DVD OF THE WEEK

GREEN ZONE ****
Dir: Paul Greengrass. Starring: Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Greg Kinnear, Brendon Gleeson

For obvious reasons people have been referring to this as 'Jason Bourne in Iraq”. And you would be pretty hard-pressed to see any light between Matt Damon's turn here and his role as the amnesiac spy. But, leaving aside comparisons, this is a crisply-made thriller, both exhilarating and involving.
Based on a (non-fiction) book about life in Baghdad's demilitarised 'Green Zone” after the Iraqi invasion, the film takes the basic setting and grafts onto it, courtesy of screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L A Confidential), a political thriller about the infamously missing Weapons of Mass Destruction.
There is, particularly in the first half, a lot of running and shouting, but I guess that's just par for the course if you're following adrenalised soldiers in a war zone. But things settle down nicely and the machinations between Kinnear's slimy diplomat and the various factions trying respectively to install a puppet ruler and to expose the truth of the war is impressively complex and skilfully handled.
Ultimately this may frustrate those wanting real answers about the political duplicity that led to an illegal invasion and the real-life absurdities are inevitably watered down by being placed in a fictional context, but it's still a damned exciting watch. Mind you, next week The Hurt Locker is out, which raises the bar another notch.

It's hard to know how to define Antichrist (* or *****), the latest provocation from Danish director Lars Von Trier. It is not a horror film in any standard sense of the word, but what is it? A two hander, Antichrist follows Willem Defoe's 'Man” and Charlotte Gainbourg's 'Woman”: their young child dies (while the couple are having sex) and they retreat to a forest for him to administer psychological therapy. There things get completely out of hand and she tortures him and herself. And that's about it really. Astonishingly the film includes both explicit sex and brutal gore yet is told in such a way that it is also frustratingly pretentious and infuriatingly obtuse. The cinematography is ravishing but even that feels at times like an overdone affectation. I don't know – this is one you need to see for yourself. If you have the fortitude to get through it.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (***) is yet another of the recent rash of films based on non-fiction books. This one involves some of the CIA's more fanciful experiments, the seventies training of 'psychic warriors” whom they hoped would be able to 'remote view”, walk through walls and – as the title suggests – kill with heir minds. The goats were practice. To tell the story there is an added modern bit with Ewen McGregor's journalist getting info from ex-warrior George Clooney. Sadly, what should be a real five star winner just coasts a bit to be great, and runs into the regular problem - that what is amazing if real becomes simply another outlandish tale if told as fiction.