Deliverance (1972)

A masterpiece. This is a survival thriller directed by John Boorman, and adapted by James Dickey from his 1970 novel. 

It stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox as four friends who take a disastrous canoe trip in the northern Georgia wilderness before the river is dammed and an entire community is erased. 

It works on multiple levels, like all great art. There’s a theme about poverty and the dispossessed – an entire band of society with no voice and no rights is abandoned and eradicated. Plus, there’s an ecological theme: we can never truly master the environment. There are also various moral questions that arise from their encounters with crazed locals. 

There’s a wonderful and poignant soundtrack. The film is beautifully shot. The characters are extremely well drawn. The dialogue is believable. The acting is uniformly strong. The storytelling is lucid. It’s moving, gripping and profound.

Heat (1995)

Cop tries to catch criminal gang causing havoc in Los Angeles. Al Pacino is the cop. Robert De Niro leads the gang. 

Heat is a complex film that introduces multiple threads. At its worst it’s in danger of becoming an episode of Miami Vice or even The A-Team. At its best, it’s like a cut-price Scorsese imitation, albeit without the elegance and sophistication. The script is reasonable enough, but there are casting problems. Val Kilmer is jarringly woeful as one of the gang members. Furthermore, the gang guys have no chemistry whatsoever. Even De Niro seems to be struggling a little with the material. Plus, some of the music is intrusive. And the threads about the stand-in getaway driver and Natalie Portman as a troubled teen could both have been removed in the interests of tightening up the narrative.

On the plus side – and it's a big plus – Pacino rises to the challenge of his role and is every bit as cool as usual. The scenes featuring him and his wife (Diane Venora) are convincing, and there’s a depth to him that the other characters lack.