Film - showing at a cinema near you
W 
Oliver Stone has assembled the cast of W the way most people draw up a Fantasy Football team: Thandie Newton as Condi Rice, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. And then we have Josh Brolin's turn as George W Bush himself - surely the stuff of Oscar-nominations. This is a biography of the outgoing 43rd American president, covering everything from his messed-up youth and strained relationship with his father to the infamous pretzel incident and the Iraq war. At times it's a little Bush-by-numbers, and by and large there is a want of the ferocity and fight that Stone showed in Nixon (1995). There is never a knock-out punch thrown - either by Stone or by writer, Stanley Weiser - though scenes such as Dubya and his father brawling in the Oval Office hint at the film that might've been. Still, for those buoyed by Bush's departure, it's a good film in which to wallow.
15, 129 mins
Easy Virtue
It's not that there's anything particularly spectacular about the plot of Easy Virtue (a Noel Coward play concerning Larita, a female motorcar racer from America who weds a member of the British aristocracy and finds herself thrust up against any amount of stiff upper lips, snobbishness and clipped vowels); it's the fact that the story is executed with such precision and panache. For starters, we welcome the return of Stephan Elliott (director of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), back after a hiatus of nearly a decade. Joining him we have the reassuring presence of Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth as our lady driver's new in-laws, not to mention new British eye-candy Ben Barnes as her beau. And then, of course, we have Jessica Biel who, as the fashionable, foxy Larita, reveals herself to be an actress of subtlety and wit. It's a keenly observed romantic comedy, stripped of the mushy Hollywood stuff, and soundtracked by Cole Porter. In short, there's very little not to like.
PG, 93 mins
The Midnight Meat Train
It seems a good 20 years since the schlocky psycho-killer Hollywood thriller reigned, so it's probably high time for a revival. And what better way to do this than a Clive Barker short story, writ large with a model-murdering meatpacker named Mahogany (Vinnie Jones) and a fey veganesque photographer hero called Leon (Bradley Cooper). Leon is in an artistic dilemma - should he carry on shooting crime-scenes or perhaps choose something a little classier? As if that weren't enough his relationship is going off the boil as his girlfriend (Leslie Bibb) dreams of a somewhat glossier life. And then along comes a snotty gallery-owner (Brooke Shields) who cocks a snook at his "melodramatic" photography... All this sends young Leon to New York's subway system, where a psychopath armed with a meathook lurks on the early-morning trains. At first our hero just wants pictures; then he wants to solve the puzzle - there are, of course, shades of Zodiac here. The Midnight Meat Train, while ticking all the obvious gore boxes, does show a little restraint and intelligence, but essentially this is the same old story: brute against bookworm, good against evil, vegan against butcher. You get the picture.
18, 100 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
Let's Talk About the Rain
In Le Gout des Autres (2000) and Comme une Image (2004), Agnes Jaoui presented herself as a director of quiet strength and great perception. In her third film she reinforces this reputation, this time also playing Agathe, a brittle, self-contained feminist writer with an eye to a political career, who returns to the south of France to deal with the death of her mother. It is here that she meets two film-makers (Jean-Pierre Bacri and Jamel Debbouze) who posit the idea of making a documentary about her. Flattered, Agathe accepts. Yet the filming process will force her to look at herself, her motivations and her past in a way she has never needed to before - and will soon lead her to feel somewhat compromised by the documentary project. For all the subdued subject-matter, this is a bright, witty film with perfect comic timing; a reassuring sign that Jaoui's strength only grows.
12A, 110 mins
Quantum of Solace
The last Bond instalment, Casino Royale, had a louche, easy charm, and although Quantum of Solace picks up where that film left off, it ups the pace from the outset. A heart-thumping car chase across the landscape of northern Italy introduces us to a plot that will swing, branch to branch, across Europe and to Latin America in pursuit of a shadowy organisation that is "everywhere, but you haven't even heard of it". Along the way, the deliciously growly Camille (Olga Kurylenko) leads Bond to her lover Mr Greene (Mathieu Amalric)- a supposedly ethical businessman plotting a coup with a Bolivian general (Joaquin Cosio). As the action shifts, we find that Bond is being trailed not only by gun-wielding villains but also by the CIA and MI6 (gamely represented by the lovely Gemma Arterton). It is, as you'll gather, all go. Daniel Craig's second outing as 007 sees the modern Bond placing less emphasis on the boudoir antics, and more upon the mystery that lies at the heart of the man, as well as his skills at physical combat over a reliance upon mere gadgetry. It works - to an extent: this is a breathless, furious thriller. But what has always made Bond different is those pauses to catch one's breath and enjoy a little light innuendo. And while Craig remains arguably the finest Bond to date, it would be a shame if the plots during his tenure were to let him down. 12A, 106 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
Pride and Glory
Edward Norton and Colin Farrell unite here in a multi-generational family cop drama. It's the tale of Ray (Norton), the latest in a long line of New York police officers, who finds his loyalties thrown into disarray when investigating a case that appears to involve his own brother and brother-in-law. Cinematic history is not short on movies worrying over the moral dilemmas of New York cops, and the great disappointment here is that director Gavin O'Connor never allows the film to rise above the formulaic and the flimsy. It's especially dispiriting when in Norton and Farrell we have two actors capable of conveying both hulking masculinity and gentle intelligence. You wonder sometimes how these things ever get made, and why their stars even bother to sign up for such projects. There are strong performances here and a sense of well-sprung tension, but both are overshadowed by a feeling of weary cliche.
15, 130 mins
Hunger
Steve McQueen's debut feature takes the story of the IRA's hunger strike of 1981 and grips it by the horns. Led by Bobby Sands (then ensconced in the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland), the protest was against the British government's refusal to recognise the incarcerated of the IRA as political prisoners. We begin with new inmate Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan), who is led to the jail's notorious H block where the residents are embarking upon a blanket protest, refusing to wear regulation uniform. Meanwhile prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham) lives in constant fear of attack and passes his days forever looking over his shoulder. All this seems a precursor to our introduction to Sands himself (Michael Fassbender), whose journey to skin and bones fills most of the second half of the movie. McQueen seems to make Sands's increasingly emaciated body almost a work of art, bringing a powerful physicality to what is a very visual film. The movie's pivotal scene, though, takes the form of a ten-minute conversation between Sands and a priest (Liam Cunningham) in which the man of the cloth asks the prisoner the ultimate use of his protest. What makes this scene especially strong is the sudden realisation that words are noticeably absent elsewhere in the film: noise, yes; words, no. It's these unusual assaults on the eye and the ear that give McQueen's debut such magnificent, sinewy vigour.
15, 90 mins
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
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
Of Time and the City
Terence Davies's love-letter to Liverpool is one of 2008's most exquisite films. An autobiographical foray occasioned by the city's current reign as Capital of Culture, it takes us through archive film back to the 1940s and 50s of the director's youth: to his working-class neighbourhood, his church-going days and the years leading up to the city's Merseybeat, Mop-Top explosion. But this is no obvious trip down memory lane; the Fab Four and the football get little look-in. Rather it's Peggy Lee, Mahler and Joyce that rush to the fore. It is Davies's personal recollections that feed this documentary: his relationship to homosexuality and God - not to mention the royal family (which he terms "the Betty Windsor show"). The observations are whip-smart, unapologetic, and, you sense, a lifetime in the making. They are the kind of realisations that come only with distance. Davies left Liverpool in the 1970s, and towards the end he wonders "Where are you, Liverpool I have loved?" On cue comes the footage of demolished terraces and tumbling brickwork. It's the age-old swell of nostalgia for a city that you left behind and now greets you as a stranger.
PG, 72 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 and warming film.
tbc, 105 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
Reviews by Laura Barton
FIRST POSTED
NOVEMBER 6, 2008
