TAKE SHELTER

Dir: Jeff Nichols. Starring: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain

Hulking actor Michael Shannon seems to specialise in playing men in trouble. After comprehensively cracking up in Werner Herzog's My Son My Son What Have Ye Done, he's at it again in this rather brilliant psychological drama, wherein his typical family man becomes plagued by visions of an oncoming apocalyptic storm, visceral nightmares of death and destruction.

One of the many things that impresses here is that his reaction to these alarming portents is actually very sensible: he both consults a doctor and begins to build a shelter. Is he falling prey to the same mental illness as his mother or are the visions real?

It's tense deliberately-paced stuff, with terrific support from Jessica Chastain as his long-suffering wife. The wonderful Chastain seems to have emerged from nowhere and is suddenly in everything – in the past month I've seen her on DVD in Texas Killing Fields, The Help (Oscar-nominated) and Tree of Life. Now this. She's definitely one-to-watch.

In Time (** ½ ) is from Kiwi writer/director Andrew Niccol and, like previous outings Simone and Gattaca, is a fascinating idea that plays out in a less interesting way that you would hope. The idea is this: everyone in the world only lives to be 25. After that you have a counter on your wrist which gives you one year of life. But you pay for everything (food, transport etc) with your time and, at work, are paid in time. If your time runs out, you die. The ramifications are endless. But the plot, which sees Justin Timberlake and his rich love interest on the run from Cillian Murphy's ‘Timekeeper' (a time cop), is obvious and lacks real urgency.

Kevin Smith, the writer/director behind Clerks and the ever-evolving world of Jay and Silent Bob, seems like an unusual guy to be making a horror film. He is not known as the most visual of directors, but he takes to Red State (*** ½ ) with a off-kilter verve not often seen in American genre outings. The film centres on a group of young guys who – lured by the promise of sex – become captives of a smalltown religious sect, led, with great style by Michael (Kill Bill) Parks. John Goodman pops up later as a SWAT team guy and the whole film takes a number of unusual tangents, making for an unpredictable and diverting ride.

Client 9 (****) may appear to be about a somewhat specialist subject, but it is a fascinating one with great relevance in these post-crash times. The doco, from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, is about the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer who, as New York's Attorney General attacked the corruption of Wall Street head-on – Merril Lynch, Bank of America, AIG – and made mighty enemies. Later, as governor, he became embroiled in a very public sex scandal, which to the delight of the financial institutions he prosecuted, ended his career. This is compelling stuff, frequently jaw-dropping in the level of barefaced corruption, filled with scary billionaires and duplicitous politicians, with a fascinatingly flawed protagonist.

Rain Fall (**) punningly centres on hit man John Rain (Kippei Shina) whose speciality is offing people and making it look like natural causes. We first meet him in a tense Tokyo operation, killing a potential ministerial leaker by inducing a heart attack via mobile phone. Gary Oldman's CIA team are close behind. But vital information goes missing and soon gangsters, the police and the CIA are on the case and Rain is on the run with the minister's endangered daughter. It's a tangled affair, hardly original but quite stylish, mostly in subtitled Japanese, with Oldman presumably there for the paycheck.