Bovie Movie

British theatre director Sam Mendes made an astonishing film debut with this sublime black comedy about midlife crises, starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening as a bored couple in suburban America. The sexually frustrated Bening begins an affair with estate agent Peter Gallagher; Spacey, meanwhile, fantasises about Mena Suvari, a teenage friend of his daughter’s. Their disparate needs make for a comic tragedy of misunderstanding that combines acute observations with side-splitting scenarios. This truly outstanding film (on which Steven Spielberg acted as an uncredited producer) deservedly picked up a clutch of Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actor for Spacey. 

Using the same multi-stranded technique as he did for his Oscar-winning screenplay of the drugs drama Traffic, writer/director Stephen Gaghan here weaves the threads of small, apparently barely linked narratives into a giant tapestry, revealing the global oil industry in all its hideous, venal and corrupt glory. The story is so labyrinthine that an adequate description is impossible (and indeed its deliberate complexity will be an irritant to some), but individual plot elements include George Clooney as a worn-out CIA agent involved in arms dealing and assassinations, Matt Damon as a grief-stricken energy analyst and Christopher Plummer as the head of a powerful Washington law firm. These seemingly disparate tales move at a relentless pace and, as a result, the whole picture is sometimes difficult to grasp — again deliberately so. Gaghan’s technique is not to convince you that you’re following a single set of characters involved in a coherent story, but rather to give you the jittery, exhilarating feeling that you’re eavesdropping on conversations you were never meant to hear. It’s an approach that makes this a compelling, richly detailed and, in the end, terrifying experience. 

The spy thriller gets an exciting 21st-century makeover in this hip and energetic tale from former indie director Doug Liman. Based on the novel by Robert Ludlum, it stars Matt Damon as a half-dead amnesiac who’s found floating in the Mediterranean Sea with no means of identification, except for a device embedded in his hip containing a Swiss bank account number. Unaware that he’s actually a top CIA assassin, he sets off to Zurich to investigate, facing cops and government killers as his employers try to wipe out their now renegade operative. The film is fast-paced and slickly executed, with an edgy sophistication that must have influenced the reinvention of the Bond franchise with Casino Royale in 2006. Despite a routine plot, every scene feels fresh and believable, making intelligent use of a sharp, well-fleshed out script and strong actors. Damon seems particularly at ease in his smart action hero role, and there’s gutsy support from Franka Potente as his love interest. 

The plot of this bracingly grown-up thriller is taken from recent history. In 2001, the FBI unmasked Robert Hanssen, one of the Bureau’s own counter-intelligence specialists, as a KGB mole. The man who uncovered this spymaster’s 15-year-plus deception was fresh-faced Eric O’Neill (played with suitable rigidity by Ryan Phillippe), a lowly agent-in-training who was used as the bait in a complicated sting operation. Sticking closely to the facts of the case, co-writer/director Billy Ray’s take on ?the worst breach in the history of the FBI? plays out as a suspenseful and cerebral game of human chess. Chris Cooper (an Oscar winner for Adaptation.) excels as the enigmatic Hanssen: a staunch Catholic with a weakness for pornography. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass (the story of a duplicitous journalist who invented his own sources), it’s a riveting human drama about the lies men tell and the personal cost of straying so far from the truth. 

Die Hard meets Speed, but with the brakes on, as transport cop Wesley Snipes tries to stop his flaky foster brother Woody Harrelson robbing the New York subway transit system. But lightning doesn’t strike twice for the White Men Can’t Jump dynamic duo, and director Joseph Ruben resorts to recycling exhausted gags and long-drawn out arguments, and the result is lacklustre in the extreme. The last third of the film, set on an out-of-control express train, is packed with eye-popping crashes and sterling stunt work, but it all comes far too late to save a vehicle that is so reliant on Harrelson and Snipes’s good-natured double act. On the plus side, Jennifer Lopez is dynamite as a Hispanic rookie cop. 

In the third film based on author Robert Ludlum’s bestsellers, former CIA agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) hits the ground running — and from then on the pace never slackens. The subtle and simple script is dazzling, as Bourne zips through stunning global locations to discover the truth about his past and take revenge on those responsible for his brainwashed plight. Damon has really made the role of the troubled assassin his own, and returning director Paul Greengrass employs the same hand-held camera technique he used in The Bourne Supremacy to add immediacy and up-close-and-personal thrills to the terrific stunts. With flashbacks to both previous episodes, and stars Joan Allen and Julia Stiles returning to marvellous effect, this final instalment is essentially one long chase that never loses its grip or credibility. Nothing is overplayed, from the scary surveillance tracking methods to the high-level corruption, making this a superbly crafted masterclass in intelligent action film-making.