Film - showing at a cinema near you
Ghost Town 
There's a lovely, jaunty gait to Ghost Town's walk; a screwball comedy of the old school, and something of a love letter to New York City. It's the story of a mardy dentist named Bertram Pincus (a fabulous Ricky Gervais) who is officially dead for seven minutes on the operating table and ever after finds himself as some kind of conduit between the living world and the afterlife - a position that means he is continually pestered by restless ghosts willing him to take care of all their unfinished business. Among these ghoulish mitherers is Frank (Greg Kinnear), a smooth, philandering city-boy who got hit by a bus and now wants Bertram to prevent his lovely (if emotionally crisp) widow Gwen (Tea Leoni) from marrying human rights lawyer Richard (Billy Campbell), whom he suspects is after her cash. It's not an easy task - Bertram after all lives in the same block as Gwen and has to date been unrelentingly misanthropic in her presence. Still, with a little bit of effort it seems inevitable that one of those deliciously mismatched romances should unravel. Ghost Town bears close resemblance to so many films that have passed before - but few have done the whole dead-meets-living romcom schtick with such wit and warmth.
12A, 102 mins
Quiet Chaos
Antonello Grimaldi's tale of the bewilderment of loss and the process of mourning has earned 18 nominations for Italy's annual film awards - and it's easy to see why. Nanni Moretti plays Pietro, a television executive from Rome who, following the sudden death of his wife one summer, finds his own life in suspension, as if he's waiting for the grief to pass. He drops his young daughter at school on the first day of term, telling her he will wait for her - and wait he does, on a park bench beneath her classroom window, lunching at a nearby cafe, never straying far. There are no extravagant displays of grief here. Rather we observe the progression of his mourning, with its ticks, quirks and details. The film in fact opens with Pietro rescuing another woman, Eleonora, from the sea, precisely at the moment his wife is dying not far away. It's a strange scene - a little violent, a little erotic - and one that is mirrored later on in the movie as he ends up having sex with Eleonora, the events acting as bookends, almost, to his period of grief. It makes for a subtle, delicate, warming film - and quite the highlight of this week's batch.
tbc, 105 mins
Eagle Eye
The question of what the hell is going on in this movie will surely keep your mind engaged, even after the initial enthusiasm for its characters has faded. The confusions are manifold. First we have Shia LeBeouf as a slacker named Jerry, and Michelle Monaghan as a harassed single mother named Rachel, and just about the only thing they have in common is that they have both been receiving telephone calls featuring a strange female voice that seems to know everything about them. Meanwhile, somewhere across town, Rosario Dawson and Billy Bob Thornton are two squabblesome cops upholding the laws of LA. How will they be connected? Are terrorists involved? Is it relevant that Rachel's son plays the trumpet? These are the burning questions of Eagle Eye. The problem is that, despite the film's magnificent cast, it becomes increasingly difficult to care whether these loose ends tie up, and the only conclusion one can reach is that this has all been done so much better before in a dozen other Hollywood cyber-terrorist conspiracy dramas.
12A, 118 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
Chocolate
This Thai martial arts movie from director Prachya Pinkaew follows an autistic female fighter and her pursuit of revenge. Events aren't quite as clear-cut as one might expect, however. Our heroine, Zen (Yanin Wismitanant), is in fact tracking down all the people who owe money to her former-gangster mother who now needs chemotherapy, aided by a street urchin pal named Moom (Taphon Phopwandee). And so begins the fighting. It's well-choreographed stuff, though not breathlessly thrilling, and while such movies are obviously more about action than dialogue, we perhaps crave a few more words from Zen. A fearless female heroine is always welcome in my book but the wordless, kickboxing, vengeful Zen lacks a certain verve - a fact that makes it a little difficult to form any kind of attachment to the movie.
18, 110 mins
Burn After Reading
A new Coen brothers movie is usually a reason to put out the bunting, and Burn After Reading has promised to be a cause for great celebration. The cast is superlative and there's an intricate plot involving gym bunnies, Google maps and goofballs - truly, it seems to have just about everything. Alas, the only thing it doesn't have is much of a pulse. This time, the brothers are spoofing the espionage movie, and so we begin at the CIA HQ where an operative named Osborne (John Malkovich) has been demoted for alcoholism. Osborne's wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with incurably vain federal marshal Harry (George Clooney), who is also dallying with internet dating, where he meets Linda (Frances McDormand) who works at a gym alongside Chad (Brad Pitt), a man who puts the buff into buffoon. It is via this straggly connection that a computer disc containing all manner of CIA secrets winds up at Chad's gymnasium and feathers start to fly. The Coens' absurd, brittle humour is usually tempered by a warm human presence, and perhaps the problem here is a want of such a figure. There are hints of it in the sweetness of Chad (Pitt, delivering a magnificent turn) and in the ever-wonderful McDormand, but what the Coens have delivered here is an essentially excellent film marred by a clutch of hard-edged caricatures. A little softness wouldn't have gone amiss.
15, 96 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
High School Musical 3: Senior Year
It's hard to ignore the cultural juggernaut that is High School Musical - a Disney vehicle that has made pin-up stars of its cast, including Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale. Having begun as a TV movie, it now transfers to the big screen, but the plot remains reassuringly familiar. It revolves around events at East High School. In the first installment we met the basketball hero, Troy (Efron), who falls for the brainy geek Gabriella (Hudgens), and in the second he had to choose between her and the rich girl offering him the moon on a plate. This time around, our lovebirds must reconcile themselves to their impending separation as she twirls off to an Ivy League university and he takes up a basketball scholarship at the local college. But there's also the prospect of a scholarship for one lucky East High student to study drama at Juilliard, which might just throw everyone's plans into disarray. High School Musical's stock in trade is big, bouncy, flyaway tunes, with a touch of teen angst, and a dab of old-school Hollywood musical. Though the central storyline is perhaps less compelling than those of the previous outings, it's still wonderful, zinging stuff. Expect Efron and Hudgens to have taken over the stratosphere by 2009.
U, 112 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
Sisterhood
There's a warm familiarity to this low-budget enterprise. Not just in the cast (littered as it is with faces you might recognise from Footballers Wives, Hustle and a hundred other television features) but also in the film's central premise: two individuals who could not be more different, brought together by circumstance. Here, Catherine (Isabelle Defaut) is an uptight Sloaney type dwelling in an exclusive corner of London. Naturally she is horrified when she returns home to find an uncouth New Zealander sitting on her sofa, drinking beer and claiming to be her sister, Shirley (Emily Corcoran). In a surprising turn of events, both have lost their mothers in freak hoovering incidents, and now the father they thought was dead - an accomplished conman named Jack (Nicholas Ball) - is laying claim not only to Shirley's sheep farm, but also to Catherine's Chelsea abode. And so the caper begins. Essentially this is the pet project of Corcoran who is the film's writer, producer and star - and the girl does good. It's unlikely to set anything on fire, but Sisterhood is charming in a sweet-natured, feel-good kind of way.
12A, 90 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
La Zona
A fierce, striking debut from Rodrigro Pla takes us to a gated community in Mexico City with its manicured gardens and SUVs, its elegant mansions and a strip of barbed wire that protects its inhabitants from the slums beyond. The destruction wrought by a heavy storm renders this fortress briefly penetrable and three young chancers sneak in for a spot of opportunistic burglary. Things go a little awry, however, and soon two of the robbers, a security guard and a resident are dead, and the remaining burglar, Miguel (Alan Chavez), is hiding out in the basement of a nearby house. The community decides to take matters into its own hands... Meanwhile teenager Alejandro (Daniel Tovar), disturbed by the turn of events, finds Miguel in the basement and realises that he has to help him escape. What you might expect to be a rather basic tale of haves and have-nots acquires considerable subtlety in the hands of Pla and writer Laura Santullo, though its central message remains simple: that the morality of those who live in La Zona is far more decayed and distorted than of those in the slums beyond.
15, 97 mins
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
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
Reviews by Laura Barton
FIRST POSTED
OCTOBER 23, 2008
