This was in the days before the BBC Talent scheme

(This was in the days before the BBC Talent scheme.) It was a film about the lure of instant celebrity and about the way the media can blur the distinction between people who are recognised for their achievements and people who are recognised just because their picture's in the paper. Volunteering for Big Brother may not be quite as heinous as taking a hostage, but there's no doubt that The King Of Comedy is now more pertinent than ever. De Niro returns to the theme with a vengeance in 15 Minutes. In this new film, he is Eddie Flemming, a New York cop who's on magazine covers and in talk-show studios as often as he is at homicide scenes. When two corpses are found in a burnt-out apartment, Eddie teams up with a very different type of detective.

His new partner (Edward Burns) is a young arson investigator from the fire department who doesn't watch TV, let alone appear on it.The murderers are two Eastern Europeans on a killing spree. Videoing their crimes as they go along, the pair believe that if they plead insanity at their eventual trial, they'll soon be free again to sell the rights to their story – and to bask in fame and fortune for considerably longer than the customary 15 minutes.The media are happy to collude with them: the murderers' video is bought for $1m by a morally bankrupt tabloid-TV reporter played by Kelsey Grammer – so much like Frasier that when he addresses De Niro as "Eddie" you assume he's thinking of his dog.Writer-director John Herzfeld (2 Days In the Valley) has worked out a bold, elegant story and drawn a cast of idiosyncratic characters. Even the arch-villain, played by Karel Roden (the Czech Robert Carlyle), elicits some sympathy. But however rich the material is, Herzfeld's point of view comes blazing through it, and that's why 15 Minutes is so unusual. Its creator's rage is what drives the film forward.As it happens, I think Herzfeld is raging about the wrong things; 15 Minutes has a vigilante mentality, and a belief that America – its execution-happy president notwithstanding – is just too darned forgiving for its own good I have my doubts. I'm not so certain either that anyone who claims to have been mistreated by the police is necessarily a money-grabbing liar, or that impoverished immigrants are the most likely people in the world to manipulate the media with the aid of high-priced lawyers. All the same, if the thesis of 15 Minutes is too right-wing for my tastes, at least it has a thesis, and one that's presented with passionate determination.

It establishes Herzfeld as someone who can make points as skilfully as he can make thrillers.Brother is the first English-language film starring, written and directed by "Beat" Takeshi Kitano – not that he speaks much English himself. The Japanese icon plays Yamamoto, a yakuza gangster who flees from Tokyo to Los Angeles, where his ruthless gunplay turns a shower of smalltime drug-pushers into a rich and powerful mob. Although he speaks only a few sentences in English, Takeshi's portrayal of an existential, immaculately suited killer is still hypnotic. For most of the film his face is blank, as if he's bored to death by his own lethal ways. For him, everyone has to die at some time and there's no point getting emotional about it.The film as a whole is similarly deadpan, even as it presents us with a disembowelment, a severed head, a handful of lopped-off fingers and countless shootings.