Claude Chabrol's nervy and nasty little 2001 thriller Merci Pour le Chocolat is based on Charlotte Armstrong's novel The Chocolate Cobweb. In Chabrol's hands it becomes a vehicle of considerable power for the unsettling, disturbed qualities of actress Isabelle Huppert, who has been one of his most important muses over the years (their other collaborations include La Cérémonie and Rien ne va Plus). Huppert plays Mika, the owner of a Swiss chocolate factory, now married to a world-class concert pianist (Jacques Dutronc) and with a stepson who is obsessive about making the family's drinking chocolate every day. As the clues unravel, it soon becomes clear that Mika is damaged goods. When Dutronc acquires a piano student (Anna Mougalis) in curious circumstances, Mika is forced to escalate her secret agenda. Huppert is fascinating throughout and the film is sinewy and, for the most part, rather clever, evoking shades of Hitchcock and Clouzot. Liszt's Les Funérailles is the ominous leitmotif, worked on by Dutronc and his protégé, and the Lausanne setting creates an other-worldliness which seems almost sterile. Only at the end does the picture dwindle into an almost Strindbergian inertia as Mika's motivation seems to evaporate in a rather unsatisfactory way. Until then it is spellbinding. --Piers Ford

Take off your thinking caps and toss 'em in a corner, 'cos you won't need 'em when you're watching this deliriously dumb thriller from 1997. Bruce Willis stars as a demoted FBI agent who comes to the aid of an autistic boy whose mind holds a potentially deadly secret. It seems that by gazing on a puzzle magazine and making order out of a hidden system of numbers, the 9-year-old autistic boy (Miko Hughes) has accidentally deciphered a sophisticated top-secret government code. This makes him the prime target of the ruthless bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin, in one of his silliest roles) and Willis comes to the rescue. This formulaic thriller sets up this plot with a lot of entertaining urgency but you can't give any thought to Mercury Rising or the whole movie collapses under the weight of its own illogic and nonsense. The redeeming values are the performances of Willis, young Hughes and newcomer Kim Dickens as a woman who agrees (perhaps too easily, it seems) to aid Willis in his plot to out manoeuvre the bad guys. Mercury Rising is not a waste of time compared to other formulaic thrillers but its entertainment value depends on how much you enjoy being smarter than the movie. --Jeff Shannon