SUNCHASER (36)

Directed by: Michael Cimino

Starring: Woody Harrelson, Jon Seda, Anne Bancroft

The Pitch: A 16-year-old killer in the final stages of incurable cancer takes a yuppie doctor hostage on a cross-country trip to the sacred Navajo mountain where his illness can be cured.

Theo Sez: Just about enough glimmers of distinctiveness to suggest that it's made by a once-interesting director instead of the hack it so richly deserves - mostly unusual editing choices, like the constant (and, strictly speaking, pointless) cross-cutting in the bar-room scene. Otherwise a poor film with truly trite, tired devices (how do we know Harrelson is arrogant yuppie scum? easy - he drives a red Porsche) and an unhealthy reliance on New Age twaddle, starting from the premise that aboriginal culture (Navajo, in this case) is somehow "truer" than its modern counterpart and culminating in Bancroft's turn as a wild-haired disciple of crystals and astrology, who says things like "Western medicine will forever regard symptoms of disease as errors to be corrected by drugs and surgery" (hey, sounds good to me). A profoundly banal movie, though its two powerful lead performances - plus the fact that the focus is unremittingly on those performances for two solid hours - provide a gruelling intensity that makes it, at least intermittently, worth watching. Why it played the Cannes Film Festival and even turned up on a couple of critics' Top Tens must remain a mystery.