradictory Salander actually makes more sense on screen than in the novel – I could actually believe in her as a real person for the first time. The opposite is the case with Blomkvist – already pretty much a cypher in the novel, here he is almost blank, despite being embodied by fine actor Nyqvist. In consequence, the unlikely pairing of the two in the novel becomes even less likely in the film. Not a spark flies.

The film looks good and there’s a cool musical score but overall the film is as disappointing to me as the novel. But no doubt 23 million viewers will say I’m wrong.

[And I’ve just seen the new edition of Empire film magazine and seen that Kim Newman, whose opinion I usually value, has given it 5 stars, the top rating the magazine gives. That’s one more than the mag gives to Scorsese or Paul Greengrass. And that is just bonkers.]

CASH [DVD]

Director: Stephen Milburn; Starring: Sean Bean, Chris Hemsworth, Victoria Profetta

A zippy low-budget film in which a suitcase full of money lands on Chris Hemsworth’s car and he and his wife set about spending it. Unhappily, the suitcase’s owner (Sean Bean) – his twin brother threw it from a van during a police chase – tracks them down. He moves into their house until they can raise the money to pay back what they’ve spent. Before you know it they’re robbing convenience stores whilst Bean keeps a tally to the last cent. Bean is suitably threatening, the tone of the film is a nice mix of menace and humour, there’s a pleasant enough sub-Tom Waits soundtrack and a neat little twist after the end credits have started rolling. Worth a look.

THE MERRY GENTLEMAN [DVD]

Director: Michael Keaton; Starring: Michael Keaton and Kelly MacDonald

Not quite a thriller but a fine directorial debut from Michael Keaton, who also plays the titular merry fellow (not). He’s a troubled hitman who develops an unlikely friendship with Macdonald - who is on the run from a troubled marriage - in the hope she can save him. As there’s a detective who has also taken a fancy to her you know there’s going to be trouble ahead._The film has an indie feel to it: Keaton doesn’t move his camera around much, the look is relentlessly unglamorous and the pace is slow as he takes his time developing the relationship between two lonely people. Although there are murders they are mostly off-screen and this is too quiet a film to count as a thriller.

Indeed, it almost goes against Mr Chekov’s famous dictum that if you introduce a hitman in the first act he has to kill someone by the end of the third – or something. The film’s focus is on MacDonald and she is extraordinary. How the homely girl of Gosford Park turned herself into Texan trash in No Country For Old Men and now into this complex, damaged character is proof of her brilliance. And Keaton, always watchable in front of the camera, shows he has a good eye behind it. Most impressive.

THE INFORMANT [DVD]

Director: Stephen Soderbergh; Starring: Matt Damon

This one came and went without troubling the box office too much, which is a shame given it’s one of versatile Damon’s most compelling roles. Any film about a whistleblower is going to suffer in comparison to Michael Mann’s magisterial “The Insider” – the film Rusell Crowe truly deserved an Oscar for. Perhaps that’s why Soderbergh goes for a light touch. Damon, who piled on the pounds for this role, plays fantasist Mark Whitacre who blows the whistle on corporate fraud in a jokey spy film. Soderbergh provides his usual added value with his commentary on the extras.

KATALIN VARGA [DVD]

Director: Peter Strickland_Starring: Hilda Peter, Norbert Tanko

A startling debut from Reading-born, Budapest-living director Strickland . Filmed on a minimal budget in the Hungarian countryside it tells the story of a young mother (Peter) and her son (Tanko) who set off across Transylvania in a horse-drawn carriage and on foot to take revenge for a past crime. Not much happens for much of the film but the landscape is stunning and the tension builds and eventually it is a powerful tale of betrayal, revenge and, of course, redemption. _DVDextras include Strickland himself talking engagingly about the film to camera. Worth checking out.

ZODIAC (2007)

Director:David Fincher; Featuring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jnr, Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox

The press release for this based-on-true-life movie calls Zodiac the ultimate cold-case. It is certainly up there with the Black Dahlia and Jack the Ripper. In the 1960s and 1970s a serial killer stalked the San Francisco area, murdering his victims in a variety of ways. His signature wasn't anything he did to the victims, it was the series of letters he sent over decades in his own code to taunt the police, all signed "The Zodiac".

His killings were the source for "Dirty Harry" (which Fincher impishly has screening in a cinema that is the location for a secret meeting). The detective who doggedly investigated the real case was the basis for Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan in that movie, Steve McQueen's renegade detective in "Bullitt", and - apparently - Michael Douglas's detective in the TV series "The Streets of San Francisco".

That detective is played by Mark Ruffalo in David Fincher's detailed and powerful analysis of the Zodiac killings. Ruffalo's character is one of four characters who become obsessed with the case. His sidekick (Anthony Edwards from ER) is the least significant and bails out of the case - though after about a decade(!). A journalist, Paul Avery (brilliantly played by Robert Downey Jnr), kicks the investigation off but then his substance abuse proves an increasing problem. It's the fourth man, a nerdy political cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhaal in another great performance) who follows the story through - and who, in real life, came up with what he felt was a solution to the identity of the Zodiac killer.

This is a terrific film, albeit l-o-n-g. Fincher, best known for Seven, eschews his usual gloom and shade for brightly lit scenes (shot on HD digital video) which makes the (few) scenes of death even more chilling. The brightly lit scenes in the news rooms of the journalist characters are a clear homage to director Alan J Pakula's decision in "All The President's Men" to present journalistic truth in a place with no shadows. ("Journalistic truth" ? now there's a phrase.)

This is like "All The President?s Men" in that it is a fact-based thriller. Fincher and his scriptwriters have been scrupulous in covering all the facts of this case. They have the identity of the killer and the argument is convincing.

One drawback in the film is that the characterisation doesn't really exist. Downey Jnr and Ghylenhaal do their best to flesh out their characters (I?ve never rated Ruffalo) but because the film has to get so much detailed information in, it doesn't entirely work.

Even so, a Fincher film in daylight is a rare and wonderful thing. My admiration.

THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Director: Stephen Frears; Featuring: John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening

Now THIS is noir - or at least a masterpiece of neo-noir. Cusack plays the young con-artist doomed because he's caught between his Oedipal attachment to his hustler mother (Huston in a career-best role) and his feelings for his sexy hustler girlfriend (the role that, alongside her cameo in Postcards From The Edge, made Bening a star).

It's a stellar product all round. The source novel is by Jim Thompson, adapted for the screen by Donald Westlake and impeccably directed by one of Britain's most intelligent helmers, Stephen Frears. (Yes, he did The Queen - so to speak - but he also made The Hit, one of the great Brit gangster films.)

The characters drive a narrative of race track scams, low-level bar hustles, the lure of big money and, ultimately, murder. The story merges financial and sexual greed to giddy effect. And Bening posing naked in her doorway, a mischievous grin on her face, is for neo-noir as iconic as Rita Hayworth tossing her hair and turning towards the camera in Gilda.

A must-see film, though this region 2 DVD release - with an interesting commentary from Cusak, Frears, Huston and Westlake - looks pretty much like the DVD that's been available on region 1 release for the past few years.

THE BIG STEAL (1949)

Director: Don Siegel; Featuring: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix

Although there has been a slew of film noir available on Region 1 for ages, Region 2 is only now catching up with the recent release of nine classic noir from Universal. The Big Steal is among them (available, I think, for the first time on either side of the Atlantic).

It's not really film noir at all, having few of the tropes the genre requires (shadowy mise-en-scene, femme fatale and a man who has run out of options etc). It takes place mostly in bright sunlight down Mexico way. Mitchum is a framed army captain out to clear his name, the gorgeous Greer is the woman willing to help and Bendix is the tough cop on his trail.

Siegel, of course, went on to make some great sixties thrillers, including Dirty Harry. Mitchum and Greer strike sparks off each other ? as they?d done two years earlier in 1947 in the definitely noir Out of The Past.

That was also known, of course, as Build My Gallows High. Rather embarrassingly, the people who have produced the DVD of The Big Steal say on the cover ?aka Build My Gallows High?. Oh dear ? but then they also colourise what was originally a b & w film. Be warned but don?t let that put you off watching this engaging movie.