DVD reviews: Tommy's quest for justice

Tommy Lee Jones makes his directorial debut with The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, Clive Owen thinks he's planned the perfect bank robbery in Inside Man and American Pie meets Asia Extreme's grisly Audition in horror film Hostel...

The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada
*****

A shoeless, incapacitated man stumbles through the scrub. Following calmly, amused by his feeble escape attempt, is another man on horseback, carrying a rifle and provisions. The uneven power play and the escapee's desperate disregard of it are pitiful or comical, depending on your viewpoint.

Perhaps this is how God sees humanity - it's certainly how the Texas patrolmen view the Mexicans they round up and turn back. The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones's first feature as director, is a border drama in reverse: a guard accidentally shoots a Mexican, which bothers precisely no one in this onehorse border town - except Pete (Jones), who had formed an unlikely friendship with the man.

Pete decides to take his friend home for burial - and ropes in the alienated, rat-faced killer, Mike (Barry Pepper) to help him as penance. Guillermo Arriaga, screenwriter of Amores Perros, has penned an unlikely fairytale; laconic and beautifully shot, this is a quest for justice in an indifferent world, carried out by a simple man rendered half-mad by loneliness.

Extras: Making-of doc, commentary, interview with Jones and Arriaga, deleted scenes. Nina Caplan

Inside Man
****

In Inside Man we meet Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), who believes he has planned and executed the perfect bank robbery. Something obviously went wrong, though, since when we meet Dalton, he's in a cell.

He takes us back through the blitzing of the security cameras, the bamboozling of hostage negotiator Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) and the tippy-toeing round the demands of scarily influential Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a power broker with a hidden agenda who knows which strings to pull.

While not a typical Spike Lee joint, it shows how well he can do a lighthearted bank robber flick if he wants to - helped out by a marvellous cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Plummer as the bank's dodgy head honcho.

Extras: None.

Dreams That Money Can Buy
****

It's hard to see the pastry for the filling with Dreams That Money Can Buy, Hans Richter's experimental 1947 avant garde drama. Joe (Jack Bittner) quickly realises he can sell people dreams and the ones he comes up with are concocted by Surrealism's finest, including Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger and Marcel Duchamp.

The dreams are wonderful, eerie, sensual exercises in the possibilities of the camera; and the voiceovers - particularly that of a middle-aged woman bereft of confidence and hope - are equally intriguing.

Extras: Alternative soundtrack and interview by The Real Tuesday Weld as well as three Richter shorts. NC

Hostel
****

Think American Pie meets Asia Extreme's grisly Audition - and if you're (at all) squeamish, think twice about booking into Hostel. Not just for its deliciously gruesome torture scenes but for the apparently casual bigotry and homophobia that has divided even hardcore horror fans.