Overlooked DVD of the month - THE KILLING ROOM

Director Jonathan Liebesman followed up DARKNESS FALL and TCM: THE BEGINNING with a quiet psychological thriller called THE KILLING ROOM. It's an austere, tightly made, well-acted film that, while mining familiar material, still manages to hold our attention. The movie takes the same kind of approach as DAS EXPERIMENT - creating a fictional exploration of a real psychological experiment - in this case, the CIA's infamous MK Ultra programme. In the real life version, "volunteers" were subjected to mind-control experiments, often drug-induced, of the kind that led to Manchurian candidates. In this fictionalised version, four men have volunteered for a medical experiment run by the ruthless Dr Phillips (Peter Stormare) and the ambitious but morally uncertain Miss Reilly (Chloe Sevigny). They have to solve puzzles, and the man with the least correct guess is summarily executed. The prisoners try to outwit the system, and even escape, while the audience try to figure out what purpose such a sadistic experiment could serve. I liked the stark production design, gathering sense of claustrophobia, and Timothy Hutton's performance as one of the "volunteers". This movie is well worth a watch.

THE KILLING ROOM played Sundance 2009 and went straight to DVD.

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE - schmaltz - top quality - but schmaltz all the same

Unmitigated, manipulative schmaltz. An emotioanally repressed surgeon and a voluble divorcee fall in love on a stormy night in a ludicrously post-card perfect beach-front hotel. They are prevented from making a new and idyllic life together by a lazy plot point that seems a little sadistic and random. There's no prickly emotional drama (as in AS GOOD AS IT GETS). The emotional transformations are a little too pat. I detest this sort of melodramatic bilge, even when, as in this case, it's actually pretty well acted by Richard Gere and Diane Lane in the main roles and Scott Glen and James Franco in support. Real weepies make you cry uncontrollably because you're wrapped up in the story- rather than tugging self-consciously on your heart-strings.

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE is on release in the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Iceland and the UK. It opens next weekend in Germany, Russia, Singapore and Austria. It opens on October 24th in the Philippines, Norway and Spain. It opens on November 6th in Australia; on November 13th in Egypt, the Netherlands and Portugal and on November 28th in Venezuela.