Latest Video: It's all in the chemistry

By EWEN MCDONALD

Affliction

****

Running time: 114 mins

In stores: March 15

* What makes a great movie? Like a great sports team it's the chemistry between the players and the coaches and the managers. If you want to see how it's done, rent this. Big, shambling Nick Nolte plays Wade Whitehouse, sheriff of a small New Hampshire town. He drinks, smokes dope on duty, his ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) hates him and his daughter looks down on him. His girlfriend Margie (Sissy Spacek) stays with him more out of sympathy than love.

Wade's problems stem from his alcoholic, dominating father Glen (James Coburn), whom he fears. There is a plot, involving a hunting incident and Whitehouse's investigation of it, but that is subsidiary to the tale of the man, his father and his brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe).

Stunning performances from Nolte and Coburn; a bleak story from Russell Banks, whose work also inspired The Sweet Hereafter; written and directed by a master, Paul Schrader (he wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Mosquito Coast and The Last Temptation of Christ, and directed Mishima and Hardcore).

Arlington Road

**

Running time: 117 mins

In stores: Today

* Jeff Bridges stars as Michael Faraday, a professor of terrorism (really), whose wife was an FBI agent (honestly) shot dead in a botched raid (hearing "Waco" yet?). The film opens with Faraday finding an injured kid in the street and racing the lad to hospital.

There he finds the boy is the son of folks who've moved in across the street - Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack). Faraday and his student girlfriend Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davis) grow friendly with the newcomers. But the paranoid Faraday begins to pick up signals that the Langs are hiding something.

He investigates and - fortunately, because the movie still has the best part of two hours to go from this stage - finds that his neighbours might fit in with his academic theory that big terrorist events are not the work of isolated loners. Great first half-hour, lots of bangs, lots of paranoia, but it slides downhill as what little logic there was to the story goes up in smoke.

Deep Blue Sea

**

Running time: 106 mins

In stores: March 15

* More terrorist events - fishy ones from Finnish director Renny Harlin in this tale which is kind of like Jaws-meets-Alien. Scientist Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) figures how to turn sharks' brain tissue into a cure for Alzheimer's disease (hmmm ... wonder if we could do something similar with mussels?).

Big business buys the idea and sets up a deep-sea shark farm. After a shark escapes and tries to eat a boat, the CEO (Samuel L. Jackson) visits the crew: shark wrangler (Thomas Jane), Bible-quoting cook (LL Cool J), and hired hands (Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rapaport, Stellan Skarsgard and Aida Turturro).

From there, like Harlin's Die Hard 2 and Cut-Throat Island, it's all action as the sharks escape their tanks and stalk the humans on their own turf ... er, surf. Well done with suspense and surprise. Sharks could've been more realistic, though.