Stars: Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts.
The film: Fans of the more familiar Confessions movies will be disappointed: there’s no Robin Askwith cavorting with, say, nurses at the local mental hospital. Instead, George Clooney’s slick directorial debut presents the curious case of one Chuck Barris – maverick television producer, presenter and, in his spare time, hapless CIA assassin. Weird enough that the inventor of Blind Date claims to have killed 33 people; even stranger when Charlie Being John Malkovich Kaufman has condensed Barris’s superb autobiography into a tar-black comedy. The shadowy life of a government hit man becomes pleasantly farcical, with Rutger Hauer and an unpaid Julia Roberts as fellow agents. But it’s A-list-star-to-be Rockwell who perfectly charts Barris’s decline from a confident, winking American version of Bruce Forsyth into gun-wielding, bearded hotel hermit. And back. Just.
The extras: Sorely-missed from the movie’s final cut, deleted scenes reinforce Barris’s growing lunacy, but featurette on The Real Chuck Barris sadly fails to ask him the crucial question: is it all just bullshit? Oh, and avoid George Clooney’s commentary: the words “luvvy” and “wankfest” hover round it like self-congratulatory wasps.