Banshee Chapter (2013/Xlrator DVD)/Dark Touch (2012/MPI/IFC Midnight DVD)/The Fifth Estate (2013/Touchstone/DreamWorks Blu-ray w/DVD)

Picture: C/C/B & C+ Sound: C/C+/B- & C Extras: C/C-/C Films: C/C-/C+

Thrillers can be fictitious or seem real, especially when elements of the genre is used in a dramatization of a real life event. That can help the fictional ones and hurt the serious dramas, which is what happens here to some extent.

Blair Erickson's Banshee Chapter (2013) wants to be somewhat like Blue Sunshine as the U.S. Government experiment with mind-altering drugs (one of many) in this case is causing the patients to go psychotic and kill while bleeding from all parts of their bodies. An investigator starts to find out that a special radio frequency starts to show up in the cases where more and more dead bodies do and so the investigation gets more and more creepy.

The twist at the end for once is a good one that works, but the low budget and too many missed opportunities hamper what could (especially shot in 3D) become a surprise indie horror hit. The cast is not even that bad, but the script needed more work and project more energy. Instead, it is like a Night Gallery or Twilight Zone that is half-memorable, but it makes us want to see what Erickson does next.

A Making Of featurette is the only extra.

Marina De Van's Dark Touch (2012) is a more straight out horror thriller of the child-in-jeopardy type and to make them work, you need ironic distance, especially from torture porn elements like denatured cinematography. This one has an 11-year-old young lady surviving the massacre of her whole family but the new adults she is around are not playing with the full deck and we spend most of the 91 minutes here going nowhere and doing everything we have seen before.

The cast of unknowns do not click and the conclusion does not even work, so any demonic force here was not convincing, unlike the possible one in Banshee. A shame this is so formulaic and contrived.

A trailer is the only extra.

Finally we have Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate (2013), a drama and sometimes thriller about the controversial Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, which was moving along fine exposing genocide, hypocrisy and censored stories until they release a ton of secret U.S. Government papers that are still causing all kinds of trouble for any war, security or government work. The film tries to give us a character study of Assange, but the screenplay is not up to the stunning performance by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Condon is a good filmmaker, but gets too carried away with throwing up endless PC-like texts too often throughout the early parts of the film along with surreal sequences that try (and do not always succeed) in conveying either cyberspace, Assange's mind or the gravity of the situation. There is some suspense, but it never becomes as dark as The Parallax View or as interesting as The Social Network, so the result is an uneven film at times that has is moments along with a good cast, but not the homerun it could have been like some of Condon's better previous films.

Subjects like freedom of speech and journalism (set up by the title) are addressed in several ways, but not all the way. Also undermined by lite thriller elements where it needed more story and thoughts, it is still worth a look and is the best release on this list. Laura Linney Daniel Bruhl, Anthony Mackie, Stanley Tucci, Alicia Vikander and David Thewlis also star.

Extras include Digital HD Ultraviolet Copy for PC, PC portable and iTunes capable devices, while the discs add three making of featurettes (The Submission Platform, In-Camera Graphics, Scoring Secrets) and Trailers & TV Spots.

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Estate is easily the visual champ here despite its extensive use of digital visuals, while its anamorphically enhanced DVD version ranks second bets on this list. It is just a well shot, well thought out film, though not all of its visuals are memorable. It is at least consistent. The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Banshee (originally shot in digital 3D not available in this release) and anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Touch are the softest performers here, though I wonder if the limits of DVD are holding them back a little bit.

The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Estate is well mixed and presented with some fancy sound at times, but still tends towards the front speakers more often than I would have liked. It's DVD version joins the other two with lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes, but it is Touch that has the second best mix, even if it is not great. Both DVD-only releases could use lossless presentations.

- Nicholas Sheffo