Dvd & Games

This thriller is based on the hunt for Robert Hansen, a serial killer in Alaska in the '70s and '80s. John Cusack plays the nut job who likes to nab "street girls" and shoot them in the woods.

The Frozen Ground *

It's incredible that Hansen got away with it for so long - he is thought to have killed 17 to 21 women over 17 years.

It's even more incredible that anyone of any clout wanted to be in this film; although promising, it's ruined by its frantic pacing. For a 17-year story, we get only the end, which begins with a girl who gets away - but the police refuse to listen.

Enter our rogue detective, Nicolas Cage (above). And so we leap from scene to scene, plot holes be damned, while the music signals that we're supposed to be excited, but we've had no time to care.

To be fair, the setting is well done: scuzzy, icy Anchorage is a depressing hole full of heartless pimps and lost girls, and the horrifying '80s hairdos drive home the hopelessness. As a mini-series, it could have been great. As it is, it's a paint-by-numbers rush to the inevitable ending and the only people you remotely care about are the missing women, already buried under the snow. - Elizabeth Sleith

Pad Na Jou Hart **

Basson (Ivan Botha), the heir to a petroleum company, has designs to modernise at the expense of the employees who helped build the family business. His ailing father (Marius Weyers) tries to persuade him against this, but Basson is bent on profit and productivity.

With the death of his father, Basson seems unstoppable, except for a condition in the will requiring him to drive a mapped route from Joburg to the funeral in Cape Town before he can be the sole owner of the company.

On route, he meets Amory (Donna Lee Roberts), who is on a journey of her own.

The story is crocheted with the sentimental sensitivities of a farmhouse doily; a formulaic journey of discovery, pasted with predictability and cliché - but engrossing at the same time. The performances of Botha and Roberts, plus the support cast, are nuanced with enough fragility to make them believable, even if the circumstances around them are not. It is a love story of little demand, but pleasing enough. - Keith Tamkei