Not enough people went to see True Crime in cinemas. Wasn't Clint Eastwood too old to be playing a guy who a variety of glorious women, from the middle-aged Diane Venora and Laila Robins to the young Mary McCormack and Lucy Liu, find attractive? Could the onetime Man with No Name credibly play a brilliant crime reporter, Steve Everett, with an ironic turn of phrase and an incurable habit of screwing up both his personal and professional lives? The respective answers to those questions are: hell no and hell yes. True Crime features one of Eastwood's best and most entertaining performances-and his work as director is utterly assured. The story (from Andrew Klavan's bestselling novel) gives Everett the last-minute assignment of interviewing a condemned man (Isaiah Washington) on the eve of his execution. The prisoner, a born-again Christian and exemplary family man, has everything the reporter lacks except a shot at seeing the next sunrise. Everett sets out to get him that, yet far from making a beeline to the exculpatory evidence that will save the life of his "client," this very tarnished hero has to spend a lot of the next 24 hours contending with the baggage he's accumulated through drinking, wenching and familial neglect. (A Pirandellian note: Everett's daughter is played by Eastwood's own daughter, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood, and her mother, Frances Fisher, returns for a feisty cameo as a prosecutor. ) This is a good one that got away. Don't let it happen again. -Richard T Jameson.

Before Harrison Ford assumed the mantle of playing Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan hero in Patriot Games, Alec Baldwin took a swing at the character in this John McTiernan film and hit one to the fence. If less instantly sympathetic than Ford, Baldwin is in some respects more interesting and nuanced as Ryan, and drawing comparisons between both actors' performances can make for some interesting post-movie discussion. That aside, The Hunt for Red October stands alone as a uniquely exciting adventure with a fantastic co-star: Sean Connery as a Russian nuclear submarine captain attempting to defect to the West on his ship. Ryan must figure out his true motives for approaching the US. McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard) made an exceptionally handsome movie here with action sequences that really do take one's breath away. -Tom Keogh.

Just what the world needs, another riff on that post-Psycho horror cliché: the slasher movie. In this version, which considerably dumbs down the Lois Duncan book, the bad guy chases naughty teenagers with a hook, all the while dressed as a dark version of the Gorton's fisherman. They seem to have killed someone in a car accident while out partying, and a price must be paid. Nothing new is added to the genre by I Know What You Did Last Summer, though it would be unfair not to note that this does have some scary moments. That is about all it has, because as much as this wanted to be another Scream, it hasn't the heart or the script. It does, however, have the requisite cast of small-screen stars (including Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt and Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar) to have snagged box-office success, spawning a sequel. -Rochelle O'Gorman.

The Jackal is filmmaking by numbers: take two huge stars, Richard Gere and Bruce Willis, and pit them opposite each other in a plot that's already been audience tested. That director Michael Caton Jones' film is based not on Frederick Forsyth's novel but on the script for the 1973 original starring James Fox is the first clue that something here is amiss. Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal was a genuinely taut and claustrophobic thriller; the remake is like a Rocky & Bullwinkle take on international terrorism disguised as an action movie. Dashing IRA terrorist, Declan Mulqueen (Richard Gere), is sprung from jail to help the FBI Deputy Director Carton Preston (Sidney Poitier) track down The Jackal, an amoral international terrorist who is a master of disguise. The FBI believes he is about to assassinate a US political bigwig and is engaged in a race against time to discover exactly who the target is and where they will be felled. Throughout the film Gere sports an Irish accent as ill-fitting and phoney as the bushy lip-wig that Willis adopts at one point as a disguise. The usually warm-hearted Willis plays the steel-jawed terrorist with a cool reserve, but he doesn't have much character development to work with (apart from a misguided attempt to introduce a gay subtext). At over two hours of running time with plenty of exposition and precious few action sequences, this film is a test of will for the audience as well as the protagonists. On the DVD: The DVD includes a lengthy "making of" featurette, several deleted scenes and an alternate ending with some small dialogue changes. There is also an exceedingly dry director's commentary by Michael Caton Jones which muses on such mind-numbingly dull details as the colour of the subway platform in the film's climactic sequence. [+]

Cry Wolf video made in 1947 and starring Errol Flynn and Barbara Stanwyck, running time 81 minutes.

It's not quite as clever as it tries to be, but The Game does a tremendous job of presenting the story of a rigid control freak trapped in circumstances that are increasingly beyond his control. Michael Douglas plays a rich, divorced, and dreadful investment banker whose 48th birthday reminds him of his father's suicide at the same age. He's locked in the cage of his own misery until his rebellious younger brother (Sean Penn) presents him with a birthday invitation to play "The Game" (described as "an experiential Book of the Month Club")-a mysterious offering from a company called Consumer Recreation Services. Before he knows the game has even begun, Douglas is caught up in a series of unexplained events designed to strip him of his tenuous security and cast him into a maelstrom of chaos. How do you play a game that hasn't any rules? That's what Douglas has to figure out, and he can't always rely on his intelligence to form logic out of what's happening to him. Seemingly cast as the fall guy in a conspiracy thriller, he encounters a waitress (Deborah Unger) who may or may not be trustworthy, and nothing can be taken at face value in a world turned upside down. Douglas is great at conveying the sheer panic of his character's dilemma, and despite some lapses in credibility and an anticlimactic ending, The Game remains a thinking person's thriller that grabs and holds your attention. Thematic resonance abounds between this and Seven and Fight Club, two of the other films by The Game 's director David Fincher. - Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Let's see-he has been Han Solo in three films and Indiana Jones in three more. So why shouldn't Harrison Ford take on a new continuing character in Tom Clancy's CIA analyst Jack Ryan? In this film, directed by Phillip Noyce, Ford picked up the baton when Alec Baldwin, who played Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, opted for a Broadway role instead. In this film, Ryan and his family are on vacation when Ryan saves a member of the British royal family from attack by Irish terrorists. The next thing he knows, the Ryan clan has been targeted by the same terrorists, who invade his Maryland home. The film can't shed all of Clancy's lumbering prose, or his techno-dweeb fascination with spy satellites and the like. But no one is better than Ford at righteous heroism-and Sean Bean makes a suitably snakey villain. -Marshall Fine.

Adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own hit stage play, Sleuth (1972) is a reflexively self-aware send-up of the murder-mystery genre, which risks everything on the tour de force performances of its small cast. Director Joseph L Mankiewicz doesn't attempt to escape the theatrical confines of Shaffer's clever and convoluted screenplay; instead he concentrates-or diverts?-our attention with close-up details of the setting. Is he showing us clues or just more red herrings? Like Agatha Christie's Mousetrap-which it rivalled in popularity on the West End stage-to say anything more about Sleuth would be to spoil the fun. But even when you've untangled the many and dizzying twists and turns, thanks to its literate screenplay and the magnetic performances of the leads this is a film that rewards repeated viewings. -Mark Walker.