Mystic River (2003)

Director Clint Eastwood's Best Picture Oscar-nominated Mystic River is simply a Boston-set police procedural, really, which makes all the solemnity, all the anguish of the story - all the blue-grey bleakness - and the fact an investigation that takes a matter of days to resolve is couched in twenty-five years of trauma context, a bit much - certainly once the movie ends and you know who killed Katie Markum, the daughter of ex-convict Jimmy Markum (a Best Actor Oscar-winning performance from Sean Penn) the question will have crossed your mind why so much trouble was taken to tell what is essentially a coincidence-heavy episode of Law and Order.

★★★☆☆

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The Pledge (2001)

The trouble with director Sean Penn's mostly-gripping The Pledge, about a cop who promises a grieving mother to find the killer of her child, is not Jack Nicholson's gnarlier-than-usual detective (compare him with the clean-cut Foyle-like turns of It Happened In Broad Daylight's Heinz Rührmann and Cold Light of Day's Richard E Grant) nor the story's movement from the Swiss Alps to Nevada, but Penn's muddling Dürrenmatt's screenplay - a jaunty mystery with a detective-novel ending - with the author's later book, "The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel, which refashions that screenplay's plot into a much darker existential drama; Penn borrows scenes from the earlier 1958 adaptation and incorporates aspects of the screenplay (such as a sequence that demystifies the serial killer), and so detracts from the book's grim philosophy.

★★★☆☆

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The Interpreter (2005)

The Interpreter has the distinction of being the first movie ever granted permission to be filmed inside the United Nations Headquarters but why Director Sidney Pollack thought such authenticity was needed is hard to fathom when so much else of what goes on in this political Sorry, Wrong Number (an UN interpreter overhears an assassination plot) stretches belief, like the earnestly expounded politics of made-up African nation Matobo; like the All-Access passes that supposedly allow interpreters to wander around UNHQ whenever and wherever they like, day or night; like the Dignitary Protection agents who fail to sweep bins for weapons...but Pollack ratchets up tension nicely and fits in some interesting ideas about words translated, whispered, and uttered in grief.

★★★☆☆

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The Game (1997)

Don't give up on David Fincher's paranoid thriller in its long, seemingly directionless middle stretch - it ultimately delivers a surprising emotional punch telling the story of Nicholas van Orton, a reclusive millionaire whose fortunes turn when his wayward brother, Conrad, turns up on Nicholas' 48th birthday with a present: a mysterious "game" run by the sinister CRS Corporation.

★★★★☆

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