BABY MAMA
***
USA
Gratifying though it is to see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler headline a buddy
comedy, you do spend half the running time wishing it had been something with
a sharper, preferably satirical edge.
wr/dir: Michael McCullers
cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany Malco,
Sigourney Weaver, Steve Martin, Maura Tierney
BALLAST
***
USA
wr/dir: Lance Hammer
cast: Micheal J. Smith Sr., JimMyron Ross, Tarra Riggs, Johnny McPhail
BE LIKE OTHERS
***½
Canada/Iran/UK/USA
dir: Tanaz Eshaghian
BOOGIE
***½
Romania
Due to the unfussy low-key-ness and principal cast of unlikable slackers at
quarter-life-crisis, it's too easy to miss out on the caustic insight and
preciseness with which Radu Muntean and his script team capture the mindset
of crushing disappointment at having inherited the paralysis that is
responsibility towards others, which seems to be defining a generation throughout
contemporary Eastern Europe, and probably further.
dir: Radu Muntean
wr: Alexandru Baciu, Radu Muntean, Razvan Radulescu
cast: Dragos Bucur, Anamaria Marinca, Mimi Branescu, Adrian
Vancica, Vlad Muntean, Geanina Varga, Roxana Iancu
BURN AFTER READING
****
USA
A bunch of tenacious lunatics with low emotional IQ's and single-minded
pursuits run around Washington D.C. with an inflated sense of their own
importance in the way the world runs. This leads to many hilarious and
convoluted mishaps and a sneaky grand statement about the moral relativism,
paranoia and blinding self-interest that have defined the decade.
wr/dir: Joel and Ethan Coen
ph: Emmanuel Lubezki
m: Carter Burwell
cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Brad
Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons
CHANGELING
***
USA
If the world were a Clint Eastwood picture, it would run very very smoothly,
since any prospective threat to the system would announce itself efficiently,
whether by slurring their words, smirking lasciviously, breaking into a loony
grin, resembling a lesbian or adopting an irregular, indecipherable yet
malevolent accent while sending a bereft mother to the nuthouse for
undermining their power.
Despite Eastwood's harried tactics, it's impossible not to get
drawn into this tale of true and sensational events surrounding the
disappearance of 9-year-old Walter Collins from his mother's home in late-20s
California. The two face expressions - half-stifled anger and wrenching cries
- which Angelina Jolie selects to represent Christine Collins do win over
your sympathy, inextricably linked as they are to the fact that there once
truly was a Christine Collins, whose child really was abducted, who - with
frightening conviction - was saddled with a dodgy replacement, and who - for
habitual reasons of convenience and patriarchy - was committed to a
psychiatric ward when crying foul.
dir: Clint Eastwood
cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Michael Kelly,
Colm Feore, Jason Butler Harner, Amy Ryan, Geoff Pierson, Denis O'Hare,
Gattlin Griffith
A CHRISTMAS TALE
*****
France
Raw, unwieldy, rambunctious gorgeousness. Other than Almodovar, no one in the
world makes movies as rich and alive as Arnaud Desplechin's. He sends you off
on several bubbly tangents at any one time and inundates you with a
generosity of spirit and novelistic detail, so that you're caught completely
off-guard every time either of these tangents evolves into a complex
revelation (and they all do). For two and a half hours (not nearly long
enough, I say!) he gives you life at a higher register. You can only leave
the cinema in a gratified stupor. You won't want to shake it off.
dir: Arnaud Desplechin
wr: Emmanuel Bourdieu
ph: Eric Gautier
ed: Laurence Biraud
m: Grégoire Hetzel
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, Mathieu
Amalric, Anne Consigny, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmannuelle Devos, Melvil
Poupaud, Laurent Capelluto, Emile Berling, Hippolyte Girardot,
Françoise Bertin, Samir Guesmi
THE CLASS
*****
France
High
school was like this. Exactly like this. Seemingly it still is: barely ever
pleasant, or productive, or un-mind-numbing, or unexhausting.
Laurent Cantet doesn’t present you
with any people or places that you don’t already know or that you care to
revisit. And yet, the children are hypnotic, the tensions are vital, and the
dynamics electrifying.
No one in the cast of mostly
underage non-actors exhibits a glimmer of awareness of there being a camera
in the room and the situations seem to develop day by day, spontaneously, so
you don’t notice a plot until one’s just about wrapped. Purely as an
achievement in logistics, it’s staggering; and as a piece of cinema –
vibrant, exhilarating.
dir: Laurent Cantet
wr: François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo, Laurent Cantet
cast: François Bégaudeau, Franck Keïta, Esméralda Ouertani,
Rachel Régulier, Wei Huang, Nassim Amrabt, Laura Baquela, Cherif
Bounaïdja Rachedi, Juliette Demaille, Dalla Doucoure, Arthur Fogel, Damien
Gomes, Louise Grinberg, Qifei Huang, Henriette Kasaruhanda, Lucie Landrevie,
Agame Malembo-Emene, Rabah Naït Oufella, Carl Nanor, Burak Özyilmaz, Eva
Paradiso, Angélica Sancio, Samantha Soupirot, Boubacar Touré, Justine Wu, Fatoumata
Kanté
THE CURIOUS CASE
OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
***
USA
No one will argue that this sentimental-whimsical behemoth was designed and
produced with a concrete purpose in mind beyond bagging a bundle of Ampass
gold (and maybe dollars). David Fincher apes Robert Zemeckis, Brad Pitt ages
backwards (the CGI gives much better face than he does) and the first two
hours are soul-crushing. And yet, in the closing hour, as the odd tragedy at
the core of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story breaks through,
neither the pandering nor the staggering silliness that is the Hurricane
Katrina framing device manage to fully mute its resonance.
dir: David Fincher
cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Jason
Flemyng, Tilda Swinton, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Jared Harris, Elias Koteas,
Elle Fanning
THE DARK KNIGHT
***½
USA
Christopher Nolan delivers another solemn, bloated Batman spectacle in a
trendy haze of profundity. Thanks to Heath Ledger's hypnotic, maniacal Joker
however, the sense of perpetually lurking evil is stronger than at any point
in the franchise since Tim Burton bailed. So the film maintains its pull even
though: Christian Bale looks constipated throughout (and when the mask comes
on, he also sounds it); the fights are not visceral, or impressionistic, or
anything other than a mess; and the epic, convoluted climax is beyond silly.
dir: Christopher Nolan
cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie
Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman
DOUBT
***½
USA
wr/dir: John Patrick Shanley
cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis
ELEGY
***
USA
Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Dennis
Hopper portray several basic facets of Philip Roth's neurosis. Isabel Coixet
oppresses you with good taste in the sincere hope that you'll overlook the
white middle-aged male over-privileged egomaniac's festival of self-pity
which she is facilitating. It isn't subtle, or incisive, or in any sense
productive, but while it's on, it's sufficiently engaging. This is in part
due to the shock of experiencing marketable faces in unapologetically
adult-oriented fare, as well as partly to the sensitivity and questions with
which said faces imbue the rather harried material.
dir: Isabel Coixet
cast: Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson,
Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard, Deborah Harry
FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL
***
USA
dir: Nicholas Stoller
cast: Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand, Bill
Hader, Liz Cackowski, Maria Thayer, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd
FOUR
NIGHTS WITH ANNA
**½
Poland/France
Another case of an Eastern European master past his prime suffocating under an
inflated budget and production values. In this tale of a mentally unsound
stalker peeping on his crush at night from across a mud pile, Jerzy
Skolimowski is aiming for some sort of eerie-whimsical resonance that eludes
him. It will elude you also, if you happen to approach women as human beings
with complex inner lives. Malnourished as it is, even at 90 minutes, it feels
twice the length.
dir: Jerzy Skolimowski
cast: Artur Steranko, Kinga Preis, Redbad Klynstra, Jerzy Fedorowicz
FROST/NIXON
**
USA
Peter
Morgan continues his pattern of taking a well-documented historical conflict,
padding it with exposition and convincing a frightening number of people that
he has contributed something. Ron Howard may as well have been directing over
the phone and Frank Langella’s Nixon feels like one of those moderately funny
party tricks that won’t go away (or go down in volume) even after you’ve
chuckled politely, turned around and tried to start up a more productive
conversation.
dir: Ron Howard
cast: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon,
Rebecca Hall, Matthew Macfadyen, Oliver Platt, Toby Jones
FROZEN RIVER
***
USA
Melissa Leo is so down on her luck that she has to forego hair product,
transport illegal aliens across a frozen river connecting the state of New
York to Canada and participate in increasingly implausible plot contrivances
in order to make sure her movie takes you exactly where you very quickly
figure out it is going. In case you aren't entirely sure where that is,
writer-director Courtney Hunt's unremittingly dour aesthetic will give you
some extra heads-up. That said, Hunt does keep things relatively tight, the
principals are all very very good and her protagonists are afforded more
dignity than they generally get away with in festival-prize-shovelling
liberal-guilt-driven indie crossover-hopefuls.
wr/dir: Courtney Hunt
cast: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone Junior,
Michael O'Keefe, Jay Klaitz, Bernie Littlewolf
GOMORRAH
***
Italy
dir: Matteo Garrone
cast: Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco,
Vincenzo Fabricino, Vincenzo Altamura, Italo Renda
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
****½
UK
For a purportedly sunny trifle about a terminally chirpy primary school
teacher, this pastel-coloured Mike Leigh joint cranks up some remarkable
tension. Even if the film leaves an aftertaste of something airy, sweet
and authentically lovely, it's unsettling in a primal way to watch the
morbidly optimistic Sally Hawkins float from mild irritations to eerie
threats to impending fiascos. Considering her optimism is only as much a sign
of innocence as it is of desperation, to see it quashed would be devastating
to the core. With charm and subtle mastery, Hawkins walks the fine line
between irresistible and exasperating. She gets great support from an
ensemble of brilliant, beautifully orchestrated character players. The film
has an aura of honesty and lives lived without much outward fuss. Even after
the credits, it's difficult to snap out of it.
wr/dir: Mike Leigh
cast: Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Eddie Marsan, Andrea
Rieseborough, Samuel Roukin, Sinead Matthews, Kate O'Flynn, Sarah Niles,
Joseph Kloska, Karina Fernandez
HORTON HEARS A
WHO!
***½
USA
One of the happier Dr. Seuss adaptations as well as one of the warmer contemporary
cartoons about talking animals with spurts of 'attitood'. Even the
aggressively postmodern snippets like the erratic anime parody, although
jarring, are never quite grating since they're never mean-spirited. The
voice-work by an unusually well-behaved Jim Carrey and the always lovable
Steve Carell helps enormously. That said, here's hoping the
overbearing-dad-alienated-teen dynamic never becomes a cartoon subplot again.
dir: Steve Martino, Jimmy Hayward
voices: Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Seth Rogen, Will
Arnett, Isla Fisher, Dan Fogler, Amy Poehler
HUNGER
***½
UK
dir: Steve McQueen
ph: Sean Bobbitt
cast: Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Helena Bereen, Larry
Cowan, Liam Cunningham, Dennis McCambridge, Liam McMahon, Laine Megaw
I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG
***
France
dir: Philippe Claudel
cast: Kristin Scott-Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge
Hazanavicius, Laurent Grévill, Lise Ségur, Frédéric Pierrot, Jean-Claude
Arnaud, Mouss Zouheyri, Souad Mouchrik
IN BRUGES
***½
UK/USA
wr/dir: Martin McDonagh
cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clémence
Poésy, Jérémie Renier, Thekla Reuten, Jordan Prentice, Zeljko Ivanek
IRON MAN
***
USA
dir: Jon Favreau
cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges,
Terrence Howard, Leslie Bibb, Shaun Toub, Faran Tahir, Paul Bettany, Jon
Favreau
KUNG FU PANDA
***½
USA
dir: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson
voices: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane,
Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, Michael Clarke
Duncan, Wayne Knight
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
***½
Sweden
dir: Tomas Alfredson
ph: Hoyte Van Hoytema
cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl,
Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg, Ika Nord, Mikael Rahm, Karl-Robert Lindgren
LION'S DEN
***
Argentina/South
Korea/Brazil
dir: Pablo Trapero
cast: Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros, Rodrigo Santoro, Laura Garcia,
Tomás Plotinsky, Leonardo Sauma
|
LORNA'S SILENCE
***
Belgium/France/Italy/France
wr/dir: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
cast: Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban
Ukaj, Morgan Marinne, Olivier Gourmet
MAMMA MIA!
*½
UK/USA/Germany
dir: Phyllida Lloyd
cast: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski, Colin Firth,
Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgård, Amanda Seyfried, Dominic West
MAN ON WIRE
***
UK/USA
dir: James Marsh
MILK
***
USA
It's difficult to criticise this hagiography of the patron saint of gay
rights in times when said rights are taking a fresh trashing. But Harvey
Milk's legacy has nothing to do with an ensemble of earnest,
nobly-intentioned actors purging hefty chunks of exposition to try reduce an
unwieldy man's life into a two-hour running time.
That said, for as long as you're watching Sean Penn, it's as
though you're watching a much better movie. Beyond the fact that he sells the
exposition and manages a phenomenal bit of mimicry, and beyond the fact that
nothing about his posture and cadences and goofy grinning is remotely
recognisable from previous Sean Penn joints, it's always gratifying to follow
a generous, wonderfully tactile and vibrant characterisation thriving over
the my-personality-is-defined-by-a-neat-chronology-of-unceasing-dignity creed
of the biopic.
dir: Gus Van Sant
ph: Harris Savides
cast: Sean Penn, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego
Luna, Alison Pill, Victor Garber, Denis O'Hare, Joseph Cross
MOMMA'S MAN
***½
USA
wr/dir: Azazel Jacobs
cast: Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Richard Edson, Piero
Arcilesi
OF TIME AND THE CITY
****
UK
wr/dir: Terence Davies
THE ORDER OF MYTHS
***
USA
wr/dir: Margaret Brown
THE OTHER BOLEYN
GIRL
*½
USA
The Tudors get sexed up for the Gossip Girl set. And when Anne Boleyn
exchanges serene looks with her sister to imply the courts have set her free,
director Justin Chadwick craftily cuts to a wide shot to reveal - gasp! -
Anne has been sent to the scaffold instead!!
Eric Bana and his juiced up pecs play Henry VIII, Natalie
Portman is a superbitch Anne, with Scarlett Johansson as her docile sister
whose love for Luke Perry is bland and true. As ever Bana is stiff in all the
wrong parts, Johansson is her usual blank self and while Portman grapples
valiantly with a British accent and stolid period-speak, it's to little
avail.
dir: Justin Chadwick
cast: Natalie Portman, Scarlet Johansson, Eric Bana, Jim Sturgess,
Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas, David Morrissey, Ana Torrent
PRIVATE LESSONS
**½
Belgium/France
dir: Joachim Lafosse
cast: Jonas Bloquet, Jonathan Zaccaï, Claire Bodson, Yannick Renier,
Pauline Etienne
QUANTUM OF SOLACE
***
UK/USA
Dubious psychoanalysis and fluffed-up topicality have infiltrated the
superhero genre, so that now Daniel Craig has to play Jason Bourne playing
James Bond. Fortunately no one told Mathieu Amalric about the series' gloomy-sexy
revamp. It's a shame he didn't grow a moustache in time so he could twirl it
and also that no one passed him a fluffy white cat so he could stroke it. He
resurrects a brand of hysterical Eurotrash villain that I at least presumed
extinct since the 70s. He's either playing in a different movie to the rest
of the cast or he is the only one among them to pinpoint the cheap and shiny
and delightfully convoluted bit of trash hiding behind the murky hand-held
world-economy-referencing gloss.
dir: Marc Forster
cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench,
Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, David Harbour, Jesper
Christensen
RACHEL GETTING
MARRIED
****½
USA
Jonathan Demme and Jenny Lumet assemble a dysfunctional-family-sized lunatic
orgy of profoundly insulated, self-absorbed people and simmer it into a
sober, pulsing, humanist slice of Dogme. Effortlessly they secure your
patience and compassion even for several flaky personages you wouldn't
hesitate to punch in real life.
In fact, it's downright disorienting that nobody behind the
camera seems to be excoriating the Buchmans for their over-privilege and
hollow pretences to multi-culti-exoticism. But then the core of this elegant
rarity among indie dramedies that set out to wage war on contemporary
American upper-financial-bracket living isn't a collection of hipster jabs at
the expensive and irrelevant surface. It's about the multitude of often
contradictory notes that define a family dynamic. The delicate and the volatile,
the cautious and the explosive, the healing and the scarring, the generous
and the chilling: Demme, Lumet and their incandescent cast find ways to
encompass it all.
dir: Jonathan Demme
wr: Jenny Lumet
ph: Declan Quinn
ed: Tim Squyres
cast: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde
Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deveare Smith, Anisa George, Debra Winger
THE READER
**½
USA/Germany
Bernhard Schlink’s novel was a solid, moderately sophisticated,
resolutely commercial exploration of enduring German post-Holocaust guilt,
with its primary strength being its sifting of a prestige-packaged-out topic
through the repercussions of an illicit erotic attachment between a pubescent
wimp and an erratic cipher twice his age.
None of the book’s sincere questioning
or sense of time and place survives this ossified, atrociously directed
adaptation, whose chief reason for existing is several people’s ravenous
Oscar-hunger. It’s a relief that the otherwise lovely Kate Winslet finally
has hers, so that she can stop selecting parts based on their FYC-campaigns.
But the performance itself is all wrong from her first tentative spurts of a
flaky Tscherman akcent through to her insistence on emphasising the cuddly,
misunderstood simpleton behind the outwardly cold Nazi and all the way
through to her uneasy pitching of a youthful timbre against the dazzlingly
1930s-biopic-pasty aging make-up.
dir: Stephen Daldry
wr: David Hare
ph: Roger Deakins, Chris Menges
cast: Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz,
Alexandra Maria Lara
REVANCHE
***½
Austria
A credible, consummately crafted Euro art-thriller. Carefully premeditated -
and perhaps a little too precisely, since you always know exactly where it's
headed. But the scenes retain a charge all the same, largely thanks to
writer-director Götz Spielmann's sure and subtle feeling for sound and
composition and what they can reveal about things we can't necessarily see or
hear.
wr/dir: Götz Spielmann
ph: Martin Gschlacht
cast: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Ursula Strauss,
Andreas Lust, Johannes Thanheiser, Hanno Pöschl
REVOLUTIONARY
ROAD
***
USA
In order to warrant putting your name across one of the great literary works
of a given century, you have to bring to it life, something fresh - something
more. And Sam Mendes' adaptation is unquestionably something less. The
context of the harsh idyll of 1950s Connecticutt and the notion of whether
this is the culprit that has oppressed the Wheelers or whether the Wheelers
have done their own oppressing but blame only their environment: that is, the
crux of Richard Yates' wrenching novel - well, that is gone. The notion of
Frank Wheeler being prematurely shoved into marriage and his dad's job, and
of April Wheeler's life amounting to the perpetual crushing of a horrific cry
of anguish. Fractions of these do translate, and there are glimmers of an
authentic-seeming and telling dynamic between the Wheelers that hints at
something bigger and shattering, but inevitably they are something of a pale
copy. The majority of the film is pale, and also stiff.
dir: Sam Mendes
ph: Roger Deakins
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Michael
Shannon, Kathryn Hahn, David Harbour, Dylan Baker, Richard Easton, Zoe
Kazan
ROMAN POLANSKI:
WANTED AND DESIRED
***
USA
Marina Zenovich digs up the facts on the notorious case that's kept one of
the world's most hallowed living auteurs in exile from Hollywood for three
decades. She focuses mostly on the legal implications of the event (and the
surrounding media circus) and tries to distract you with half-relevant
subplots any time the moral implications come up (he's survived unfathomable
trauma! lots of people screw minors without doing jail time!). While it's
certainly engaging for the issues it tackles, her film feels somewhat minor
for the issues it skirts around.
dir: Marina Zenovich
SITA SINGS THE BLUES
***
USA
dir: Nina Paley
SLUMDOG
MILLIONAIRE
**½
UK
Life in
the slums of Mumbai is a video clip, the citizens of Mumbai communicate in
expository dialogue and when Dev Patel tenses up his face in an expression
that uncannily resembles other, lesser actors struggling to disguise their
self-consciousness at being asked to emote before a camera and a 20+ person
crew, it’s merely a sign of his time- [and logic-]defying love for an orphan
that has blossomed into the face of Estee Lauder.
dir: Danny Boyle
cast: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE
***½
USA
dir: Errol Morris
SUMMER HOURS
***
France
wr/dir: Olivier Assayas
cast:
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
****½
USA
wr/dir: Charlie Kaufman
ph: Frederick Elmes
ed: Robert Frazen
m: Jon Brion
cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Dianne
Wiest, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Stanley Krajewski, Hope Davis,
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lynn Cohen
THREE MONKEYS
***
Turkey/France/Italy
dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
ph: Gökhan Tiryaki
cast: Yavuz Bingol, Hatice Aslan, Rifat Sungar, Ercan Kesal, Cafer
Köse, Gürkan Aydin
TROPIC THUNDER
***
USA
dir: Ben Stiller
cast: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Nick Nolte,
Steve Coogan, Jay Baruchel, Brandon T. Jackson, Tom Cruise, Matthew
McConaughey, Brandon Soo Hoo, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Reggie Lee, Trieu
Tran
TULPAN
****
Kazakhstan/Germany/Poland/Russia/Switzerland
dir: Sergei Dvortsevoy
cast: Tolepbergen Baisalakov, Ondas Besikbasov, Samal Esljamova, Ashkat
Kuchencherekov, Bereke Turganbayev
24 CITY
***½
China/Hong
Kong/Japan
dir: Jia Zhang Ke
cast: Chen Jianbin, Joan Chen, Lü Liping, Zhao Tao
VICKY CRISTINA
BARCELONA
****
USA
Even at their most piercing, Woody Allen's nervous fantasias romanticised
every chunk of grit and ethnicity out of New York, so it's not unsettling
that he sets this breezy cynical jaunt in a Barcelona straight out of a
Lonely Planet guide. Even if the settings feel vaguely inauthentic (since you
get the sense this isn't by accident, you can still suck in all their
touristy splendour without feeling guilty), the same can't be said about the
neuroses.
Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, an annihilating Penélope Cruz and
an out-of-her-league Scarlett Johansson exchange fluids in a heightened
rom-com key, but there is a deft, acute seventy-something-year-old
orchestrating their shenanigans, with his mind on something real and
fascinating. As for those pesky, inevitable cries of misogyny, they seem
particularly out of place in this study of a thinking and layered woman with
a conscience scrounging to keep afloat in a [unisex] sea of charming idiots.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
ph: Javier Aguirresarobe
cast: Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penélope
Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, Christopher Evan Welch
WALL·E
****
USA
The title is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class, and
it refers to a lonely, diminutive cross between E.T. and Chaplin's Tramp,
only ten times more adorable and a robot. For the most part, the Pixar team
eschew dialogue, and with it the stale snark and pandering that plagues much
of contemporary animation. Their film is as imaginative, melancholy-joyous
and entrancing as anything since at least Toy Story 2, and what's more, in
theatres at least, it is preceded by Presto, the most ingenious piece
of animation (forgive all this hyperbole) since the Looney Tunes.
dir: Andrew Stanton
wr: Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter
cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, John
Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
****
Israel/Germany/France/USA
wr/dir: Ari Folman
WENDY AND LUCY
***
USA
dir: Kelly Reichardt
cast: Michelle Williams, Walter Dalton, Will Patton, John
Robinson, Will Oldham, Larry Fessenden
THE WRESTLER
****
USA
dir: Darren Aronofsky
wr: Robert D. Siegel
ph: Maryse Alberti
cast: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Mark
Margolis, Todd Barry, Wass Stevens, Judah Friedlander, Ernest Miller
|