:::: Time Out Bengaluru - city guide and fortnightly listing magazine ::::

All residents of an unnamed city except one woman go blind. The first victims of the contagion are herded into prison. One group of inmates take over the jail and terrorises the others, demanding food and sexual favours at will. Jose Saramago’s brilliant parable about the limits of morality was deemed unfilmable for years after it was published in 1995. Perhaps it is. Fernando Mereilles’s lacklustre adaptation fails to rise to the challenge of bringing to the screen the novel’s complex investigation into the collapse of social order. The events take place exactly as they unfold in Saramago’s book, with the horrible bits tastefully viewed through a blurred lens. Mereilles’s movie has big-name Hollywood talent such as Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal, but all that wattage cannot brighten the film’s prospects. The DVD doesn’t have any extra features. Malli Ray

Book of Eli

Regions 2 & 5. Sony Rs 499

The Hughes brothers had an impressive big-budget outing in 2001 with From Hell, a slasher lite starring Johnny Depp as a policeman investigating the Jack the Ripper killings. Last year’s Book of Eli, with Denzel Washington as a character simply known as “The Walker”, is far less engaging despite impressive production values and locations. The flimsy story is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the surviving humans exchange goods such as shampoos and food for the most precious commodity of all – water. The Walker, however, has one rare object in his backpack that he won’t part with – the last edition of the King James Bible. He runs into a crooked businessman Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who wants to control the world with the book. The movie never recovers from the conversion of the Hughes brothers from ghetto-blasting directors to Bible-thumpers. The extras include a featurette on the making of the film, which details the production design – easily the best thing about the movie. MR