Reuniting the "dream team" of director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter (and esteemed director in his own right) Paul Schrader-the men who brought you Taxi Driver and Raging Bull-Bringing Out the Dead provoked outrageously high expectations on its theatrical release. But when this brown-paper parcel of a film was unwrapped by critics and film-goers, the collective Christmas-morning sigh of disappointment was all but audible. Sure, there is a lot of blood but where are all the guns, the wise guys cracking wise, the filmic fireworks most people expect from a Scorsese movie? But shake the wrapping a bit and out rolls a tiny, perfect parable about New York City ambulance driver Frank (Nicolas Cage) who finds grace just when he seems to have hit rock bottom. Deprived of sleep, wired on speed of kinds, haunted by visions of a homeless girl he couldn't save, like Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, Frank roams the neon-spackled streets despairing at the decay around him. He's as war-torn by the ravages of the 1980s (the film is set in the early 1990s, before Mayor Giuliani got tough on crime) as Travis was by Vietnam's after effects. But Frank's problem is too much empathy, not alienation, and at least he is not as crazy as his co-drivers-one addicted to food (John Goodman), one to religion (Ving Rhames) and one to drugs and violence (Tom Sizemore)-each colleague more hilarious and frightening than the last. This is a story of a man who thought he could not take it anymore, one wracked by guilt and regret, who ends up being redeemed by-it's a movie cliché, and yet it just about works here-the love of a good woman (Patricia Arquette). Bringing Out the Dead may lack the glamorous, adolescent angst of Taxi Driver and eschew the rigorous dissection of masculinity that distinguished Raging Bull but it has its own quieter virtues and just as much visual bravura. Watching it on the small screen gives you more time to absorb its moral subtleties, its spectacular time-lapse photography and, like all great Scorsese movies, its hysterical stretches of black humour (Rhames' character's attempt to raise a seemingly dead clubber is a particular highlight). It may not be one of the director's, or even the screenwriter's, best films, but it still towers above most of the dross churned out by Hollywood every year and remains indispensable viewing for anyone serious about cinema. [+]

This delirious mix of sex, sadism and style has a masked man stalking the gorgeous mannequins of a Roman high fashion house, murdering them in a strikingly fetishist manner and then leaving the corpses to be discovered like grisly works of art. Mario Bava's 1964 film, originally titled Sei donne per l'assassino, is one of the earliest slasher movies, and remains a suspenseful, disturbing and oddly seductive film. The complex, lurid plot features blackmail, murder for profit, drug addiction and scandal among the beautiful people. Smooth Cameron Mitchell and lovely Eva Bartok are the conspirators, pursued by a plodding Columbo-style detective. However, Bava goes beyond the world of Agatha Christie or Edgar Wallace to embrace the surreal and the nightmarish. Each murder is handled like a musical number, with elaborate camera moves, striking colour effects and a strangely memorable jazz score. There is certainly more than a tinge of misogyny in the treatment of actresses as disposable dummies, but the plot is equally cynical about its grasping, feeble, suspicious male characters. This welcome video release-more complete than any previous UK edition-is letterboxed to show off the cinematography and, most importantly, preserves Bava's astonishingly rich colour effects. -Kim Newman.

Michael Crichton's bestselling novel was both a high-tech thriller and source of controversy with its hot-button plot about a man's charge of sexual harassment against a female colleague and former lover. The movie, directed by Barry Levinson, turned these issues into a prurient thriller dressed up in glossy production values, virtual reality computer graphics and steamy sex between Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Having cornered the market on roles for men whose brains are located south of their waistline, Douglas is well cast as the computer-industry guy who loses a plush promotion to the opportunistic Moore, and he's perfected the expression of paranoid panic. If you don't think about it too much, this is one of those films that can draw you into its manipulative web and really grab your attention. Disclosure is more entertaining than thought provoking (because the filmmakers basically danced around the story's potential controversy), but there's enough star power and visual glitz to make this an enjoyable ride. -Jeff Shannon.

Ever felt the chill wind of déjà vu? You will with Stag, as its entire premise follows that of director Peter Berg's none-more-black comedy Very Bad Things to the letter-except that Stag actually came first. While Very Bad Things starred Cameron Diaz and Christian Slater and therefore got a cinema release, Stag stars (oh dear) Mario Van Peebles, ex-Brat Pack star Andrew McCarthy and Taylor Dayne, and therefore didn't grace the silver screen. Van Peebles plays Michael, the loyal best friend and housemate of Victor (John Stockwell) who is poised to leave the buddy fold for marriage and domesticity. So, being a pal, Michael organises a surprise stag party for Victor, and invites along a host of their old crowd-including, regrettably, drug dealer and racketeer Pete (McCarthy), and the obligatory pair of strippers, Serena and Kelly (Dayne and Jenny McShane). Of course, things swiftly turn rowdy, Kelly falls to her wholly accidental death, and the boys have to cover up the death fast. Having established this nightmarish scenario, Stag veers away from the Gap-ad Grand Guignol of Very Bad Things and instead attempts to juggle suspense, melodrama, and a fairly ponderous examination of modern-male morality. The results aren't particularly edifying, but they do display a certain conviction, even if it's never satisfactorily explained why Van Peebles spends the entire film without eyebrows. Them's the breaks. -Danny Leigh.

The first of Alfred Hitchcock's World War II features, Foreign Correspondent was completed in 1940, as the European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Its titular hero, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), is an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to put a fresh spin on the drowsy dispatches emanating from overseas, his nose for a good story (and, of course, some fortuitous timing) promptly leading him to the "crime" of fascism and Nazi Germany's designs on European conquest. In attempting to learn more about a seemingly noble peace effort, Jones (who's been saddled with the dubious nom de plume Hadley Haverstock) walks into the middle of an assassination, uncovers a spy ring, and, not entirely coincidentally, falls in love-a pattern familiar to admirers of Hitchcock's espionage thrillers, of which this is a thoroughly entertaining example. McCrea's hardy Yankee charms are neatly contrasted with the droll English charm of colleague George Sanders; Herbert Marshall provides a plummy variation on the requisite, ambiguous "good-or-is-he-really-bad" guy; Laraine Day affords a lovely heroine; and Robert Benchley (who contributed to the script) pops up, albeit too briefly, for comic relief. As good as the cast is, however, it's Hitchcock's staging of key action sequences that makes Foreign Correspondent a textbook example of the director's visual energy: an assassin's escape through a rain-soaked crowd is registered by rippling umbrellas, a nest of spies is detected by the improbable direction of a windmill's spinning sails and Jones's nocturnal flight across a pitched city rooftop produces its own contextual comment when broken neon tubes convert the Hotel Europe into "Hot Europe". -Sam Sutherland.

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.

Do you know anyone who hasn't seen this movie? A box-office smash when released in 1993, this spectacular update of the popular 1960s TV series stars Harrison Ford as a surgeon wrongly accused of the murder of his wife. He escapes from a prison transport bus (in one of the most spectacular stunt-action sequences ever filmed) and embarks on a frantic quest for the true killer's identity, while a tenacious U. S. marshal (Tommy Lee Jones, in an Oscar-winning role) remains hot on his trail. Director Andrew Davis hit the big time with this expert display of polished style and escalating suspense, but it's the antagonistic chemistry between Jones and Ford that keeps this thriller cooking to the very end. In roles that seem custom-fit to their screen personas, the two stars maintain a sharply human focus to the grand-scale manhunt, and the intelligent screenplay never resorts to convenient escapes or narrative shortcuts. Equally effective as a thriller and a character study, The Fugitive is a Hollywood blockbuster that truly deserves its ongoing popularity. -Jeff Shannon The Fugitive could have been just another action movie, compelling in the cinema but losing impact on the small screen, were it not for two things: it has a brilliant script and a very strong line-up of actors. When eminent surgeon Dr Richard Kimble is wrongly convicted of his wife's brutal murder (let's face it-his story about doing battle with a one-armed intruder is hardly plausible), he's sentenced to death. Fate, however, gives him a second chance when his prison bus is involved in an accident with a train and he escapes, determined to find the real killer and clear his name. [+]