Song of suspense

Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon team-up for Atom Egoyan's supremely weird Where The Truth Lies, Werner Herzog takes on a latter-day Klaus Kinski in Grizzly Man and John Huston's final film The Dead is a family affair...

Where The Truth Lies
***
Where The Truth Lies starts back in 1963, when Vince (Colin Firth) and Lanny (Kevin Bacon) were entertainers, singing and goofing around for adoring audiences. Backstage, naturally, they were shagging everything that moved, popping pills and occasionally punching someone. But that didn't tarnish the sheen until a girl was found dead in their bath.

Fifteen years later, young journo Karen (Alison Lohman) has a deal to write Vince's story but her hunger for the truth - and for Lanny - may be the ruin of all three of them. Atom Egoyan's latest is supremely weird, with candy-bright colours, multiple voiceover and a sly insistence on titillation over information.

Firth suits the straight man part, and Bacon can do anything, but wide-eyed Lohman grates: the femme fatale looks don't mesh with her colossal naivety and neither make her convincing as a sleuth.

Extras: Making-of doc and deleted scenes.

Grizzly Man
***
Werner Herzog, always attracted by madness and wildness, takes on a latter-day Klaus Kinski in Grizzly Man. His subject is Tim Treadwell, who made his home among Alaskan bears, befriending and sentimentalising them, while mythologising himself with the aid of a camcorder - until killed and part-eaten, along with his girlfriend, by his so-called friends.

Herzog's astute editing and thoughtful voiceover are at least as valuable as Treadwell's rantings but despite the fascination of a man entirely devoid of selfknowledge and bent on destruction, Tim palls before the film's end.

Extras: Doc on the film's music.

Come And See
****
Apparently, director Elem Klimov used live ammunition for the filming of Come And See; perhaps that tactless innovation is why it has never been released on DVD here before. This impassioned World War II film follows a young boy (Alexei Kravchenko) who joins the partisans fighting the invading Germans.

But this is no heroic war tale: war, Klimov shows us, is grotesque and the magnificent imagery he uses only adds to the grossness. Kravchenko ages visibly as he's forced into one mind-pulverising situation after another - and since the film was shot chronologically, and builds to a pinnacle of desperate violence, it's possible to speculate that he did genuinely grow wizened with trauma as the production went on.

Extras: Disc of interviews and archive newsreel footage.

The Dead
****
Two years after he helped actress daughter Anjelica to an Oscar for Prizzi's Honor, John Huston made his final film - and this was even more of a family affair, with John's son Tony adapting James Joyce's superlative short story
The Dead. Gretta (Anjelica Huston) and husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) join an annual gathering at Gabriel's aunt's house in an early 19th-century Dublin winter.

It's all conviviality until they hear a plaintive song - one that has great resonance for Gretta, although this is the first her husband has heard of it. Huston's last film is about family, Ireland and, of course, old age and the realisation that some things will never come again - or never came along at all. Despite this heavy emotive load, it's a powerful and humane film - if lacking the spark of humour that served Huston so well, from The Maltese Falcon to Prizzi.