ALMOST FAMOUS
***
USA
In 1973, a high school boy gets
the chance to write a story of a
rock band on the rise, as he accompanies them on their concert tour.
A sweet, nostalgic journey down a familiar road.
wr/dir:
Cameron Crowe
cast: Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, Patrick
Fugit
AMERICAN PSYCHO
**½
USA
A dark, violent, but
strangely uninvolving adaptation of a cult novel. (Since when is it so hard to
satirise the 80s?) Reese Witherspoon's bratty cameo is the highlight.
AMORES
PERROS
****
Mexico
A young Mexican tries to raise
money through dog fighting to elope with his sister-in-law, a successful
model suffers terrible injuries, while a homeless man is hired to kill a
businessman.
A bold, confronting and harrowing collection of loosely connected stories
revolving around the ugliness of life in modern Mexico. Brilliantly
directed, each of them packs its own punch.
dir:
Alejandro González Iñárritu
cast: Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Emilio Echevarría,
Álvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche BATTLE
ROYALE
***
Japan
In the near future, a class of
Japanese ninth grade students are forced to fight to death in an isolated
island.
Ambiguous as to whether it classifies itself as an allegory, a parody
or simply a splatterfest, it offers demonstrations of great skill and dark
humour alongside jarring miscalculations, unsure pacing and an
unsatisfying conclusion.
dir: Kinji Fukasaku
cast: Takeshi Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro
Yamamoto, Masanobu Ando, Kou Shibasaki, Chiaki Kuriyama
BEDAZZLED
*½
USA
A forced, contrived, superfluous remake.
BEFORE
NIGHT FALLS
**½
USA
The life of Cuban
poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas.
An episodic, respectable, uninventive and unremarkable biopic.
dir:
Julian Schnabel
cast: Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea Di Stefano,
Johnny Depp
BEST IN SHOW
****½
USA
The trials and tribulations of
dog owners at the Mayflower Dog Show
in Philadelphia.
One of the supreme mockumentaries, this one achieves the
level of -funny- that makes your stomach hurt. With a bunch of offbeat
characters and terrific ensemble work, it's arguably the team's best.
dir: Christopher Guest
cast: Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara,
Michael McKean, John Michael Higgins, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane
Lynch, Parker Posey, Michael Hitchcock, Fred Willard, Jim
Piddock, Bob Balaban
BILLY ELLIOT
***
UK
A boy from a troubled working
class family discovers ballet
dancing.
A sugary, sentimental character-building lesson. Very well-acted
though.
dir: Roger Daldry
cast: Jamie Bell, Gary Lewis, Julie Walters
BLACKBOARDS
***½
Iran
A bizarre, ostensibly poetic fable about the misadventures of a duo of
itinerant schoolteachers seeking out willing pupils in the forbidding
landscape near Iran’s aggressively patrolled borders. It gets digressive,
didactic and repetitive, but (20-year-old) director Samira Makhmalbaf does
manage to come up with an arresting setpiece at a rate regular enough to
make the experience worthwhile.
dir: Samira Makhmalbaf
wr: Samira Makhmalbaf, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
cast: Saïd Mohamadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Behnaz Jafari, Rafat Moradi
BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE
***½
Japan
A relatively brief (45 min.) but strong anime, with stunning visuals.
BRING IT ON
***½
USA
A light, likable cheerleader movie.
THE BROKEN HEARTS CLUB
***
USA
Grade-A queer fluff.
CAST AWAY
**½
USA
A FedEx executive crash-lands on
a deserted island.
A Hollywood attempt at minor artiness, mostly watchable but never more
than that.
dir: Robert Zemeckis
cast: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt
CECIL B. DEMENTED
***
USA
An entertaining and generally funny if never quite spot-on satire of
independent filmmaking.
wr/dir: John Waters
cast: Melanie Griffith, Stephen Dorff, Alicia Witt, Maggie
Gyllenhaal, Adrian Grenier, Larry Gilliard Jr., Jack Noseworthy, Mink
Stole, Ricki Lake, Patricia Hearst
CHARLIE'S ANGELS
***½
USA
Some of the best dumb fun of the year, it's a clever homage-parody of girl
power and action
films, with a game cast.
dir: McG
cast: Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Bill Murray,
Sam Rockwell, Kelly Lynch, Tim Curry, Crispin Glover, Luke Wilson, Matt
LeBlanc, Tom Green, LL Cool J
CHICKEN RUN
****
UK
Chickens attempt to escape a
Yorks farm in the 1950s.
A fast-moving, witty and entertaining stop-motion cartoon feature.
dir:
Peter Lord, Nick Park
voices of: Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Jane Horrocks
CHOCOLAT
**½
USA
The opening of a chocolate shop
causes controversy in a small
Hollywood French
village.
A plastic, Oscar-hungry sherbet bomb, with charming actors.
dir:
Lasse Hallström
cast: Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp, Alfred Molina,
Judi Dench, Carrie-Anne Moss THE
CIRCLE
***½
Iran
The paths of an assortment of
Iranian women rejected by society intersect.
Although the episodic structure limits the emotional impact, this
restrained, realist exposé of the subhuman treatment of women
in Iran (where it was banned) still makes for tortuous,
thought-provoking, enraging drama.
dir:
Jafar Panahi
cast: Fareshteh Sadr Orafai, Nargess Mamizadeh, Mariam
Palvin Almani, Elham Saboktakin, Monir Arab, Fatemeh Naghavi, Mojgan
Faramarzi
THE CLAIM
****
UK/France/Canada
In 1867, the mayor a small
Western town is shattered by the arrival of a stagecoach carrying a
railroad surveyor, an ill woman and her young daughter.
A patient, haunting Western epic, detailing the
change of an era and how it affects several deeply contrasting
individuals. Unfairly neglected, despite intelligent performances,
sensitive direction, as well as spectacular imagery.
dir: Michael Winterbottom
dir: Alwin H. Kuchler
cast: Peter Mullan, Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Sarah Polley,
Nasstassja Kinski
COMMITTED
**
USA
A New York woman is abandoned by
her husband, but she is determined to travel across America in search of
him.
A Sundance offering high on plucky, quirky intentions but no real
talent.
dir:
Lisa Krueger
cast: Heather Graham, Casey Affleck, Luke Wilson, Goran
Visnjic, Patricia Velasquez, Alfonso Arau, Mark Ruffalo
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
***½
Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China
In pursuit of a stolen sword,
two experienced warriors are led to an amazingly skilled nobleman's
daughter at a crossroads in her life.
A universally acclaimed, sensationally successful historical action
epic, where unnecessary romantic stretches keep getting in the way of some of
the most breathtaking fight scenes ever put on film (and exported to
Western multiplexes).
dir: Ang Lee
cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang
Chen
DANCER IN THE DARK
*****
Denmark/Sweden/France
A migrant worker fights
injustice and receding eyesight for her son's sake.
A gruelling melodrama, partly shot under Dogme conventions, with musical
numbers providing much needed escape from misery both to its tortured
protagonist and its outraged audience. Its ultimately overpowering
emotional impact however, stems largely from Björk's delicate, devastating
conviction. It's arguably one of the screen's great performances.
wr/dir: Lars von Trier
music/lyrics: Björk, Lars von Trier, Sjon Sigurdsson
cast: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter
Stormare, Joel Grey
THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN
****
Iran
A triptych of pertinent tales of three women, who may as well be
three
variations on a single, oppressed one at three crucial stages in her life.
In the first story, Hava is an hour away from turning nine, and having to
wear a chador as well as end her friendship with the boy next door. In the
second a recently wed woman enters a bicycle race to escape from her
husband and two vengeful brothers. In the third, an elderly woman goes on
a shopping spree, collecting every household appliance she’d been deprived
of in her youth. To varying degrees, an element of surrealism – or just
plain absurdism - dominates each of the three vignettes.
Marzieh Meshkini is a sensitive and supremely talented woman. This is
her first film – her film school thesis even – and already she appears to
have developed a peerless sense for where to put the camera in order to
most economically evoke a lifetime of deep and profound mourning.
dir: Marzieh Meshkini
wr: Marzieh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
ph: Mohamad Ahmadi, Ebrahim Ghafori
cast: Fatemeh Cherag Akhar, Hassan Nebhan, Shabnam Toloui, Sirous
Kahvarinegad, Azizeh Sedighi, Bard Iravani
DINOSAUR
*½
USA
An uninspired CGI-cartoon feature with weak voicework. Now suitably
forgotten
DIVIDED WE FALL
***½
Czech Republic
A childless couple in
Nazi-occupied Czechozlovakia hides a Jew during the war.
A layered, deeply human Holocaust drama that earns its tears with
honour and dignity, even if it does blur into all the others in
retrospect.
dir:
Jan Hrebejk
cast: Bolek Polívka, Anna Sisková, Jaroslav Dusek,
Csongor Kassai, Martin Huba
THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE
****
USA
A self-centred emperor is
turned into a llama and overthrown by his scheming administrator.
A witty, energetic and shockingly inventive Disney feature. The
best and most brilliantly animated in years, it went by practically unnoticed.
dir:
Mark Dindal
voices of: Dennis Spade, John Goodman, Eartha Kitt
ERIN BROCKOVICH
***½
A tough and determined single
mother becomes a legal assistant and discovers a California company
polluting a city's water supply.
What do you know? Julia acts. Though you'd never suspect it's based on
fact, this is a smart, entertaining and ideally manufactured star vehicle.
dir:
Steven Soderbergh
cast: Julia Roberts, Albert Finney, Aaron Eckhart
ESTHER
KAHN
***½
France/UK
Arnaud Desplechin's ambitious, seductive, arch and confounding inquiry
into a maladjusted Jewish girl's acting bug in 19th-century London. Summer
Phoenix takes on the title role with a fragility that hints at neurosis
and serves the film's first couple of acts tolerably well. But as the
picture progresses and characters start bigging up Esther's talent and
stage presence, no real transition makes itself felt in Phoenix's
performance. And you begin to suspect that Desplechin may be holding too
much faith in his ingenue. It's quite clear that rather than Esther's
commanding the stage, his main point of interest is Esther's incapacity to
emotionally engage with the real world, with her attraction to theatre and
dogged determination to become a great actress coming about merely as
consequences. But is it genuinely Desplechin's primary goal to refocus
your attention at Esther's disassociation from her interior battle when he
doesn't let you hear her triumphant line deliveries as Hedda Gabler, or is
he merely filming around his star's plainly limited acting range? It is
entirely likely that in Phoenix's shifty gazes and hushed speech patterns
Desplechin is seeing a layered, abstruse performance, while you're pretty
much seeing a blank. But of the two of you, who's right?
dir: Arnaud Desplechin
wir: Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bordieau
ph: Eric Gautier
cast: Summer Phoenix, Ian Holm, Fabrice Desplechin, Frances
Barber, Lazsló Szábó, Claudia Solti, Emmanuelle Devos, Paul Regan, Ian
Bartholomew
EVERYBODY FAMOUS!
***
Belgium
An entertaining but soft-centred satire of wanna-be pop-stars.
FAST FOOD FAST WOMEN
***
USA
Various eccentric individuals,
generally advanced in years, search for love and sex in Manhattan.
An odd indie exploration of relationships and the lifeline of sexuality,
it shoves in some quirk and doesn't boast much of a style, but Kollek
largely compensates with an infectious
warmth towards his characters.
dir:
Amos Kollek
cast: Anna Levine, Jamie Harris, Louise Lasser, Robert
Modica, Lonette McKee, Victor Argo, Angelica Torn, Austin Pendleton,
Sandrine Holt, Valerie Geffner, Mark Margolis
GEORGE WASHINGTON
**½
USA
A group of adolescents in a
decaying Southern town attempt to cover up a boy's tragic death.
Moments of genuine sensitivity are rare in this vague, hollow attempt at a tone
poem.
dir:
David Gordon Green
cast: Donald Holden, Candace Evanofski, Damian Jewan Lee,
Curtis Cotton, Rachael Handy, Paul Schneider, Eddie Rouse, Janet Taylor,
Ebony Jones
THE GIFT
**½
USA
A formula thriller made watchable for the most part by Cate Blanchett's excellent performance.
GINGER SNAPS
**½
Canada/USA
The werewolf storyline certainly makes for a novel approach to an
exploration of adolescence, but eventually all except the Z-grade aura falls apart.
GLADIATOR
***
USA
A destroyed Roman general seeks
revenge as a gladiator.
History's sole gladiator with a heavy Australian accent forms the
centre of a well-crafted but vacuous Hollywood return to the historical epic.
The
re-creation of ancient Rome is spectacular and the action sequences are thrilling,
but much of that money would have been better invested in the script
department.
dir:
Ridley Scott
cast: Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver
Reed, Richard Harris
THE GOLDEN BOWL
**
UK/France/USA
A poor Italian prince marries a
rich American heiress despite being in love with her best friend.
Meticulous, mechanically sumptuous and principally pretentious
soap opera that hollows out and suffocates its characters through leaden
dialogue and contrived metaphors. It completely misses out on
the essence of Henry James' novel.
dir:
James Ivory
cast: Uma Thurman, Jeremy Northam, Kate Beckinsale, Nick
Nolte, Anjelica Huston, James Fox
HIGH FIDELITY
***
USA
A record store owner has
commitment issues.
A self-consciously clever Hornby adaptation that transfer's
the novel's action from London to Chicago. The characters are
original and fully realized but with a general tendency to
irritate.
dir:
Stephen Frears
cast: John Cusack, Iben Hjejle, Jack Black, Todd Louiso, Tim
Robbins
|
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
***½
UK
In 1905, an ambitious New York
socialite is destroyed in hope of marrying the man she loves.
An intelligent costume drama, with a striking central performance.
dir:
Terence Davies
cast: Gillian Anderson, Laura Linney, Eric Stoltz, Dan
Aykroyd, Eleanor Bron, Anthony LaPaglia, Elizabeth McGovern
IN
THE MOOD FOR LOVE
****
Hong Kong
In 1960s Hong Kong, a man and a woman suspect their
spouses are having an affair.
An elegant, elegiac romance, most remarkable
for vividly evoking a time and a place.
dir: Wong Kar-wai
cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung
KEEPING THE FAITH
**½
USA
Bearable as far as fluff goes, but clearly Edward Norton has no place behind
the camera.
LOOKING FOR ALIBRANDI
**½
Australia
An adaptation of a beloved teen novel, it's rushed
and amateurish, but it proved successful on home soil.
MEET THE PARENTS
*½
USA
A lame, predictable star vehicle that made too much money.
MEMENTO
****½
USA
A man with short-term memory
loss attempts to track down his wife's killer.
A dark, intense and brilliantly crafted mystery thriller, it unfolds in
anti-chronological order but ultimately - and thankfully - it amounts to a
lot more than a gimmick.
wr/dir: Christopher Nolan
ed: Dody Dorn
cast: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano
NINE QUEENS
***½
Argentina
One of those con man movies that exists purely for its twists. It becomes
pretty predictable pretty quickly, but it's nice to look at, darkly funny
and thoroughly entertaining.
NURSE BETTY
****½
USA
As a result of post-traumatic
stress, a Kansas waitress goes in search of a soap opera doctor whom she
believes to be real.
A dark, witty, violent and subversive throwback to classic Hollywood
screwball comedy.
dir: Neil LaBute
cast: Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear,
Chris Rock, Aaron Eckhart, Allison Janney
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR 2: THE KLUMPS
*½
USA
A witless, unnecessary sequel, set up to revive a dead career.
O, BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU!
*****
USA
In the Depression Era, three
convicts escape to go across the southern states in search of treasure.
A joyous, witty evocation of the Depression Era, it's a loose
re-imagining of Homer's "Odyssey". It's also an
episodic pastiche of classic Hollywood genres ranging from chain gang films to
musicals to screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. The title comes from
the movie Sullivan never got to make in Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels"
(1941).
dir: Joel Coen
wr: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
ph: Roger Deakins
cast: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson,
Charles Durning, John
Goodman, Holly Hunter
101 REYKJAVIK
***½
Iceland
A witty, quirky tragicomedy covering
a few complicated months in the life of an indolent, unemployed
30-year-old. Writer-director Baltasar Kormakur whole-heartedly embraces what's left over from his
twenty-something angst and the picture isn't to be taken too seriously,
but it's impossible to dislike it.
In any case, it would take a special
amount of effort to make a dull movie set against the majestic Icelandic
landscape.
wr/dir:
Baltasar Kormakur
cast: Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, Victoria Abril, Hanna Maria
Karlsdottir, Baltasar Kormakur, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Thrudur
Vilhjalmdottir
OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS
***½
Spain/France/Columbia
A gay writer returns to his
Colombian home town and finds it ruled by gang wars and chaos.
Shot on video, on location, guerrilla-style, this is a hyper-violent,
baffling melodrama. The level of accuracy in representation seems dubious
at best, ditto several of the plot complications, but there is a harrowing
immediacy to the proceedings.
dir:
Barbet Schroeder
cast: Germán Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David
Restrepo, Manuel Busquets
PAY IT FORWARD
*
USA
Pathos-driven and pathetic, failed Oscar bait.
THE PERFECT STORM
*
USA
A terribly overblown, fact-based melodrama. There is a telling, golden moment
towards the end, when superimposed onto one sailor's noble death scene
is the image of his loved one waving from the shore in slow motion. Around
this point, the picture qualifies as self-parody.
POLLOCK
***
USA
The life of self-destructive
painter Jackson Pollock.
The acting is undeniably strong but the character insight never goes past
the flashy, glamourously alcoholic surface-level.
dir: Ed Harris
cast: Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Jennifer Connelly,
Amy Madigan
PSYCHO BEACH PARTY
***½
USA
A light, funny, spot-on parody of 50s' horror B-movies.
QUILLS
***½
USA
A Catholic priest and the
Marquis de Sade fight for the soul of a beautiful young woman.
Of little worth as a historical document, it is nevertheless
witty, well-acted and compelling.
dir: Philip Kaufman
cast: Geoffrey Rush, Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Winslet, Michael
Caine
REQUIEM
FOR A DREAM
**½
USA
A pensioner, her son and his
girlfriend suffer through drug abuse.
Bold and confronting certainly, but it's too eager to shock and doesn't come up
with anything constructive. "Drugs are bad." Well,
duh.
dir: Darren Aronofsky
cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly
RUSH HOUR 2
*½
USA
A contrived reteaming of a shrill Chris Tucker and a wooden Jackie Chan. SCARY
MOVIE
**
USA
A smug parody of teen horror hits of the 90s. SCREAM 3
***
USA
Every Parker Posey movie is an event but, even though there's still some fun in
it, this sequel fails to live up to its magnificent predecessors.
SHADOW OF
THE VAMPIRE
***½
USA
Director F.W. Murnau hires a
real-life vampire to play Nosferatu.
An accomplished, highly entertaining picture based on a
legendary myth.
dir: E. Elias Merhige
cast: John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Udo Kier, Cary
Elwes, Catherine McCormack, Eddie Izzard
SHANGHAI NOON
***½
USA
A very funny Western parody, with a great turn from the always
reliable Owen Wilson.
SMALL TIME CROOKS
***½
USA
An incompetent crook's failed
plan to rob a bank leads him and his eager wife to a phenomenally
lucrative cookie store and a place in high society.
The characters are impossibly dumb, the humour is broad and most of
what happens is improbable, but there are laugh-out-loud moments.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
cast: Woody Allen, Tracey Ullman, Hugh Grant, Elaine May
SNATCH
***½
UK
A bunch of small-time and big-time
crooks get involved in a race to track down a priceless stolen jewel.
Every now and again, there's a monologue or a montage that reminds you
how hard Ritchie is trying to be cool, but it's very easy to fall for the
majority of the picture. Pluses include a healthy, black sense of humour,
memorably offbeat characters and a bunch of fantastic one-liners.
wr/dir: Guy Ritchie
cast: Jason Statham, Alan Ford, Brad Pitt, Vinnie Jones,
Dennis Farina, Rade Serbedzija, Benicio Del Toro, Ewen Bremner, Robbie
Gee, Lennie James, Jason Flemyng
SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR
****½
Sweden/France/Denmark/Norway/Germany
Surrealist vignettes set in
a town ruled by heartless bureaucracy with little tangible relation to
each other beyond a vague apocalyptic undercurrent. A stark, darkly humourous satire on numerous
aspects of contemporary, consumerist, capitalist societies, it carries a
hypnotic tone all its own.
wr/dir:
Roy Andersson
cast: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson
STATE AND MAIN
***½
USA
A Hollywood film crew invades a
small town.
A clever, funny Hollywood satire, which curiously lacks bite but
provides enough warmth, wisecracks and outstanding ensemble work for
that to be ignored.
wr/dir:
David Mamet
cast: William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec
Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Julia Stiles, Rebecca Pidgeon, David
Paymer, Charles Durning, Patti LuPone
THE TASTE OF OTHERS
***
France
An intellectually challenged
trucking company owner falls in love with his obnoxious English teacher.
A perceptive though very cold French comedy of
relationships. Winner of the César for Best Film.
dir: Agnès Jaoui
cast: Anne Alvaro, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Alain Chabat, Agnès
Jaoui, Gérard Lanvin, Christiane Millet
THIRTEEN DAYS
***
USA
A generally intelligent and compelling reconstruction of events
during the Cuban missile crisis, October 1962, even if it is from a limited,
flagwaving perspective. And Kevin Costner's attempt at a 'New-Yawk' accent
is appaling.
TILLSAMMANS
***½
Sweden
Seeking divorce
from her alcoholic husband, a housewife moves into a Swedish commune in
1975.
A warm-hearted, funny comedy with quite a bit of insight about all sort
of relationships, with a focus on the familial (and the unorthodox).
wr/dir: Lukas Moodysson
cast: Lisa Lindgren, Michael Nyqvist, Emma Samuelson, Sam
Kessel, Gustaf Hammarsten, Anja Lundqvist, Jessica Liedberg, Ola Norell
TIME
CODE
**½
USA
Several narratives simultaneously take place in separate quadrants of
the screen in real time and a single take. It's a remarkably ambitious and, on a
technical level, quite
successful experiment, but without dramatic interest. The entertainment value wears off with the curiosity factor.
THE TOWN IS QUIET
***
France
A leftist, layered but
often heavy-going look at
the contemporary working class in Marseilles.
TRAFFIC
***
USA
A drug campaigner discovers his
daughter is a heroin addict, a Mexican cop struggles to follow his moral
code, while a pregnant woman takes over
the business when her husband is arrested.
Soderbergh's handling of the technical aspects is masterful but he
can't seem to find any decent bits to focus on in the preachy,
patronizing (and naturally, Oscar-winning) script.
dir:
Steven Soderbergh
cast: Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine
Zeta-Jones, Erika Christensen, Don Cheadle, Luis Guzmán, Dennis Quaid
UNDER THE SAND
***½
France
A middle-aged woman won't accept her husband's disappearance.
An arty, subtle dissection of grief with an intriguing central
performance.
wr/dir: François Ozon
cast: Charlotte Rampling VAMPIRE
HUNTER D: BLOODLUST
**½
Japan
Anime set in a
post-apocalyptic world of vampires that features hints of breathtaking
design work. But the animation always appears awkward and airless, while
the dialogue and plotting are insufferably contrived and leaden.
dir:
Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Tai Kit Mak
WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS
***
France
A middle-aged man seduces a
20-year-old.
Based on a story even Fassbinder deemed to risky to film, this is an
odd, ambitious and certainly unique tale of obsessive love - or sex. Never
leaving its single set however, it quickly becomes claustrophobic, and the
characterisations are not only alienating but somewhat questionable.
dir: François Ozon
cast: Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier, Anna
Thomson
WHAT WOMEN WANT
*
USA
An unprecedented ego-trip. A remarkably sexist, smug, self-serving Mel
Gibson mug-fest.
WONDER BOYS
****½
USA
A literature professor deals with
a mid-life crisis.
Warm, wise and genuinely uplifting, with likable characters and
excellent performances.
dir: Curtis Hanson
cast: Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances
McDormand, Robert Downey Jr, Katie Holmes
X-MEN
***
USA
A sombre Marvel comics adaptation with some honourable intentions, though the story lacks heft.
YI-YI
***½
Taiwan/Japan
The various crises of an
extended family in contemporary
Taipei.
An incisive, detailed study of a family of
three generations, though it's overlong and not
always compelling.
wr/dir:
Edward Yang
cast: Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Kelly Lee, Jonathon Chang,
Issey Ogata
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
****½
USA
A single
mother must deal with the sudden return of her troubled
younger brother.
A mature, unusually intelligent and very moving family drama,
with impeccable writing and performances.
wr/dir: Kenneth Lonnergan
cast: Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Rory Culkin, Matthew
Broderick, Kenneth Lonergan
|