Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg Starring Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Jeremy Davies, Tom Sizemore
One of the crowning achievements in Spielberg's career, this unrelentingly intense and truly remarkable anti-war movie remains riveting throughout its 170 minutes, although its visual power will be somewhat diminished on the small screen. It opens and closes on two extraordinary sustained battle sequences of cacophonous chaos and mayhem, and the edgy calm of the central sequence - as the last surviving brother in a family of soldiers is sought by a seven-man platoon - is permeated by an ever-present sense of danger. This is a thoughtful, brilliant and harrowing film.
Dead Man's Curve
Directed by Dan Rosen Starring Matthew Lillard, Michael Vartan, Randall Batinkoff, Dana Delaney
Rosen's dark and resolutely cynical comedy hinges on two lazy college students who plot to kill their room-mate and make his death look like suicide - so that the semester's work will be treated more sympathetically in the light of the trauma they will have experienced. The movie is peppered with off-the-wall humour and played with deadpan panache.
The Governess
Directed by Sandra Goldbacher Starring Minnie Driver, Tom Wilkinson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Set in the 1840s, this turgid pot-boiler reveals Minnie Driver's limitations in the demanding role of a Sephardic Jew who poses as a Gentile to get work as a governess on a remote Scottish island. The film takes an inordinate amount of time getting down to the inevitable business of her secret affair with the paterfamilias.