Review: Invictus (3/5); Mugabe and the White African (4/5); Astro Boy (3/5); Eamon (2/5); Youth in Revolt (2.5/5)

At the movies, there is nobody more sacred than Morgan Freeman. We’ve come to worship him for those roles where no one else will do. Need a man to dispatch wisdom in a voice of cool reason? Ring Morgan’s agent. How about paternal forgiveness or a heart of gold? You know who to call. Freeman looks out at you from the big screen with those benign, soulful eyes and you feel blessed. When he speaks, real slow, his voice deep with gravel and weighed down with gravitas, he makes music of the mundane. He could talk about the traffic and you’d be transfixed. Freeman has played God twice. Now, in Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, he plays Nelson Mandela. Morgan Freeman is truly the holy trinity of Hollywood.
Freeman whispers the words of ‘Invictus’, William Ernest Henley’s rousing Victorian poem: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. And in that moment, nothing is insurmountable.” Invictus, though, is not about a matter of life or death, but something less important than that: rugby. And Mandela uses the poem to inspire the Springboks, South Africa’s national team, to win the rugby world cup and unite the troubled nation. The film makes it look that easy: build it, and they will come good.
Invictus takes its cues from the John Carlin book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation. And this being from the po-faced Eastwood, you’d expect a little rough play: a tense dramatic scrum with some head-butting and a few digs to the ribs. Instead, you go in for the huddle and you get a feelgood hug. When the final whistle blows, it triumphs as a shameless crowd-pleaser.
Freeman’s Mandela is the kind of guy who leaps out of bed at darkness o’clock and, before he’s even standing, has the bed all tidied into place. The newly-elected president spends the rest of the day smoothing out the deep and divisive wrinkles of South Africa. The year is 1995 and the rugby world cup is coming. The Springboks are a mess: on the field, they are led by Matt Damon’s earnest captain Francois Pienaar. Damon, bulked up for the role, looks like a meat truck, although his character is little more than a meathead and is given little to tackle. The team is a shambles.
At the start of the film, the camera mucks in among a field of amateur rugby players. It follows the line of play, then rises up to look at a field across the road where young black kids are playing soccer: rugby is the preserve of the privileged white man; a symbol of the old Apartheid. When England play the Springboks, the small number of blacks who turn up do so to support England. It is in this climate that the newly-empowered black government is preparing to change the Spingboks’ name and alter the national anthem. But Mandela is against it: do not alienate the white population, he says. Let’s include them.
Most of the drama works in this manner: someone is asked to do something that goes against their deep-seated prejudices; then Mandela ruffles them up with some undeniable wisdom. Freeman smiles gently like a know-all and attitudes change that little bit.
It is obvious Eastwood is taking a breather from serious drama. And he isn’t pushing for the biopic that Mandela deserves. In Attenborough’s Ghandi, the sense of epic struggle, a nation heaving against itself, added to the significance of Ghandi’s achievement. Invictus, however, is a ray of sunshine trying to stamp out the shadows. At one point, Mandela goes for a morning walk and his security team fidgets nervously: a van, the kind that usually ferries terrorists, races down the street. It stops in a skid just before them. Hands go to guns. It’s the newspaper delivery man.
Invictus is that kind of film. The white South African players visit a township and teach rugby to the black kids. They come away feeling good about themselves. The suspicious black bodyguards in Mandela’s security detail learn to trust the white special branch officers and soon it’s a smiling party. The feel-good factor reaches fever pitch: the world cup final involves a predictably slow-motion rugby ball tumbling between posts. There is much to be said about the film’s message of inclusivity, betterment and forgiveness. But caught up in its wash of euphoria, you almost forget how much gloss it paints on the politics of South Africa.
A tougher African reality is invoked in Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s documentary Mugabe and the White African. Their film kicks you awake because what you are seeing is happening in Zimbabwe today. This is the disturbing story of white farmer Mike Campbell who goes head to head with a dictator. Campbell bought his land post-independence. He paid the mortgage over 20 years and is regarded as a moral employer. But under Robert Mugabe’s ‘land reform’ policy, he has been told the government is taking his farm.
The film gives the lie to the myth that this is about anything other than racism: white farmers are savagely beaten, their farms given to Mugabe’s cronies and not redistributed to the poor population. Campbell, however, refuses to budge and takes a test case to an international SADC court. Armed gangs prowl the edge of the farm. The Campbells live in fear. The case drags, but they stand their ground for it could set a precedent. The film teases out that difficult, perennial problem: if you are being persecuted, how far should you go before you cut your losses and run? Watching Mugabe’s iron fist come down violently on the Campbells is unsettling and enraging.
There’s plenty of iron fist, too, in Astro Boy, a whizz-bang kids’ cartoon with voices from Nicolas Cage and Donald Sutherland. It tells of a young robot with superpowers who learns he was built by an inventor to replace a lost son. The story is fashioned around formula and borrows heavily from Wall-e and The Iron Giant, but it rockets along enjoyably. Our hero gets to make good of his powers against a despotic nasty and for a while I fantasised about setting him loose on Robert Mugabe.
Eamon, the debut film from Irish director Margaret Corkery, refreshes and disappoints in equal measure. It’s the story of a loveless relationship: Grace (Amy Kirwan) is a selfish strop. Her sexually frustrated boyfriend (Darren Healy) sleeps on the couch. Their hyperactive son Eamon (an amusing Robert Donnelly) sleeps with mommy in the bed. He really is an Oedipus hex. They go on a beach holiday and their family dysfunction is prodded with gentle humour. Eamon, too, is cinematic: Corkery tells the story through images, not dialogue, with clean and controlled compositions. The first hour is sharply observed, fuelled by small shifts of personal interaction.
You regret, then, when the drama switches into the overwrought, forcing an unsatisfactory resolution. Corkery loses her grip and odd things happen: there’s a bizarre gay encounter and a ridiculous car crash plucked straight from a road safety advert. You suspect the script was meddled with, as if somebody said: you can’t fuel a drama on the small stuff alone. But you can: masters such as Ozu, Renoir and Bresson made a career out of it. Corkery, too, is unsure who the emotional centre is. We are told it is Eamon, but it’s really Grace. Kirwan is an actress to watch and her character is fascinating and troubled. But just when you hope to sympathise and understand her, the film withdraws from her emotionally.
Meanwhile, JD Salinger has passed and Hollywood is still no closer to putting The Catcher in the Rye on screen. Who would play Holden Caulfield? I can imagine Michael Cera if he wasn’t so knowing and ironic. Youth in Revolt, directed by Miguel Arteta from the CD Payne novel, is another bastard child of Catcher where an anxious teen throws shapes against the world. It’s funnier than it should be, because Cera’s Nick Twisp has an alter-ego – a plimsoll-wearing, pencil-tached French man, played also by Cera, who prods him into doing all sorts of badness. Why? For the sake of a girl, of course, played by Portia Doubleday. What Nick really needs is some paternal advice, preferably delivered by Morgan Freeman in that relaxing, dulcet tone: Just relax, take it easy, you’re still young, that’s your fault, there’s so much you have to know.

Review: Precious (4/5); Edge of Darkness (2/5); Adoration (3.5/5); 8.5 Hours (1/5)

Precious is a film about a diamond in the rough. That diamond is our eponymous hero, Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones (Gabourney Sidibe), a 16-year-old of elephantine bearing and skin almost midnight black. The rough is not the Harlem of 1987 where she lives, but her family home – a den of suppurating poison. Precious’s story, then, if there was any doubt, is how she finds her sparkle.
The first thing you notice about Precious is not her weight but her eyes. First-time actress Gabourney Sidibe glowers upon the world with default suspicion. Precious’s glare is a fortress trying to shield her from the world. No such luck. She is pregnant for the second time by her absentee father. We flashback to his rape of her, and the camera watches uncomfortably the springs bounce on the bed, while he whispers “Daddy loves you.”
Her mother Mary (Mo’Nique) is a hectoring harridan. When not vegetating on the couch watching TV with the shades drawn, she specialises in emotional and physical abuse. She demolishes her daughter’s self esteem like a human wrecking ball. “I should have aborted your motherf**king ass,” she tells her. She displays jealousy towards her boyfriend’s affections for his own daughter. She refers to Precious’s daughter as Mongo – a child born with Down’s syndrome. When Mary doesn’t get what she wants, she throws everything at Precious’s head but the kitchen sink.
If this sounds like kitchen-sink filmmaking, that’s because it is. Social realism has rarely scratched the glossy gaze of American romantic-realism. If the thrust of American myth-making is towards the dream of betterment and escape, its films rarely want to remind you of what lies beneath. Precious rummages there fearlessly and comes up fresh. Though even its director, Lee Daniels, feels the need for escape.
Sometimes he sprinkles a little magic as if the grit becomes too grinding. We see Precious lying on the ground after various moments of abuse, and we travel inward into fantasy where she dreams of being a pop star or a movie idol, feather boa’ed with adoring crowds. Then there is the moment after she is forced to quit school due to her pregnancy. She cannot read or write and is on the verge of joining an Each One Teach One programme. She stands tentatively outside the classroom and the doorway shimmers with gold. It’s as if she has entered a magical realm. And in some ways, she has. Her teacher is called Blu Rain (Paula Patton) and she is all sunshine. Precious takes her first step up in life, but doesn’t have to climb the desk and shout O Captain! My Captain! Thanks goodness for that.
Gabourney Sidibe is the unlikeliest of screen presences. Her face is largely inexpressive. She makes John Candy look like a snack. And yet we are transfixed because her Precious is a real character who battles against the world – not for a large piece of it, for just a little dignity.
How refreshing, too, to watch an American film where the overweight African American is not there as a punchline. Precious might be a punchbag for abuse, but she gets to hit back. Daniels doesn’t sugarcoat her story. Compared to the African-American landmark work A Killer of Sheep, Precious might look a tad manufactured. But in its humane and compassionate qualities, it feels honest.
The story’s emotional arc aims for an upswing. But just when you think things are getting better, it faces you with reality. There are times when anything could cheer you up. Even the sight of Mariah Carey, who appears without make-up. She is all low-key understanding as Precious’s social worker. But she’s no diva compared to Mo’Nique, who takes over the stage. She has a remarkable scene where she uncorks Mary’s ignorance and insecurity to show how she is a damaged little girl herself. “That was my man and he wanted my daughter and that’s why I hated her,” she says. It is a powerful moment, one that allows us to understand and sympathise with a monster. Precious allows us to find compassion not just for its underprivileged hero, but for its villains too.
Unlike Precious, Edge of Darkness is all about what a father will do for his daughter. In Die Hard 4, Bruce Willis got shot of the slippers and went semi-automatic to save his daughter. In Taken, Liam Neeson went gun crazy for his teen. And now here’s Mel Gibson, a Boston detective investigating the murder of his daughter. Dads rock, sort of. The protocol in family vengeance is dad is divorced. If he were still married to mom, no doubt she would talk sense into him.
Gibson doesn’t look like the lethal weapon of before. He’d growl at you now if you asked him to dislocate that shoulder. His leathery face is dulled like an old boot. When he starts kicking, he does so with weariness. No wonder the editor gives him a helping hand. Gibson’s Thomas Craven, though, is no coward. He discovers his daughter was an activist and her death leads to the doorway of a shady multinational. Danny Huston plays the oily corporate boss. Anybody who wears a suit that smooth is up to no good. Meanwhile, Ray Winstone skulks about duplicitously, a government agent in charge of a cover-up.
The film, directed by Casino Royale’s Martin Campbell, is a reworking of his 1980s award-winning British TV series. The plot involves illegal nukes, shady senators, and Alexander Litvinenko-style radiation poisoning. (Don’t drink the milk, Mel.) Campbell marries the vengeance movie with the conspiracy thriller but doesn’t shake anything new out of it. In fact, it made me yearn for the swift sadism of his last Bond film. The paranoia won’t make you look over your shoulder: characters keep telling us how frightened they are; I suppose if they keep saying it, it must be true.
Atom Egoyan’s Adoration is a drama full of satisfying smarts. But it doesn’t wriggle under your skin. The film’s many layers are deftly assembled to form an intelligent cultural portrait: the role the internet plays in our lives, and the prejudice and ignorance embedded in so-called liberal society. Devon Bostick plays Simon, a highschool student, who turns an ordinary school assignment into a controversial project. He concocts a fictional drama that rewrites the past of his dead parents so that his Arab father was a would-be airplane bomber. He pretends it’s real and has the complicity of his teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian). But the story spills onto the web and into their lives.
Egoyan’s visual style is measured beautifully. He glides fiction alongside reality and examines how the web transports fiction as fact and how readily we buy into stories. Scott Speedman as Simon’s uncle is a lovely, soft presence. He becomes entangled in the strands of the story and transforms under its examination.
8.5 Hours is a turgid multi-strand drama from writer/director Brian Lally. It’s an unintentional farce, playing out on screen like the rant of a demented, ultra-right Catholic bigot. On paper, it is supposed to be an examination of Celtic Tiger Ireland but Lally goes to work with a bulldozer. This is a day in the life of four Celtic cub stereotypes: two of them snort coke at their desks; everybody seems to be cheating on their partners; one will do anything to get a mortgage for a Dublin 4 apartment, while two men who are in straight relationships are having secret gay sex in toilets and car parks. Obviously, the Celtic Tiger makes them do it. The film denounces without any insight or sympathy for its cardboard characters. Its nastiness is without reprieve. There are more fundamental problems, however. Lally sees no need for plot mechanics or character development. It is edited without rhythm and the film is so padded you could insulate your attic with it. It should be put in a box and left there.

Review: A Prophet (5/5); Brothers (3/5); The Boys Are Back (3/5); Ninja Assassin (1/5)

There is a moment in A Prophet, the breathtaking new film from French director Jacques Audiard, when a car full of gangsters slams into a wild deer on a country road. The world seems to pause: the stricken animal is somersaulted slowly into the air, a moment of unearthly beauty. And then the shot cuts and we see it lying dead on the road. The hero of the film, a young Arab Frenchman called Malik, could be that young deer: the movie slams into his frightened body, tosses him existentially into the universe and watches his flight. But by the time he lands, firmly on his two feet, you realise you’ve witnessed the greatest gangster film in at least two decades.
Malik is played by the unknown French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim. When we part with him, we feel like we have watched the flowering of a young De Niro. Malik is in that car, on day-release from prison for good behaviour, which he spends, naturally, promoting bad behaviour. Though when we first meet him, he’s a naïf who has just been sent down. He wears the frightened look of a teenager snatched from his bed: his scraggly head houses a pair of dark, frightened eyes. Asked if he has any friends or enemies inside, he says no. Malik, then, begins the film as a blank slate: prison precipitates a fall from grace, then his will to power. The ghosts of Coppola’s Godfather I and II lurk faintly. But A Prophet is never in service.
The man who co-opts Malik is something of a godfather. César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) is a brutal, grizzled Corsican criminal who controls prison with paid-off guards. Arestrup cuts a terrifying presence – he can do things with a spoon your mother never taught you. His henchmen could gut you with a stare. Malik, like a defenceless lamb, is cornered and told to murder a man to earn protection. For this he has to practise hiding a razor in his mouth. Malik is all cut up: it is kill or be killed.
A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is as intense as that other great French prison movie, A Man Escaped by Bresson. Both directors obsess over the behaviour of survival (although Bresson was the more pessimistic of the two). Malik becomes a lapdog for the Corsicans, and alienates his kindred Arabs. Then he starts to network. Quietly, he learns to read. He teaches himself Corsican from a dictionary. We see him learning the words ‘rage’ and ‘raging’. It seems apt: Audiard’s heros are criminals who rage against the world and its various oppressions.
We saw this in Read My Lips, where Vincent Cassell shook the screen with his volcanic personality, and with Roman Duris, in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, who cut more of a swagger. Here, though, Rahim burns from the inside. His eyes project a raw intensity. His face burns with hopelessness, survival, determination, then cunning. In one scene, crafted as a moral boundary to match Pacino’s restaurant scene in The Godfather, the camera pauses and the sound dies down, amidst bullet casings dancing in slow motion, to take a look at Malik’s face: he lies on his back surrounded by death and he’s smiling.
Audiard’s camera soaks up life with the lens of social realism. The prison is an appalling nightmare. In true gangster fashion, Malik is a hero who comes from an oppressed minority. There is a fine line here, and you worry it could stray into sober, preachy documentary. But it doesn’t. It remains electric entertainment – the grit of the film’s texture on top of great storytelling is what makes it vital.
Audiard is a sublime, understated stylist. He barely bothers with long or medium shots, choosing instead to work almost entirely with close-ups. The mood is clammy and claustrophobic. You almost hold your breath watching it. His camera is obsessed with the human face: characters live in action but it is the duress written on their face he looks out for.
Much of Audiard’s style we saw in his previous films, but here he shows off a higher register, switching at will into moments of rare poetry. Scorsese did that too, but where he was all gangster showmanship, Audiard is more concerned with the loss of innocence. His violence, too, is ugly and real. A sliced throat geysers blood red like a fountain. Death is pathetic and ugly.
Audiard has said he wanted to create an icon, an image for people “who don’t have images – the Arabs in France”. That he has done, and Malik, like all great heroes, operates mysteriously. He is always working away from the eyes of the audience. Trying to figure him out is what keeps you glued. As he matures, his gaze starts to harden. His shoulders swagger. And so they should: Malik gets to pull a remarkable sleight of hand, and right under the nose of the audience too.
Brothers, a Hollywood melodrama directed by Jim Sheridan, plays everything out in the open. Tobey Maguire’s Sam, an impossibly clean-cut US Marines captain with eyes like a strangled locust, is a poster boy for GI Responsible: he’s got Grace, a dishy wife in the shape of a blonde Natalie Portman, and two adoring daughters. On the eve of being shipped to Afghanistan, his daughter asks if he will be back for her birthday. Of course, he tells her. This is a lie, and everybody in the audience knows it. Sam goes MIA and is presumed dead. Back home, his tearaway brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes home from prison. Tommy has a temper, fuzzy stubble and still doesn’t eat his peas. So he must be trouble. The dialectic is set: can Tommy sharpen up and step into Sam’s shoes?
Brothers is a reworking of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2004 drama, Brødre, though it begins to resemble The Deer Hunter for a new war and a new generation. Cimino’s film sketched an entire society disfigured by Vietnam. The focus here is limited: for Sheridan, family is the totem of society. That totem here is dismantled by war. The lesson Tommy learns is that family counts, though dramatically, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch for him to come good.
When Sam returns home still alive, he is not only post-traumatic, but starts re-enacting Raging Bull. Sexual jealousy and psychosis begin to spill, complicating the picture. If the writing is knock-off, Sheridan’s direction is commanding. In one scene, army officers come to tell Grace she has lost her husband, and the moment, a war film cliché, breathes with life and sorrow. Portman’s response, too, is touching. She is an actress who, despite her beauty, commands with quietude. The performances lift up the film.
Grief and family are the locus, too, in The Boys Are Back. This earnest drama, from Shine director Scott Hicks, takes the story of single-parent sportswriter Simon Carr and installs Clive Owen in the leading role. I’ll bet Carr was pleased with that. Joe (Owen) is forced to look after his young son when his wife (Laura Fraser) dies of cancer. Grief blankets the house. The kitchen becomes a sty. The workaholic distant father must bond with his son. Joe turns home into a neverland where he never says no. When his estranged teenage son (George MacKay), from a marriage he fled in England, comes to stay with him, trouble brews: laissez-faire parenting threatens to topple upon him. Owen is not much of a dynamic dramatic actor. But he cuts a masculine presence: it’s good sport watching him buckle under the weight, metamorphosising from dinosaur-man into new-man.
Ninja Assassin, meanwhile, does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a gory snore.

Reviews: Up In The Air; 44 Inch Chest; Still Walking and All About Steve

Up In The Air (4/5)
(Jason Reitman) 15A
44 Inch Chest (1.5/5)
(Malcolm Vinville) 18
Still Walking (4/5)
(Hirokazu Koreeda) IFI Club
All About Steve (1/5)
(Phil Traill) 12A

Up In The Air, the new seriocomedy from Juno director Jason Reitman, is a movie about coming back down to earth. The story, adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, is a familiar one: its backdrop is the boulevard of broken dreams of the past two years. Which is another way of saying this is a recession film. Which it is, though it comes with the Chesire grin of George Clooney, a man so smooth he could make the words ‘you’ve just lost your job’ sound like melted butter.
This is what Clooney’s Ryan Bingham does. He flies around America firing employees for a firm that is hired by craven employers. (His boss, played by Jason Bateman, can’t hide his glee. “It is one of the worst times in America. This is our moment!”) We meet a parade of faces throughout the film, ordinary Joes and Joanettes faced with the dire news. And Clooney’s voice seems to have adapted for the role. Its smoothness has deepened. He now speaks like a velvet shag pile rug. You can imagine naked women throwing themselves on top of it.
As with all Clooney characters, there is that silken smugness. But what makes this one of his finest roles is the way he allows the film to ruffle him up, to scrape against his own gloss. When he isn’t lounging in airports, or jetting his way towards his target of 10 million air miles, Ryan gives motivational speeches about being on your own. “Let everything burn and imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. It’s kind of exhilarating, isn’t it?” he preaches. He is a man with no ties, no family, no loyalty but to loyalty cards. He makes his life look like bliss, so wrapped up is he in his own self-denial.
This is unpicked delicately by two women. The first is Vera Farmiga’s Alex, another frequent high flyer. They exchange glances in an airport bar and soon they’re swapping loyalty cards (and cheek cells) like corporate soul mates. The moment reminds you of Patrick Bateman eyeing up business cards in American Psycho, and there is similar satire at work here: Reitman’s eye is cross-haired on the business class. He wants to know what it is like to be human in the midst of the inhuman. The world here is the colour of corporate: all drained blues. Laptops are put together to arrange a next date. On an airplane, Ryan is confronted by an air hostess with a soft drink on a tray. “Do you want the cancer?” she asks him. “What?” he asks. The film depicts the modern world as a kind of disease, eating away at what we call life.
Reitman captures Ryan’s slick travel routine with some neat editing: his slim suitcase is zipped, zapped and swizzled. And though Reitman’s style is clean and sharp, he doesn’t seek to break boundaries with his camera. Instead, he chips away at American pieties – notably the foundation myth about work and wealth creation. Reitman journeys towards what we might call real values: the gravity of family. But he’s not a sentimentalist and does not shy from disappointment.
It comes to weigh upon the face of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new employee at Ryan’s firm. She hits the job like a hurricane, with the naïve surety of an Ivy League grad. She spends her time doing up a flow chart on how to fire people, and pioneers a technique for terminating careers over the internet that would take Ryan off the road. Kendrick, a snappy young actress with a film future in the bag, begins to take on the weight of real life when she goes out on the road, meeting people face to face.
The film bubbles with gentle humour and there is a welcome complexity to Reitman’s characters. In some ways, he slots into the slipstream of director Alexander Payne, sharing the same quiet purpose. His eye is attracted to the incongruities of modern life and the grand failures of our small affairs. And he underlines without needing a bold pen. His theme is starting to look like disappointment.
In Juno, the heroine went through an entire film to learn that life doesn’t match our idealism. Here, Reitman shorthands that journey for Natalie in an amusing scene where, holding Ryan and Alex captive in an airport lounge, she bombards them with the entire outline of her dream man, all of which she has realised is a fiction. Ryan, too, comes to realise his life is a digression, a “parenthesis” in fact, and Clooney’s face sags with real ache, the Chesire grin wiped from his lips. I can’t imagine being called anything worse than that.
There’s a lot of name-calling in 44 Inch Chest, a film that swaggers like some kind of sexy beast. If only it were Sexy Beast. Screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who wrote Jonathan Glazer’s terrific Brit gangster flick, pair up again, while two of that film’s cast return in the shape of Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. Meanwhile, Ben Kingsley, whose explosive Don Logan made one of the great on-screen nasties, is exchanged for John Hurt, which is much like exchanging a stick of dynamite for a glass of brandy.
Winstone plays Colin, a burl of a man with eyes like black holes. He has just been cuckolded by a pretty-boy waiter and his response, along with his pals, is to kidnap the fella, tie him to a chair in a warehouse and shout at him, with the plan to kill him. In Brit gangster fashion, the men spend their time calling each other c**ts. Though the most ridiculous line falls to Stephen Dillane’s Archie, who unloads this mouthful into the ear of the gagged and bound hostage: “You f**ked his f**king wife you f**king wife f**ker”. Indeed. One would presume, then, that the f**king f**ker is f**king f**ked. Or is he?
In Sexy Beast, the violence was viscerally verbal. Its alpha male stand-off was as tense as any murderous heist movie. 44 Inch Chest wants to play the same game but ends up a boob. The script is over-stuffed and its verbal violence is spread evenly, rather than given focus in just one nasty character. It slugs it out on screen with the balletic poise of Bluto then pauses every five minutes to give us a lumbering anecdote, much like a Guy Ritchie movie but without the pyrotechnics. It feels like a stage play. First-time director Malcolm Vinville makes it look like a stage play too.
Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda nods at Ozu’s towering Tokyo Story and updates it in Still Walking, making family life in modern Japan that little bit more complicated. What if some of the grown-up kids want to spend time with their parents but find it difficult? What if the parents are a pain to behold?
Here, retired patriarch Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is an isolated, petty, childish man, while granny Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) is seemingly benign but quite the bitter slice – she bad-mouths her kids behind their backs. Koreeda kindly offers them a reasonable excuse: their eldest son drowned 15 years ago. Old age is seen to embitter rather than soften. Chinami (Japanese cult figure YOU) and her husband and kids smile at the pernicious parents, while Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) and his wife and stepson walk on eggshells. From plot particulars to some waist-height camera shots and pillow shots of passing trains, there are plenty of references to Ozu’s film. Koreeda’s script, which takes place over a day, is carefully observed and the dysfunction is shaped on screen with rare grace.
All about Steve, a Sandra Bullock comedy, should be basted and roasted upside down in the oven. Whatever reputation Bullock had left as a comedian is cooked. She plays Mary Horowitz, a crossword puzzle writer and simpering irritant who can’t find a man because, basically, she’s deranged. Her calling card is a pair of shiny red boots, so annoyingly bright, you begin to hope she’ll meet a bull and be gored magically off screen. Instead, she spends the film chasing after Steve, a TV cameraman who meets her for a blind date and spends the rest of the film running away from her. He’s played by Bradley Cooper, an actor in demand now after The Hangover and surely cursing his luck that this deeply unfunny film, made in 2007 but sitting on a shelf till now, ever got a release.

The Road (3.5/5)
(John Hillcoat) 16
It’s Complicated (3/5)
(Nancy Meyers) 15A
Treeless Mountain (3/5)
(So Yong Kim) G
It Might Get Loud (3/5)
(David Guggenheim) PG

You would think the world had ended in 2009, such was the collective hullabaloo. If there was any doubt in the new year that it hadn’t, along comes The Road to remind us what the end of the world really looks like. It should be required viewing for snivelling whingers: see how bad it could get? Now shut up.
The Road, then, journeys to the closure of humanity. The post-apocalyptic world is an ashen wasteland. The sun is dimmed to a crepuscular shade. The earth groans sadly. Telephone poles lie toppled as if they no longer have the strength to stay standing. Trees stand naked and dead, the wind a shivering sigh. What is left of mankind’s imprint lies ransacked and empty. Unlike most films where the plaintive music is spread thickly on top, Nick Cave’s score isn’t even needed: to just see this is to experience apocalypse wow.
The film, from The Proposition director John Hillcoat, follows almost to the letter the eponymous Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. This was a book so atmospherically powerful that I found myself buying tinned food after reading it, just in case. Its recreation on the screen is a depressing marvel. As in the novel, the nature of end days is never explained. We are just left to witness what becomes of man in its aftermath.
All that helter-skelter of the Hollywood doomsday picture is exchanged for a forlorn weariness. You can see it etched into the face of Viggo Mortensen, a character called the Man, who escorts his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) towards the coast. Mortensen is all taciturn and noble bearing. He has that raw manliness you need to guide you through danger and the intelligence to try and make sense of what can’t be made sense of. His voiceover is exhausted and leaden, for the world is almost empty. “How many people do you think are still alive?” the Boy asks him. “In the world? Not very many.”
They have a lot to deal with. They need food and shoes. They are so ragged, in one tracking shot, that the camera passes them slowly by and they cannot keep up. Mostly, they have to avoid becoming food themselves. They push a trolley full of odds and ends and a truck rumbles slowly out of a tunnel behind them, its engine growling like some kind of monster. But the only monsters here are what is left of mankind, and those on board the truck are cannibals prowling the wastelands for human meat.
The Road is all about the Boy. The Man asks a gang member what they are eating. He responds with a sly smile and a glance at the Boy: “Whatever we can find”. What keeps the Man going is a responsibility to his son: to keep him alive, to educate him, to teach him morality in the complete absence of it, to uphold the last vestiges of civilisation. But he also teaches him how to shoot himself, just in case. In a flashback, we see his mother (Charlize Theron) give up the fight, arguing with the Man about suicide.
This is a film without comfort, almost without reprieve, a desolate wasteland of despair. Out of the dimness and dismantling of humanity shines the occasional small joy. A wash and a brushing of teeth is a kind of bliss. A tin of found spam is a Bacchanalian soiree.
In his novel, McCarthy scratched off the veneer of civilisation and stripped mankind to bare bones. He wanted to see what was left: why do we want to keep on living when there is nothing to live for? What is the hold children have on their parents? These are ineffable mysteries, though McCarthy took us as close to the edge of understanding as we could hope to get. Hillcoat shows serious concern with the visual textures of the film. But little of the book’s philosophy bubbles to the surface.
If McCarthy’s book has reached the status of a modern classic, it is perhaps because the language itself is not a tool but is embedded in its meaning. The words reach around you with almost suffocating strength, beauty lurching out from death. Here, there is little beauty. Just a grim weariness you are glad to be shorn of.
Meryl Streep is all autumnal beauty in It’s Complicated, a rom-com from Nancy Meyers, director of What Women Want. What Streep’s Jane wants, or actually needs, is to loosen up. She’s divorced 10 years and runs a successful bakery, but her sex life is cooling in the fridge. Streep initially feeds off awkwardness and spends the first 10 minutes doing reaction shots: at her indifferent grown-up kids, at the diaphanous young wife of her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) or at a canoodling couple in a lift.
But can an ex ever be an ex after 20 years of marriage? Baldwin looks well-fed but his Jake misses Jane’s food. He purrs like a smooth cat and suddenly he’s an ex with benefits. Then Steve Martin’s architect Adam shows up and he has designs on her too.
Streep shakes Jane alive and is a lovely presence. She enjoys sex, smokes pot, and gets emotionally confused. She’s awkward in front of her ex with her body, but the film is never unkind to her. For It’s Complicated is a song of praise to women in middle age.
The pace, too, is middle-aged. There are times when it feels like it should nod off for a nap. Then there are the indulgent montages: Streep getting drunk, Streep having fun, Streep scratching her nose, Streep baking. (All that gorgeous food is an advertisement for the nice life. Don’t watch it on an empty stomach.) But there are moments too of twinkling comedy. I doubt that Baldwin’s brilliant “Home sweet home” line was even in the script.
It’s Complicated makes the case that older women are beautiful. It helps, obviously, when you have Streep in the lead role. There’s a gentle nod to The Graduate, but here, the older woman gets the man. The question is which man.
In Treeless Mountain, an Ozu-inspired film from South Korean writer and director So Yong Kim, the gaze adopts the point of view of children. It is a film so gentle it could come apart in your hands.
There’s Jin (Hee Yeon Kim), a seven-year-old moppet with a helmet of dark hair, and Bin (Song Hee Kim), her tiny sister. Their mother (Soo Ah Lee) is an addled woman with a tired face and can’t look after them any more. So they are dumped with an unloving, neglectful aunt (Mi Hyang Kim) who doesn’t feed them. “You two are a real pain,” she says.
Kim handles the slide into neglect with skill. She films the story with the kind of naturalism that looks misleadingly easy, while she draws a remarkable performance from Hee Yoen Kim. Where we are used to the look-at-me extroversion of Hollywood child actors, here, the performances are introverted yet full of spirit. What you understand about Jin is etched in her face.
True to her unforced style, Kim wants for an ending that feels natural. But where Ozu could open a door from an ordinary moment into something transcendental, Treeless Mountain remains underwhelming.
David Guggenheim’s affectionate documentary, It Might Get Loud, is ostensibly an homage to the electric guitar. It’s really about the attitudes and inspiration of three seminal players: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and Jack White of The White Stripes/The Raconteurs.
White is all gurning authenticity, recounting his formative days learning the blues in downtrodden Detroit. The Edge revisits Mount Temple School and fiddles with a delay pedal while facing the Irish Sea. And Page recounts his remarkable journey from skiffle to stadium stratosphere. The trio sit on a stage, chat and play riffs. The Edge looks uneasy off-the-cuff. White is all off-the-cuff. But the real star of the show is Page. He whips out the opening riff of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and the Edge leaps out of his seat to get a closer look. He stands with White, the pair grinning like smitten kittens.

Review: Avatar (3/5)

Avatar
(James Cameron):
Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, (Voice: Zoe Saldana). Running time: 162 minutes (12A) HHH

We were told about banks, during this Great Recession, that were “too big to fail”. Well, here’s a film that is “too big to fail” too – James Cameron’s long-anticipated sci-fi action-fantasy Avatar. It is a film, he has said in a moment of hubristic critic-baiting, that will change movies forever. And at a cost of $500m, its distributor 20th Century Fox will make sure the world will buy into it.
It’s certainly a film that will take your breath away, though not for the right reasons: this is a victory of ceaseless spectacle over innovative storytelling, a white-man-goes-native plot that is yawningly conventional and dumbed down to hell. After 162 minutes, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had just watched a very posh-looking, not to mention instantly forgettable, Michael Bay film.
The very dull Sam Worthington stars as Jake, a ‘Jarhead’ marine with a spinal injury. He travels to the distant planet of Pandora where an aggressive corporate enterprise wants the planet’s resources. They have to relocate a native, humanoid race called the Na’vi – intelligent indians who look like giant Amazonian Smurfs – away from their homeland. As part of the battle to win “hearts and minds”, Jake climbs into a pod and assumes his Avatar – a Na’vi body which he controls with his mind – and goes to live with the locals where they accept him as one of their own. There are sprinkled references to Iraq and Bush’s tenure, but the story takes a turn into twee environmental fable when Jake falls in love and turns against the villainous imperialists, preferring the intuitive, primitive life over shallow technology.
I’m with Jake on this one. While Cameron really wows you with gee-whiz technology, you’re almost blinded from noticing how the film’s emotional engagement is flatlining. Live action and animation are merged into a seamless fit. Pandora’s jungle and its exotic creatures are a lush spectrogram of colour. And while the 3D is a classy affair, I didn’t emerge from it feeling I had just experienced a revolution. Contrary to the plot, technology wins and heart and soul loses. The emperor James Cameron is not naked on his horse, but he is wearing little else but fancy underpants.

The Films of the Decade

(As appeared in the Sunday Tribune, 27.12.09)

The lifting of Russell Crowe’s iron mask in Gladiator with the words: “My name is Maximus Desmus Meridius, Commander of the Army of the North…”; the exhilaration of the passengers charging the hijackers in United 93; Sacha Baron Cohen’s naked hotel wrestle in Borat; the rabid sneer on the lips of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight; Daniel Day Lewis’ Daniel Plainview sucking on his metaphorical milkshake in There Will Be Blood; Maggie Cheung’s sensual, slow-motion sashay during In The Mood For Love; Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen’s conversation about pinot on the back porch in Sideways; Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham’s verbal volleying amid a halo of smoke in Hunger; Naomi Watts’ audition for a movie part that turns into a smouldering sex scene in Mulholland Drive; that grab-you-by-the throat moment in the swimming pool in Let The Right One In; that ending in Hidden; that beginning that was the ending in Memento; and that moment of sorrow on Tommy Lee Jones’ face in the last scene of No Country for Old Men.
The past decade is a trove of cinematic treasure. But how to choose its 50 best films from the thousands that graced the screens? For every list of 50 films, there is another list with an alternative 50 titles. There will be groaning and grumping. (Yes, Amelie is not on the list. Neither are any Bourne films, enjoyable as they are.) Everybody has their favourites. But to round up the best from a decade’s worth of movies requires something extra. These, then, are the films that raise the bar for filmmakers to come. These are the films that are the most beautiful and the most original, films that bristle with that exciting element of strangeness yet have the ability to connect deeply with audiences. These films speak volumes about who we are and the times we live in, yet will hold up and be watched by future generations, films you can watch again and again. So here are the top 10 films of the decade, in order only of year of production, followed by the next best 40...

Top 10 Greatest Films of the Decade

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
One of the great unconsummated love stories in the movies. Wong Kar-Wai’s poetic masterpiece (photographed by Chris Doyle) takes a moment in time between two spurned lovers – Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Hong Kong in the 1960s – and fills it with an aching, mute sadness and the regret of missed opportunity. It shimmers beautifully on the screen, while Cheung and Leung look and behave the way real movie stars should but rarely do.

Together (Lukas Moodysson, 2000)
Bergman called him a “young master”. Lukas Moodysson has since gone wayward, but with Together, his second film, he hit a level of humanist filmmaking worthy almost of the great work of Jean Renoir. A touching, hilarious and life-affirming tale of a hippy commune in 1970s Sweden to the soundtrack of Abba, all of life is held within Moodysson’s expert yet tender grasp.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Film noir, fever dream, Hollywood homage and movie hedonism, David Lynch’s mellifluous mindbender shows a master of the cinematic medium at full power. It also contains one of the great performances of the decade – the then unknown Naomi Watts changing dramatic register as if she were in five different movies at once.

Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
This story about a 1950s housewife made something very modern of something very old – Haynes’ salutation to the 1950s melodramas of Sirk and Ophuls. Headily expressive with divine compositions and craft – this is a cineaste’s dream. It is also Julianne Moore’s finest moment on screen.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
A film that makes a symphony of the small moments in our lives. Gondry’s film overcomes its patent absurdity to make a genuinely moving statement about the way we can’t live with relationships yet can’t live without them. Unsentimental but deeply romantic, like all great movies it connects with you in the gut, on a level you just can’t quite explain.

Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)
This road movie about two wine-sloshed mid-life slackers is Payne’s finest moment: a satire full of gently observed detail and log-fire warmth. Payne hangs the flaws of his characters on screen like dirty laundry but makes us love them anyway. Sideways is not just one of the golden comedies of the decade and a great piece of compassionate filmmaking, it was also so influential, it put a cork in worldwide sales of Merlot.

Hidden (Caché) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Daniel Auteuil lies down on his bed from the sheer weight of remorse and the rest of us could hardly move out of our seats such was our awe. Haneke packed arthouses with Hidden – a searing, slow-burning examination of historical and personal guilt and a whodunnit that leaves a vital piece of the puzzle deliberately missing.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
Breathtakingly sad, unsentimental and uplifting, Julian Schnabel’s transformational film about life and death has a spiritual charge that pulses through you, transporting you to the kind of height that leaves you exhilarated and appreciative for your own ordinary life. It is staggeringly inventive with a profound moral sense.

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Its greatness gnaws at you, long after you’ve seen it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s juggernaut is about oil and it is about America and it is one of the most cynical films about human nature ever made. It also added a great character to the film canon – Daniel Plainview, a perversely hilarious and monstrously amoral oilman unforgettably played by Daniel Day Lewis.

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
With his second entry in the top 10, Austrian Michael Haneke is the pre-eminent European film master at work. The White Ribbon – his most beautiful, complex and dazzling film – is a work of psychological brilliance. With a previously unseen tenderness and a vice-like grip, Haneke explores the tyranny of religious purity and the origins of Nazism in a small town with novelistic detail.

The Next Best 40

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
The martial arts movie is reborn. Ang Lee’s balletic Asian western fused magic realism with martial arts to form this electrifyingly romantic epic.

Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
Christopher Nolan’s dazzling debut has a beginning that is the end and an end that is the beginning. Oh, how we struggled to put the pieces together.

Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)
These three slices of life in modern-day Mexico City in Iñárritu’s powder-keg debut made the world sit up and take notice.

Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
Russell Crowe came, he saw and he conquered, while Ridley Scott reset the bar for what old-fashioned epics could do in the noughties – a strident swords-and-sandals swashbuckler.

Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
Cuarón’s vibrant road movie threw social commentary and eroticism into the mix and helped spur on the Mexican cinema revolution.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
This exotic, exquisitely-drawn flight of fancy from Japanese animation maestro Miyazaki is both a masterpiece and a children’s favourite.

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
It began as a sleeper hit but became a cult favourite. Kelly’s genre-bending, sci-fi puzzler found the perfect balance between revelation and restraint. It bent the space-time continuum and pleasingly warped our minds too.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2003, 2005)
They said it couldn’t be done. But the three films were better, bolder and more beautiful than anyone could have imagined. It showed Peter Jackson running rings around other Hollywood directors.

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
Almodovar had a glorious decade. This tale of obsession, loneliness and unexpected friendship shows the Spanish director at his most restrained yet poetic-passionate best.

Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman sends up the movies with this post-modern skit on movie writing. Hilarious, irreverent and clever-clever.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)
The danger, the heat, the bravado. And they were just kids. Brazil thrust itself upon the world with this flamboyant and flagrant gangster epic and the world lapped it up.

Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
Russian master Sokurov did the unthinkable by shooting an entire film in one take – a 96-minute steadycam shot. The result is a ghostly, mysterious and captivating ride through 300 years of Russian culture.

Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002)
If the cinema is clogged full of documentaries, then this is the film to blame: Michael Moore’s rifle blast to the face about gun culture in America. Who can forget that Charlton Heston interview?

Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Ceylan’s films graft the poetic neo-realism of Abbas Kiarostami with the emotional isolation of Michelangelo Antonioni. This stirring, profound work examines a man entombed in his own isolation and depression. It also helped set the agenda for a new breed of Turkish filmmaking.

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
What did Bill Murray whisper into the ear of Scarlett Johansson? Does it matter? Coppola’s dreamy, sensual love story set in neon-lit Tokyo seized a moment of shared tenderness amidst cultural and relationship alienation.

American Splendor (Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman, 2003)
Live action and comic-book art mingle in this hilarious and highly innovative biopic about blue-collar cartoonist Harvey Pekar.

Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, 2003)
Chan-wook Park fuses madness and mayhem with the operatic and the baroque to produce this ultra-stylish revenge fantasy – the pinnacle of the burgeoning Korean film movement.

Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)
Classical Hollywood storytelling at its best. But the real champion was Eastwood who, despite being in his 70s, produced knock-out film after knock-out film throughout the decade.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
Cronenberg takes a family revenge drama, injects it with hints of perversion and explosive violence, and scrapes the veneer off civilization to poke underneath at our more unsavoury evolutionary instincts.

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
Herzog sculpts found footage from Timothy Treadwell – a foolish, monkish outcast who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska only to be eaten by them – into a masterly documentary about his classic theme, that fine line between witless man and indifferent nature.

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2005)
A poignant film about a broken friendship. The film’s static camera captures time like vital moments being lost forever. It then hinges into a moment of transcendence. Hypnotic and profound.

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
Ennis del Mar puts his hand on the empty shirt of Jack Twist and audiences gasped. Ang Lee’s groundbreaking film – a tragic story of love and loss between two gay cowboys – was delicately handled yet had the power to smash through a near-century of Hollywood prejudice.

United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)
Paul Greengrass addressed the demons of 9/11 head-on by putting us inside that ‘fourth plane’. His breathtaking simulator-style cinema left out sensationalism and sentimentality right until that last harrowing blackout.

Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul Apichatpong, 2006)
Mysterious, beautiful, hypnotic, and utterly unique, a beguiling hybrid of installation art and Lynchian strangeness.

Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Guillermo del Toro’s anti-fascist parable exorcises Spanish civil war ghosts and blends brutal reality with fairytale fantasy in a marvellous and moving way.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006)
Sasha Baron Cohen as the mustachioed, fizzy-haired Borat takes shock comedy to new heights, dismantles political correctness, and lampoons shallow seriousness. The funniest film of the decade.

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
A beautiful, haunting picture about a nation under surveillance and the final, crumbling years behind the German iron curtain – a clambering frenzy of paranoia and forced treachery.

Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007)
A high-voltage screwball, but Knocked Up transcends its comedy to become an affecting story in which the slacker generation finally grows up. It also unleashed the Apatow comedic genre on the world.

No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
The Coen Brothers refashion Cormac McCarthy’s flinty, spare prose into images of spiritual simplicity – a serio-comic neo-western that is a lament for modern times. Beautifully shot, acted and edited, it is the Coens’ masterpiece.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
The pinnacle of the Romanian new wave, Cristian Mungiu’s film is a harrowing drama about totalitarianism and a stunning thriller about one student’s plight while trying to help her roommate get an abortion.

Couscous (Abdel Kechiche, 2007)
Abdel Kechiche invisibly and very beautifully knits a complex social portrait of a French-Tunisian community – a stunning reimagining of neo-realism.
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
Bob Dylan turns eclectic. This biopic is a unique response to the problem of pinning down a man who refuses to be pinned – a cinematical tour-de-force that explores the many faces of Dylan.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)
What’s the matter with kids today? Van Sant empathises with troubled teens in this lo-fi experiment about the affectlessness of youth. It almost climbs inside the mind of its teenage protagonist such is its subjective, dreamy, disconnected camera work.

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
A masterwork of visual, almost silent, poetry and a gentle love story between two robots set on earth and in space. And it does all this within the constraints of the family movie. The Citizen Kane of animation.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2007)
“This town deserves a better class of criminal,” says Heath Ledger’s The Joker. He did just that, while Christopher Nolan took the superhero movie to untrammeled new heights.

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
This Swedish vampire chiller leaves Hollywood for dead. A coming-of-age story told with the kind of atmosphere that ices your breath. The great horror film of the decade.

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
Michael Fassbender is unforgettable as Bobby Sands. A work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. A visceral thump to the senses.

Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008)
A political biopic that spills hot all over the screen with a flaming, bravura audacity. Imagine Tarantino and Fellini listening to techno.

The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)
Cantet’s film about a Parisian classroom poses major questions about multi-culturalism. It’s so naturalistic, you could be watching a documentary. Neo-realism evolving into extreme-realism.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2009)
Danny Boyle’s Bombay mix. An exhilarating epic and a triumphant, swooning fantasy about the rise of a slum kid in Calcutta, it juggles a handful of genres into something unique.

Close but no cigar...

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel), Inland Empire (David Lynch), The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu), Still Life (Jia ZangKe), Gosford Park (Robert Altman).