MOVIE DUNGEON

Inside the weird and wacky world of DTV

Stabbed by an underage hooker, Antonio Banderas crashes though a bookshop window and staunches his wounds with a paperback of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Inspired by the bloodstained book, he takes a vow of silence (except for voice-over narration) until he has completed his quest for revenge on the unknown lowlife who murdered his family. Of course, interrogating suspects involves more punches in the face than tricky cross-questioning. Isaac Florentine’s Death Wish-esque vigilante tale ACTS OF VENGEANCE is given heft by Banderas’ intense performance and off-the-wall plot developments.

In one of those all-too-common situations, The Mercy and Crowhurst

got made at about the same time and came out like conjoined twins. The Mercy got the theatrical push, leaving Simon Rumley’s smaller-budgeted biopic of the round-the-world yachtsman to bob around in its digital wake. The Mercy isn’t bad, but CROWHURST is better — with Justin Salinger more intriguingly deluded, misguided and hubris-ridden than Colin Firth as Donald Crowhurst, and a hallucinatory last act that sails out of biopic niceties into a sea of madness. It even makes ‘God Save The Queen’ into an anthem of terror. Rumley (Fashionista, Red White And Blue)

is a major British talent.

Filip Kovacevic’s Serbian INCARNATION is a time-loop do-over thriller with a great hook — a young man (Stojan Djordjevic) wakes upon a bench in a busy city pedestrian intersection, and is stalked by four assassins. They kill him, and he wakes up again, with four potential directions in which to flee. Each iteration offers dwindling possibilities of escape, but he keeps trying. It’s a Twilight Zone-ish piece, with more mystery than solution.