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USA/France: Paul Verhoeven, 1992; IMDB

UK/France: Edgar Wright, 2007; IMDB

USA: Alfred Hitchcock, 1960; IMDB

UK: Neil Marshall, 2010; IMDB

I was pleasantly surprised by CENTURION. After the disappointment of Neil Marshall's previous film, DOOMSDAY - a sloppy and ill-disciplined hodge-podge of homages to various genres which started off amusingly stupid but quickly succumbed to being just plain stupid - my hopes weren't exactly through the roof for his take on the fate of the infamous Ninth Legion which, so legend says, disappeared in Britain in the early second century AD. (Incidentally, it was also the subject of a book I read as a child, Rosemary's Sutcliff's THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH - itself being adapted for the screen by Jeremy Brock and Kevin Macdonald.)

To my surprise, it's actually very good, and far from the low-grade knock-off of GLADIATOR that the subject matter and promotion would seem to suggest. ("Britain's answer to GLADIATOR!" screams that exalted tome, NUTS, on the back cover - conveniently forgetting that GLADIATOR's director and most of its crew WERE British.) CENTURION is actually a chase movie that actually has quite a bit more in common with those POW escape movies than any historical epic I've ever seen. It's brief, bloody and not particularly subtle, but it knows exactly what it is and gives the audience what it wants to see: lots of tension, lots of battle scenes, and a fair amount of the old tomato ketchup. You've got a decent (some might say over-qualified) cast giving it their all, savvy use of the limited budget, and a director who absolutely knows the meaning of crowd-pleasing. You honestly couldn't ask for much more.

THE DESCENT remains Marshall's best film by a considerable margin, but he has regained a lot of the ground that he lost for me with DOOMSDAY, and I'm definitely looking forward to whatever he cooks up next.

UK/USA: Ridley Scott, 2000; IMDB

France/Germany/UK: Roman Polanski, 2010; IMDB

Roman Polanski's latest offering, THE GHOST WRITER (THE GHOST in the UK), has been somewhat overshadowed by its director's temporary stint under house arrest (which prevented him from being present in the editing room during the final stages of post-production)... which is a shame, because I believe every film deserves to stand on its own two feet irrespective of what its filmmakers may have got up to, and THE GHOST WRITER is a very fine thriller indeed.

Somewhat reminiscent of Polanski's own THE NINTH GATE, albeit with a less tongue-in-cheek approach to its subject matter (although it's shot through with Polanski's unmistakable brand of wry humour and fascination with the slightly off-kilter), with Ewan McGregor stepping into the shoes occupied by Johnny Depp in that earlier film - the dogged, slightly naive everyman who finds himself stumbling upon an elaborate conspiracy and putting his own neck on the chopping block in his relentless search for the truth. That the subject of the conspiracy, former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, is so clearly inspired by Tony Blair, gives the material a palpable sense of veracity that the rather silly supernatural frolics of THE NINTH GATE lacked.

Excellent performances all round, with Olivia Williams stealing the show as Lang's spurned wife, and some nice use of the perpetually overcast locales (with various locations in Germany and Denmark standing in for Massachusetts)... although the rather obvious use of green-screen does become a bit distracting at times. Definitely one to watch: there are many layers at work here, and the result is a complex and satisfying thriller that I suspect will stand up to repeat viewings.