Cross And Bothered

Antichrist, Odeon Telford, Tuesday October 6 2009, 8pm.

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009) is an everyday story of love, death, sex, grief, psychotherapy and genital mutilation. Not exactly obvious material for a date movie, then, and if that night's performance was anything to go by not the sort of movie of any kind for about 90% of moviegoers: several walked out, and there was a lot of sighing, snoring, giggling and tutting throughout. Come the closing credits and a dedication to legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky leads one disgruntled punter to chunter 'he should be shot!'. Which was a bit harsh on a poor fellow who's been dead fifteen years!

The film features a therapist (Willem Dafoe) and a writer (Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to come to terms with their grief when their young son falls out of a window to his death while they have sex against a washing machine. Defoe's character breaks his own professional beliefs by trying to treat his wife himself, leading to the couple confronting nature and their own natures in a secluded retreat in the woods.

(The trailer below contains contentious themes and simulated sex so is NOT WORK SAFE)



Antichrist isn't a conventional horror film, although its' isolated, claustrophobic atmosphere, and focus on the (mental and physical) violence that men and women do to each other and unto themselves, not to mention the supernatural overtones that envelop the second half of the film, ultimately gives it the feel of being one, even though it's a million miles removed from crass contemporary franchises in the medium.

The film is worth sticking with, despite some scenes which seem to have been deliberately rendered boring, some clumsy exposition here and there and occasionally unconvincing effects. This is mainly because at least it's a film that's actually about something, even if its own conclusions seem muddled and potentially offensive (ie. is it a film about misogyny that ultimately becomes mysogynistic?), and also because it's often beautiful to watch, the performances from Dafoe and Gainsbourg match their director for bravery, and the breathtaking audacity of what unspools leave you genuinely uncertain what Von Trier will come up with next. A film, ultimately, that has to be seen to be believed, even though 9 out of 10 of you hepcats will probably prefer the taste of something else entirely.

The Strife Of Brian

The Damned United, Odeon Telford, Monday April 13 2009, 8.45pm.

The makers of The Damned United decided that David Peace's dark brilliant fictionalisation of Brian Clough's doomed 44 day tenure as gaffer of 'dirty Leeds' clearly wanted bloody shooting, despite the structural difficulties of filming a novel that was driven by an increasingly despairing and hugely controversial internal monologue.

Lacking privy to Clough's imagined personal thoughts but having access to TV footage from the time, the film seems a little more factual and even-handed than Peace's book, and what is lost in terms of stylised psychological torment is replaced by a stronger focus on the on-off relationship between Clough and his assistant manager and scouting genius Peter Taylor.

The resulting film is not without its flaws (erratic casting in the supporting parts and slight tendency to sentimentalise being the major contributing factors to an occasionally uneven feel) but remains a highly entertaining addition to the footie film canon, with an astonishing recreation of Clough by the ubiquitous Michael Sheen and strong supporting turns by Timothy Spall as Taylor and Jim Broadbent as Cloughie's Derby chairman making this compulsive viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the green-jumpered gaffer.

Today My Heart Swings

Two Lovers, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Wednesday April 1 2009, 3pm.

Joaquin Phoenix's final role before his apparent personal meltdowndecision to make a career as a rapper, sees him play a bipolar dry cleaning assistant in his family business whose repeated suicide attempts are interrupted when he becomes part of a love triangle with two women - Vinessa Shaw's decent but predictable Sandra and Gwyneth Paltrow's flaky blonde neighbour Michelle. Phoenix swings between the two as rapidly as his moods change, but who will he ultimately choose? Or will the choice be taken out of his hands?

Director James Gray has made his name as director of dour but impressive thrillers (The Yards, We Own The Night) and in Two Lovers he retains his keen sense of milieu, familial ties and character study but elects to remove the crime out of the melodrama this time around. Whether this strategy is entirely successful will possibly depend on personal taste, with the film at times resembling a Hitchcock movie minus the murder but focussing on the mystery of an erotic erratic blonde whom neither the male lead or the audience truly get a grip on during the film's duration.

The result is a gloomy meditation on life, love and laundry that offers an almost fatalistic feel to its' resolution. And yet, despite this palpable lack of romance and thrills, Gray's film manages to charm through its' own resolute seriousness, aided by some powerful performances by Phoenix and Paltrow, and a determination from all involved not to patronise the audience with pat platitudes. But if Two Lovers stiffs at the box office, don't be too surprised if dead bodies start littering the doom and gloom of Gray's next venture.

Fertile Imagination

Puffball (directed by Nicolas Roeg), available on R2 DVD via Yume Pictures, 120mins.

In Nic Roeg's comeback film Puffball, the seemingly ubiquitous Kelly Reilly plays an ambitious architect who buys a rundown building in a remote Irish valley to transform and renovate. A spot of alfresco rumpty-pumpty later, she falls pregnant, much to the consternation of a neighbouring family who for reasons unknown other than their own belligerence and stupidity feel the unborn child belongs to them. Cue all sorts of nonsense involving dodgy wine, a glowing ball and an impenetrable cameo by Donald Sutherland.

A self-styled 'thriller about love, life, grief and sex', re-uniting director Roeg with star Donald Sutherland, it's not difficult to assume Puffball's backers were hoping for some of the magic of Don't Look Now to rub off on this latest project. While there's enough of Roeg's skills in evidence to just about keep the interest flowing through its' overlong 2hr running time, this latest tale of life, death and architecture, based on a Fay Weldon story, lacks the satisfying structure that made his earlier work such compelling viewing. The result is a vaguely beguiling misfire, mainly of interest to people keen on following the director's career, although to be fair that should include pretty much everybody with a regard for intelligent, handsome cinema.

Ring Stings

The Wrestler, Odeon Telford, Saturday January 17 2009, 3pm.

Mickey Rourke's drift from 80s sex symbol to bloated, washed-up self-parody finds possibly deliberate parallels with the story arc of Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, a big star in the hair-metal days now going through choreographed motions to dwindling numbers in Darren Aranofsky's The Wrestler (2008). This duality adds an extra level of pathos as the audience roots for The Ram to overcome the many obstacles (advancing years, worsening health, dysfunctional personal life) in the way of making his last redeeming shot of a return to the big-time.

Although the movie has been derided in some quarters as 'a poor man's Rocky', Aranofsky films proceedings in a downbeat documentary style that helps offset any tendencies to sentimentality the plot setup might offer. Aside from Rourke's colossal performance the film's other main strength is that no scene seems wasted, telling little details and nuances littering every shot. A hardcore underground wrestling bout in which Rourke and his combatant set at each other with various hardware items is an instant classic and if your life wouldn't be complete without seeing someone stab Rourke's face with a fork before attacking his chest with a staplegun then The Wrestler is definitely must-see entertainment.

Two other scenes that stand out take place on a deli counter where Randy works weekends during his retirement. His first day on the counter offers a brilliant example of how to make the best of a bad job, his initial consternation when faced with having to recommend the best type of smoked ham giving way to a more relaxed, humourous style as he finds the showman from within. Later in the film and during his darkest moments, Randy somehow rediscovers his mojo and quits his job in spectacular, riotous and predictably bloody fashion.

Much more than just a high-concept sports movie, The Wrestler feels like a tribute to what Iain Dowie once memorably dubbed 'bouncebackability'. The film never once shies away from the more unpleasant aspects of life or indeed the many flaws of its hero, but finds a savage nobility, something to warm to, something to root for, in Randy's erratic but stubborn striving for purpose, connection and redemption in the most unpromising of circumstances. Like many of the best movies, it leaves itself equally open to interpretation as a comedy or tragedy, and is all the better for that.

Robert DeNiro's Tailgating

Righteous Kill, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Sunday October 5 2008, 3.45pm.

Although they've shared screenbilling twice previously (in Godfather Part 2 and Heat) Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino for the first time share considerable amount of actual screentime in Jon Avnet's Righteous Kill. Turns out just as well that the movie has this USP going for it, as much else in the film seems sufficiently second-hand you find yourself looking for the name of Knock-off Nigel on the end credits.

The living screen legends play veteran NYPD detectives buddied up with a younger pair (the perennially under-used John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) to track down a serial killer. When the evidence starts piling up it seems increasingly likely that one of their number is the perp, the undertow of paranoia and recrimination not helped by an apparent love/lust triangle between DeNiro, Leguizamo and a kinky colleague (Carla Gugino, the unlikely recipient of a partially-seen rear-end pounding from Bobby).

The leads work hard at keeping the tension sufficiently charged to carry the audience through to a seemingly-rushed conclusion, but director Avnet's attempts at flashy direction (quick cuts, wonky camerawork, disorientating time shifts) and the gimmicky casting of Fiddy Cent in a supporting role fails to persuade that this is anything other than a straight-to-DVD plot made entertaining and watchable by the high-wattage star turns from the screen heavyweights.

The Strife Of Reilly

Eden Lake, Odeon Telford, Tuesday September 16 2008, 6.30pm.

A weekend break in the secluded beautyspot Eden Lake for Kelly Reilly's primary school teacher and her buff diver boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) gains nightmarish proportions when they become terrorised by a feral mob of local youths. James Watkins' thriller adopts the classic trick of using familiar horror movie tropes to address contemporary social concerns, in this case anti-social behaviour, knife culture, dangerous dogs and general all-round 'chav' fear.

The result is nasty, brutish and short, but nevertheless, in all senses, a bloody good film. The combo of social realism and intense, hyperdriven violence is an awkward one to pull off, but Watkins manages it superbly through ramping up the suspense and terror an extra level at judicious points. The film is also ably served by a starmaking turn from curvaceous ingenue Reilly, who manages to look magnificent even after being fully dunked in a tank of shit, and makes the audience care enough to carry them through to the heartstopping climax.

Grace Bothers

Savage Grace, Electric Cinema, Birmingham, Saturday July 26 2008, 4.30pm.

CAUTION: CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS.

This is your intrepid inquisitor's first visit to the Electric Cinema since it was re-opened to much blogging hullabuloo a few years back. It's now touted as the oldest operating cinema in the UK, and it is a grand building, although your long-in-the-tooth loafer remembers it rather differently in its' Tivoli guise in the 80s, when it was considered something of a sleazepit where we made furtive forays to see B-movies like James B Harris' Cop and Craig R Baxley's criminally-under-rated Action Jackson. Visiting the cinema now feels a much more welcoming, middle-brow experience, with plush sofas; pretty, friendly box-office staff and a silver spoon to go with your white chocolate and raspberry ice-cream.

Tom Kalin's Savage Grace is the cinematic fare this afternoon, a film that is apparently attempting to re-construct the events leading up to the savage murder of a socialite by her troubled young son in 1972 London. The film is pretty to look at and mostly watchable, contains some strong performances (notably Moore as the doomed diva) but has too many serious flaws to be considered a success. Any film of such relatively short length is going to suffer from the episodic structure imposed on it here, leaving the viewer to struggle to get their teeth into the filletted fare on offer, and as a psychological study it's a non-starter as we're left none the wiser at the end of the film why the son takes the knife to his mother then calmly orders a Chinese.

Wikipedia's references to the real-life case would suggest that the film has played fast-and-loose with many of the facts of the case, something that would have made more sense if it had made the story more interesting not less. As it is, Kalin has made a film that brings to mind past movies like Mommie Dearest; Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?; The Sheltering Sky and Ma Mere, but only serves to highlight their relative superiority to the shallow showboating on offer here. Although any film that reacquaints us with elfin curveball Elena Anaya from Sex and Lucia ain't all bad so gracias for that.

Related link: Moore happy to embarrass kids.

E Gore

Donkey Punch, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Tuesday June 22 2008, 7pm.

Who knew that Eli Roth's Hostel, in which hormonal Westerners are butchered abroad for their unethical behaviour, would be the single most influential film of the latter part of this decade? Goes to show that if you make a cheap film that brings in huge profits and critical kudos you instantly create a template for others to follow. Oliver Blackburn's Donkey Punch at least comes to the slightly different and entirely reasonable conclusion: Brits aboard are (quite literally) their own worst enemy.

So we have three girls from Leeds abroad on holiday hooking up with a British crew of likely lairy lads on a luxury yacht. Ecstasy and hardcore Russian drugs leads to orgiastic ecstasy and softcore sex, until things take a sudden swerve to the worse when the titular sex act leaves one of the participants in the fleshy fivesome experiencing the 'petit mort' a little too literally for everyone's comfort. It's then every lad and ladette for themselves as the bodycount piles up amidst recriminations, cover-ups and sheer lunatic bloody-mindedness.

Donkey Punch has been described as a kind of Dead Calm for the Ibiza set, benefitting from a decent soundtrack that includes Parallax View faves The Knife and Peter Bjorn and John. While there are numerous faults (banal, seemingly semi-improvised dialogue, wavering performance levels, all-over-the-place plot structure), some of these weaknesses actually help Donkey Punch overcome the main danger in making this type of movie: formulaic predictability. The result is a bloody mess from just about any perspective, but remains gripping, stylish entertainment, different from the norm but not so out-there that people won't get it, and seems destined for cult status when it finds its natural home on DVD.

Summer Night City

Richard Prince: Continuations @Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London, Sunday June 29 2008, 11am.
Female Agents, Odeon Covent Garden, Sunday June 29 2008, 6.25pm.

Spent the first weekend in a while down in London, the first couple of days mainly taken with meeting up with and getting to know a certain voluptuous Brazilian online friend of mine, who, amongst other things, introduced me to the delights of pacoquinha, an intensely sweet hit of peanut taste textured somewhere between biscuit and fudge, good with tea or coffee as long as long as you have a sweet tooth!

Sunday represented an opportunity to soak up some culture, and went along to see the Richard Prince exhibition Continuations at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. Prince may be best known to alt.music fans for providing the striking sleeve art to Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse, but, although there were a few of his nurse paintings included, as well as a drumhead autographed by Thurston, Kim and Lee from SY, the exhibition presented a broader overview of his work that spans over four decades.

Just as the nurse pictures are appropriated images from pulp novel covers subverted and fetishised by Prince, much of the rest of his work involves customising found objects such as car hoods, and in one stunning case, an entire Buick adorned with objectified images of naked women. Elsewhere, there are a series of photographs of cowboys and biker chicks, and Prince isn't even beyond appropriating other peoples' jokes, with stylised paintings featuring looped one-liner gags. The result is an impressive, arresting collection worth a half-hour's browse for anyone in London with an interest in modern art.

Then headed off on the District Line to Brick Lane, where visited Rough Trade East for the first time, renewed my taste for octopus, wine and chocolate dessert at a tapas festival and wandered into 93 Feet East where there was supposed to be an all-dayer happening, but found no punters to be seen or music to be heard!

A quick change at the hotel later and then into the West End to see Female Agents, which follows in the sly, saucy footsteps of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book by looking at the derring-do of undercover female resistance agents in World War Two. In this case, Sophie Marceau's crackshot recruits/conscripts some dodgy distaff divas into the SOE's female operative branch (known as, we shit ye not, FANY) to distract the Nazis in France long enough for them to help the escape of an Allied geologist doing important groundwork paving the way for D-Day.

It's fairly derivate stuff, suffering from some erratic levels of characterisation that means you don't always care as much during episodes of jeopardy as perhaps you ought, but it says much for the zip of the production and the committed performances from the game, gallic cast that, despite some obvious flaws, the resulting film manages to be thrilling and poignant for the most part, particularly recommended for filmgoers with equal levels of passion for wartime heroics and the female form.

Turned out to be a bad time of it for Germans all round, as got back to the pub beneath the hotel in time to watch the second half of the Euro2008 final in which Spain vanquished the 1996 champions 1-0 to become worthy winners of a surprisingly entertaining competition, a particularly welcome result given that many of the bar's patrons seemed to be Spanish or Portugese speakers.

Memories Of A Geezer

Flashbacks Of A Fool, Odeon Telford, Saturday April 19 2008, 2.45pm.

CAUTION: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS.

In Baillie Walsh's Flashbacks Of A Fool Daniel Craig plays a washed-up Hollywood star who's woken up by his housemaid (Eve, in a breakthrough bit of casting for a black woman) after a coke-and-hookers orgy and wonders where it all went wrong. Thanks to the titular flashbacks to his youth we find it all started with a few quick schoolboy bangs with Jodhi May's bored, busty housewife that lead to a more explosive climax elsewhere. Discussing where the movie went tits-up, however, may take slightly longer to explain.

The film is pretty to look at, but is dreadfully dull for the most part, and some strong, serviceable performances are often hamstrung by the fact that too much screentime is given to characters that don't move the plot forward while pivotal parts are marginalised to the extent that the whole story premise is fatally undermined. Aside from Jodhi May and a striking Felicity Jones as the glam racket-loving schooldays sweetheart, few come out of the film with any credit, which often looks like a vanity project to enable British actors like Mark Strong and Emilia Fox to showcase their American accents, and sees producer/star Craig packing more wood in his performance than he does inside his tight-fitting trunks. Indeed, just thinking about Flashbacks Of A Fool in any detail is enough to induce Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in any mug punter silly enough to part with their hard-earned six quid for this flat farrago. A word to the wise, then: avoid.

Mister Derrick

There Will Be Blood, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Wednesday March 5 2008, 4.45pm.

The last time we remember cinema looking into what happens when a prospector strikes lucky, Nicolas Roeg's neglected masterpiece Eureka (1983) asked the question: what happens when a man gets everything he wants? In contrast to Gene Hackman's self-made man Jack ('I've Never Made A Nickel From Another Man's Sweat') McCann in that film, however, Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Painview in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2008) is less a rounded personality than a physical manifestation of the will to power, a relentless one-man force of capitalist growth that can never by definition be satiated. Plainview is portrayed as a virtually sexless man, with only the vaguest yearnings for family bonding occasionally softening his edge, who seeks to impose his masculinity on the earth through his big fuck-off drills that are ultimately superceded by his big fuck-off pipeline that pulses and disseminates his oil.

Religion, in the shape of Paul Dano's preacher Eli, attempts to establish a moral conscience on Plainview, but succeeds only in nipping at his ankles, a nuisance too easily swatted away because you can never bullshit a bullshitter with total success, and the man-of-the-cloth's lies, hypocrisy and greed are all too easily seen through by the prospector for whom the truth is never acknowledged or spoken if there's any chance of it hindering profit and progress.

In many ways There Will Be Blood should have won the Best Film Oscar along with the Best Actor nod for Daniel Day-Lewis. It's rare indeed that a film with one such dominant role could reverberate with such political and historical resonance, and you could boil this movie down for eternity and still not find an ounce of fat - everything you see and hear serves a purpose of exposition, and that's even more scarce during a 150-min. running time. But given that There Will Be Blood holds up a mirror to the lies and corruption that helped lay the foundations of modern California, perhaps it's not so surprising that the Hollywood heirarchy found the Coen Brothers' admittedly marvellous but nevertheless relatively unfocused No Country For Old Men a more palatable prospect.

Hell Is Other People

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday February 2, 2008, 1.10pm.

Sidney Lumet may now be an octegenarian, but the opening scene in his latest film Before The Devil Knows You're Dead featuring the doughy gluteus maximus of Philip Seymour Hoffman as he gives a rear-end pounding to a very naked Marisa Tomei, reveals the veteran director has no intention of his work growing old gracefully.

Hoffman plays a real estate accountant in need of a cash injection in the light of an upcoming IRS audit, his various drug addictions and an escape plan to head off to Rio with his stunning wife (the aforementioned Tomei). He enlists his younger brother (Ethan Hawke), who is better looking but similarly cash-strapped, to rob a 'Mom and Pop' jewellery store and clear their debts. The Mom and Pop store he has in mind is their own parents' (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) but the family betrayal doesn't end there as his younger brother is also banging his wife behind his back. The 'victimless crime' with 'no guns' predictably gets bungled and Mom gets fatally wounded in the melee. Pop sets out to find out whodunnit, uncovering some messy family business in the process.

Lumet returns to the heist-gone-wrong genre he pretty much nailed down in 'Dog Day Afternoon' back in the day, but whereas the film's seedy lowlife feel definitely gives off a 70s vibe, the time-sequence shifts, multiple points-of-view and brisk, racy pacing manage to maintain a contemporary edge. Hoffman is superb as the troubled eldest son more in need of counselling than heroin, particularly in a scene where he explodes in frustration driving home after his mother's funeral. Ethan Hawke really disappears into his character as the shifty younger brother, all nervous tics and rat's teeth, light years from his earlier, cockier roles, while Albert Finney is mostly subdued until the veritably eye-popping climax. Marisa Tomei is also on good form and in great shape, but the script poorly serves her character who in effect is used as little more than a sperm repository for the two bungling brothers.

The film is less misogynistic, than it is misanthropic, with 'life is evil' and 'there's no telling what people will do for money' being two messages the Albert Finney character learns all too late in proceedings. The underwritten female roles aside, however, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead makes for great Saturday Night entertainment with potent ingredients of violence, sex, drugs and plot twists masterfully concocted by Lumet into a tense, thoughtful thriller of note.

Chigurh Hit

No Country For Old Men, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday January 26 2007, 12.15.

Set in Rio Grande in 1980, The Coen Brothers' multi-award nominated No Country For Old Men features Josh Brolin as a local ne'er-do-well Vietnam vet who stumbles upon a grisly crime scene and makes off with 2 million dollars worth of drug money. Soon on his trail are some murderous Mexicans, a cocksure Woody Harrelson and a taciturn hitman with a cattle gun and ridiculous Three Stooges moptop haircut called Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem). 'It's a real mess, ain't it' states the deputy to Tommy Lee Jones' lawman, who drawls in reply, 'Well, if it ain't, it'll sure do 'til the real mess comes along'. The real mess duly obliges.

The first two thirds of this movie represents Hollywood's finest slam-dunk thriller dynamics since Scorcese's The Departed, a straightforward enough chase set-up offering up a memorable river pursuit, elaborate survivalist stunts and an explosive shootout that had your jaded jobbing-blogger jumping in his seat not once, not twice, but three times in a sequence that had the old pacemaker working overtime. So far, so exciting then, but the film slowly but surely shows its hand as having something more on its mind than mere multiplex mayhem, emerging as something of a meditation on mortality and a requiem for decency seen through the fearful eyes of a never-before-more-vulnerable looking Tommy Lee Jones' lawman. This knockout combination of visceral thrills and metaphysical dread, heightened by the Coens' trademark black humour and an odd but undeniably stunning turn by Bardem as 'the messenger of fate' marks out No Country For Old Men as a genuinely terrific must-see masterpiece.

Comma Chameleon

Lust, Caution: Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday January 12 2008, 4.40pm.

Just as Paul Schrader's tricksy political thriller The Walker (2007, out as of last week on DVD) begins with a genteel game of cards, Ang Lee's erotically-charged spy story Lust, Caution has a lengthy opening scene featuring a game of Mahjong, an inscrutable pastime which seems to be a kind of combination of Yahtzee and Dungeons and Dragons played with small slabs that resemble white chocolate Bendick's Mingles.

Set in Japanese-occupied Shangai during World War Two, nothing is quite what it seems underneath the civilised veneer of small-talk and drawing-room games. The importer's wife introduced to the gentleman of the house Mr Yee (played by Tony Leung) is a poor player of Mahjong for the reason she's too busy concentrating on keeping up her cover to study the nuances of the game, as the film's flashback structure reveals her to be a young actress hired to seduce the high-ranking collaborator and lead him towards his assassination.

Mr Yee, however, is an understandably cautious man, and there's plenty of human chess moves, not to mention betrayal and bloodshed, before the film's well-publicised explicit sex scenes explode upon the screen. The result is a slow-burning pot-boiler with plenty to reward the patient viewer, not least the two lead performances. Relative unknown Tang Wei is bewitching both as the radical student and troubled spy lost in lust with her smouldering prey, while Tony Leung impressively conveys the brooding passion beneath his character's buttoned-up exterior with a quiet, dignified subtlety that helps raise the material above mere melodrama.

Parallax View Films Of The Year 2007

Our pick of what we saw that was released in cinemas for the first time in UK in 2007.

1. CONTROL (directed by Anton Corbijn)
2. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)
3. Zodiac (David Fincher)
4. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
5. Dans Paris (Christophe Honore)
6. Hallam Foe (David Mackenzie)
7. The Lives Of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmark)
8. The Walker (Paul Schrader)
9. Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick)
10. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Serious Moonlight

We Own The Night, Odeon Telford, Saturday December 15 2007, 3.45pm.

It's already been noted that James Gray's We Own The Night is a kind of Godfather in reverse, with Joaquin Phoenix as a hedonistic nightclub owner fast-tracked into the family cop business to right a wrong and settle a crime war. The presence of Robert Duvall as the plain-speaking patriarch reinforces the 70s feel, while the soundtrack (Blondie; Bowie's Let's Dance and Coati Mundi!) is early 80s Studio 54 chic, so it's slightly disconcerting to find the film's purported setting is a 1988 New York where an influx of a new wave of drugs from Eastern Europe sees top cop Mark Wahlberg (still wearing that ridiculous side-parting from The Departed) coaxing his errant brother into helping in The War On Drugs. Initially, the bon viveur just says no, but when bro gets mown down outside his home, Phoenix rises to the occasion.

Aside from having amoral Russians with dodgy haircuts cast as the villains of the piece, writer/director Gray's picture seems almost determinedly unfashionable with a slowish pace and uncompromising seriousness unlikely to sit well with younger viewers. We Own The Night may be indebted to 70s policiers but crucially lacks the cinematic sweep and social realism that distinguished and enlivened the genre films of that era. But if the movie more closely resembles a better-than-average Kojak episode that's not to say there isn't plenty to like here. Phoenix has piled on some pounds for the role but has never looked so comfortable in his skin on screen before, while a car chase sequence in the driving rain manages the near-impossible feat of seeming fresh, vivid and genuinely in-the-moment.

And any film that starts with Eva Mendes feeling herself up to Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass' can't be all bad. Phoenix joins her on the sofa, only for their coitus to get interruptus, so we guess it's a case of from whacking off to Joaquin off?

All Milla, No Filler

Resident Evil: Extinction, Odeon Telford, Wednesday October 31 2007, 6.10pm.

Whatever you might think about zombie movies, it's the genre that refuses to stay dead. Despite the critical kicking the first two films in the Resident Evil computer game spin-off series received, the third installment is now upon us, with Highlander director Russell Mulcahy jumping aboard to try to breathe new life into his own stalling career.

While Mulcahy's films aren't often remembered for their intelligence, cultural significance and socio-political insight, one thing he can normally be relied upon is to deliver retina-scorching cinematic sweep, and true to form he delivers with the shit-kicking action taking place in post-apocalyptic desert vistas that sometimes recall the Mad Max pictures (although in place of Tina Turner, we get Ashanti - progress of sorts, we guess).

The result is a bright, glossy, sexy piece of entertainment which eschews pretension in favour of the superficial thrills of Milla Jovovich slicing and dicing zombies while wearing a wide range of wet and clingy outfits. For once, we have a zombie film that's quite happy to admit it's mindless fun, and this refreshing change allied to the stunning visuals gives more enjoyment than the hipper, edgier stylings of 28 Weeks Later. Milla's tale's worth following.

Russian Ruffians

Eastern Promises, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday October 27 2007, 6.10pm.

Let's get the trivia out of the way first: Eastern Promises is the first film that David Cronenberg has directed outside of his home country Canada. It also re-unites him with his A History Of Violence leading man Viggo Mortensen in a tale set amongst the bloc-rocking beasts of Russian mobsters running amok in a gangland war in London.

Brummie Steven Knight's screenplay eschews potential topical twists of football-club takeovers and atomic dust cappuccino sprinklings for the more old-school thrills of knives, tattoos and family loyalty. The use of set-pieces such as barber-shop throat-slittings and bath-house brawls threaten to plunge the project into mundane, anachronistic territory but the film is salvaged by the usual stylistic sang-froid Cronenberg delivers to the gory violence, and another iconic performance from Mortensen. The latter relishes a role which gives him the opportunity to display both physical and moral superiority while beating and stabbing the shit out of everyone who dares cross his path, recalling the stoic splendour of a Charles Bronson or Burt Lancaster in their pomp as he does so.

Naomi Watts, on the other hand, is an actress you'd consider destined to play a memorable role in a Cronenberg film, but this isn't it as she tries hard but gets lost in a thankless role of a curious and compassionate midwife that's the kind of one-dimensional ingenue turn she should by rights have left behind her after Mulholland Dr.. This under-written role and the sparsity of memorable whip-smart dialogue works against a film which manages to keep the interest going throughout, sparks into genuine excitement here and there, but lacks the clean, formal brilliance of its predecessor A History Of Violence.

Nic's 'Snatch' Not Quite Up To Scratch

The Invasion, Odeon Telford, Saturday October 13 2007, 1pm.

Why bother going to see a fourth screen adaptation of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers? Good question, and one which the makers of The Invasion (2007) seek to answer by placing it in the milieu of a post-Iraq America beset by a curious combination of paranoia and self-loathing, acutely agitated by the prospect of enemies within yet troubled by their own violent tendencies revealed as they defend through offence.

In fact, the film-makers busy themselves so much in justifying the remake in terms of topical relevance, referencing not just Iraq several times but also the break-up of the Soviet Bloc, the use of anti-depressants to flatline emotions and the near-pornographic fetish for 24/7 news saturation that other, equally crucial elements to make the film come alive are fatally neglected. Namely, there's an acute shortage of credible romance, thrills or suspense. The lack of chemistry between an often uncomfortable Nicole Kidman and a worryingly wooden Daniel Craig is worthy of a sci-fi investigation in itself, the tension never quite builds to anything you might call excitement and the action sequences barely rise above competent and fail at any stage to quicken the pulse.

Still, at least Nicole Kidman remains easy on the eye, and even though her blonde bob, bleached visage, pinched nose and heavily arched eyebrows make her so unrecognisable from the freckle-faced redhead who made such an impact in Dead Calm that it might suggest a bodysnatching exercise worthy of a thriller plot in itself, it's reassuring to know she still looks good running around in a range of tight-fitting tops whilst in deadly peril. Yet if it seems harsh in this day and age to criticise an action blockbuster for having too many ideas in its head to concentrate properly on the staple action dynamics, no thrills + no suspense = nobody paying at the box-office in this or any other known universe.