Prisoners

A RIVETING AND TIGHTLY plotted thriller, Prisoners is a dark and

haunting movie experience. But it rewards its audience’s attention with intelligent filmmaking and some career-best performances from its cast.

We know him best for lighthearted comedies and the superhero Wolverine, but Hugh Jackman plays against type to impressive effect here.

He is Keller Dover, a regular guy driven to do bad things. Set in rural America, the movie centres on the Dover and Birch families, who live in the same peaceful neighbourhood and are close friends.

During a Thanksgiving dinner, a confusion leads to the two girls being briefly unsupervised and to the horror of both families, they disappear without trace.

The finger of suspicion immediately falls on Alex Jones, a mysterious man seen in an RV nearby, played by cinema’s go-to oddball, Paul Dano.

But despite bringing in a top team of detectives lead by the sharp-thinking Loki (Gyllenhaal), the law enforcers are unable to find any concrete evidence linking Jones to the crime.

Convinced of his guilt, and adamant that the girls could still be alive, Dover decides to take the law into his own hands.

It would ruin the movie to give any more away, but what emerges is a dense, twisty thriller that plays mind games with its audience without ever cheating them.

Far more than a revenge flick or a murder mystery, this is sophisticated stuff or the calibre of movies like Zodiac or Gone Baby Gone.

It’s the first English-language film from French/Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and he has wisely surrounded himself with very talented people.

The always-good Gyllenhaal puts in a career-best performance, fleshing out what could have been just another dogged movie cop.

His scenes with Jackman, where their very different characters try to get the measure of each other, are among the finest in the film. Jackman, too, is a revelation, and will surely bag more dramatic roles on the basis of his performance here.

Blue Jasmine (15A)

IN RECENT YEARS Woody Allen fans contented themselves with the director turning out light European comedies. Patchy as they may have been, there were always some great lines of dialogue in there and he threw up the occasional gem like Midnight in Paris.

What a pleasure, then, to discover that Allen’s latest is a masterpiece, a pithy, dark morality tale about what happens when the wealthy hit the skids. The filmmaker shows here that he’s still capable of being an angry young man at the tender age of 77.

The always-reliable Cate Blanchett is at her very best as Jasmine, a rich New York socialite who turns up at the house of her working-class sister Ginger (Hawkins), penniless and heartbroken, but still carrying Louis Vuitton and flying first class.

In a story that unfolds in flashback, we quickly learn that Jasmine and hubby Hal (Baldwin) have split up and have been left with nothing after being involved in a financial scandal.

She never had much time for her happy go lucky sister when she was mixing with the elite classes but leans heavily on her now, much to the annoyance of Ginger’s boyfriend (Cannavale).

You don’t have to scratch too deep to see that Allen is having a pop at the wealthy who gambled the markets and feel that someone else is to blame when they lost everything. There are many laughs here, but it’s darker and more dramatic than many of Allen’s recent films.