brute reality and our capacity to comprehend it, this sequence functions as a microcosm of the whole film. No ready-made explanation is provided for the aberrant behaviour we witness, and though the ending may imply the impending retribution of the law, it could hardly be called cathartic. What makes Henry chilling, rather than just "shocking", is its capacity to leave the viewer at a loss. Art does not come much less reassuring than this. With its opulent production values, star names (Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon), and extensive location shooting, Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (Cannon Shaftesbury Ave, 15) is stylistically the antithesis of Henry. But this film also harks back in format some 20 years, to the era of the road -movie. The switch is that the male bonding of that genre has here undergone a sex change. This is the story of two women friends who take off for a brief holiday, run into trouble in the shape of a rapacious redneck, and settle his hash but ultimately their own too by blowing him away. As they kiss goodbye to their unfulfilled lives Davis's husband is a boor, Sarandon's boyfriend a dead loss and head south for the border, the action barrels forward with a rhythm that manages to combine inexorabil ity using cross-cutting to the counter-efforts of police and FBI with a constant undertow of the unpredictable. Technically, Scott s mm is ex- mlaraungly accomplished, and aided by Adrian Biddle's com- plex yet unshowy camerawork, the director gives the proceedings a startling illusion of independent life. Neither this nor the immediacy of the pefor-mances can, however, cover up the lack of psychological grounding in Callie Khouri's screenplay, with its hints at an undisclosed trauma in Sarandon's past and its recourse to rhetoric of the "I've never felt this awake before" variety. In consequence, the apocalyptic ending seems more fabricated than inevitable. All the same, sheer command lifts Thelma amd Louise well clear of the commercial norm, and makes it a suitably inventive curtain-raiser for tonight's start of this year's Cambridge Film Festival. Transatlantic rumour had it that the Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk (Odeon West End, 15) was pretty much of a dud. Rumour, alas, proves to have been understating the case. This entertainment about a singing (sic) cat burglar seems able to provide little more than maladroit slapstick, mainly entailing graphic injuries, and reams of repartee whose sole distinction is to prove definitively that actors are incapable of dying from embarrassment. On the sub-titled front, Noce