Reel look/Hollywood

Based on the novel by James Jones, the film tells the story of a US army rifle company thrown into the cauldron of Guadalcanal in 1944. If Kubrick, Stone and Coppola recounted the nausea of Vietnam, Malick tells you WW-II was no picnic either.

We don8217;t see the war for the first 45 minutes, instead the camera moves lazily amongst the lush Australian locales. And then it hits you in a never-ending fusillade of blood, bullets and bravado.

If stomachs churned with the Normandy landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan then it8217;s the bloodbath on a lush hill here. The carnage is seen through the eyes of an assemblage of principal characters. Nick Nolte, the tough ageing colonel in his first battle, Jim Caviezel as the soldier stopping to smell theflowers and Ben Chaplin who survives on memories of his wife. Sean Penn, Elias Koteas and Woody Harrelson are fellow voyagers to hell even as John Toll8217;s spellbinding cinematography grabs snatches of the effect of war on the environment and its torment of the human soul.

The philosophical narratives of the principal characters are interspersed with dreamy flashbacks. Blink and you8217;ll miss John Travolta and George Clooney who pop in for cameos.

Though it8217;s not for the squeamish, Red Line is a must-see film, worth every one of the seven Oscars it was nominated for.

Dark City

A darker version of The Truman Show, where the megalomanical director and the TV audiences are replaced by an army of Nosferatu-like space beings called The Strangers. These aliens create a giant city populated by abducted humans, silently watching them so they can understand the race better, tinkering with artificial memories as effortlessly as they churn out the metropolis8217; brick and concrete structures.

Rufus Sewell, theprime suspect in a series of murders, is the fugitive who discovers that the city is really an endless nocturnal nightmare. Pursued by sympathetic William Hurt8217;s detective character, Sewell ultimately battles the Strangers and wins the affection of Jennifer Connelly. With a lot of help from Kiefer Sutherland8217;s memory injecting psychiatrist character.Film owes a lot to elements of classic sci-fi lore including Philip K Dick8217;s artificial memory stories turned into films like Bladerunner and Total Recall and Fritz Lang8217;s Metropolis. Writer-director Alex Proyas has a field day recreating the gloom and urban dystopia of his earlier venture The Crow. Though it gets a bit silly towards the end, Dark City is a passable film.

Death and The Maiden

As with other minimalist fare, this Roman Polanski film derives its strength from its spartan cast and setting: three actors on a night in a house on a lonely cliff.

Sigourney Weaver discovers that the kindly Ben Kingsley who gives her stranded husband a lifthome is none other than her devilish tormentor in a military prison.

Her former student activist husband Stuart Wilson has just been appointed by the president to probe into the torture and human rights abuses. Weaver trusses up Kingsley and subjects the apparently-guiltless doctor to the same venom you8217;d think she8217;d reserve for the Aliens.

This film could alternatively have been called Playback Payback. Its title is the Schubert symphony which forms the same macabre association that Singing in the Rain8217; had with homicide in A Clockwork Orange. Weaver beats up Kingsley to Schubert8217;s symphony which he had once played for his victims.Director Polanski shakes off the temptation to deliver distracting flashbacks or, horror of horrors, a vigilante ending to this classic.

Sterling 10.45 pm8211; SANDEEP UNNITHAN