Complicity

It says a lot about the British film industry that dross like Rancid Aluminium commands a wide theatrical release, while this sensitively judged adaptation of Iain Banks' best novel goes straight to video. In fact, Complicity shares many of the virtues of the BBC's excellent 1996 version of The Crow Road, among them director Gavin Millar, screenwriter Bryan Elsley and half its cast (including Bill Paterson and Valerie Edmond). Jonny Lee Miller isn't everyone's idea of Cameron Colley - the left-leaning, coke-snorting, sexually deviant Edinburgh hack who finds himself implicated in a series of grisly murders, all of them of corrupt establishment figures - but he's not bad. (Dougray Scott, another Crow Road veteran, would have been great.) And although it packs a little too much into its 99 minutes, it has clearly been made with love, as well as respect for the source material. Millar gets Banks' nostalgic, mournful idealism just so. Meanwhile, estimable period-drama queen Keeley Hawes seems to have spent the shoot pondering the question: Why wear a bonnet when you can wear nothing?