"Director: Simon Moore"

• Under Suspicion | DVD | (29/08/2011) from £7.29   |  Saving you £5.70 (78.19%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Liam Neeson's battered gloomy features make him a natural for film noir, and the 1991 Under Suspicion makes exemplary use of him as Tony Aaron, a private eye headed for the death cell. Part of the film's strength is its 1959 setting--this is a past where people are hanged, where homosexuality is a crime and where people fake adulteries to get divorces. One such faked adultery leads to the death of Aaron's wife and their client. His own chequered past--he was thrown off the force for getting a colleague killed--means that most of the local police want him to be guilty. Only his best friend (Kenneth Cranham) even begins to be prepared to believe in his innocence and the possible guilt of the client's mistress, Angeline (Laura San Giacomo). Where Under Suspicion is content to recreate the seedy Brighton of the 1950s, and lives trapped by an unthinking puritanism, it is excellent. Unfortunately, much of this emotional power is dissipated by an over-elaborate plot in which artists' signatures, interlocking scams and extortions play a large part. --Roz Kaveney