It's not unusual for Hollywood to remake European hits. What is unusual is the director of the original getting the chance to helm the new version with an American cast, which is what happened with this film based on an intensely creepy Dutch film of the same name (both directed by George Sluizer). Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock are on vacation when, while stopped at a crowded rest area, she disappears. He devotes the next several years to discovering what happened to her, ruining his life in the process. When he does get a clue, it leads him to Jeff Bridges, who plays a bizarre and highly organized individual whose motives are almost as strange as he is. Bridges is spooky, but Sluizer ultimately is undone by Hollywood's demand for a happy ending, which makes this film affecting but far less unsettling than the original. -Marshall Fine Forget Hitchcock, forget Brian De Palma, The Vanishing is one of the scariest, most disturbing thrillers ever made. Yet there's not a knife, a gun, or a drop of blood in sight. The terror in George Sluizer's film is wholly psychological, insidiously uncoiling itself before our incredulous eyes. A young Dutch couple on holiday in France stop at a motorway service station, where the girl inexplicably vanishes. [+]

Directed with a cool remove by Dominic Sena, Kalifornia falls somewhere between Badlands and Natural Born Killers. David Duchovny is a blocked author with a fascination for outlaw killers who hatches a plan to road trip through America's mass-murder landmarks to finish his book. He enlists the help of his frustrated photographer girlfriend Michelle Forbes, who desperately wants to leave the East Coast for LA, and they advertise for riding partners. Luckily for them, they wind up with a veteran killer, the greasy trailer-park ex-con Brad Pitt, who decides to skip parole with his cowering child-woman girlfriend Juliette Lewis. Duchovny is enamoured by gun-toting Pitt's recklessness and lawless disregard for, well, everything-simultaneously terrified and thrilled by Pitt's brutal beating of a barfly. Meanwhile, Pitt's leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. Pitt brings a ferocious magnetism to his part, but it's still hard to buy genial Duchovny's odd attraction; Juliette Lewis conveys a terrifying sense of victimization with her poor dumb creature. Despite the film's best efforts, it never really plumbs the psyche of Pitt's simmering psycho-he's just plain bad, you know-but it does fashion an effective little thriller out of the tensions brewing in the restless quartet. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

Taking its lead from Jonathan Demme's Oscar-winning pulse-raiser The Silence Of the Lambs, Copycat strives for intelligence over gristle and carnage. It's a terse, involving thriller that swings away from the usual cinematic notion of violence as a means to an end by forgoing brawn for brains. Young San Francisco police inspector Ruben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney) is teamed with brilliant force vet, M J Monahan (Holly Hunter), a diplomatic, no-nonsense cop who must buck the system in order to find a killer who is copying the crimes of history's most notorious serial killers. Ruben would rather shoot to kill than merely wound a suspect; Monahan labours to help him think more diplomatically. Everything changes when crank calls arrive at the station from serial-killer pin-up girl psychiatrist Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver). She's been housebound for 13 months, ever since murderer Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr. ) nearly made her his next victim because she testified against him in court. Though he's in prison, he's still mentor and muse to every loose cannon walking the streets-one of whom is killing people with a vengeance and hoping to finish the job Cullum began. Cop and doc team up to solve the case in this stylish, plot-driven movie. Though Copycat loses steam in the end, it still makes a point. [+]

In the entire history of American movies, The Night of the Hunter stands out as the rarest and most exotic of specimens. It is, to say the least, a masterpiece-and not just because it was the only movie directed by flamboyant actor Charles Laughton or the only produced solo screenplay by the legendary critic James Agee (who also co-wrote The African Queen). The truth is, nobody has ever made anything approaching its phantasmagoric, overheated style in which German expressionism, religious hysteria, fairy-tale fantasy (of the Grimm-est variety), and stalker movie are brought together in a furious boil. Like a nightmarish premonition of stalker movies to come, Night of the Hunter tells the suspenseful tale of a demented preacher (Robert Mitchum, in a performance that prefigures his memorable villain in Cape Fear), who torments a boy and his little sister-even marries their mixed-up mother (Shelley Winters)-because he's certain the kids know where their late bank-robber father hid a stash of stolen money. So dramatic, primal, and unforgettable are its images-the preacher's shadow looming over the children in their bedroom, the magical boat ride down a river whose banks teem with fantastic wildlife, those tattoos of LOVE and HATE on the unholy man's knuckles, the golden locks of a drowned woman waving in the current along with the indigenous plant life in her watery grave-that they're still haunting audiences (and filmmakers) today. -Jim Emerson, Amazon. com.

Extreme Measures loses credibility near the climax when it sacrifices its hold on reality, but this entertaining, intelligent thriller effectively applies a formulaic plot to the complicated ethics of medical research. It also gives Hugh Grant an opportunity to break free from lightweight comedy by playing an emergency room surgeon who discovers that a renowned neurologist (Gene Hackman) has been conducting secret experiments on patients. When Grant fails to save a patient whose body later mysteriously disappears from the morgue, his investigation leads to an underground community of healthy homeless people, some of whom have been test subjects in Hackman's revolutionary, but criminal research toward a cure for paralysis. Co-produced by actor-model Elizabeth Hurley and capably directed by Michael Apted, this otherwise conventional thriller rises above its limitations by asking morally complex questions that give its far-fetched plot an extra kick of dramatic impact. -Jeff Shannon.

It's easy to understand why Arlington Road sat on the studio shelf for nearly a year. No, the film isn't awful; rather, it's an extremely edgy and ultimately bleak thriller that offers no clear-cut heroes or villains. In other words, Hollywood had no idea how to sell it. Director Mark Pellington's underrated directorial debut, Going All the Way, suffered the same fate, essentially because the film-maker's presentation of suburban America often shifts dramatically within the same film. Characters are usually miserable and bordering on meltdown, no situation is straightforward and things usually end badly. Arlington Road begins as an astute study of suburban paranoia. Michael Faraday (a face-pinched Jeff Bridges, who spends most of the film on the brink of tears) is a college professor who teaches American history courses on terrorism. He's been a conspiracy freak since his wife, an FBI agent, was killed during a botched raid that feels like a thinly fictionalised reference to the Waco tragedy. After saving the life of his next-door neighbour's child, he initially befriends the family (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), but soon believes the husband is a terrorist. The first half of the film mocks Faraday: he has no real evidence and is not the most stable of protagonists. [+]

Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden, a film adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's stunning play about the legacy of torture, has more in common with the director's first film, Knife in the Water (with all the latter's unnerving ambiguities about power, sexual transgression and confused alliances among three people) than a straightforward political parable. Sigourney Weaver (a bit underwhelming in this role, but good overall) plays a former political prisoner in an unnamed South American country that has turned democratic. She is married to a government official (fine work by Stuart Wilson) heading up official inquiries into the practice of torture under the former regime. Still shattered by her experience, Weaver's character seeks safe haven in closets of the cliff-top house she shares with her husband. But when her other half returns home with a seemingly nice fellow (a brilliant Ben Kingsley), she believes she recognises the stranger as the interrogator who raped her repeatedly in prison. She violently takes him hostage, and what ensues is a hurricane of fury and confusion, as Kingsley's terrified character denies all accusations, Wilson's guilt-ridden spouse can't decide whom to defend and Weaver turns her psychosexual rage into a weapon of humiliation. Dorfman adapted the screenplay himself, but there's no question that Polanski is leading us down the familiar path of human betrayal and terror that he crossed in such films as Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion and Bitter Moon. At times stunning in its bluntness and compelling to the last, Death and the Maiden literally takes us to the edge of oblivion where-in Polanski's films-the hardest truths always seem to fall into a heretofore unknown perspective. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

The director and action-magician John Woo (Face/Off) can always be counted on to create spectacular violent set pieces, with bodies and broken glass gracefully airborne in slow motion. But everything else in this feature-length TV pilot is grindingly conventional. Woo managed to rise above Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target, but there's not much he can do with Dolph Lundgren's Jack Devlin, a kick-boxing former U. S. Marshall turned bodyguard, assigned to guard the body of a drug-addicted supermodel (Kam Heskin, from TV's Sunset Beach). Between shootouts, the elements of the future series are wheeled creakingly into place: a spacious Ikea deluxe apartment with a built-in armoury, a caustic eye-patched sidekick (Saul Rubinek), and even a precocious freckle-faced girl (Padraigin Murphy) who becomes Devlin's stepdaughter, when his best buddy is rubbed out. The gorgeous showdown scene between Devlin and the psycho-stalker bad guy (Phillip MacKenzie) takes place in a milk-bottling plant, with the white stuff splashing all over-but this is TV fare, so there's no red stuff mixed in. Action addicts are advised to stick with the world-class gunplay films of Woo's Hong Kong period, A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled. -David Chute.

Anthony Hopkins is a brilliant actor; Cuba Gooding Jr is a talented guy with a lot of charm. Both have recently won Oscars (Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs and Best Supporting Actor for Jerry Maguire, respectively); neither can make Instinct compelling. Hopkins plays a brilliant anthropologist studying gorillas who entered into their world, becoming part of their family, and who killed two park rangers in the gorillas' habitat. Gooding plays a brilliant young psychiatrist who is supposed to evaluate Hopkins and determine whether he's fit to stand trial. Hopkins, along with a number of other psychotics, is being held at a prison, which serves to illustrate the movie's themes about control and freedom. It's not so much that the ideas themselves are hokum-nature versus civilisation is always a rich topic-it's that Instinct boils them down to inane sound bites. Psychology is reduced to a game in which the psychiatrist's job is to trick the patient into believing the correct thing or revealing the key that will solve the puzzle. There's not a credible moment in the whole movie, despite the presence of a good cast, including Donald Sutherland and Maura Tierney. -Bret Fetzer, Amazon. com.