Bovie Movie

Despite misleading genre trappings and nasty gore, Exorcist director William Friedkin’s film is not a horror piece but an overwrought psychological drama. Adapted by Tracy Letts from his off-Broadway play, it stars Ashley Judd (whose fearless performance is wasted here) as a trailer-trash waitress who is in hiding from her abusive jailbird ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr). Shacked up with her in a tacky motel room is traumatised soldier Michael Shannon (reprising his acclaimed stage role), and the pair feed off each other’s paranoid delusions. He starts seeing bugs everywhere, she wraps everything in tin foil and together they discuss aliens, conspiracy theories and secret government experiments. Each becomes more hysterical as manic fantasy takes over from fact, with Friedkin pushing the ludicrous third act into dead-end grotesque camp. It’s an alienating and exhausting rant that never escapes its offputting theatrical origins. 

This military thriller from director William Friedkin is far-fetched in the extreme, but luckily the action sequences have a terrific, visceral impact — despite there being very little in the way of character development on which to hook them. A traumatised US veteran of the conflict in Kosovo (Benicio Del Toro) is loose in the woods, gruesomely dispatching game-hunters, and the man who taught him how to kill (a typically gruff Tommy Lee Jones) is brought in to track him down. In a case of individuality sacrificed at the altar of efficiency, the two leads have a hard time bringing distinct personalities to their rather clichéd characters (they run, they fight, they run again), though both have enough presence partly to overcome this. Friedkin’s film eventually runs into a blind alley, but until then it’s an enjoyably gritty ride powered by star charisma rather than logic. 

Based on a real-life drugs bust by New York narcotics cops, this crime drama from director William Friedkin brings a fluid, documentary-style realism to Ernest Tidyman’s adaptation that makes it one of the most influential movies of a very fertile decade for American film. Gene Hackman made his name (and won an Oscar) as wild-card detective “Popeye” Doyle, chasing down Fernando Rey’s suave French drugs overlord before the “connection” can be made. Grey, nippy and sleazy, this is the underside of New York and a distinctly non-glamorous portrait of police life in which Hackman and sidekick Roy Scheider sit for hours in cars watching doorways and eating fast food. The frantic action sequences — such as the film’s iconic car chase beneath an elevated train track — are handled with the same sense of thrilling authenticity.