Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg

Viggo Mortensen is back; he's similarly as mysterious as in his last Cronenberg outing, but looking like a scarier version of Kurt Douglas as Nikolai Luzhin, driver and 'cleaner' to a Russian gangster boss living in London. Hard-working Naomi Watts  plays an innocent midwife drawn into a world of grimness when she tries to find relatives for the child of a 14-year-old who died giving birth.

OK - this sounds like a pretty contrived and slightly preposterous set up, but the script, by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), manages to just about wheel the characters into a world of probability. Personally, all my favorite Cronenberg films are the ones he's scripted himself (which he seems to have stopped doing around the turn of the century). Similarly, the scenes that work best for me are the ones where he and his effects crew get to go ape in: After watching this you'll realize that there are just not enough naked men knife fight  scenes in cinema.