To a Land Unknown review - the migrant hustle

A slick tale of two refugees striving and surviving in Athens

The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic.

Films like Io Capitano and Green Border, tracking the tragic migrant trail to and through Europe, prick consciences and sweat palms in equal measure, but those two fine examples from last year were made by European directors on helicopter missions, as it were, to raise consciousness and to mine fresh seams of character.

Blu-ray: Hitchcock - The Beginning

★★★★★ BLU-RAY: HITCHCOCK - THE BEGINNING Embracing the sound revolution

A box set shows how Alfred Hitchcock embraced the sound revolution – pathologies intact

There's a tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s early films between misogyny and condemnation of the patriarchal suppression of women. The suppression was inherent in the original sources from which The Pleasure Garden (1926), Easy Virtue (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929), Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) were adapted. 

Blu-ray: Juggernaut

Witty and exciting British thriller, brilliantly cast

That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in desperation. His quest to salvage Juggernaut in a just a few weeks mirrors events in the film, its protagonists attempting to defuse a set of bombs planted in the bowels of a transatlantic liner.

Red Rooms review - the darkest of webs

Writer-director Pascal Plante has a cult hit on his hands with this skilful cyber-thriller

A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. 

Trap review - how not to find a serial killer in a haystack

★★★★ TRAP M Night Shyamalan serves up some preposterous Hitchcockian fun

M Night Shyamalan serves up some preposterous Hitchcockian fun

Don’t think too hard about the narrative absurdity of Trap, the new movie wriitten and directed by M Night Shyamalan. There’s a serial killer called The Butcher on the loose in Philadelphia and though the FBI doesn’t know their quarry’s name or what he looks like, they muster what looks like hundreds of agents, SWAT teams, and private security to bring him in.

Sleep review - things that go bump in the night

★★★ SLEEP Weird nocturnal phenomena threaten couple's marital bliss

Weird nocturnal phenomena threaten couple's marital bliss

The question Korean director Jason Yu is asking in this eerie little spine-tingler (his debut feature) is “how well do you know your partner?” He may also be inquiring whether or not you believe in life after death, while planting nagging seeds of doubt about the competence of the medical profession.

Mothers' Instinct review - 'Mad Women'

★★★ MOTHERS' INSTINCT Sixties suburban duel veers between daftness and spooky power

Sixties suburban duel veers between daftness and spooky power

This is a Nineties psycho thriller in Mad Men clothes, undermining its Sixties suburban gloss and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s desperate housewives with genre clichés, yet sustained by the courage of debuting director Benoît Delhomme’s un-Hollywood conviction.