Broken Arrow (1996)

Brilliantly silly action thriller directed by John Woo. 

John Travolta and Christian Slater are military pilots testing a stealth plane armed with two nuclear missiles. But Travolta seizes the weapons and holds the world to ransom. The action plays out in the Utah desert (the scenery is stunning), where Travolta is helped by a gang of henchmen and Slater is joined by a friendly park ranger (Samantha Mathis). 

The action is unrelenting. There are plenty of James Bond tropes – a ticking timer on a bomb, fighting on top of a train, macho feuding and plenty of helicopter explosions – but it’s all done with John Woo’s sense of heightened reality. Everything is turned up to 11, with a deliberately absurd element. It’s made even more exciting by Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, which incorporates motifs from westerns and clanking industrial interludes.

Runaway Jury (2003)

Legal thriller adapted from a John Grisham novel. 

The plot is a little tricky to explain, but here goes... Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman) is a consultant who gets paid off to rig juries in court cases. Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman) is a morally upstanding lawyer who believes in truth, justice, decency and so on. The two men are pitted against each other during a trial against a gun manufacturer following an office shooting. But one of the jurors (John Cusack) and his girlfriend (Rachel Weisz) appear to hold all the cards about the real outcome of the court ruling. And, inevitably, nothing is quite what it seems.

It ought to work, and it very nearly does, but you are deliberately left in the dark about Cusack and Weisz’s real motivations until about 10 minutes before the end. By the time everything suddenly makes sense, you feel a little cheated that the film did so little to guide you through the various twists of the plot. Plus, their relationship isn’t fully explored. When we first meet them they appear not to know each other, but then it transpires that they’ve known each other for years. So were they pretending to be strangers as part of the scam? If so, why, when they were merely talking in an empty candle shop and this had nothing to do with manipulating the court case? If there was an explanatory cue here, it wasn’t clear enough.

All four of the leads are good, if not exactly stretched in the acting department, but there’s still something missing. Plus, Hackman’s hi-tech centre of operations – a flashy surveillance crime hide-out that no one seems to know about – is almost as implausible as the elaborate dens of villains in the 1960s Batman TV series.

Proof of Life (2000)

Intermittently enjoyable but extremely uneven thriller. 

Russell Crowe stars as Terry, a former SAS man tasked with rescuing Meg Ryan’s husband from the guerrilla rebels of the Liberation Army of Tecala. 

It’s morally all over the place, with one American’s life apparently worth so much more than the lives of all the locals from the fictional South American country. 

It’s also clumsily written, with a couple of plot threads not satisfactorily resolved. For example, why does Terry’s sister Janis (Pamela Reed) drop out of the narrative about halfway through? And what happened to the story about the oil pipeline funded by a US conglomerate? Also, the story has you hoping that Crowe and Ryan will get together as a couple, somewhat limiting your wish to see Ryan’s husband safely delivered home – the entire purpose of the mission.

Crowe and Ryan are both charismatic and watchable, and they lift the sub-standard material, but it’s still poor. And while no one would wish to deny the right of Meg Ryan’s character to wear nice make-up and clean white vests all of the time, you do wonder why she never once looks tired, nervous or unkempt despite the living hell she has to endure.

Pay It Forward (2000)

Extremely unusual drama set in Las Vegas and based on a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. 

A pre-teenage boy called Trevor (Haley Joel Osment) is inspired by his new school teacher Mr. Simonet (Kevin Spacey) and his alcoholic mother Arlene (Helen Hunt) to start doing more good in the world. He creates a scheme based on passing on kind deeds, which ends up having a profound effect on others around him and beyond.

The film works because you can believe in the characters, who are given depth and complexity. In particular, Spacey and Hunt are credible as emotionally (and in Simonet’s case physically) scarred adults doing their best to hold things together. 

It’s different enough to be thought-provoking, unpredictable, touching and memorable. My only real criticism was that it seemed a little too easy for Arlene to stop drinking after she decided to do so. 

Knives Out (2019)

Directed by Rian Johnson, this is a brilliant parody of a classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. 

Daniel Craig stars as the detective Benoit Blanc, who is hired to investigate the suspicious death of a hugely successful crime novelist named Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer). All of Harlan’s family stand to gain from his will, and all of them have a motive for killing him. So who actually committed the murder?

Craig’s “deep south” accent takes some getting used to, but he’s compelling in the role nevertheless. Ana de Armas is perfect as Marta Cabrera, Harlan’s kindhearted nurse who becomes inextricably mixed up in the events and who – in a surreal twist – cannot tell a lie without vomiting.

It works because alongside the mystery needing to be unravelled there’s also an intriguing portrait of a dysfunctional family. And in a surprisingly old-fashioned way, the film seems to offer a simple moral about kindness.

A sequel followed in 2022.

Four Weddings & a Funeral (1994)

The best of the romantic comedies written by Richard Curtis. The script and narrative are tighter and sharper, so there’s not the messy sprawl of Love Actually. 

The story revolves around a group of friends, who we only meet via the sequence of formal rites-of-passage events alluded to in the title. It’s expertly constructed, with what seem like throwaway lines thrown in early on ending up having a neat pay-off later. 

Hugh Grant is extremely watchable – at his charming-but-nervous best. Has anyone ever done “flustered” better than him? Andie McDowell is suitably aloof and exotic as the mysterious American visitor who attracts his attention. 

The only character that doesn’t quite work is Scarlet (Charlotte Coleman). I assumed she was Charles’ sister but it turns out she’s only his flatmate. On the plus side, Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, John Hannah and Rowan Atkinson are all excellent.

Proof (2005)

Excellent drama, directed by John Madden and adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn. 

A brilliant mathematician, Robert Llewellyn (Anthony Hopkins), suffered mental problems and has recently died. His daughter Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) – also a genius with numbers – appears to suffer a similar condition. She has been caring for him in his troubled final years. After Robert’s death, Catherine’s controlling sister (Hope Davis) arrives from New York and tries to organise her. Meanwhile, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a former graduate student of Robert’s who wants to go through his papers and find out if he left anything else of worth.

All four characters are brilliantly drawn and portrayed. The dialogue is plausible. 

The “troubled maths genius” trope recalls Ron Howard’s 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, but there’s strong enough acting and a compelling enough premise to make this well worth watching.

Eye in the Sky (2015)

Interesting thriller about drone warfare.

The story dwells on one single operation in Kenya – primarily focusing on the moral questions regarding whether or not an international anti-terrorist strike team should destroy a building in which suicide bombers are preparing an attack. A little girl who lives locally is selling bread for her mother within the proposed impact zone and would be harmed if the strike went ahead. But refusing to act might allow the loss of many more civilian lives.

It’s a little hammy – especially Alan Rickman, who only ever seems able to act one kind of character. In fact I wondered if it was drawn from a play, such is the oddly stagey way it’s written and filmed. 

Helen Mirren is passable as UK military intelligence officer Colonel Katherine Powell, but she doesn’t get to spark off anyone because – like the other stars – she’s filmed in isolation at a different location from everyone else. Perhaps it’s this “remote” feeling that denies the film dynamism. That said, the simple question of whether or not the little girl will be harmed keeps you hooked until the end.