12 Monkeys
By Charlotte Stace
Brice Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt star in former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam's excellent and complex thriller about time travel and the possibility of altering fate. Willis is James Cole, a convict who is sent back in time from a future in which a virus has wiped out almost all of humanity to gather information about the origins of the outbreak. Cole is sent back to 1990 rather than 1996 and is incarcerated at a mental hospital on the diagnosis of Dr Kathryn Railly (Stowe). There he meets Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), who has been sent to the mental hospital because of his extreme environmentalist and anti-corporate views.
12 Monkeys continues down this fantastical, non-linear path from there, and does so with a level of success that would have been impossible in lesser directorial hands. Inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetée, it fleshes out its source material brilliantly, never wasting a minute and teasing landmark performances from its leads.