If the names "Pilager" and "Raven" don't immediately suggest something predatory in the air then what follows certainly will.Raven hires a rumpled private investigator, Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston), to check on certain people he suspects of derailing Dickie's campaign, and thus launches one of those plots that would very much like to be described as "labyrinthine". In the course of his truffling Danny encounters all sorts, including a radical blogger (Tim Roth), a right-wing talk-show host (Miguel Ferrer), a smarmy political lobbyist (Billy Zane) and a journalist (Maria Bello) with whom Danny used to share revolutionary ideals, and a bed, back in the old days. "Americans don't have the patience for the underdog they used to," someone observes, which has allowed a fat cat like Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson) to get his claws into real estate, and use the soon-to-be-governor Dickie Pilager as his puppet.It transpires that Silver City itself is an abandoned mining town where ecological vandalism is being hushed up, or was being, until that corpse bobbed disobligingly into view. Sayles has spent a career ploughing an honourable anti-establishment furrow, and, occasionally, turned up some treasure doing so (Matewan, City of Hope, Lone Star), but there is a heavy-handedness that weighs on Silver City right from the start.

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The second thing Dickie does after mangling the TV speech is to reel in a corpse from the lake where he's fishing, prompting his chief handler, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), to launch an inquiry.

Just a hunch, but do you suppose he had someone in mind when he wrote this character? Chris Cooper will never be lost for a party-piece as long as his George W Bush impersonation remains this good - the sudden loss of concentration mid-sentence is particularly inspired - though one could have wished it had been used to better purpose. This starts with a gubernatorial candidate named Dickie Pilager - "Dumb Dickie" to his friends - fluffing his lines for a TV election promo. The Pilagers are a powerful family backed by money and big business in their native Colorado, and, despite his inability to string two sentences together, Dickie's down-home, reactionary politics look to be swaying the voters in his favour. John Sayles's Silver City was released in the US in October last year during the run-up to the 2004 election. If X-Men is the Big Brother of the superhero ensemble, this is pretty close to Celebrity Love Island.. The villain is called, with no startling originality, Dr Doom, and instead of drama we are offered some paltry musings on celebrity (it's set in New York) plus great swathes of scenery-trashing. This Candide-like parable of an innocent abroad derives much of its appeal from Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe as James, a devout Christian who leaves Nigeria on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Jailed by immigration at Tel Aviv, he's hired as slave labour by a businessman and learns the wiles of a materialist society; the ex-ploited turns exploiter Alex-androwicz keeps it simple, and springs a cruel twist.. It's a good job Marvel Comics exist, otherwise Hollywood studios would be even shorter of ideas than they already are. This latest concerns a quartet of astronauts who survive a lunar storm, only to discover that their DNA has been messed with, turning them into superheroes. That's fine for team leader Ioan Gruffud, who's endowed with infinitely extendable limbs, Jessica Alba, who gets powers of invisibility, and Chris Evans (no relation, though he does think he's God's gift), who can turn himself into a human torch. But you have to feel for Michael Chiklis, who's transformed into an orange Hulk-style creature called The Thing - also known as five hours a day in make-up.