|
AFTER LIFE
***
Japan
After people die, they have one
week to decide the only memory they like to keep with them into eternity.
An intriguing concept rendered difficult to sit through via slow pacing
and hollow characters.
wr/dir: Hirokazu Koreeda
cast: Arata, Erika Oda, Susumu Terajima, Takashi Naitô
AMERICAN HISTORY X
*½
USA
The kind of hysterical, socially relevant melodrama that name-drops
more issues than it raises. Everybody sounds like a ninth grade essay.
Edward Norton plays a neo-Nazi who goes to prison and makes good but not
before his impressionable younger brother takes on his wicked wicked ways.
The actors are talented and bring maximum conviction to their lines, but
it seems misplaced. The picture shifts back and forth in time and ends
just as it threatens to become complex.
dir/ph: Tony Kaye
cast: Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Beverly D'Angelo, Avery
Brooks, Jennifer Lien, Ethan Suplee, Stacy Keach, Fairuza Balk, Elliott
Gould
ANTZ
***½
USA
A neurotic worker ant falls in
love with the colony's princess.
DreamWorks' first attempt at computer animation. It loses steam towards
the end, but for the most part it's witty and inventive. Each of the voice
actors sticks to their familiar persona but there's enough clever lines to
keep them from sounding half-assed.
dir: Eric Darnell
voices of: Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone,
Christopher Walken, Anne Bancroft, Gene Hackman, Danny Glover, Jennifer
Lopez, Dan Aykroyd
THE BIG LEBOWSKI
***½
USA
A slacker mistaken for a
millionaire seeks compensation for a ruined rug, with the aid of his
bowling buddies.
As offbeat, surreal and eccentric as anything the Coens have done, and
often very clever, except for a few stretches where things get a little
indulgent.
wr/dir: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
cast: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi,
David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid
BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT
****½
Yugoslavia/France/Germany
A marriage is arranged to
settle debts between two Gypsy families.
A joyous, kaleidoscopic, surreal Gypsy epic. It will no doubt seem
familiar to fans of Kusturica, but his direction is more focused than
usual. He handles the chaos with a greater refinement.
dir: Emir Kusturica
wr: Emir Kusturica, Gordan Mihic
cast: Bajram Severdzan, Srdjan Todorovic, Branka Katic,
Florijan Ajdini, Ljubica Adzovic
BUFFALO '66
***½
USA
A just-released convict kidnaps a
girl to pose as his wife upon his return home to his parents.
Bleak and blackly funny in an endearing, idiosyncratic way. There might
be a warm, elusive streak running beneath. You come out of the picture
nostalgic of a small town monotony you should be grateful you never lived
through.
dir: Vincent Gallo
cast: Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Anjelica
Huston
A BUG'S LIFE
***½
USA
An ant recruits an insect
circus troupe to protect his colony from grasshoppers.
A bright, funny follow-up to Pixar's "Toy
Story" (1995), though it came far too soon after DreamWorks'
"Antz".
dir: John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton
voices of: Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus,
Hayden Panettiere, Phylis Diller, Richard Kind, David Hyde Pierce, Joe
Ranft, Denis Leary, Jonathan Harris, Madeline Kahn
BULWORTH
***½
USA
A disillusioned senator hires a
hitman to kill him and therefore speaks honestly during his re-election
campaign, often through rap.
There's bits where you get the uncomfortable feeling that you are
contributing to someone's ego by just paying attention. But there's a lot
more bits where you're convinced you're watching a biting, penetrating
political satire.
dir: Warren Beatty
wr: Warren Beatty, Jeremy Pikser
cast: Warren Beatty, Halle Berry, Oliver Platt
CABARET BALKAN
***½
Yugoslavia/Macedonia/France/Greece/Turkey
Tensions rise as the paths of
several unstable people criss-cross one night in Belgrade.
A gripping, disturbing trip through contemporary Serbia that appears
exaggerated but is uncomfortably close to the truth.
dir: Goran Paskaljevic
cast: Mira Banjac, Ivan Bekjarev, Aleksandar Bercek, Vojislav
Brajovic, Azra Cengic, Bogdan Dilic, Milena Dravic, Nebojsa Glogovac,
Mirjana Jokovic, Dragan Jovanovic, Mirjana Karanovic, Miki Manojlovic,
Toni Mihajlovski, Nebojsa Milovanovic, Dragan Nikolic, Nikola Ristanovski,
Lazar Ristovski, Ana Sofrenovic, Danilo 'Bata' Stojkovic, Ljuba Tadic,
Sergej Trifunovic, Marko Urosevic, Velimir 'Bata' Zivojnovic
CENTRAL STATION
***½
Brazil/France
A bitter former schoolteacher
helps a young boy search for his father.
If this had been made in America, it would have scored at the Oscars
(and probably been titled "Finding Fernanda"). The plot is
horribly derivative, and as written, so are the characters. But the actors
are remarkably vivid. You can't help but get involved in their plights and
you inevitably end up moved by them. Another big reason the picture works
well is the bacground detail of contemporary Brazil.
dir: Walter Salles
cast: Fernanda Montenegro, Vinícius de Oliveira
CROUPIER
***½
UK
An aspiring writer becomes a
croupier to make ends meet.
A cool, complicated neo-noir. Its leanness distinguishes it from the
dozens of other British gangster pictures that cropped up around the same
time.
dir: Mike Hodges
cast: Clive Owen, Gina McKee, Alex Kingston, Alexander
Morton, Kate Hardie, Paul Reynolds
THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS
***½
France
Two penniless young women
become friends in Lille.
A fierce, gritty study of two contrasting characters,
one bright and life-loving, the other miserable and self-destructive. The
leads are impeccable.
dir: Erick Zonca
wr: Erick Zonca, Roger Bohbot
cast: Élodie Bouchez, Natacha Régnier, Grégoire
Colin, Patrick Mercado, Jo Prestia
ELIZABETH
***½
UK
The early years of Elizabeth I,
Queen of England.
A fast-moving, compelling portrait of a fascinating woman, with a
spellbinding central performance.
dir: Shekhar Kapur
cast: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes,
Christopher Eccleston, Richard Attenborough
FESTEN
****
Denmark
Devastating family secrets are
revealed at a 60th birthday party.
A hard-hitting, gruelling family drama, the first and one of the most successful
products of the Dogme movement. Even if the surplus of ego and lack of
comic relief make themselves felt, evidently there is great talent behind the writing,
direction and performances since by the end you're able to disregard the
flashy technique and become completely absorbed in the characters at the
core.
dir: Thomas Vinterberg
wr: Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov
cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen,
Paprika Steen, Birthe Neumann
FLOWERS
OF SHANGHAI
***½
Taiwan
In his drama about the
unfulfilled workers and clientele at a high-class Shanghai brothel towards
the end of the 19th Century, Hou Hsiao-hsien dispenses entirely with
graphic sex and violence. He almost dispenses entirely with drama in
general.
His picture is composed of a series of lengthy takes
where the camera is placed at a medium to long distance from its subjects
and, along the way of movement, is only free to sluggishly pan left and
right from its stationary position.
He chooses to present his potentially highly charged material
(pent up as it is with enough passions, longings and desires to provide
for a solid soap opera) in a low-key, detached style, focusing on empty
small talk, pregnant silences and letting much of the plot develop
off-screen. The intention seems to be to render the brothel's opulent,
glamourous environment as mundane as it would appear to the people who
attend it daily and therefore reveal the hollowing, benumbing effect it
would have over them. It's a fair enough ambition, but at several points -
particularly early in the picture - you have to stop and wonder whether
Hou is aware of the danger when it comes portraying a mundane, prosaic
reality of making a mundane, prosaic picture.
After a half hour has passed and seemingly nothing of note
has happened, you may wonder if he has nothing more in mind beyond a mood
piece. The lush, emotive score, which liberally lulls in and out of just
about every scene, complements the proceedings with subtlety and
resonance, and the sets are textured and detailed. But the detail is kept
too far from the camera to be properly appreciated and is further muted by
a hazy, monotonous orange glow that hovers over the entire picture.
In the meantime, Wong Kar-wai devotees will do well to follow
their first instinct and begin inspecting Tony Leung's impeccably chiseled
face from frame one, looking out for every tiny but deceptively tortuous
gesture that escapes it. Maybe because his is the most familiar of the
many faces, it seems to pop out from the crowd from the opening scene.
Leung is a master at conveying poorly suppressed melancholy without
seeming to upset as much as a muscle - a throng of boisterous people
surrounding him only serves to highlight this. As his whore of choice, the
similarly photogenic Michiko Hada plays well off him. She knows when to
speak and when to give him room to brood.
Technically Leung and Hada are part of a greater ensemble -
there are nearly a dozen prominent characters - but their plot strand is
the dominant one. They play the kind of willful but fated lovers, each of
whom is thoroughly besotted with the other but afraid to confess to this
before the other one does. A confession in this context would denote a
submission of power. Any open acknowledgement of emotion is practically
deemed unproductive. So their relationship has become a competition of
stubborn trances and furtive glances, of pregnant pauses and pointed
charges. In the end, the picture seems to be entirely concerned with these
kinds of deceptively fierce battles and struggles built on tiny but
poignant gestures. Only those who master them can hope to achieve any kind
of contentment - and the nervous, unofficial kind at best.
This is supremely challenging cinema. Hou is demanding a lot
from the viewer - some may decide he's demanding more than he chooses to
deliver. A lot of his stylistic choices he leaves unjustified - e.g.
considering the key role awarded to gesture, you wonder if the perpetual
long-shot was really the cleverest of approaches. But patience is rewarded
in the final scene which finds Leung and Hada seated opposite each other,
with one half-smirking and pointedly refusing to return the other's gaze.
By now, you've been trained to pick up on these things. This way neither
of them has to utter a word but you're told all you need to know about the
emotional stalemate they have implicitly agreed upon and you're left to
ponder what kind of future they could possibly share.
dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien
wr: Chu T'ien-wen
ph: Pin Bing Lee
m: Yoshihiro Hanno, Tu Du-Che
pd: Wen-Ying Huang
cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Michiko Hada, Carina Lau,
Michelle Reis, Vicky Wei, Shuan Fang, Jack Kao, Rebecca Pan
FUCKING ÅMÅL
****½
Sweden
Agnes, a shy and depressive
girl living in a small town is secretly in love with Elin, a popular but
bored girl from her high school.
A warm, poignant, detailed teen love story. Moodysson has a strong feel
for the way teenagers act, look and talk. The stingy settings are
uncannily convincing and the acting is uniformly of a standard rarely
encountered outside French cinema.
wr/dir: Lukas Moodysson
cast: Rebecka Liljeberg, Alexandra Dahlström, Erica
Carlson, Mathias Rust, Stefan Hörberg, Ralph Carlsson, Maria Hedborg
THE GENERAL
***
UK
The rise and fall of gangster
Martin Cahill.
Those able to penetrate the thick Irish accents are likely to best
appreciate this good-looking, elegantly crafted biopic. There will still
be patches where you wish it moved a bit faster.
dir: John Boorman
cast: Brendan Gleeson, Adrian Dunbar, Sean McGinley,
Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball, Jon Voight
GODS AND MONSTERS
***½
USA
The last days of
"Frankenstein" director James Whale.
An intelligent, well-acted speculation.
wr/dir: Bill Condon
cast: Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave
|
HAPPINESS
****
USA
A disturbing black comedy about various dysfunctions to do with sex and
family. There is heart steeped under the heavy cynicism, but the
cynicism is the highlight. The cast succeeds admirably in shaping
characters out of what could have easily amounted to no more than a group
of miserable caricatures.
wr/dir: Todd Solondz
cast: Jane Adams,
Dylan Baker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cynthia Stevenson,
Lara Flynn Boyle, Justin Elvin, Ben Gazzara, Louise Lasser, Camryn
Manheim, Jon Lovitz
HILARY AND JACKIE
***½
UK
The strage relationship between the
musically gifted sisters Du Pre.
A biopic about a piar of good old-fashioned suffering geniuses that is enlivened by enthralling
performances. It takes an odd turn half-way through when the point of view
switches from one sister to the other without interrupting the narrative.
This turns out to be a good idea.
dir: Anand Tucker
cast: Emily Watson, Rachel Griffiths, James Frain,
David Morrissey, Charles Dance
THE IDIOTS
***½
Denmark
A group of people go around
pretending they are intellectually disabled in order to get in touch with
the inner idiot within them.
A bit like a postmodern version of a Luis Buñuel picture. Shocking, confronting,
often hilarious and generally compulsive.
wr/dir: Lars von Trier
cast: Bodil Jorgensen, Jens Albinus, Louise Hassing, Troels
Lyby, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Henrik Prip
LOVE IS THE DEVIL
***½
UK
The life of brilliant and
controversial British artist Francis Bacon.
Artier, more ambitious than most biopics. Maybury bases his visual
style on his subject's and seems to be more concerned with interpreting
Bacon's vision than he is with his character. Bacon the man becomes a
heartless, motiveless queen bitch and it's difficult to accept him as
such; but his art does come alive through striking imagery and pure guts.
dir: John Maybury
cast: Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton
MY NAME IS JOE
***½
UK
An unemployed former alcoholic
wants to go straight.
A gritty, naturalistic and affecting study of a charismatic character.
dir: Ken Loach
cast: Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall, David McKay,
Anne-Marie Kennedy
ONE TRUE THING
***½
USA
A career woman must look after
her cancer-stricken mother.
Sensitive performances raise this cancer drama well above Lifetime
channel mediocrity. The flashback structure is distracting - try and
ignore it.
dir: Carl Franklin
cast: Meryl Streep, Renée Zellweger, William Hurt,
Tom Everett Scott, Lauren Graham, Nicky Katt, James Eckhouse
THE OPPOSITE OF SEX
*****
USA
A scheming and obnoxious
16-year-old goes to live with her gay half-brother.
A biting, subversive and outrageous satire of teen movies with a
commendable amount of quotable one-liners. The writing is exceptionally
clever and sassy and the actors are pitch-perfect.
wr/dir: Don Roos
cast: Christina Ricci, Lisa Kudrow, Martin Donovan, Lyle
Lovett, Ivan Sergei, Johnny Galecki, William Lee Scott
OUT OF SIGHT
****½
USA
A bank robber breaks out of
jail and develops a mutual attraction for an FBI agent he has kidnapped.
Impossibly cool, clever, sexy and seductive. Soderbergh shifts back and
forth in time and makes it look easy. It's a highlight in several people's
careers.
dir: Steven Soderbergh
wr: Scott Frank
ph: Elliott Davis
ed: Anne V. Coates
cast: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Don
Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson
PI
**
USA
A reclusive mathematician
obsessively searches for a formula that will expose all patterns of the
universe.
The hollow
writing betrays the coarse, pretentious sensibility of a film
school upstart functioning beneath the flashy stylistic aspirations.
dir: Darren Aronofsky
cast: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart,
Stephen Pearlman
PLEASANTVILLE
****½
USA
Two modern teenagers
accidentally transfer themselves to a 1950s sitcom, where their influence
results in great societal changes.
A warm, perceptive and funny dramedy about the clashing of contemporary
values with stifling ones from the Eisenhower era. It's particularly
damning of repression, conservatism and conformity. The writing,
direction, acting and photography are all of the highest grade.
wr/dir: Gary Ross
ph: John Lindley
cast: Tobey Maguire, Joan Allen, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff
Daniels, William H. Macy
PRIMARY COLORS
***½
USA
The campaign of a Clinton-like
presidential candidate.
Hardly a revelation, but all the same a smart, witty political satire.
dir: Mike Nichols
wr: Elaine May
cast: John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy
Bates, Adrian Lester, Maura Tierney
RINGU
**½
Japan
After the mysterious death of a
group of teenagers, a journalist watches a videotape of obscure images and
is told by phone that she will die in seven days.
A complicated horror story, wildly successful on home soil and promptly remade
in the USA. Too drawn-out to be eerie.
dir: Hideo Nakata
cast: Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani, Hiroyuki Sanada, Yuko
Takeuchi
RUN LOLA RUN
****½
Germany
A girl has 20 minutes to find a
great lot of money to save her boyfriend's life.
A unique, innovative, hyperkinetic collection of poignant coincidences and what-if scenarios. Great fun.
wr/dir: Tom Tykwer
ph: Frank Griebe
ed: Mathilde Bonnefoy
cast: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup,
Nina Petri, Armin Rohde
RUSHMORE
***½
USA
An intellectual high school
student falls in love with his teacher.
A cult hit that proved to be a breakthrough for its talented maker.
It's more compact and subdued than his later efforts but not as engrossing
and touching as the best of them.
dir: Wes Anderson
wr: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
cast: Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams,
Seymour Cassel, Brian Cox, Mason Gamble, Connie Nielsen, Luke Wilson
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
**½
USA
Eight soldiers are sent to
bring back from behind enemy lines a mother's last surviving son.
If not for a couple of impressively showy sequences, you could swear
this was directed by Frank Darabont. It's among the most earnest of
simple-minded war pictures. You can recognize the majority of the
characters from a selection of Vietnam dramas from the 70s and 80s. There
is a lot of flagwaving and forced profundity, and not much real
contemplation. The clumsy, pathos-hungry flashback structure is another
minus.
dir: Steven Spielberg
cast: Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, Jeremy
Davies
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
*****
USA/UK
William Shakespeare lacks
inspiration in creating his next play "Romeo & Ethel, the
Pirate's Daughter".
A clever, fast-moving, bright and sexy mix of romance, comedy and
tragedy with an ingenious script, exemplary crafting and delightful
performances. Beyond the sets, it's hard to say how much of this has
anything to do with the real Shakespeare or the Elizabethan era. But the
romanticising is where the charm lies. The picture is intoxicating in the
way only great love stories tend to be.
dir: John Madden
wr: Tom Stoppard, Marc Norman
ph: Richard Greatrex
ed: David Gamble
m: Stephen Warbeck
cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush,
Colin Firth, Judi Dench, Rupert Everett, Simon Callow
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
***½
USA
Thirteen years after he injures
himself on prom night, an insecure writer cannot get over his high school
crush.
Rude and crude and largely predictable even, but it still feels fresh.
The jokes come at a steady rate, the actors are energetic, the timing is
spot-on and there is a healthy dose of self-effacing going on.
wr/dir: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly
cast: Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon, Chris Elliott,
Lee Evans
A SIMPLE PLAN
****
USA
Two brothers stumble upon an
airplane crash with $4m inside it.
An expertly paced, consistently compelling thriller.
dir: Sam Raimi
wr: Scott B. Smith
cast: Aidan Quinn, Billy Bob Thornton, Bridget Fonda
SITCOM
***
France
A pet rat seems to be heaving
outrageous psycho-sexual effects on its host family.
An eagerly shocking, proudly outrageous black farce, which probably
wouldn't exist if it wasn't French. Like Buñuel gone hardcore. Or
Pasolini's
"Theorema" (1968) updated with the stranger reincarnated
as a rat.
dir: François Ozon
cast: Évelyne Dandry, François Marthouret, Marina de Van,
Adrien de Van, Stéphane Rideau, Lucia Sanchez
THE THIN RED LINE
*****
USA
In World War II, a group of
young soldiers is brought in to fight the battle of Guadalcanal.
An elegiac, hypnotic meditation on war as an abscess of humanity. The
scenes of warfare carry an impact that is all the more harrowing in the
way they interrupt the serene imagery of vibrant, idyllic forests,
wetlands and seashores. The cast is peppered with big names in minor parts
but the lesser-knowns deliver the more impressive performances.
wr/dir: Terrence Mallick
ph: John Toll
ed: Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, Billy Weber
m: Hans Zimmer
cast: James Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Ben Chaplin,
John
Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Adrien Brody, Elias Koteas, George Clooney, John
Travolta, John C. Reilly
THE TRUMAN SHOW
***½
USA
Truman Burbank is the star of a
24/7 television show - only he doesn't know it.
Whereas creating a world of its own would have clearly brought more
freedom and fewer narrative gaps and loopholes, this almost prophetic
satire of contemporary media and reality TV boldly opts to set
its story in a world that is barely removed from our own. It's ambitious and far from a complete failure -
with this concept it could never be less than fascinating - but also fragmented,
uneven and increasingly muddled and
unconvincing as it nears the end and struggles to incorporate some
inappropriate Hollywood conventions.
dir:
Peter Weir
wr:
Andrew Niccol
cast: Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Noah
Emmerich,
Natascha McElhone, Holland Taylor VELVET
GOLDMINE
****
UK/USA
In 1984, a journalist is sent
to explore the world of 70s glam rock and the myth behind a flamboyant
rock star's disappearance.
A flashy, flamboyant, indulgent and often exhilarating pseudo-exposé
of the glam-rock
era. For the sake of style, liberty has been taken with the facts and there are flaws and
excesses, such as bits left over from Haynes' "Poison" which
don't feel comfortable within this context. But a seductive energy and
imagination permeates every frame.
dir: Todd Haynes
cast: Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale,
Toni Collette, Eddie Izzard, Emily Woof, Michael Feast
|