Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has proven to be a master of deep, thoughtful films that, on the surface, might come off as slight. His last film, 1997’s striking The Sweet Hereafter, garnered much attention and awards, turning the spotlight on this gifted writer/director. With his latest entry, based on William Trevor’s novel, Felicia’s Journey, Egoyan continues his streak of bleakly impressive films.

Set in England, Journey focuses on Joey Hilditch, a food-catering manager for a large factory in Birmingham and Felicia, a pregnant Irish teenager who comes to England looking for her boyfriend, Johnny. Elaine Cassidy, who embodies a haunting tenderness and innocence that can be lost on a ‘star’, plays Felicia. Hilditch is superbly played by Bob Hoskins (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mona Lisa), who gives his most flawless performance as this quiet and disturbing portly man who lives alone in a large house and spends his after work hours cooking lavish dinners and watching videotapes of a 1960s cooking show. Decked out in a suit and setting his table as if he were hosting a big dinner party, he sits alone, having prepared a whole turkey or rack of lamb, and watches the French cook on the ‘telly’ at the other side of the dining room through opera glasses.

While the film starts with Felicia looking for her boyfriend in England, we learn through regular flashbacks about her ‘journey’ up to this point and also about Hilditch’s past and why he might have become what he is today. Felicia’s father is utterly disapproving, not because she is carrying a baby at her young age, but because it’s the ‘enemy’s’ (read: British) baby. Johnny’s mom offers Felicia no help in finding her son. She obviously doesn’t approve of the two, either.

Hilditch, who drives an old car and listens to music that was popular fifty years ago, comes off as a caring soul when he meets up with Felicia as she searches for the factory where she thinks Johnny works. He begins to befriend her and feigns helping her in her search. Hilditch has a bad habit that I’ll keep to myself so you can slowly watch it develop on screen rather than in print — although Egoyan keeps things PG-13 while giving us the creepy feeling of an R-rating.

Suffice it to say about all the characters in this and other Egoyan films: they are not simple people with easy to understand problems. Even when the characters are portrayed as innately horrible, they still display a level of humanity and goodness, something that is evident in the film.

Journey is about more than the physical journey of its characters. It’s about the journey of escape from the past. It becomes a journey to the new crossroads of these peoples’ lives and we get to be silent witnesses of the fascinating trip.

Taking a different journey, Steven Spielberg’s recent blockbusters Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park have finally been released on DVD. As I wrote in my Jaws DVD review, Spielberg has long held out transferring his bigger hits to this fledgling format and only recently decided to release some of them (like Jaws earlier this summer). While these two latest releases won’t be on any top ten best film lists, they sure rank up there as monumental entries in the action/adventure all-time classics categories and their appearance on DVD makes them all the more enjoyable as couch classics.

With the phenomenal advances in the last couple of years in digital special effects technology (think: Toy Story 1 and 2, Armageddon, and dozens of other digitally enhanced films), the fact that the seven-year-old Jurassic Park still looks like it could have been done this year, shows how well it holds up while other movies done even more recently already show how far the wizardry of effects has evolved since they were filmed. The two DVDs are offered as a two-disc set (in Dolby Digital), or separately in either Dolby Digital or DTS sound formats. In the way of extras, nothing too wonderful jumps off the screen except for a couple of decent documentaries, dino info, and some trailers. If you are using your computer’s DVD-ROM drive to watch the film, there is a link to webcasts for the making of Jurassic Park III currently being shot (although if you have Windows ME and Internet Explorer 5.5, you might have some problems navigating the software, necessitating the download of some patches from the software maker-which I haven’t done successfully yet.) Aside from that, it’s a treat to watch these two films again and in such fine form.