DVD OF THE WEEK

ELITE SQUAD ****
Dir: Jose Padlha
Starring: Wagner Moura, Andre Ramiro, Caio Junqueira

Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, Elite Force tells another side of the story that emerged in the brilliant City of God (it shares the same writer). This time instead of focusing on Rio de Janeiro's drug dealing favela dwellers the focus is on the police.
Elite Force throws you right into the vibrancy of night time Rio, all pulsing music and striking oversaturated colours. Our narrator is Captain Nascimento of the BOPE, the elite police unit at the heart of the war with drug lords in the overcrowded violent slums. They make SWAT look like wimps. All around him in the police (but not BOPE) is corruption and, with a pregnant wife at home and the Pope needing protection on an upcoming visit to the city, he is seeking a replacement, someone tough, smart and honest enough to take over. And he's falling apart under the stress.
This is his story of the two rookies whom the captain considers as possible replacements, one a hothead, the other more bookish. It is fast paced, brutal and brilliantly made, from its deconstruction of corruptions at all levels of the police to the tortuous BOPE training scenes. The captain's continual narration is also used very effectively, at first being all the viewer has to follow what is happening on screen but, by the end, diverging from facts we know and suggesting that the embattled BOPE officer is deluding himself about the possibilities of escape from his gruelling life.

Journey To The Centre of the Earth (**) gives you the choice between the regular 2-D version and taking home the glasses and watching it in 3-D. On the bright side, watching it in 3-D is still slightly novel, even if the whole film is unavoidably tinted green and purple. And the occasional things that fly out of the screen take one's mind off the fact that this remake just doesn't have the magic of the (now very dated) original. Brendan Fraser is his usual enthusiastic self and hams it up with skill and pride, and the film's simple charms may please younger viewers, as he encounters dinosaurs, giant plants and more during the titular journey.

With Willem Dafoe's detective still haunted by a serial killer case he solved five years ago and a string of copycat killings beginning, Anamorph (**) hardly has an original premise. But its all how you tell ‘em. This one is downbeat, intelligent and deadly earnest, a descendent of Se7en that takes itself very very seriously. It's creepy, arty and unusual (the opening credits immediately impress), and Defoe, even buttoned-down as here, is always watchable, but everything is a little too gloomy and a tad incoherent. The classical art references give a different slant but things never quite comes together.

In Freebird (***) three miscreant friends on bikes head to the Wales to buy cannabis from the mysterious 'Hippy”. Fred, the 'sensible” one, Tyg with a predilection for violence, and Grouch, so out of it that he even lies to his girlfriend's imaginary reflection in the mirror about having given up drugs. Surprisingly, the Welsh countryside is teeming with bikers as a Wessex gang have arrived for a war with the locals. A war inadvertently sparked by Grouch. Based on his play, director Jon Ivay's debut is a riot of bikes and drugs and English humour, not exactly subtle, but with some nice character touches. Veteran bikers particularly will lap it up.

Different genres require different standards. You don't judge a wild exploitation flick by the same criteria as serious drama. The Tripper (***) is the former and a bunch of fun it is too. The cheerfully gory tale of a psycho killer in a Ronald Reagan mask working out a childhood hatred of hippies by butchering drugged-out attendees of a woodland music festival is the directorial debut of David Arquette (the Scream films) and he has roped in some real actors (and Jason Mews of Clerks fame), and also co-wrote the frankly bonkers script. There is a glut of really bad horror films at the moment; this is one of the good bad ones.