Monsters (2010 90min.) [Film4 9.00pm &+1]
Science-fiction drama starring Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy. Six years after an alien life-form has spread throughout Mexico, a cash-strapped photographer escorts the daughter of his newspaper-magnate boss out of the quarantined region and back to the US, fully intending to give the area infected by aliens a wide berth.
Debut feature film by Gareth Edwards who for many years was one of the most highly regarded digital special effects people working in the British film and TV industry.
It's a very slight story made watchable by the likeable lead characters, the direction and the special effects. Part road-trip adventure part character drama - all underpinned by some very expensive looking CGI monsters and effects.
The fact that Edwards did all the special effects work on his computer at home is startling and impressive; the way he uses this skill to deliver a film that looks as though it costs several million times it's tiny budget even more so.
The tiny details and obvious care just add to the enjoyment - as does the guerilla film making style; the cast and crew shot many scenes on the fly without official permissions and with little more than a bare bones script and a couple of lightweight cameras.
This gives the film a real sense of urgency and a fantastic pace.
His work on this film got Gareth Edwards the job of directing the mega-million dollar Godzilla re-vamp that's currently in cinemas everywhere.
Mesrine : Killer Instinct (2008 108min.) [BBC2 12.25am sunday]
Biographical crime drama starring Vincent Cassel. The first part of the story of notorious French criminal Jacques Mesrine, from small beginnings as a Paris thug and armed raider, to fugitive bank-robber and jail-breaker, until he was eventually declared Canada's Public Enemy Number One.
Extraordinarily powerful film full tot he brim with great performances and superbly directed by Jean-Francois Richet.
Brazil (1985 137min.) [Ch.4 1.35am sunday &+1]
Science-fiction fantasy starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro and Katherine Helmond. Sam Lowry's frequent flights of fantasy take him away from the drab reality of his job at the Ministry of Information. Then a mistake in the system plummets Sam into a nightmare world of renegade heating engineers, storm troopers, terrorists and torturers.
Terry Gilliam's fantasy film has a lot of fun with the conventions and form associated with 1984 style imagined future worlds.
The totaliterian regime is depicted as a top-heavy bureaucracy obsessed with paperwork and the rituals of office life and Gilliam's visual flair is given free reign to contrast the grimness and tattered decay of Sam Lowry's "real" world with the glorious beauty of his inner fantasy existence.
Pryce is excellent in the lead role, Robert De Niro has great fun as an SAS-style repair man and there's some neat counter-type casting of Michael Palin.
It's the dark reverse of The Wizard Of Oz and it rattles along at a decent pace; thoroughly entertaining and a significant film in the development of Gilliam's career from animator to top level fantasy director.
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