Film - showing at a cinema near you
Gomorrah
This bare-knuckled movie from Matteo Gorrone is something of a hard, bleak triumph. It knots together several separate stories surrounding the Camorra, the Naples-based equivalent of the Mafia. So we find the still-green teenager desperate to join the fun and sign up to the Camorra, the two dumbasses who try to set up a rival 'business', and then the jaded tailor (exquisitely played by Salvatore Cantalupo) falling in with Chinese manufacturers. From the waste-ground to the apartment block, the settings are miserable, everything sitting beneath a layer of yellowish grime. The film's message is clearly that everything is besmirched, everything tarnished; that the society of this Italian city, indeed the entire country, is so riddled with corruption that it will never truly get clean. One leaves with the sense that the paybacks, the deals, the drama and the violence are all completely inevitable and entirely unfightable. It's a grim message, artfully told.
15, 137 mins
City of Ember
Add together Monster House director Gil Kenan, a children's novel by Jeanne Duprau, a screenplay by Edward Scissorhands writer Caroline Thompson and the mighty talents of Bill Murray (not to mention Tim Robbins, Liz Smith, Mackenzie Crook, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway), and you would be hard pushed not to come up with something magnificent. Happily, City of Ember is equal to the sum of its parts. We're in a subterranean, post-apocalyptic world with orphaned 12-year-old Lina (Ronan) and her pal Doon (Treadaway) scrabbling for survival whilst caring for Lina's batty grandmother (Smith) and younger sister. Casting a shadow over their fragile existence is the knowledge that the future of their underground world is threatened, and the city's mayor (Murray) is doing nothing to save it. And so it must fall to our young heroes to rescue their homeland by sidestepping the mayor and venturing into the great unknown beyond its boundaries. City of Ember is a fabulous construction of a movie, leading us into a world that is rich, vivid and engaging. Excellent stuff.
PG, 95 mins
Righteous Kill
Getting Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on screen together for the first time since 1995's Heat must have seemed like a brilliant idea. But simply putting these two greats in the same room is not enough. There is a frustrating lack of direction and backbone to Righteous Kill and the result is that the two actors seem merely to flounder and revert to type - shouting a lot and looking angry. Two well-worn New York City cops, Rooster (Pacino) and Turk (De Niro) - who certainly earn those nicknames with their puffed-up, bird-like swaggering - are investigating recent activity by a suspected serial killer whom they thought they had jailed years before. Are they connected? Did they lock up the wrong guy? Do we care? It's certainly hard to give two hoots by the time the denouement comes round, since the film is something of a long trek (once the gleam of seeing two movie magnificoes up there together has worn off). The best way to pass the time is perhaps to wonder what you could have done with that budget (a whopping $60 million) and those actors.
15, 101 mins
Man on Wire
High up above Manhattan on a late-summer day in 1974, a Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped into the air between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Petit (an experienced funambulist) proceeded to spend 45 minutes balancing on a wire stretched between the towers in a spectacular display of illegal tightrope walking. In his riveting film, director James Marsh recounts the feat itself and the events leading up to it, interviews Petit and his co-conspirators, onlookers and police chiefs - all in a considered documentary style that draws largely on Petit's own book, To Reach the Clouds. Not once does Marsh reference the events of September 11th and the loss of those towers from the New York skyline - a decision that appears gently respectful. This is, after all, a story about both mortality and the life-affirming effect that such a ludicrous gamble can have. It's a triumph of quiet simplicity.
PG, 90 mins
Nights in Rodanthe
You might well be tempted to see Nights in Rodanthe. It boasts, after all, a seriously impressive cast (Diane Lane, Richard Gere, James Franco, Viola Davis) and suggests a movie of some lip-trembling, glance-lingering romantic maturity. But, dear cinema-goer, do not be fooled. This is, alas, a film of such depressing shallowness that you will be hard put to even get your ankles wet. Lane plays Adrienne, a woman constrained by both joyless marriage and snivelling children, who one weekend heads to the coast of North Carolina to look after an inn run by a dear friend (Davis) who is taking a few days off to canoodle with some hunk or other. But, goddarnit, as soon as dear Adrienne takes up the reins, in sweeps a hurricane - accompanied by a swish, handsome bachelor named Paul (Gere). What follows is quite tearfully predictable: weather-lashed inn, shutters a-rattling, steamy clinches and the kind of soft-focus, sensitive sex scenes one can only describe as lurve-making. The real glitch, though, is that one never really has any clue about how Adrienne or Paul feel about this set of events, and therefore quite what the point of all this might be - except, perhaps, to appeal to those women trapped in such domestic misery that any Richard-Gere-in-a-storm film will do.
PG, 97 mins
Brideshead Revisited
This much-anticipated adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel is a loving tribute to English country houses, Oxford quads, and the delights of Venice. Whether it does justice to the original novel - or indeed rivals the 1981 TV version - is debatable. Strolling through these charming settings is Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a handsome, wide-eyed young thing who becomes enchanted with an aristocratic family, falling first into a passionate friendship with Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), then with his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), as their estranged parents (Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon) hover overhead. But alongside these great flutterings of the heart is a discussion on the British class system, sexual taboos and, most importantly, religion. And it is here that this Brideshead grows flimsy, casting the fervently Catholic Lady Marchmain (Thompson) as the source of her family's undoing, her husband's departure and her children's confusion. What we crave here is subtlety, a more nuanced approach to such complex subjects. Instead we must make do with dreamy portraits of the English landscape, and a clutch of beautiful young things.
12A, 133 mins
88 Minutes
The fundamental problem with 88 Minutes is one of excess. Not only is Al Pacino's skin too orange and his hair too bouffant, but for a film that depends so heavily upon the notion of a time schedule of 88 minutes, it overruns itself to an indulgent 105 minutes. The plot is also far too complicated. It begins with the sadistic murder of a young woman before fast-forwarding to a time when her murderer is imprisoned, thanks to the work of forensic scientist Dr Jack Gramm (Pacino), who is also a university professor with some devoted students, a bachelor pad and an impressive wine collection. Gramm's enviable existence is one day disrupted by a telephone call telling him he has just 88 minutes to live, followed by the discovery of various young women's bodies, all murdered in the same style as the first. There is, you'll gather, an awful lot to cram into those dwindling minutes. Of course it's all downright ridiculous, and quite preposterously acted (shame on you Mr Pacino). Indeed, 88 Minutes' only hope of salvation is surely the vague possibility of its becoming some kind of camp classic - a festival of dead bodies, bad dialogue and dreadful hair.
15, 105 mins
Mirrors
Alexandre Aja has taken inspiration from the Korean film Into the Mirror for this psychological horror movie. Here, it's the tale of a New York City cop named Ben (Kiefer Sutherland) who leaves the force in disgrace, then pretty much loses his wife (Paula Patton) and seeks comfort in a bottle of liquor. He takes a new job as a night watchman at a fire-wrecked department store that has a somewhat creepy history: a former life as a mental hospital, a lunatic doctor, unexplained deaths, the suicide of the former watchman... you get the picture. Ben is soon disturbed by the way the building's mirrors throw back his reflection, distorted and eerie, and how strange handprints appear on their surfaces. Naturally, he decides he must work out what the hot damn diggery is going on here before the spooky mirror-ghosts attack his family. There's the air of a cult classic to this ludicrous creepfest, but also a sense of what might have been. Aja's portrait of the empty department store is impressively spine-chilling, for instance, but the droning stupidity that follows renders Mirrors more tedious than horrible.
15, 110 mins
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Many of us will now be familiar with Toby Young's account of his own gaffe-prone attempt to conquer New York: a British journalist, he ballsed up a golden opportunity to work on an American magazine (here named Sharps, in truth Vanity Fair), but was somehow redeemed by the love of a good woman. There are various shifts in this big-screen adaptation. Toby is now christened Sidney (played rather splendidly by Simon Pegg) and has acquired a degree of likeability which, to be perfectly honest, the original Young seemed to lack; the hackish ambition replaced by a bumbling, Englishman-abroad routine. At the heart of this movie sits Young's drooling pursuit of a Hollywood starlet (a fabulous Megan Fox) who is firmly guarded by her publicist (an equally magnificent Gillian Anderson), and the confidences he shares with his only friend, co-worker Alison (Kirsten Dunst). Could it be that he is looking for love in the wrong place? For all the fine performances and amusing turns, How to Lose Friends never quite finds its groove - a result, one supposes, of Young's original toe-curling, stomach-curdling honesty being replaced by something a little more eager to please.
15, 110 mins
Death Race
For all its meatheadedness, there is something strangely pleasing about Death Race. It makes no apology for its ultra-violence and there are no cringeworthy attempts to reach for highfalutin' dialogue. Instead, this is a plain, simple, monosyllabic monster-truck of a movie. An update of the 1975 movie Death Race 2000, this movie (courtesy of Paul W S Anderson - thankfully much improved since his Alien vs Predator days) places us in the slightly futuristic environs of 2012 New York, where the prison service is now commanded by dodgy private companies who have instigated a money-spinning ploy where inmate is pitched against inmate in various physical feats, screenings of which make for pay-per-view entertainment. In the jail where the creme de la creme of terrible inmates reside, prison warden Hennessey (Joan Allen) has a dilemma on her hands: her prized driver - the mask-wearing Frankenstein - has been killed and she is devising a plan to replace him with Jensen Ames (a perfect Jason Statham), a racing driver wrongly jailed for the murder of his wife. If he wins the race, he can walk free. It's an oily, hulking tale told in oily, hulking grunts, hot metal, fire and fumes.
15, 105 mins
Tropic Thunder
Spawned by the talents of Ben Stiller, Etan Cohen and Justin Theroux, Tropic Thunder is an occasionally sharp, occasionally too-familiar skewering of the film industry and its audiences. Stiller is in his element as Tugg Speedman - a fully-fledged action hero who hopes to reinvigorate his career with a 'Nam movie, starring alongside respected Australian actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr) and popular comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black). It's a movie that requires as much pyrotechnic force as the studio can muster - blood, guts, lost limbs and decapitations. But these aren't the only scenes of dubious taste: Kirk undergoes a skin-darkening procedure for his character; and Tom Cruise (as the film's Jewish producer) is a heavily latex-ed, money-hungry grotesque. It's all rather repellent, but the idea is, of course, that Tropic Thunder is an unflinching parody of Hollywood: its stereotyping, miscasting and love of violence. There are times when it gets a little lost on this mission, when the viewing is uncomfortable and the jokes a little trampled, but you can't help thinking that Stiller and co are saying something rather valuable here, and that it's rather bold of them to say it at all.
15, 107 mins
Import/Export
The bright, shiny optimism of new beginnings is the subject of Ulrich Seidl's film - alongside the huge chug of disappointment once those dreams begin to fade. Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a Ukrainian nurse and single mother who leaves her homeland and heads west to Austria in search of opportunity. Pauli (Paul Hofmann) is a security guard, recently unemployed, who quits Vienna and heads to the Ukraine with his trucker stepfather. Of course, their new lives are much trickier than they envisaged. Olga ends up working in a geriatric hospital as a cleaner - her perky, sweet spirit somewhat crumpled by her fate and the wrath of the ward matron. Pauli (a less lovable figure at the outset) is similarly crushed by what he encounters on the road east - his stepfather's sexual adventures, poverty and miserable high-rise blocks. It's bleak and it's grey and it's unremitting, but Import/Export is a rare and affecting film, Seidl, Rak and Hofmann all bringing an unusual and strangely beautiful honesty to the screen.
18, 141 mins
I've Loved You So Long
This is precisely the kind of small, intimate movie Kristin Scott-Thomas was surely born to make. Here, she's playing the slightly dowdy and extremely weary-looking Juliette, who is trying to re-forge a connection with her sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) after an absence of 15 years. Lea is now married to Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) and kept busy caring for two adopted children and Luc's elderly father. Though Lea tells her daughter that Juliette has been away in England, it transpires that she has in fact been in prison, jailed for the murder of her six-year-old son. Though there is plenty of satellite action as Juliette fumbles her way into employment and through dinner parties and dates, the centre of this film is the bond between Lea and Juliette and their attempts to rebuild their relationship in spite of all that has passed. Set in eastern France, it's a very handsome movie, but the most compelling thing on screen is Scott-Thomas, giving us perhaps her finest performance to date.
12A, 115 mins
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
Reviews by Laura Barton
FIRST POSTED
OCTOBER 9, 2008
