Film - showing at a cinema near you
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
It is World War II, and an unlikely friendship is blossoming across a barbed wire fence: Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the eight-year-old son of a Nazi officer (David Thewlis) who finds companionship with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) - a Jewish boy of his own age who is imprisoned in the nearby concentration camp. It's something of a rude awakening for Bruno as he discovers his father's involvement in the camp and draws a direct line between the man he thought he knew and the suffering of the people behind the fence who - to his young, innocent mind - are forced to wear striped pyjamas and spend their days working ceaselessly on a farm. That the resolution is grim is inevitable and necessary, though it still seems unsettling for what is essentially a children's movie (adapted as it is from the children's book by John Boyne). Strong performances from Butterfield, Scanlon and Thewlis only enhance what amounts to a sad, simple and deeply affecting tale.
12A, 94 mins
The Women
This remake of George Cukor's 1939 film, courtesy of director Diane English (Murphy Brown), seems propelled by the same force as Sex and the City: the idea that what women want is a movie with an all-female cast talking about relationships. This time, the cast numbers Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett-Smith, playing a housewife, a career gal, a mother and a lesbian (which isn't, strictly speaking, a profession, though in this instance you'd be forgiven for thinking it might be). Their lives entwine when a department store manicurist lets slip to one of them that the hottie behind the perfume counter (Eva Mendes) is canoodling with a rich married man - a fact that soon makes its way back to his wife (Ryan). All of the actors play their parts immaculately, with Ryan and Bening on particularly good form. But the problem here is a want of wit and bite; it's all too darned wishy-washy and feel-good and actually winds up feeling pretty false. There's also the questionable involvement of soap manufacturer Dove (product placement ahoy) as part of their 'campaign for real women'. And, ultimately, that's all The Women feels like - one long soap advert.
12A, 114 mins
Rock 'N' Rolla
With considerable fanfare, Guy Ritchie returns not just to our screens but also to the territory that made his name back in 1998 with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: the ducking and diving of London's gangsters. These are different times, of course, so Ritchie brings a frisson to proceedings by introducing Russian mobsters to the usual clutch of East End ne'er-do-wells. The action focuses on a shonky land deal organised by the Russians, which promises get-rich-quick possibilities for all manner of folk, including old-school gangster Lenny (Tom Wilkinson), Russian newbie Uri (Karel Roden) and Lenny's accountant (an excellent Thandie Newton). The plot thickens and thickens, until it proves almost unravellable - needless to say it involves a junkie rock star, a faked death, crooked police officers, tons of machismo, silly nicknames and a briefcase we never peep inside. One suspects Ritchie was aiming for something Tarantino-esque here, and he doesn't entirely fail - the movie has the romping feel of a good cartoon. But its characters are never fully drawn, and the movie feels strangely dated, which means, sadly, it never quite captures the zest of Lock, Stock.
15, 114 mins
The Dark Knight
When Christopher Nolan gave us Batman Begins back in 2005, he brought a certain dourness to the previously brash world of cinematic comic book heroes. Here, he takes the director's chair again, and seems to bring the series to an even darker, moodier place. Christian Bale is back as the caped crusader, still chased by those demons, still looking one half chiselled superhero, one half American Psycho, but now also thoroughly unsettled when into Gotham City springs his nemesis, The Joker (a creepy, nerve-jangling and masterful performance by the late Heath Ledger), intent on wreaking havoc. It's the same old fight, the same old opponents, the same old love interest, but somehow The Dark Knight feels different. Gotham City itself is all glass and steel, more fragile-looking, while Batman is even more troubled, more elusive and more dragged down, it seems, by a sense of inevitable doom. The screens are crowded with superheroes this summer, but there are few as hauntingly impressive as this new, unsettling Batman.
12A, 152 mins
Ashes of Time Redux
Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Ashes of Time was the director's sole foray into martial arts - a loose adaptation of Louis Cha's novel about a lone swordsman. Here, he revisits that movie, with a few alterations here and there, to make Ashes of Time Redux. Ou-yang (Leslie Cheung) runs a desert hotel, alone now, since his wife left him. He spends his days watching others: a sweet, sad bunch, all bruised by lost love and missed opportunities, from the man whose mental illness means forgetting his appointment with the woman he loves, to the celebrated swordsman who is now losing his eyesight and the young warrior who finds his success hampered by the constant presence of his wife. It's the pace of Wong Kar-Wai's movies that I love the most, Ashes included. Here, the action is measured out by the five seasons of the Chinese almanac. It is startling to see a martial arts film performed at such a pace and in such a rhythm, rather than charged with high-speed battles and lingering shots of desert terrain. But it's a relief, too, to see such scenes replaced by the characters' emotional battles - fights with themselves that prove more compelling than any flash of steel.
15, 93 mins
You Don't Mess With the Zohan
One might feel a little tired at the mere prospect of You Don't Mess with the Zohan. It's the latest gross-out flick that comes complete with an ensemble cast of Hollywood's male comedians (plus Mariah Carey and John McEnroe), a script part-written by Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler (who also stars, naturally), jokes about semen and hummus and a plot that hinges on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But I do advise you to muster the energy to see it: Zohan (Sandler) is a Jewish counter-terrorism operative who spends his days battling his nemesis The Phantom (John Turturro) and his nights dreaming of becoming a hairdresser like his hero, Paul Mitchell. So he flees to New York where he finds employment in a salon run by inevitable romantic partner Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui) - who just happens to be Palestinian. Of course it's irreverent, disrespectful and makes light of a dreadfully serious situation, but it takes no sides, mocks everyone equally and is also terribly funny.
12A, 113 mins
The Wackness
We are in New York in 1994 - a fact hammered home in Jonathan Levine's movie with the considerable force of hip-hop parlance, nods to Rudolph Giuliani and Nirvana. Our focus on is the life of Luke (Josh Peck), a surly, introverted teen who hails from a relatively poor background and earns his pocket money by selling pot. One of his customers is a psychiatrist named Dr Squires (Ben Kingsley) who pays Luke not in hard cash but in therapy. Squires, though, is himself a little bit wayward, struggling to maintain his marriage while making out with a young stoner (Mary-Kate Olsen). Luke, meanwhile, is falling in love with Squires's daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby) - a contrastingly carefree, optimistic and thoroughly popular young woman. The familiar territory of the coming-of-age drama is given new life here, largely due to a sweet, soft gentleness that permeates The Wackness. In mood and inconsequentialness, but also in sure-fire charmingness, it recalls Reality Bites - another movie that deals with growing up, falling in love, and just happened to be released in 1994.
15, 99 mins
Heavy Metal in Baghdad
There have been an awful lot of documentaries about Baghdad in recent times - many of them excellent, of course. But even the most involved in the subject must be beginning to wonder whether they really need another 90 minutes of footage from the front line to tell them that war is bad. Heavy Metal in Baghdad, however, is a different kettle of fish. Filmmaker Suroosh Alvi managed to sneak into Baghdad, and - with the aid of a bulletproof vest and a security guard - set about making a documentary on the only heavy metal band in Iraq, Acrassicauda (named after a particular kind of scorpion native to the Iraqi desert). His argument for entering the danger zone? "Uh y' know, heavy metal rules." Not even Jack Black could have put it so succinctly. The band plays one solitary gig at a hotel which will later be blown up by a car bomb, and as a result they hotfoot it to Damascus as refugees. Alvi's film is a splendid piece of DIY documentary. While the essential topic of heavy metal is at times amusing, the things that emerge from this film are the more serious subjects of Iraqi refugees and the impossibility of self-expression in this environment. Fantastic stuff.
15, 84 mins
The Duchess
Director Saul Dibb's cinematic debut Bullet Boy was a surly tale of gang life, so his second feature is an interesting step to the left. Here we follow Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Keira Knightley), who - as we've often been reminded in the lead-up to the movie's release - was the great-great-great-great aunt of Princess Diana, and, in her day, also a fashion icon and gossip-column regular, trapped in an unhappy marriage. It's this last fact that occupies much of The Duchess, which skips lightly over Georgiana's political work (Milady was a prominent Whig) to focus on her relationship with William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire (a splendid Ralph Fiennes). She must tolerate his constant affairs (including one with her best friend), his decision to move his lovers into the marital home, and, in one scene, marital rape. She must also suffer her own unconsummated romance with Lord Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), her childhood friend and the future prime minister. So, of course, there is much bosom-heaving, sumptuous decor, and plenty of shots of Knightley (who delivers a sweet performance) looking beautifully sad. It's not what it could have been - a portrait of a woman who blazed something of a feminist trail through 18th-century London society - but at the very least it satisfies our deep need for a taffeta-swishing, lushly shot costume drama.
12A, 110 mins
Step Brothers
Not so very long ago, the union of Judd Apatow and Jimmy Miller brought us Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky and Bobby starring Will Ferrell and John C Reilly. It was not only a magnificent movie, but also a rip-roaring success. So, they must have figured, why not do it all over again? Step Brothers reunites not only Apatow and Miller behind the scenes, but Ferrell and Reilly up on the screen as well, this time playing a pair of Apatow-trademark drop-outs who become brothers when their parents wed - an event that only seems to sustain their perpetual state of adolescence. The problem is that the jokes just aren't as funny the second time around - or the third, fourth, fifth. All those penis quips and Freudian yearnings are starting to wear a little thin. So, guys, it might just be time to grow up.
15, 98 mins
Get Smart
I'm a bit on the young side to be acquainted with Maxwell Smart - a television spy hero of yesteryear who forms the basis for this objectionably unobjectionable Steve Carrell vehicle. The basic gist is that Smart, aka Agent 86, is a kind of buffoonish American operative who, despite his cackhandedness, always gets the job done, aided and abetted by a bevy of one-liners and a foxy female sidekick (here played by Anne Hathaway). The plot is not especially important - it's the usual swashbuckle of foreign spies, raging bosses and a dumbo President (plus a lot of pepped-up action sequences and special effects). Carrell fills his role nicely, and Hathaway certainly fits the bill. In short, there's nothing really wrong with Get Smart, beyond the fact, of course, that it is so thoroughly formulaic and so tediously predictable that it feels like one long motorway drive of a movie.
12A, 110 mins
Never Apologise
Though it is a remarkably simple idea, actor Malcolm McDowell's one-man show about Lindsay Anderson is a riveting work. At the Edinburgh festival in 2004, McDowell staged a tribute to his friend, the director of If... and This Sporting Life, who had died a decade earlier. He reads excerpts from his diaries and letters and hauls out anecdotes involving Laurence Olivier, Richard Harris, Bette Davis and John Gielgud. He remembers fondly the time Anderson chose his epitaph, 'Surrounded by fucking idiots', after a rather trying luncheon spent in the company of British film critics. Anderson's life - not only as a director but also as a critic and writer - would be a source of great wealth for any performer, but for McDowell (who worked with Anderson on numerous occasions) it is almost an embarrassment of riches. It is easy to forget, in this whiz-bang age of technical wizardry and short attention spans, just how gripping a fantastic speech can be. And it makes a lovely thing to behold - there is such tenderness, humour and warmth here that you feel as if you're in attendance at the very best kind of wake.
TBC, 111 mins
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
There is a mind-boggling amount of stuff crammed into the 110 minutes of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II (the follow-up to his first adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic-book heroics, Hellboy). For a start, we have Hellboy himself: exiled from the underworld, he stands a devilish red, and - though his horns have been lopped off - he's still enticingly demonic. At the paranormal research lab where he is gainfully employed, Hellboy is dealing with the fall-out of a resurgent war between elves and humans, the arrival at the lab of new agent Dr Johann Kraus (Seth MacFarlane), and the return of his partner in heroics, Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) - not to mention a love story between our curiously seductive hero and the melancholic Liz (Selma Blair). Where most comic adaptations focus on the kapow and splat of special effects, del Toro chooses to evoke an atmosphere which is more old-fashioned and chivalrous - part pulp fiction, part film noir. It's all told in such high-res, lurching splendidness that it's hard not to fall a little bit in love with Hellboy II. Fabulous stuff.
12A, 110 mins
Somers Town
Shane Meadows has really cornered the market in scruffy modern Britishness in recent times. His films carry a sensuality that the swishy confections of Richard Curtis cannot rival. His last film, This is England, for instance, brought out the tastes and textures of 1980s Britain with astonishing accuracy. Here, Meadows is recounting the story of a young runaway from Nottingham, Tomo (This is England's Thomas Turgoose), who heads to London and encounters a Polish boy, Marek (Piotr Jagiello), with whom he strikes up a firm friendship. Together they run amok in the great sprawl of London, falling in love with a French waitress, doing odd jobs to fund the presents they buy her and getting legless when she returns home to Paris. Told mostly in black and white, with occasional Polish subtitles, it is an infinitely touching tale - a love story of sorts between the boys and their waitress, between Tomo and Marek, between Meadows and his country. More than anything, though, this is a portrait of a living, breathing, multicultural Britain.
12A, 75 mins
Reviews by Laura Barton
FIRST POSTED
SEPTEMBER 11, 2008
