Living in exile in Paris after eluding a controversial charge of statutory rape in America, director Roman Polanski seemed professionally adrift during the 1980s, making only one film (the ill-fated Pirates) between 1979 and 1988. Then Polanski found inspiration-and a major star in Harrison Ford-to make Frantic, a thriller that played directly into Polanski's gift for creating an atmosphere of mystery, dread, escalating suspense and uncertain fate. Set in Paris (Polanski couldn't go to Hollywood, so Hollywood came to him), the story begins when an American heart surgeon (Ford) arrives in the City of Lights with his wife (Betty Buckly) for a medical convention. They check into a posh hotel, and in a brilliantly directed scene, Ford takes a shower and emerges to find that his wife has vanished. This mysterious disappearance-and a confusion between two identical pieces of luggage-leads Ford into the Paris underground and a plot that grows increasingly dangerous as he approaches the truth of his wife's disappearance. The plot of Frantic gets too complicated, and the pace drops off in the cluttered second half, but in Polanski's capable hands the film is blessed with moments of heightened suspense in the tradition of classic thrillers. -Jeff Shannon.

There are several occasions when this rousing Australian thriller from 1987 should have ended with a well-placed shot from a speargun or a stronger knot of rope, but you don't think about these small details when you're being scared out of your wits. In a role that catapulted her to international stardom, Nicole Kidman plays a young wife who has joined her husband (Sam Neill) on a yachting trip to recover from the tragic death of their son. Far out to sea, they encounter a sinking ship with one survivor (Billy Zane, 10 years before Titanic) but inviting him aboard turns out to be a very bad mistake. While Neill attempts to salvage the sinking boat, Kidman is fighting for her life against the psychotic Zane-a villain so creepy that you eagerly look forward to his demise. By the time that moment arrives director Phillip Noyce has resorted to a typical slasher-movie climax (proving that no boat should be without a flare gun) but until then Dead Calm is a nail-biting thriller that's guaranteed to keep you in a state of nail-biting suspense. -Jeff Shannon.

Previous UK releases of Catchfire have listed the pseudonymous Allan Smithee as director, but this version proudly opens with "a Dennis Hopper film". Also known as Backtrack, it offers a plot that advances by illogical leaps and bounds while whole scenes seem to go astray. With prominently billed actors getting almost nothing to do while major players go un-credited, a bland music score that might have been laid in from another film entirely and an ending that makes a lot of noise without actually resolving much, the film certainly has its bad points. However, it's also one of Hopper's more eccentric films, and more fun than Colors or The Hot Spot (which he had no trouble owning up to), partly because the director also takes a quirky lead role and his own personal interests are stirred by the modern art frills of the chase plot. The film opens with LA-based conceptual artist Jodie Foster, looking chunkily terrific just before her adult career took off, suffering a minor breakdown on the freeway and happening on a gangland execution. Pint-sized mob boss Joe Pesci sets his killers on her but the crooks ineptly murder Foster's boyfriend (Charlie Sheen, taking a very early bath). Pesci calls in Hopper, a professional hitman who immerses himself in Foster's life and art in order to track her down only to develop an obsessive crush on the woman. When he finds her, he gives her the choice between getting rubbed out or becoming his property. Hopper retains the knack for finding odd-looking byways of rural America, but is uncomfortable with helicopter chases and shoot-outs. The leads, despite great chunks of missing story, are both interesting-Foster sexily vulnerable and Hopper doing a wry New York drawl as the sax-playing hit man. [+]

This curiously overlooked drama from Clint Eastwood, released just after his Oscar triumph with Unforgiven, concerns a prisoner (Kevin Costner) on the run with a kidnapped young boy as protection and the Texas Ranger (Eastwood) and federal agent (Laura Dern) on his tail. Eastwood manages a number of nice touches-the boy's innocence is nicely contrasted with Costner's soft-spoken desperado by the Casper Halloween costume he wears and the law-enforcement officials look vaguely foolish, travelling around the countryside with a high-tech camper in tow. Eastwood gives a grizzled performance that, despite its seen-it-all surface, still feels fresh after all these years, and he coaxes surprisingly sensitive work out of Costner. But it's the sheer, modest scale of this piece that makes it so disarming-no planet lies in jeopardy, there are no cosmic make-or-break consequences here, just committed people doing their job and a well-meaning bad guy hoping things don't get too out of hand while he prevents them from doing so. -David Kronke.

The genius in him created her. The devil in him destroyed her.

A thinking person's thriller, Spy Game employs dense plotting without sacrificing the kinetic momentum that is director Tony Scott's trademark. The film has the byzantine scope of a novel, focusing on veteran CIA operative Nathan Muir (Robert Redford), whose protégé Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is scheduled for execution in a Chinese prison. It's Muir's last day before retiring (cliché alert!), and Bishop is being deliberately sacrificed by oily CIA officials to ensure healthy trade with China. Muir has 24 hours to rescue Bishop and his perfunctory love interest (Catherine McCormack), and Spy Game connects the mentor's end-run strategy to flashbacks of his student's exploits in Berlin, Beirut and beyond. Ambitious but emotionally bland-and not as exciting as Scott's Enemy of the State-Spy Game offers pass-the-torch humour between leather-faced Redford and pretty boy Pitt, and although their dialogue is occasionally limp, the movie compensates with efficient style and substance. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

This 1992 crowd pleaser made almost as much money for Whitney Houston as its chart-busting soundtrack. A high-wattage star vehicle as only Hollywood can make, The Bodyguard stars Houston as a pop-music diva (now there's a stretch) and Kevin Costner as the stern bodyguard who is assigned to protect her after the singer receives some nasty death threats. Pop star and bodyguard don't hit it off at first, but they wear down each others' defenses, and before long Houston is baring her tonsils with a rousing rendition of the Dolly Parton chestnut "I Will Always Love You. " The film, written by Lawrence Kasden, was originally intended for Steve McQueen, but the script languished for years before Houston took an interest in the project. A proposed sequel would potentially have starred Costner and Princess Diana, until Diana's tragic death precluded that possibility. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Released in 1971 (the same year Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange hit the screens, which must make 71 the annus mirabilis for violent films set in Britain), Get Carter opens with gangsters leering over pornographic slides and ends on a filthy, slag-stained beach in Newcastle. It's a low-down and dirty movie from beginning to end, and possibly the grittiest and best film of its kind to come out of Britain. The granddaddy of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and all its ilk, director Mike Hodges' Get Carter offers revenge tragedy swinging-60s style, all nicotine-stained cinematography, shabby locations and the kind of killer catchphrases Vinnie Jones would die for ("You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me, it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself", says Michael Caine's deadpan anti-hero Carter before inflicting a few choice punches on Brian Mosley, aka Coronation Street's Alf Roberts, to name but one example from Hodges and Ted Lewis' exquisitely laconic script). Presenting the dark horse in his family of loveable Cockney geezer roles (Alfie, The Italian Job), Michael Caine plays the title role of Jack Carter, a man so hard he barely registers a flicker of regret watching a woman he has just had sex with plunge to her death. After taking the train up to Newcastle as the credits roll and Roy Budd's chunky bass-heavy theme tune plays, Carter returns to his hometown to attend his brother's funeral and investigate the circumstances of his death. Not that he's all that sentimental about family: he shaves nonchalantly over the open coffin, and shows affection to his niece Doreen (Petra Markham) by cramming a few notes in her hand and telling her to "be good and don't trust boys". Gradually, Carter unravels the skein of drugs, pornography and corruption tangled around his brother's death, which brings him up against supremely oleaginous kingpin Kinnear (played by the author of Look Back in Anger John Osborne) among others. A remake starring Sylvester Stallone is in the offing, but quite frankly it will be a 30-degree (Celsius) Christmas night in Newcastle before Hollywood could ever make something as assured, raw and immortal as this. [+]

The Hot Spot is best known to lecherous film buffs for Jennifer Connelly's topless scene, but this sultry southern noir deserves more than prurient interest. It's arguably Dennis Hopper's best directorial effort (OK, so that's not saying much), and Charles Williams' source novel Hell Hath No Fury finds Hopper in a comfortable B-movie milieu, riffing on Double Indemnity with an overripe tale of sex, greed and blackmail in an unnamed Texan town. Fresh from the final season of Miami Vice, Don Johnson stars as a shifty drifter, conning his way into a salesman job on a used-car lot, where the boss's insatiable wife (Virginia Madsen) offers him sexual favours and a lovely secretary's (Connelly) innocence is threatened by a percolating scandal. Nobody's really innocent, of course, and Hopper spices this languid web of secrets with enough trashy misbehaviour to qualify The Hot Spot as a bona fide guilty pleasure. -Jeff Shannon.

Martin Cruz Smith's bestselling mystery novel seemed ideal material for a movie version, but in Gorky Park director Michael Apted and the usually reliable writer Dennis Potter couldn't quite solve the problem of taking the story from page to screen. William Hurt plays Renko, a Cold War-era Moscow police detective who must cope with both crooks and Communist party protocol as he tries to solve a murder case in the middle of one of Moscow's public parks that leaves three faceless corpses. The strands of the mystery involve corruption, American money and the fur trade and, ultimately, take Renko to New York. But the tension is never all there, despite a deliciously menacing performance by Lee Marvin as the bad guy and Brian Dennehy as an American cop who becomes Renko's ally. -Marshall Fine.