mainlymovies

2011's best films not made in 2011

2012-01-10T11:09:00.003Z

I inaugurated this feature last year, and here it is again, by popular demand: the thirty best films I saw for the first time in rep, or screened myself, over the last twelve months. (Thanks are due again to Masters of Cinema, the BFI, Freeview's more enterprising programmers, the British silent film festival, the Criterion Collection, San Sebastián, and all the friends I saw these with, especially Maxie Szalwinska.)

1. The Ballad of Narayama (Shohei Imamura, 1983) A+
2. Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945) A
3. The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924) A

4. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932) A

5. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928) A–

6. La peau douce (François Truffaut, 1964) A–
7. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955) A–
8. Pavement Butterfly (Richard Eichberg, 1929) A–
9. Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1982) A–

10. My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988) A–

11. The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977) A–

12. Far From the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967) A–

13. Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais, 1968) A–
14. Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924) A–
15. Cria Cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975) A–
16. Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985) A–

17. A Summer's Tale (Eric Rohmer, 1996) A–

18. Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, 1985) A–

19. Profound Desires of the Gods (Shohei Imamura, 1968) B+

20. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (John S. Robertson, 1920) B+

21. Peau d'âne (Jacques Demy, 1970) B+

22. Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951) B+

23. La collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967) B+

24. Liebestraum (Mike Figgis, 1990) B+
25. Cœur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923) B+
26. Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh, 1980) B+

27. Queen Kelly (Erich von Stroheim, 1932) B+
28. Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowksi, 1970) B+
29. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984) B+
30. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965) B+

2011: My Top Ten

2011-12-26T23:37:00.001Z

1. Margaret
2. Weekend
3. The Tree of Life
4. A Separation
5. Bombay Beach
6. Tomboy
7. Tuesday, After Christmas
8. Snowtown
9. Senna
10. Love Like Poison

LFF: updated guidance

2011-10-10T18:16:00.019+01:00

SLEEPING SICKNESS

Current tally: 40

360 (D) Hammerhead thesis — sex compromises! — woven into by-the-numbers anomie quilt. Whole cast might as well be in bad wig and raincoat

50/50 (C+) Overproud of its cancercom "bravery", esp when all diagnosis/treatment played for schtick. Central pairing does tickle and touch

LAS ACACIAS (B) Simple and strong, in rich tradition of Argentinian road movies. A lovely debut

ALPS (B+) Might have been hallucinating, but nervy and suggestive in all the ways I'd hoped. Can't wait for a second go-round

AMERICANO (C+) Suffers TTAC (total third act collapse) after decent first hour. Plenty good to look at, and I've never liked Hayek more

THE ARTIST (B+) Pure pleasure, luminously charming, and melancholy about its ever-shifting medium. Not wild about the music

THE AWAKENING (C–) Love old-school spookery but this snoozes on job. Stiffer than it is elegant, succumbing to coy hysteria and batty reveals

BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 (B+) Hard to fail with footage this great, and fail they don't. A sequential scrapbook: more fury than filth

CARNAGE (C) Brittle and dwindling, a crabbiness convention hitting oddly flat highs. Play already a relic, like out-of-print art catalogue

A CAT IN PARIS (C+) Perfectly diverting, even if undercooked design and ho-hum story elements cap your enthusiasm

CORIOLANUS (B–) A jaggedly functional read on the play; contemporising hits and misses, but Redgrave is awesome

CORPO CELESTE (B+) Faith at a low ebb, a priest who's given up, and a young girl choosing her own rites of passage. Hums with unruly life

DARK HORSE (D+) Listless schlubcom, unredeemed by half-ironic empathy, and this from someone who usually has time for Solondz

DARWIN (B) Not quite BOMBAY BEACH, but dustily eccentric community doc with the flavour of mad home brew. Pop 35 Nevada shantytowns FTW

THE DEEP BLUE SEA (B) Velvety, classical staging, terrific Weisz performance, a slight air of Davies falling back on old devices

THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD (B–) Marston's story of Albanian blood-feud feels a little dutiful and box-ticking, but it's certainly not bad

THE FUTURE (C+) Hemlock for many, and often exasperating, but some ideas do stick

HERE (C–) Cartography-as-metaphor comes off as studenty as it sounds; experimental inserts feel, well, inserted. And loooong

THE HOUSE (C) Composed with skill, but ruthlessly on-the-nose in its symbols and conflicts

HUT IN THE WOODS (B–) Didn't need such a dungeon-dim look, but brave & quite affecting, like Andrew Kötting with a gentler hair shirt

LAST WINTER (B–) Shivery lensing plunges you into the Hardy-esque setting, but protag and his plight remain frustratingly opaque

LIKE CRAZY (C+) Tender, plausible, but no lift-off: it's too hung up on the glum practicalities of across-the-pond dating. Jones good

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (B+) Sculpted in shards, unnerving in both timeframes. A brittle thing, but woozily accomplished. Olsen rivets

NATURAL SELECTION (C) Matt O'Leary scores, but Rachael Harris' biological stepmom is a tiresome main character. All a bit rotely Sundancey

NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU (POUPOUPIDOU) (C) Shaggy-dog neige noir needs brighter lead 'tec, more pulse, point. Quizzical tone gets tiresome

OSLO, AUGUST 31st (B+) Day-out-of-rehab thinkfest earns despair with clear eyes; it's about craving oblivion when all the wrong people care

PARIAH (B) Overcomes hurdles of cliché with vigour and fresh feeling. Nicely tentative, and doesn't grope too hard for gift-wrapped closure

SARAH PALIN: YOU BETCHA! (C) Too little too late, failing to marshal obstacles to access into any kind of revealing narrative

SHAME (B+) Questionable material, especially at the climax, but bracing, bruising stuff in every area of style and performance

SHE MONKEYS (B–) Familiar but supple debut about girl-on-girl teen desire, with side order of equestrian acrobatics

SHOCK HEAD SOUL (C+) Egghead psychiatry curio will win fans, but leaves us little the wiser about fin-de-siècle madness. Preferred BODYSONG

SLEEPING SICKNESS (A–) My pick of the Berlinale: a spellbinding Conradian drama about going native in Cameroon

SNOWTOWN (A–) Not for gran, unless she's Rose West. Sordidly devastating, and puts the "bleak" in "oblique", while digging its way into you

THE SUN-BEATEN PATH (D+) Cookies for anyone who keeps their eyelids open through the whole of this "New Tibetan" road-trip non-event

TALES OF THE NIGHT (B–) A portmanteau grab bag with lovely sections for Ocelot fans, though it's middling for him

VOLCANO (B) Icelandic retirement drama, keenly shot, judged and acted, with vivid relationships

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (A–) Coolly shattering, a jigsaw of grief and self-recrimination, with peak Tilda

WEEKEND (A) Modestly breathtaking, gorgeously real. Pillow talk so searching and intimate it left me floating on a cloud

WITHOUT (B+) A sideswipe building from nowhere; ploughs into alarming, depressive territory after lullingly affectless start

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (B–) Wholly admirable formally, even if it's intractable and laboured in the retelling

[Walkouts: TARGET, SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES, THE SOMNAMBULISTS]

2011, thus far

2011-09-17T12:15:00.003+01:00

Nick Davis has beaten me to the punch, but before all the touted movies from the autumn come out, I thought I'd also list my favourites of the year so far. There are quirks on these lists: to make them more interesting, I'm intentionally excluding films that haven't received their UK release yet. So, though I'm already on record as having flipped for Vanessa Redgrave in Coriolanus, for instance, she'll have to wait until the year-end honours to get listed; ditto such other potential contenders as We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Deep Blue Sea, Wuthering Heights, Melancholia and Tyrannosaur (though I have seen all of those). The one exception I'm making is for Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas, on the basis that it doesn't, to my knowledge, even have a UK distributor, let alone a release date. And therefore needs all the help it can get. (Before you ask, I really do like Oldman in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but he came in sixth.)

BEST FILM

The Tree of Life
A Separation
Love Like Poison
Senna
Tuesday, After Christmas
Tomboy
Arrietty
Kill List
Ballast
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within

BEST ACTOR

Romain Duris (The Big Picture)

Tom Fisher (Treacle, Jr)

Brendan Gleeson (The Guard)

Peyman Mooadi (A Separation)
Adam Scott (Passenger Side)

BEST ACTRESS

Clara Augarde (Love Like Poison)

Zoé Héran (Tomboy)

Liana Liberato (Trust)

Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre)

Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Tom Hardy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy)

Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids)

Jack O’Connell (Weekender)

Christopher Plummer (Beginners)
Hugo Weaving (Oranges and Sunshine)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Valeria De Franciscis Bendoni (The Salt of Life)

Sarina Farhadi (A Separation)

Mary Page Keller (Beginners)

Mirela Oprişor (Tuesday, After Christmas)

Maria Popistaşu (Tuesday, After Christmas)

Providence (1977)

2011-07-09T11:08:00.001+01:00

Alain Resnais’s Providence begins with an eerie up-the-garden-path approach, a bit Rebecca, a bit Citizen Kane, into the eponymous mansion of a dying, depleted novelist (John Gielgud) in the act of redrafting various lives – his own, partly, but mainly those of his near, dear, and not so dear. We don’t behold Gielgud’s face for a good ten minutes, but see an arthritic hand tip something off a side table, and spend most of our later scenes with him writhing in bed, whether he’s administering suppositories, complaining of the shooting pain up his arse, or chuckling to himself about the small victories he’s managed to hold on to, amid the many resentments and outbursts of vitriol which otherwise sour his memories.

“Sour” is certainly a keyword for the concocted situations this unforgiving patriarch authors from his deathbed, in which he features omnipresently as puppetmaster, rewriter, and manipulator of who’s on screen, but not at all, until the very end, as a living participant. It’s clear, in fact, that he considers himself in all practical senses dead already: when the family doctor intrudes on camera and manages to hog a close-up or two, Gielgud’s Clive (who provides an acrid voiceover for most of his own imaginings) wants him yanked off screen, but next casually wonders if the cadaver this minor character is in the act of examining might even be his own.

For the ensuing 90 minutes or so, until a structurally crucial coda breaks the spell, we are almost entirely in Gielgud’s devious hands, and his performance, both vocally and during our intermittent bedside visits, is deeply comfortable with the English idioms of literary conceit, waspish character assassination and grandiloquent gamesmanship, sufficiently so that we never doubt him as the plausible author of what we’re given to see. The question that does remain is whether what we’re seeing was worth authoring, and indeed worth watching. Providence gives such a disproportionate amount of its screen time over to the curdled theatrics of an old man getting his own back on his fractious kin, by fictionalising and intentionally misrepresenting all of their implied relationships, that it risks sabotaging the most basic audience connections to who these people are, and why we should give a damn. In particular, Clive’s feelings about his son, a successful lawyer who spends the first major scene viciously haranguing an accused soldier for the illegality of a mercy killing, are so inexhaustibly contemptuous that Dirk Bogarde has no choice in how to play the part: spitefully and archly, up to the hilt, in what has to be a sustained act of virtual self-parody. It’s the only possible approach to the character, and you can hardly fault him, like almost every scene which Gielgud allows him to preside over, for being perfectly unbearable. The accused soldier, Woodford (David Warner), becomes a puzzling hanger-on in a grey turtleneck pullover for most of the movie, until we twig that he’s a version of Bogarde’s half-brother in disguise, whom Gielgud entangles in semi-romantic trysts with his other son’s American wife (Ellen Burstyn) just for the hell of it; and the fifth major character is a mistress-figure called Helen (Elaine Stritch), recruited into proceedings out of the blue because of her close resemblance to Gielgud’s suicidal wife Molly, whom Stritch also plays, at one point switching roles without warning in the space of a scene.

The enigmas about life, death and art one would hope this meta-fiction might spawn and illuminate, far from proliferating as richly as they do in something like Synecdoche, New York, remain curiously stifled here if they’re given any real birth at all. Really, the movie, which is to say the construct Gielgud intends as a memoir but which we’re experiencing as a movie, is hammering away at one tone – venomous camp – and giving its characters almost interchangeable aperçus to deliver, which vary from the distantly witty to the merely brittle and pompous. It becomes hard to separate the conceit of the Gielgud character in doling these out from the conceit of the script, by playwright David Mercer, in letting him dole out quite so many, and in general getting so carried away with the Nabokovian possibilities of handing over responsibility for authorship to a “literary genius” so full of unquenchable contempt and schadenfreude. If the whole edifice comes across as smug, Mercer can blame it on Clive, but enduring it is such a chore that we may not feel inclined to let either of them off the hook.

Nabokov, and Kaufman, manage to stretch and massage their narrative gambits, to offset the dangers of self-satisfaction by making them pliable, allowing other viewpoints to intrude, or letting their similarly hermetic visions balloon to the point where they burst and backfire on their own authors. Mercer just plonks us in the same toxic biosphere for seven-eighths of a movie, not bothering with air conditioning, and it’s a real disappointment that Resnais lets him get away with it so easily, abetting the general sense of imprisonment with greenish-hued hothouse lighting, ostentatiously “artificial” outdoor sets, and oppressive interior décor with paintings by HR Giger and others adorning the walls above white curving marble steps that compositionally trap the eye. Drawling and drinking endless glasses of chilled white wine, the enclosed quartet of characters lounge on beds, sometimes gesturing towards taking their clothes off, but thinking better of it: “I don’t smell sex,” comments Bogarde on finding Burstyn and Warner together. “Has there been any?” Once or twice, Mercer’s imagination rises to the occasion of its own self-congratulatory, sinister weirdness – sorry, Clive’s – as when Warner admits to being particularly troubled at having an erection, proffering the simple explanation: “It’s not mine”. Gielgud is determined to foist Freudian relations between Bogarde’s Claud and his own mother, more or less, and to cuckold him using his bastard brother, and to make all this lot regularly swap identities to fire off fresh volleys of accusatory bile at each other, so why not have them share sexual organs as well?

The film’s intermittent cleverness, and the kind of deftness you’d expect from Resnais with its interior rhythms, erasures and transitions, makes it possible to justify almost everything it’s doing with this or that crafty strategy, but it offers few workable solutions for the actors, other than Gielgud, to navigate through it with anything like nuance. Thrusting his role into one hissy key, Bogarde, if anything, has the best of it; Warner can’t help making his mostly-inconsequential wannabe-astronaut Woodford into someone we simply want booted out, and Burstyn, whose doleful daughter-in-law is admittedly and accurately described as “opaque”, seems particularly lost, wanting to oscillate between bitter self-absorption and a faraway pathos, but hitting her lines as if she can’t quite decide.

Only in the final scenes, which switch into an altogether softer and more lyrical mode as the whole clan, minus Stritch, gather for an al fresco birthday lunch in Clive's honour, is some balance and integrity restored: we feel we’ve stepped outside Gielgud’s scribbled revenge fantasies and entered a closer approximation to the reality of these relationships, or else a more gently-delineated alternative vision of how he’d like them to be. Burstyn and Warner don't particularly register in these scenes, but Gielgud suddenly has three other players to respond to, and Bogarde is an instant revelation, an entirely different, sadder and more anxiously loving figure who nonetheless feels himself a disappointment to his father and wishes it were otherwise. Watching him downplay this final section, pretty masterfully even by his standards, is not only a relief after the preceding assault, in which he’s often felt like a supercilious MC who hates his job, but provides an entirely new-found way into the movie, from the deferred perspective of a son grievously misunderstood by his father and given no credit for wishing they were closer. Whether Resnais and Mercer have a clue what they’re doing in making us wait so long for this metamorphosis, and whether it truly rescues the remainder of the film or makes it feel like even more of an exasperating waste, will be questions each viewer answers for themselves. All I can say is that having found long chunks of Providence basically purgatory, I came out with at least half a sense, salvaged at the last minute, both maddening and tantalising, that it was purgatory on purpose. C

2010's other best movies

2011-01-10T10:18:00.004Z

I'm shamelessly stealing this idea from Nick Davis (and bulking my list out to thirty titles). These are the best films I saw for the first time in repertory, on DVD, Blu-ray or TV last year. Whatever the merits of 2010's new vintage, I'm not sure I've ever seen as many masterpieces in a single year before, for which huge thanks are due to the British Film Institute, Eureka's Master of Cinema series, the programmers at Berlin, and whoever schedules the stuff on Freeview. The top ten movies here will be jostling to get into my forthcoming revised Top 100, as and when I dare confront that.

1. Sanshō the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) A+

2. The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928) A+

3. The Bill Douglas Trilogy (Bill Douglas, 1972, 1973, 1978) A

4. The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956) A

5. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) A

6. The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg, 1928) A

7. Pandora's Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929) A

8. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Elia Kazan, 1945) A

9. The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933) A

10. A Day in the Life: Four Portraits of Post-War Britain (John Krish, 1953-1964) A

11. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961) A–

12. Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) A–

13. Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960) A–

14. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991) A–

15. The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) A–

16. The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957) A–

17. The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927) A–

18. The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928) A–

19. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953) A–

20. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) A–

21. The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941) A–

22. Sons and Lovers (Jack Cardiff, 1960) A–

23. Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) B+

24. Dillinger (Max Nosseck, 1945) B+

25. From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) B+

26. Battleground (William Wellmann, 1949) B+

27. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1957) B+

28. Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944) B+

29. On the Town (Stanley Donen, 1949) B+

30. Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932) B+

2010: list time

2011-01-04T01:53:00.011Z

I still haven't come to terms with how good this was, overall, as a movie year. A few things seem clear: it was a stellar 12 months for animation, with two wildly different specialised releases inside my final ten, two mainstream ones (Toy Story 3 and the delightful How to Train Your Dragon) hovering just below, and one belatedly released claymation gem (Mary & Max) justifying everyone's enthusiasm too. It was a pretty weak year for documentaries, with due apologies to Frederick Wiseman's luminous La Danse and a pair of exciting, slippery indie wind-ups in Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop. And it really wasn't much of a year for things big and loud from Hollywood, was it? There was a serious lack of basic fun in that department, whatever we extracted from the overambitious Inception; I remember an early summer of Titans, 2012s and Alice in Wonderlands that seemed to go on forever, and the par for even Apatowian comedy and, heaven help us, Katherine Heigl vehicles dipped alarmingly. I still think Tony Scott's Unstoppable might be the most proficient straight action ride I saw this year, but there weren't enough Unstoppables. There weren't even enough Salts.

Anyway, my gratitude for such succulent pickings in the Euro and Asian art-house zones will be pretty clear from the below ten, and it's worth mentioning how many solid-to-good British debuts (Down Terrace, Monsters, Shed Your Tears and Walk Away) buttressed the Leigh and Mullan entries, even speaking as someone much less enamoured of Clio Barnard's The Arbor than most. Having already voted under stricter criteria for the London Critics' Circle Awards and Evening Standard Film Awards, I've cut loose a little here, including several yet-to-be-released movies I saw at festivals, so it's not exactly a level-playing-field list for either UK or US readers, but having put White Material at #4 on my 2009 run-down, this seemed like the most sensible way to go.

PS. I am bound to have forgotten things/people, particularly on the runners-up lists for acting, so will continue to tweak after posting and put any additions in bold.

FILMS OF THE YEAR

1. Dogtooth
2. I Am Love
3. Poetry
4. Raging Sun, Raging Sky
5. The Illusionist
6. The Fighter
7. The Headless Woman
8. How I Ended This Summer
9. City of Life and Death
10. A Town Called Panic

runners-up: Another Year, Au Revoir Taipei, Neds, La danse, Carlos, Toy Story 3, Father of My Children, Mary & Max, How to Train Your Dragon, The Maid, Winter's Bone, Beeswax, The Social Network, Whip It, Fish Story, The Temptation of St Tony

BEST DIRECTOR

Lee Chang-dong (Poetry)
Julián Hernández (Raging Sun, Raging Sky)
Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth)
Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman)
David O. Russell (The Fighter)

runners-up: Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love), Jessica Hausner (Lourdes), Lu Chuan (City of Life and Death), Sylvain Chomet (The Illusionist), Peter Mullan (Neds), Frederick Wiseman (La danse), Mike Leigh (Another Year), Arvin Chen (Au Revoir Taipei), Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy)

BEST ACTOR

Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)
Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine)
Louis-do de Lencquesaing (Father of My Children)
Edgar Ramirez (Carlos)
Andy Serkis (Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll)

runners-up: Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom), Robert Hill (Down Terrace), Dragos Bucur (Police, Adjective), Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right), Eugene Byrne (The Be All And End All), Riz Ahmed (Four Lions), Jim Broadbent (Another Year), Colin Firth (The King's Speech), James Franco (127 Hours), Jay Baruchel (She's Out of My League), Mathieu Amalric (On Tour), Eric Elmosnino (Gainsbourg), Grigoriy Dobrygin (How I Ended This Summer)

BEST ACTRESS

Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy)
Yoon Jung-hee (Poetry)
Catalina Saavedra (The Maid)
Kristin Scott Thomas (Partir)
Tilda Swinton (I Am Love)

Extra-close runner-up, but I just couldn't do it to Tilda... Emma Stone (Easy A)

runners-up: Ruth Sheen (Another Year), Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right), Sally Hawkins (Made in Dagenham), Greta Gerwig (Greenberg), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone), Anne Dorval (I Killed My Mother), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Kristen Stewart (The Runaways), Kim Hye-ja (Mother), Hilary Swank (Conviction), Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine/Mammoth), Brenda Blethyn (London River), Tilly Hatcher (Beeswax), Maggie Hatcher (Beeswax), Sylvie Testud (Lourdes)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Christian Bale (The Fighter)
Jemaine Clement (Gentlemen Broncos)
Sergei Puskepalis (How I Ended This Summer)
Steven Robertson (Neds)
Peter Wight (Another Year)

runners-up: Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole), Jackie Chan (The Karate Kid), Lawrence Ko (Au Revoir Taipei), Rhys Ifans (Greenberg), John Hawkes (Winter's Bone), Michael Shannon (The Runaways), Colin Farrell (The Way Back), Dan Byrd (Easy A), Eddie Marsan (Heartless), Yvan Attal (Partir), Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Geoffrey Rush (The King's Speech), Mickey O'Keefe (The Fighter), Cillian Murphy (Inception), Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs the World), Armie Hammer (The Social Network), Sam Rockwell (Conviction), Pete Postlethwaite (The Town), Jeremy Renner (The Town), Tom Noonan (The House of the Devil), Dakin Matthews (True Grit), David Thewlis (London Boulevard), Daryl Sabara (World's Greatest Dad)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Dale Dickey (Winter's Bone)
Monica Dolan (The Arbor)
Julianna Margulies (City Island)
Anita Reeves (The Maid)
Dianne Wiest (Rabbit Hole)

runners-up: Mia Wasikowska (The Kids Are All Right), Imelda Staunton (Another Year), Lydia Leonard (Archipelago), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom), Amy Adams (The Fighter), Juliette Lewis (Conviction), Karina Fernandez (Another Year), Greta Gerwig (The House of the Devil), Charlotte Rampling (Life During Wartime), Kate Fahy (Archipelago), Claudia Celedón (The Maid), Mila Kunis (Black Swan), Melissa Leo (The Fighter), Kimberley Elise (For Colored Girls), Anika Noni Rose (For Colored Girls, mainly the monologue), Emily Watson (Cemetery Junction), Rosamund Pike (Made in Dagenham), Rebecca Hall (Please Give), Amanda Peet (Please Give), Cher (Burlesque), Elina Löwensohn (Lourdes)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Andrew Bujalski (Beeswax)
Mia Hansen-Løve (Father of My Children)
Aaron Katz (Cold Weather)
Efthimos Filippou/Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth)
Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective)

runners-up: Adam Elliot (Mary & Max), Jessica Hausner (Lourdes), Götz Spielman (Revanche), Derek Cianfrance/Joey Curtis/Cami Delavigne (Blue Valentine), Alexei Popogrebsky (How I Ended This Summer), Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy), David Michôd (Animal Kingdom), Luca Guadagnino etc (I Am Love)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Shauna Cross (Whip It)
Sylvain Chomet/Jacques Tati (The Illusionist)
Tamio Hayashi (Fish Story)
Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)
William Davies/Dean DeBlois/Chris Sanders
(How to Train Your Dragon)

runner-up: Floria Sigismondi (The Runaways)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE (click titles for excerpt)

Jeff Grace (The House of the Devil)
Dickon Hinchliffe (Winter's Bone)
Daft Punk (TRON: Legacy)
Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross (The Social Network)
Simon Whitfield (Skeletons)

runners-up: Michael Brook (The Fighter), Alexandre Desplat (The Ghost — and only The Ghost), Hans Zimmer (Inception), Jon Hopkins (Monsters)

BEST EDITING

Kirk Baxter/Angus Wall (The Social Network)
Ivan Lebedev (How I Ended This Summer)
Christopher Rouse (Green Zone)
Moon Sae-kyoung (Mother)
Dylan Tichenor (The Town/Whip It)

runners-up: Teng Yun (City of Life and Death), Jonathan Amos/Paul Machliss (Scott Pilgrim vs the World), Ti West (The House of the Devil), Walter Fasano (I Am Love)

BEST SOUND

How to Train Your Dragon
Salt
Unstoppable
Valhalla Rising
Winter's Bone

runners-up: The Social Network, Inception, The Temptation of St Tony

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Thimios Bakatakis (Dogtooth)

Philipp Blaubach (The Disappearance of Alice Creed)

Martin Gschlacht (Lourdes/Revanche)
Oleg Mutu (My Joy)
Y. Mingmongkor/S. Mukdeeprom
(Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)

runners-up: Pawel Edelman (The Ghost), Bárbara Álvarez (The Headless Woman), Barry Ackroyd (Green Zone), Harris Savides (Greenberg), Kim Hyun-seok (Poetry), Andrew Reed (Cold Weather), Michael Fimognari (Au Revoir Taipei), Matthew Libatique (Black Swan), Yorick Le Saux (I Am Love), Alejandro Cantú (Raging Sun, Raging Sky), Benoît Debie (Enter the Void), Matt Gray (Heartless)

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Antonella Cannarozzi (I Am Love)
Robin Fitzgerald (The House of the Devil)
Beatrix Aruna Pasztor (The Brothers Bloom)
Catherine Marie Thomas (Whip It)

Amy Westcott (Black Swan)

runners-up: Jeffrey Kurland (Inception), Carol Beadle (The Runaways), Mark Bridges (The Fighter), Ruth E. Carter (Black Dynamite)

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN/ART DIRECTION

Donald Graham Burt (The Social Network)

Adam Elliot (Mary & Max)

Bjarne Hansen (The Illusionist)

Stavros Hrysogiannis (Dogtooth)

Hao Yi (City of Life and Death)

runners-up: Francesca Balestra Di Mottola (I Am Love), Bob Pauley (Toy Story 3), Ryu Seong-hie (Mother)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Monsters (for resourcefulness, not perfection)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
The Social Network (for the Winklevi, not the digital breath)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

BEST ENSEMBLE

Another Year

The Fighter

Neds

Whip It

On Tour

Whew!

San Sebastián: ROUND-UP

2010-09-27T19:31:00.000+01:00

Linkitude here.

San Sebastián: NEDS

2010-09-25T16:02:00.007+01:00

[No major plot spoilers, as long as you know it's about non-educated delinquents. Which is the title acronym.]

Watching Peter Mullan's Neds at a Spanish-subtitled screening in San Sebastián's Teatro Principal was an experience both electrifying and frustrating in ways an immediate tweet-response and grade can't really take into account, so I'm glad I've had the benefit of a few days and an unexpectedly epic homebound journey to ponder it further, particularly since it's now been awarded the Best Film and Best Actor awards. I remain thoroughly on the film's side, some clearly wobbly sequences notwithstanding, but an especially tricky problem was posed by the sound: this soft Southerner struggles to comprehend thick Scottish accents at the best of times, but every single English-speaking viewer I bumped into afterwards had the same complaint about huge quantities of mumbled Glaswegian slang falling by the wayside. (Trust me, the leeway Mullan gives his locally-sourced actors in this makes Trainspotting sound like An Ideal Husband.) There were insults and laugh-lines only the local viewers found hilarious, thanks to the benefit of being able to read the Spanish — if it weren't for the embarrassment, I'd have turned to my neighbours and asked "What was that uproarious thing he just said?" more times than I was able to count. Though the Principal's acoustics may have been partly to blame, my strong hunch is that Mullan will be asked to subtitle the movie for English (and surely American) audiences too; I think it's customary to find this silly or appalling, but in this case I actively look forward to catching it a second time and being able to relish all the rude catcalls and bits of bullying invective I missed, on top of the many excellent scenes that rang out loud and clear.

That initial tweet reaction ("messy but inspired") is still roughly where I'm at, but inspiration and mess tend to go hand in hand here: the film has superb, sustained passages which jostle right up against chunks of stuff that plain don't work. Everyone will draw their own conclusions about the following: the whole last act, dramatically choppy and schizoid in ways that bothered me less than the too-organised flaggy allegory of Shane Meadows's This is England, to which it's already being compared; the ostentatiously metaphorical final sequence, which I'm still mulling over; slightly earlier and even bolder, a druggy, go-for-broke encounter with a kick-ass manifestation of Christ; and Mullan's own supporting performance as the main character's permanently wasted, abusive father, a fierce and gurning turn which is right on the edge of being simply too much.

Then again, Mullan's best work as a director is almost always dancing on this very precipice. For every viewer who mentally checked out of The Magdalene Sisters when Eileen Walsh started shouting "You are naart a man of Gaard!", I know someone else who thinks it's the film's bravest and most brilliant coup. What's particularly outstanding here is the school stuff, and there's a (very) good hour of this. The journey of John McGill from milksop swot to vicious sociopath, charted through jagged phases that I believed far more palpably than the textbook conversion of Shaun in the Meadows film, is quietly tragic and unobtrusively affecting: we watch his intelligence curdle, this bright, diligent mind reorient itself to discover a kind of animal cunning. Neds never feels like lecturing sociology, serving up the mitigating circumstances to explain why John falls in with the ASBO crowd. It's significant that he hardly spends any time with his older brother Benny (Joe Szula), a notorious wrong 'un, because Mullan consistently keeps them at arm's length, more interested in the disparities between these siblings, in age, interests and scholarly drive, than the temperamental common ground forced on them by domestic circumstances. "Problems at home" may not have been so specifically dramatised since Nil By Mouth, albeit in a glancing, intentionally banal way here. The repeated shots of Mullan hollering at his wife from the base of the stairs have a harsh, lurid, debatably overacted menace, but he's even scarier as this faceless, disarticulated presence moving through rooms, violently opening drawers, a dark midriff passing silently behind the dinner table. It's entirely apropos that we want to spend as little time in this fearful household as humanly possible.

At school, Mullan resists any tempting Magdalene urge to ham up an ensnaring sense of institutional oppression. It's a place of apathy, mockery, and just muddling along, which is nonetheless desperately likely to fail all its students (and indeed staff) in offhand yet brutally life-altering ways. John, played as an uncertain youngster by Gregg Forest, fights his bookish little corner to begin with, but Mullan only needs a judicious moment for a forward jump and older actor (Connor McCarron, the gong-winner) to suggest what has changed, a certain light that's gone out, a hardening against the idea of being exceptional in the herd. Among the various teachers, played with chippy charm by Crying with Laughter's Stephen McCole, whose wrong side you would not want to see, ineffectual palliness by David McKay in a terrific one-scene cameo, and Gary Lewis, whose introduction, offering John a piggy-back through the school's main entrance, is a bizarre and unsettlingly deadpan tour de force, the most significant is Mr Bonetti (Steven Robertson), who welcomes John into Latin lessons and has wily methods of encouragement which carry frequent risks of backfiring. Robertson's scenes are almost unfailingly the film's best, I think, not only because his performance, as the most guardedly optimistic character, has places to go the other supporting turns lack, but because Mullan builds him into the pivotal moment when John conclusively turns his back on academic ambition, throwing this kindly, exasperated mentor to the wolves when he calculates what classroom cred he can gain from an act of insolent insurrection. McCarron is at his strongest here too, stepping up to a level of performative cockiness pitched carefully to John's peers — he manages to combine wicked assurance with shrugging indifference, and win the fight hands down.

The patchier second half never reaches these formidable peaks, though two scenes on a bus come close. John steals money from a driver at knife-point, a charged, indelible, oddly intimate encounter that lasts mere seconds, and later taunts his posh ex-friend Julian (Martin Bell) from the seat behind, cruelly flicking the ear of a black companion he's never met, and whose only moment in the film this is. Anyone who has ever sat through an uncomfortable or hostile experience on British public transport will feel the excruciating power and precision of that flick, more for the point it's proving than the token pain caused: it made me wince more than any of the all-out scenes of Clockwork Orange-esque gang beatings, the scrabblings with knives in school bathrooms, or the clonking of a character on the head with a loose gravestone, acute though Mullan's staging control often is in these outbursts. I don't want to dwell here on what's simply disorganised towards the end of Neds, which seems strangely unclear whether it's disappearing inside John's swirling head or backing away into abstract metaphor, because the limitations of the movie are easily the least interesting thing about it. What Mullan grasps here he grasps with clenched fists, and shakes often enough to sock his points home: that adolescent unhappiness and intellectual promise can be about the worst possible bedfellows, and the deadliest thugs, in another, more privileged life, might have been shoo-ins to Oxbridge. B+

San Sebastián: I SAW THE DEVIL

2010-09-18T14:30:00.002+01:00

I'll admit up front that I really don't get on too well with Kim Ji-woon among Korea's genre virtuosos, basically because I keep waiting for his films to develop beyond snazzy, self-adoring showreels with an ever-dwindling sense of actually going anywhere. A Tale of Two Sisters was entirely promising and allowable in this regard, without quite, for me, being the full banquet many enjoyed; A Bittersweet Life left me as thoroughly cold as gratuitously bloody existential macho cool always seems wont, if not actively designed, to do; and The Good, the Bad, the Weird wore out its crazy, caffeinated welcome long before the 130-minute running time crawled to a cherished end. Even longer and flinging out a frankly batshit pick'n'mix of customised serial-killer revenge games, I Saw the Devil is operatically grisly if nothing else: the first victim, betrothed to Lee Byung-hun's sharp-suited secret agent, is jumped in her broken-down car, begs for her life and explains she's pregnant before getting casually hacked up by Choi Min-sik's favourite cleaver, leaving only a severed ear (!) and a head in a box (!) to hint at her vapidly film-referential fate. There's plenty more squirmy stuff with Achilles tendons being slowly sliced, guillotines roaring in the OTT sound mix (OTT are Kim's favourite letters, except maybe CRAZY!), and a whole bevy more victims being leeringly and kind of annoyingly jeopardised by the illogical deferrals of Lee's payback scheme. Still sporting the most devastating male cheekbones in cinema, he can't for one second plausibly drive the character to let Choi off the hook as often as he does: Kim wants that Nietzsche quote about monsters becoming monsters to justify the absurd contortions of his prolong-the-pain plot, but it doesn't at all. You get the moment-by-moment set piece flair you're probably expecting, and Choi's louche villainy, schticky though it is by now: he's just the latest sick fiend with style, one of many psycho loners Kim is caught between reviling and blatantly idolising. But how often can a camera adopt the sex killer's aroused point of view, panning right up into a schoolgirl's trembling knickers, before you start to feel a dodgy complicity about this whole fandango? D

Thoughts on this redesign?

2010-09-16T12:08:00.000+01:00

Bearing in mind that I'm utterly hopeless at html. Opted for blogger upgrade mainly so that I can embed my twitter feed, which the old version wouldn't let me do. Wish I could make the sidebar background different from the main one for posts, but that doesn't seem possible on this template... unless some genius out there can advise me otherwise? Extra cookies to whoever identifies the header picture.

Les maudits (1947)

2010-09-01T00:30:00.018+01:00

(screened on nitrate print at the bfi Southbank, 31/8)

René Clément made his name with the cinematographer Henri Alekan, who would go on to carve out an arguably greater reputation for Cocteau’s La belle et la bête and Wings of Desire, with an Oscar nomination for Roman Holiday along the way. I haven’t seen their acclaimed 1945 documentary La bataille du rail, about Resistance saboteurs, but a stark faux-doc style is the hallmark of this surprisingly obscure subsequent feature, a commercial flop at the time which has amassed the paltry sum of 44 votes on IMDb to date. No measure of a movie, I know, but it surely deserves better than that on face value alone, as a grimly involved and engrossing tale of maritime intrigue in the closing days of the war. The action is largely confined to an escaping U-boat, which pulls away from Oslo to seek harbour in one of those South American Nazi sanctuaries where Josef Mengele pitched up. (At least, that's the plan.) It’s almost Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in negative — this vessel's full of Nazis and collaborators of various nationalities (the title means “The Damned”, making it the third film of that name I've seen this year) whose safety or certainty of escape is obscurely compromised by the arrival on board of French doctor Guilbert (Henri Vidal), who knows more German than anyone quite realises. He’s beckoned in to attend to the injured, near-comatose wife of an Italian industrialist, played by Florence Marly in a performance with more than a touch of Foreign Affair Dietrich: her blatant cavorting with Kurt Kronefeld’s SS general suggests a long-hatched escape plan which makes for awkward moments aplenty, given that everyone, to include her outraged husband (Fosco Giachetti), is bunked in such heaving and smeggy proximity.

Alekan’s skill is not, alas, at full maturity in every frame of this often crudely lit, excessively shadowy production, but there’s an excellent, viscerally wobbly, Paths-of-Glory-trench-cam reverse tracking shot as Guilbert is lured down the full length of the sub to attend to Marly's flaky diva, little realising that the boat will pull away before he has the chance to disembark; he's thereby held captive for his continued medical expertise before the assembled fugitives grasp that his presence is potentially treacherous, if not disastrous. The other visual highlight is an on-shore episode involving negotiations with a turncoat agent (Marcel Dalio, top-billed for a virtual cameo) who plans to sell them all downriver now that Hitler’s death in the bunker has hit the airwaves: a wily young German adjutant (Michel Auclair) tries to strike a deal to make his getaway, hiding in a warehouse full of coffee-bean sacks which Alekan treats to a welcome touch of overhead expressionism. Otherwise, functional claustrophobia is the order of the day, with as many talking heads crammed into the average frame as possible, while morale frays and the less fervent buddies of the Führer start panicking about when to desert this figuratively sinking ship, and how.

It must be said that Clément’s on-again, off-again approach to the point of view he’s giving Guilbert, who gets voiceover through some parts, and is first shown committing his whole testimony to a journal, but is nowhere to be seen through key sequences like the Dalio stuff, makes the dramatic basis of the movie a lot more rickety than it might have been: popular though Vidal would become in the 1950s, he’s a colourless lead here, and the character gets lost in his endless skulking in and out of hatches below deck. The real star — the film’s Col Hans Landa, if we must — is Jo Dest, whose Gestapo officer Forster is handily outranked by the decorated SS general he essentially strips to mince. Elderly and obviously homosexual — Kronefeld at first places him only after a glance at Auclair’s pretty-boy sidekick — he’s all the more snakelike for what a deferential role he appears to be playing: Dest makes of him a deadly veteran functionary, who can insinuate his way to the top of command and talk the crew into firing up torpedoes. The framing business with Vidal scribbling ardently by candlelight and the final, declamatory coining of the title are thudding and lame, but no more so than you might get from a jobbing-it Orson Welles, say, taking a crack at a promising Graham Greene script everyone else had passed on. It's some way better than its overrated Losey and Visconti namesakes, and certainly never as squiffy as Welles’s more-or-less contemporary The Stranger (1946), but if we needed further proof that Clément is merely roughing out a commercial style here, the altogether smoother, more clement (I went there!), yet somehow headier voyage of Plein soleil (1960) is right there to provide it. B–

By popular demand...

2010-08-20T08:08:00.003+01:00

(This already short review was trimmed to fit the page. The original cut, for what it's worth...)

Piranha 3D (18 cert, 88 min) ★★

The suspense is as skimpy as the swimwear in this shameless 3D remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 Jaws spoof, directed by French gore specialist Alexandre Aja. The presence of Kelly Brook, who acquits herself fine, typifies an excessively guilty bit of Friday-night trash — it wants to have its breasts and eat them. It’s spring break at a lake in Arizona, and a minor quake unleashes prehistoric gnashers on an unsuspecting parade of partying hotties, under the concerned eye of Elisabeth Shue’s sassy sheriff. Richard Dreyfuss and Christopher Lloyd have fun cameos, but Aja’s lazy direction and reliance on tawdry digital body trauma makes the movie more of a gloating endurance test than an actual good time: it’s quite leering enough before Eli Roth turns up.

Robey's Oscar Rewrites: (4)

2010-08-08T08:56:00.010+01:00

(Going by IMDb year, as usual.)

BEST ACTOR, 1987

They said...

*Michael Douglas, Wall Street
William Hurt, Broadcast News
Marcello Mastroianni, Dark Eyes

Jack Nicholson, Ironweed
Robin Williams, Good Morning, Vietnam

I say...

Timothy Dalton, The Living Daylights
Richard E. Grant, Withnail and I
Joe Mantegna, House of Games
Donal McCann, The Dead
Terry O'Quinn, The Stepfather

Honourable mentions:

John Candy (Planes, Trains and Automobiles), William Hurt (Broadcast News), Peter Weller (Robocop), Christian Bale (Empire of the Sun), Gary Oldman (Prick Up Your Ears), Dennis Quaid (The Big Easy).

When I went up...

2010-08-08T08:41:00.001+01:00

..this.

Robey's Oscar Rewrites: (3)

2010-06-19T12:43:00.019+01:00

With apologies for the lengthy break in service.

BEST ACTRESS, 1994

They said...

Jodie Foster, Nell
*Jessica Lange, Blue Sky
Miranda Richardson, Tom & Viv
Winona Ryder, Little Women
Susan Sarandon, The Client

(Not quite as useless a line-up as people often claim, though it could have been so much stronger if it weren't for eligibility snafus and general myopia...)

I say...

Toni Collette, Muriel's Wedding
Linda Fiorentino, The Last Seduction
Juliette Lewis, Natural Born Killers
Julianne Moore, Vanya on 42nd Street
Sigourney Weaver, Death and the Maiden

Sharing the sixth spot:

Melanie Lynskey, Heavenly Creatures
Kate Winslet, Heavenly Creatures

Honourable mentions:

Irène Jacob (Three Colours Red), Isabelle Adjani (La Reine Margot), Lauren Velez (I Like It Like That), Alberta Watson (Spanking the Monkey). Who says this was a bad year for actressing? Not me!

This week's reviews

2010-05-09T19:41:00.007+01:00

The Back-Up Plan (12A cert, 104 min) ★

A Nightmare on Elm St (18 cert, 95 min) ★

Here’s the way Hollywood careers work. Jennifer Lopez needs a comeback. She’s looking terrific – no problems there. She’s 41, just past what studios normally consider the romcom best-before date, but Sandra Bullock has earned an extension on that, so why can’t she? After all, she’s put Ben Affleck and Gigli behind her – so very 2003. Still, we don’t want to risk a failure that conspicuous, anything risky like a thriller, or anything with an actual plot. Something safe, then. Old tricks.

New spin? A baby, perhaps. She’s had one? Passé. She wants one. How about artificial insemination, so she’s pregnant before even meeting the man of her dreams? A premise! It’s new-ish, without being off-puttingly new. It’ll fit into an acceptable zone of mind-numbing, women’s-weekly-editorial, pseudo-zeitgeisty tedium. It’ll do.

Thus The Back-Up Plan was surely conceived, and it absolutely puts your back up. J.Lo’s new-found beau (Alex O’Loughlin) runs a goat farm and peddles cheese at a market stall. Of course he does. I won’t knock his shirtless tractor driving, but he exudes all the charisma of a boiled slug. Before their first dinner date, we get the inevitable comedy with home pregnancy tests. Her dog swallows one, then throws it up. During the date, he (that’s the beau, not the dog) lays on candlelit pizza for two in one of Manhattan’s obliging walled gardens, leans over for a kiss, and knocks over what must be the world’s only flammable bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. A disaster, all round.

There’s further scintillating dialogue to come (“I’m your cheese muse”) and a grotesque parody of a single mothers’ support group, culminating in an entirely undelightful sequence with another mum’s polluted birthing pool, into which J.Lo obviously trips. The tick-tock of the biological clock might be a real enough subject, but actual parturition is the grossest thing this movie can imagine, except when Lopez herself gets round to it. D–

There was always a high likelihood the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street wouldn’t work out. Freddy Krueger’s dream-murder tactics stop being scary the second they’re too familiar, and Samuel Bayer’s film is nothing if not that, rehashing plenty of sequences from Wes Craven’s 1984 original: Freddy’s finger-blades emerge from bathwater, his upper body bulges in the wallpaper above someone’s bed, and he slaughters the same sleep-deprived teens in pretty much the same order. Would novelty have cost them anything?

Jackie Earle Haley, inheriting the role, isn’t to blame, but he’s more stymied by the burn-victim cosmetics than Robert Englund was, and his half-baked performance feels mangled in the edit – it’s not imposing enough. This version is ghoulishly overt about Freddy being a lynched paedophile; where the murkiness of his back-story made him almost a fairytale figure in Craven’s script, here everything has to be depressingly literalised.

I’m not claiming Craven’s film was exactly a tour de force in the acting department, but at least Freddy’s victims had a modicum of personality, so that we cared on some level whether they lived or died. Bayer’s movie, which is garishly incompetent in basic areas like sound synching, assumes bad CGI is enough in itself to suggest slippage between nightmares and reality. There’s maybe some sense of how agonising it might be to stay awake for days on end, but the movie is so sluggish and feebly imagined you could soundly snooze through it and not miss a thing. D

Furry Vengeance (PG cert, 91 min) ★★

Brendan Fraser, whose labours in the arena of family entertainment get more and more masochistic, stars as a land developer thrust into a turf war with imperilled forest critters. The whole movie feels extrapolated from the five-second clip of a scheming chipmunk on YouTube, bulked out with many, many shots of Fraser being thwacked with some generic foley crunch noise and falling backwards with his feet in the air. A diabolical raccoon masterminds the attack of the allegedly cute fauna, but they’re off-puttingly creepy and computer-generated, and ever-trashier director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions) severely overestimates both the comedy and eco-preaching value of being repeatedly skunk-sprayed. In fairness, there might be some silly fun for the kids here, and Ken Jeong has snappy timing in the role of Fraser’s Blackberry-pecking boss, whose lip-service to green principles never lasts more than a microsecond. But it’s needlessly lame and cardboard stuff. D+

Sus (15 cert, 91 min) ★★★

A cannily-timed release for Barrie Keeffe’s absorbing three-hander, set on election night 1979, and set almost wholly in a police interrogation room where a black Brit called Delroy (underrated Clint Dyer) is hauled up on suspicion of killing his wife. Dyer’s transition from cocky boredom to tear-streaked fury is powerfully handled, and Ralph Brown brings a credible menace to his covertly bigoted cop. Though it’s hard to see what Rafe Spall’s dawdling, lightweight deputy brings to the party, Keeffe’s play packs a solidly indignant punch on screen. B–

A Room and a Half (12A cert, 130 min) ★★★

Flights of melancholic reverie and animated fancy pervade this imagined life of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky – at times self-conscious in its sepia-tinted nostalgia, at others glowing and magical. B–

Psych:9 (15 cert, 97 min) ★

Hysteria and hysterectomies in a deserted hospital. You mainly fear for the mental health of the screenwriter. F

One Night in Turin (15 cert, 97 min) ★★

Naggingly unnecessary doc about the Italia 90 World Cup. C–

ENDS

Last week's reviews and capsules

2010-04-26T08:23:00.007+01:00

The Joneses (15 cert, 98 min) ★★★

Centurion (15 cert, 97 min) ★★

Agora (12A cert, 126 min) ★★

Any film which casts Demi Moore as capitalism incarnate, which The Joneses does, gets points for figuring out at least one way to use her. Uneasy though we may feel playing spot the surgery, it almost fits her role as a one-woman advertising campaign: she hardly needs act to make it the best thing she’s done since Disclosure (1994).

The film starts out pert and amusing, like a dark sitcom. Moore and the nimble David Duchovny are all health and wealth as they move into an upscale neighbourhood with their two teenage kids (Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth, both much too old for these roles, but no matter).

It’s quickly clear none of the Joneses are actually related. They’re paid agents in a stealth marketing scheme, their mission to turn heads, show off clothes, cars, gadgets to the admiring golf and pedicure set. Duchovny’s Steve is the rookie in the operation – he needs to boost his sales. Moore’s Kate, who won’t even let him sleep in the same bed, might reconsider if those numbers go up.

Writer-director Derrick Borte’s conceit is a fun one to be in on, but basically too synthetic to have the satirical bite it wants – it’s more a playful fantasy of consumerist whim than an edgy exposé. You know where it has to go – down some Damascene route of realising this whole scam, and consumption in general, is bad for the soul. It’s just a matter of time before everyone starts slapping their wrists, if not slitting them, but the spree is entertaining while it lasts. C+

There’s much grunting in Centurion, slicing of major arteries and clambering around on mossy Scottish hillsides. There’s also the kind of dialogue you only wish members of Rome’s ill-fated Ninth Legion had plausibly uttered. “This is Hadrian’s big f***ing plan? A wall?”. Quick memos scribbled on stone would have Latin teachers shaking their heads in horror.

More to the point, the whole thing’s a crudely reductive excuse to pit Romans against Picts and go splatter-mad, without building much in the way of suspense or anything in the way of character. A faintly disappointing Michael Fassbender and fellow survivors of the decimated Ninth team up to rescue their general (Dominic West, on good burly form), but it all goes horribly wrong, and they find themselves preyed upon by woad-smeared savages. Etain (Olga Kurylenko), who is meant to be the scariest huntress in all Caledonia, is more scowly irritant than fearsome villainness. It’s not a disaster, but it’s cheesy and generic stuff from Neil Marshall – too much guilt and not enough pleasure. C

You can’t fault Agora, a saga of ancient Alexandria, astronomy and religious strife, for gumption or ambition – just plain common sense. It’s of some egghead interest, but who on earth paid for it? Rachel Weisz, fetching in Egyptian shawls, stars as the philosopher Hypatia, who appears to have cracked gravity but not yet how the planets and sun interrelate. The director, Alejandro Amenábar, has a crashing great beef with Christian fundamentalism and the threat to scientific learning – everyone grabs what scrolls they can before the library’s ransacked. Meanwhile, the ridiculously handsome Max Minghella moons around as a lovestruck slave, vying with snooty-pants student Oscar Isaac for Hypatia’s affections.

Some clunky captions lurch us forward an hour in, and it’s still not clear what Amenábar thinks he’s doing – there are a few piercing images amid a lot of patience-taxing marketplace dust-ups, and some of the worst barnets in Christendom. Visibly recut, the movie has too little time to do itself intelligent justice – I wish it had been a miniseries. C–

La danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (PG cert, 159 min) ★★★★★

A long but enrapturing documentary from the great Frederick Wiseman, this majestic film follows seven ballets from rehearsal through to performance, but there’s as much focus on sequins as pliés, catering as choreography. All is captured in this director’s famously quiet and unobtrusive style, achieving a measured tempo and feel for the subject which will beguile dance fans young and old. A–

Extract (15 cert, 92 min) ★★

Mike (Beavis & Butthead) Judge struggles to make the grade with this ambling, half-hearted comedy about small business. Jason Bateman’s nicely beleaguered charm gets it off the ground, but Judge wastes the gifted Kristen Wiig as his bored wife, and Mila Kunis’s conniving con girl never earns her screen time. Fairly amiable, but that’s it. C

It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (12A cert, 100 min) ★

Gurinder Chadha serves up a trainwreck romcom about unwed Roopi (Goldy Notay, deserving better) whose mum goes to murderous lengths to find her a suitor. The paste-grey apparitions of dead parents seem to be gunning for Ealing-esque dark laughs that never materialise, and a demented riff on the climax of Carrie hardly scoops us out of the doldrums. F

Cherrybomb (15 cert, 86 min) ★★

Rupert Grint doesn’t disgrace himself as a horny Irish teen – colour me surprised – and his co-stars are wayward but promising. So it’s a pity this reasonably polished slice of Skins-style youthsploitation makes such a deeply fake and undangerous lurch into pills-and-vandalism melodrama. C–

The Calling (15 cert, 105 min) ★

Rum as a barrel of Sailor Jerry’s, Jan Dunn’s comedy-drama about Benedictine nuns in Ramsgate has Brenda Blethyn trying her best, Susannah York making half-deranged Sapphic overtures, and Rita Tushingham digging up mutant carrots. It ought to be set in Barking. D

This week's capsules, uncut

2010-04-18T10:38:00.007+01:00

Dear John (12A cert, 102 min) ★

Existing in a world where sunsets go on for charmed weeks at a time, farewells are uniformly moist, and bouts of terminal cancer are more dramatically convenient than they are sad, Dear John, it hardly needs saying, is the latest epistolary romance from the pen of Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, Message in a Bottle). All that’s missing from that title is the word “oh”. Channing Tatum stars as a soldier on leave, comporting himself in typical Tatum-ic fashion as if it were a physical burden to be swimming in so much testosterone. He meets Amanda Seyfried on a beach, and impresses her with his ability to create fire. “Very primal.” He’s also good at carpentry. She, an idealist, plans to open an equestrian summer camp for autistic kids. 9/11 intervenes, and he’s called to Afghanistan. Anguish looms, but all Lasse Hallström’s gauzy montages are powerless to coax a believable adult relationship out of this pair, so it’s hard to worry. Instead, they do that thing where you close one eye and cover the moon with your thumb, acting as if it were a thrilling discovery for our race. Are they six? D

Repo Men (18 cert, 111 min) ★

Nothing to do with Alex Cox’s 1984 cult comedy Repo Man – more’s the pity – this ghoulish and wildly illogical sci-fi thriller is all about a mega-corporatised dystopian near-future in which artificial organs are mortgaged out to the needy. Fail to make the repayments, and Jude Law and Forest Whitaker will come round to collect with a scalpel. The slicing and dicing is unsparingly full-on to the point where hardened critics were hiding behind their hands, and the ending is a daylight steal from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. But it’s the gruellingly slow pace which really does this in. D–

City of Life and Death (15 cert, 135 min) ★★★★

Very possibly the war film of the year, Lu Chuan’s excellent picture about the Rape of Nanking has a lacerating widescreen immediacy, but also a true artist’s gravity and tact. It’s meticulously assembled and quite devastating, with a particularly impressive first hour. Surveying the mass slaughter of Chinese POWs in silvery monochrome, the director gives these horrors the ghostly, ineradicable weight of historical fact, and achieves humane switches of perspective on both sides which put Saving Private Ryan to shame. B+

Boogie Woogie (15 cert, 90 min) ★

We learn that the London art world is dog-eat-dog – don’t stop the presses – in a tonal catastrophe which keeps kissing the air and calling it satire. Danny Huston’s Jay Jopling impression consists mainly of affected guffaws every few seconds, and Gillian Anderson has never been anywhere near this lousy. Think Pret-à-Porter, brace yourself, then make it even worse. F

The Market (15 cert, 94 min) ★★★

The always-interesting Brit experimenter Ben Hopkins (The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz) began work on this Turkish co-production after 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, his doc on a migrating tribe called the Pamir Kirghiz. His dolorous parable about a black-market trader (Tayanç Ayaydin) is an astute take on capitalism and its binds, though it might have worked better as a pithy short. B–

Crying with Laughter (18 cert, 103 min) ★★

A smashing turn from Stephen McCole as a troubled stand-up comedian elevates Justin Molonikov’s dark Scottish thriller – but the plot takes a wrong turn at the halfway point and never quite recovers. C

The Heavy (18 cert, 94 min) ★

Watching reluctant hit man Gary Stretch try, for no very obvious reason, to drown a cat affords the biggest laugh in this massively stupid London gangster movie, otherwise only recommended to those who urgently need to see Lee from Blue’s fingers being chiselled off. D

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (15 cert, 121 min) ★★★★★

John Frankenheimer’s original, delirious, brilliantly acerbic Cold War thriller. A–

Viewing log: 2/4/10

2010-04-03T18:08:00.005+01:00

New Releases

Clash of the Titans D+

A batty shambles, and ugly to boot, but you could snigger throughout at the costumes alone

Double Take B

An intellectual game, addictive to play, but let's not pretend its kooky thesis really adds up

How to Train Your Dragon B+

Everything I said here

Kick-Ass D

Disguises a cynical core under cute flash and cartoon brutality -- and disguises it badly

Remember Me C–

Pretty effortful, full of glum stick-people, and the Big Twist stinks up the joint

Samson and Delilah B–

Faintly disappointing in its overdone "lyricism", but plainly heartfelt and certainly touching

Other Adventures

Passe ton bac d'abord (1979) B+

Great faces, great specificity, and terrifically supple in the ways it circles and observes

Children of God (LLGFF) D+

Dramatises both Bahamian homophobia and gay self-doubt with sledgehammer crudity

Viewing log: 26/3/10

2010-03-30T17:53:00.010+01:00

New Releases

The Blind Side C–

We've seen worse, let's face it, but it's hard not to feel unduly hugged and patronised

In the Land of the Free B–

I question the manipulative score and odd omissions; still, potent and commendable

Lion's Den B+

Trapero's direction is characteristically great on detail, texture and rock-solid humanism

Lourdes B

Often dazzling, and great around the edges; does seem evasive about its own point at times

Nightwatching D–

Exposition Hell: one-time alchemist Greenaway transmutes lead into more lead

Perrier's Bounty D+

An inspiration vacuum, with little going for it except the reliable Gleeson

Storm B–

Impressive leads in a welcome feminist take on reconciliation politics, but thrill it does not

(still haven't seen: No One Knows About Persian Cats, Shank, Nanny McPhee)

Other Epic Adventures

Appaloosa C–

Bumbles along, shackled to a terminally musty conception of male camaraderie

on flight to...

...34th Hong Kong Film Festival and Filmart

Crossing Hennessy D+

Helped with my city geography, but not with my ongoing bafflement at opening-night selections

Bloody Shake zzz (jetlag)

Road Train D (but!)

Nothing makes any real sense, but it just about kept me awake

Fire of Conscience B+ (review)

on flight back...

Vengeance C–

Same old sentimental score-settling; the line between this and Taken is thinner than To's fans admit

and on the same day(!)...

...24th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

I Killed My Mother B+

I expected precocious and up itself, which it is - but too damn confident not to impress

Mississippi Damned B

Admirably tough, forceful and well-acted, until the pile-up of misery just gets too much

Christopher Strong (1933) B–

Flippant fun when it's being flippant fun, though it's technically dodgy and hard to take seriously

(36 hours' sleep)

Raging Sun, Raging Sky B+

Gay love explicated through a dreamscape of danger and myth; a gorgeous homo-odyssey

Viewing log: 19/3/10

2010-03-30T17:39:00.008+01:00

New Releases (youch, what a week this was)

The Bounty Hunter C–

Should have loathed this, but Aniston lifts surprising swathes of it to near-watchability

Happy Ever Afters D–

Two depressing weddings for the price of one, and they've really skimped on the photography

The House of the Devil B+

The Far From Heaven of retro slasher homages: precise and shivery, even if it's all build-up

I Love You Phillip Morris C+

Never establishes a workable tone, but it's surprisingly full-on with the guy on guy stuff

Old Dogs F

I could emit distressed animal noises but don't know how to spell them

My Last Five Girlfriends C

Not unpromising, but it juggles too many conceits and drops them one by one

Salvage W/O

Couldn't discern any degree of formal flair, just lots of syrupy orange blood

The Scouting Book for Boys C

Starts well, looks great, but too much is hard to buy, and the acting wobbles

Sons of Cuba B–

Initially like every other kiddie-contest documentary, then gains muscle as it proceeds

Other Adventures

The Exorcist III* (1990) B

The shape's a bit random, but I love its thoughtfulness; moving and eerie by turns

Young and Innocent (1937) B–

Middling Hitch for the period, dawdling a bit towards its one great set piece

Viewing log: 12/3/10

2010-03-11T13:12:00.008Z

New Releases

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo C

Disappointingly stodgy at best, and leaves a rather acrid taste in the mouth

Green Zone C+

Obviously compromised, pulled off watchably within its limits: still, a shame

Hachi: A Dog's Tale C–

What's with Gere and the Japanese remakes? Sits, lies down, begs for your love

The Kreutzer Sonata B

An astute incision into pathological jealousy, matchmaking Rose's passions

Shutter Island D+

Clanks its way through an ill-conceived plot with futile look-at-me craft

Other Adventures

Black Death B

Almost too grim, but I'm all for serious British horror and admire its integrity

Viewing log: 5/3/10

2010-03-07T11:34:00.011Z

New Releases

1234 B–

Modest but engaging; a more charismatic lead might have helped it fly

Alice in Wonderland D+

Confused about what it's for, visually unenticing, and traitorously generic at the end

Case 39 D

I've started feeling sorry for Ren-Zel, but really, the whole contraption is risible

Chloe C–

Julianne shines in a fast-nosediving project Egoyan clearly doesn't care about

Father of My Children B+

Deceptively artless, as befits a philosopher's movie, assembled with thought and grace

Legion C–

Crummy... but there's some trash pleasure to be had when it's not yapping on and on

Motherhood F

A dubious brief -- Uma does Mrs Dalloway -- which becomes parodic and nightmarish

Ondine D

Hard to see how anyone thought this was a good idea, least of all Chris Doyle

Other Adventures

The Killer Inside Me B–

Strangely academic, but Affleck's committed, and it's an honest stab at the book

Whip It B+

Wasn't sure at first, but the ensemble fill it up with life like some joyous balloon

The Messenger B+

Powerfully sober, with Harrelson only the third best in show; Foster is wonderful

Red Dust (1932) B+

Count me a Jean Harlow convert! Pleasurable as more than just camp

Viewing log: 26/2/10

2010-03-07T11:32:00.007Z

New Releases

The Crazies C–

Promising set-up, but devolves rapidly into a no-brain, resonance-free apocalypse

Everybody's Fine C+

Perfectly harmless, even pleasant, save for the garish kiddie apparitions

Extraordinary Measures D

Unduly mawkish disinterring of a manky old chestnut; the "light" bits are deadly

From Paris with Love D–

Lots of guilt, no pleasure -- noxiously retrograde, and the leads don't help

Leap Year D–

To be sure, eejit leprechauns trapped Amy in this charmless, gone-off confection

Micmacs C–

Tiny bits pop, but the whole proposition is so tactless and off-putting

Other Adventures

Sleeper B

Iffy gender politics lessen but can't spoil the inspired makeshift silliness

Viewing log: 19/2/10

2010-02-27T10:54:00.012Z

A Closed Book C–

Not exactly Nabokov, plus too smug and threadbare to function cinematically

Crazy Heart C+

Can't begrudge Bridges, and easily indulged, though the Maggie stuff feels tepid

The Headless Woman A–

A glancing yet exacting moral puzzle which turns the viewer into a detective

The Last Station D+

I've dissed this already, but forgot to employ the words "porridgey" and "why?"

The Lovely Bones D–
Let's make a Nancy Drew cartoon of love and loss! Almost eerily misguided

Robey's Oscar Rewrites: (2)

2010-02-25T07:19:00.005Z

BEST DIRECTOR, 1962

They said...

Pietro Germi, Divorce — Italian Style

*David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia

Robert Mulligan, To Kill a Mockingbird

Arthur Penn, The Miracle Worker

Frank Perry, David and Lisa

I say...

Luis Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel

John Frankenheimer, The Manchurian Candidate

David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia

Sidney Lumet, Long Day's Journey Into Night

Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan's Childhood

With a huge roster of unusually worthy runners-up: Stanley Kubrick (Lolita), John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Robert Aldrich (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane), Michelangelo Antonioni (L'eclisse), Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water), Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker), Tony Richardson (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), Jean-Luc Godard (Vivre sa vie), Edward Dmytryk (Walk on the Wild Side), Otto Preminger (Advise and Consent) and Herk Harvey, for my beloved Carnival of Souls. What a year! Plus I haven't even seen Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon yet. And I don't really get Jules et Jim, hence its exclusion.

Oscar Symposium

2010-02-25T07:09:00.002Z

@The Film Experience. Join us!

Get to The Point

2010-02-22T23:22:00.003Z

It's not often I have something to plug other than my Telegraph reviews, but I'm chuffed to announce that a longer piece commissioned from me by a fledgling Chicago-based magazine is both up online and available in the print edition. It's about David Cronenberg. You'll see there's much else to browse through, and though I haven't made time yet for a proper perusal of their second issue, I loved the first: the intellectual scope of the thing, ranging from classical philosophy to politics and the arts, is massively refreshing, and it was a real privilege to write for them. I may write more, if their increasingly prestigious roster of guest contributors leaves any room for the likes of me. If you like what you're reading, and agree with me that it's the kind of publication that needs to be championed, do spread the word!

Berlin: Days 5+6+7

2010-02-22T22:13:00.005Z

Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, Aus: Panorama) B
Wobbly script, but cracking drive, sound and intensity for a debut

Caterpillar (Koji Wakamatsu, Japan: official competition) W/O

Literally pitches itself as gruelling arthouse gimp porn, so don't blame me

Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess, US: Generation 14+) B–

Wildly up and down, but hard done by, particularly given the delightful perfs

Amphetamine (Scud, Hong Kong: Panorama) D

Nothing but copious nudity and insane naiveté to recommend it. I did stay...

The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, UK/France: Berlinale Special) A–

A beautiful wisp of a thing: captures the Edinburgh twilight just sublimely

Please Give (Nicole Holofcener, US: out of competition) C+

Pleasant enough, though the want of ambition or novelty disappoints

Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, US: Forum) B+

Superb community flavour around a bracing Dardenne-ish narrative grip

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, US: out of competition) B+

Radical no, generous and hilarious and expertly performed? Absolutely

Berlin: Days 3+4

2010-02-15T09:24:00.005Z

Making the Boys (Crayton Robey, US: Panorama Dokumente) C+

Valuable anecdote trussed up in wearing, gossipy montage

Submarino (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark: official competition) B–

21 Grams-ishly grim, but does have guts, and it's memorably acted

La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1961: Retrospektive) A–

A marriage in freefall: pristinely disconsolate, and Moreau's terrific

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, US: official competition) C

Morose People? Tries hard to say things, but too often drab and taxing

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Bansky, UK: out of competition) B+

Riotously funny, shape-shifting doc, full of ironies about art and profit

World on a Wire (RW Fassbinder, Germany, 1973: Berlinale Special) B

The story's confounding, but it's so delirious design-wise you don't care

Berlin: Days 1+2

2010-02-13T11:09:00.006Z

Apart Together (Quanan Wang, China: official competition) C+

Too much on-the-nose reminiscing, and the static style gets mannered

The Ghost (Roman Polanski, France/Germany/UK: official competition) B–

Frisky and wittily played, if limitingly lightweight as a political thriller

Beautiful Darling (James Rasin, US: Panorama Dokumente) B

Good for this overplayed genre, thanks to some piercing archival finds

Howl (Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, US: official competition) B–

Animation (and poetry) aside, it's a thoughtful and touching portrait

Bill Douglas Trilogy (Forum) A

Perfect, rapt, quiet, mundane poetry with sullen soul -- lives up to its rep

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, US: out of competition) D+

Why, Marty, why? Loony, gimmicky and pretentious -- it's like Gothika

Viewing log: 12/2/10

2010-02-13T10:47:00.006Z

New Releases (blurbs to follow)

Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin B

Brave with its ambiguities, rock solid in filming and structure

Battle for Terra C

Kind of gawkily well-meaning, but I mainly felt sorry for it

Beyond the Pole C

Laughs at the start, but gets sketchy and unrewarding

Food, Inc. B–

It's a shame the movie makes its case so darn politely

Letter from an Unknown Woman* B

Used to love this, now just like it: the acting is kind of shallow

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief D–

The kind of processed cheese I wouldn't wish on anyone

Ponyo B–

Oddball yes, cutesy yes, beguiling only sporadically

A Single Man* C

Worth it for Firth, but only just: the style doesn't mean anything

Takeshis' D

A thoroughgoing rhyme and reason drought, from a director I don't get

Valentine's Day D+

Mosaics of love lost and found rarely come fuglier

Winter in Wartime C

The Dutch Resistance as a blandly handsome, Boy's Own exercise

The Wolfman C

Some capable craft at the service of scared, MOR compromise

Viewing log: 5/2/10

2010-02-06T09:48:00.011Z

New Releases

Astro Boy C–

Perky to the point of vapid, and the plot's a wholesale rip-off of A.I.

Holy Water D–

Benny Hill might have thought these routines a trifle moth-eaten

Invictus C

Didn't Mandela have some other projects that first year? Uninspiring

Malice in Wonderland D

Some credit for craziness, but it's such a lurid and unpleasant ride

Tony C+

Lots of good, awkward scenes, but it doesn't disturb or go anywhere

Youth in Revolt C+

Starts well and Cera anchors it deftly; bitty and oddly insincere, though

Other Adventures

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn A

Gorgeous, clear-eyed portrait of a family; Peggy Ann Garner is something else

The Seventh Veil C

Robey's Oscar Rewrites: (1)

2010-02-03T23:29:00.012Z

New series. Simple idea. Random category from Oscar history -- and my alternatives. Minus a winner, which you're welcome to propose...

All hail, by the way, IMDb's much-improved search-by-year function! Which makes this, if not more possible, then certainly much quicker.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, 1986

They said...

Tom Berenger, Platoon

*Michael Caine, Hannah and Her Sisters

Willem Dafoe, Platoon

Denholm Elliott, A Room with a View

Dennis Hopper, Hoosiers

I say...

Julian Beck, Poltergeist II: The Other Side

Michael Caine, Hannah and Her Sisters

Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet

Ray Liotta, Something Wild

Tom Noonan, Manhunter

With an honourable mention to Jeffrey Jones in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I consider Daniel Day-Lewis a lead in My Beautiful Laundrette -- though not, of course, in A Room with a View. Chime in, friends! I think this one could run and run.

Viewing log: 29/1/10

2010-01-30T13:33:00.009Z

New Releases

Adoration C
Better than Chloe, but a plausibility nightmare; gets plain silly

Breathless F
Lordy, I loathed this -- ugly, amateurish and intolerably overextended

Edge of Darkness C–
A hot mess, barely intelligible, with some (almost) redeemingly weird scenes

Horses B
Not Zoo 2. Somewhat faux-naif, but engagingly sad and gently whimsical

Late Autumn A–
Wondrous colours and a fascinating relationship with urban modernity

Oil City Confidential B+
Temple explores the backstreets of music history with addictive flair

Precious* B+
Plenty of mistakes, but the movie's half-deranged empathy can't be denied

The Princess and the Frog B–
Lovely visuals when it's in New Orleans; the bayou bits drag, unfortunately

Other Adventures

The Woman in the Window* (1944) A–
An old favourite I still love for its implacable, paranoid logic and the perfs

The Lodger (1927) A–
Hard to beat for clockwork build-up of suspicion and eroticism

Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) C–
Neeson's quite good, but Nesbitt's terrible, and the script flails conceitedly

Georgia (1995) B+
A sublimely complex sisterly relationship; the occasional duff note elsewhere

Bananas (1971) B+
Irresistible nonsense: surely one of the funniest of the "early, funny ones"

Billy Bathgate (1991) B+
Elegantly muted, nobly adapted and way-underrated. Steven Hill is superb

Viewing log: 22/1/10

2010-01-23T15:05:00.008Z

New Releases

Armored B–
Yay for Walter Hill throwbacks this businesslike, even when the plot's creaky

The Boys are Back B

Far more sincerity and detail in the relationships than you'd think

Brothers C–

One fake moment after the next, thanks to Benioff and the glum leads

Ninja Assassin F

It scrunched my face into a dyspeptic rictus from start to finish

A Prophet* A

Brutal and tender, unshakeably real and daringly surreal, epic and confined

Toy Story 2 (3D)* A

Still every bit as glorious, and Pixar's real benchmark for story construction

Other Adventures

La tête contre les murs (1959) B–

Some great imagery, but the script's too patly diagnostic

The Invasion (2007) F

Did aliens make this, or Nokia PRs? Literally nothing goes to plan

88 Minutes (2007) D–

Might be Pacino's nadir, and I've seen Righteous Kill

The Unloved (2009) B+

The parent scenes don't work, but everything else is compassionate magic

Same Time, Next Year (1978) D–

A chintzy, Neil Simon-ish simulacrum of hell, absurdly up itself

Down to the Bone (2004) C+

Borderline drudgery, but improves towards the end, and Vera's great

Nine Lives (2005) C+
Liked the early segments, before it slides into softcore Guillermo Arriaga

*denotes a repeat viewing

Old Rope, new life

2010-01-16T01:03:00.003Z

Bertie Carvel in Rope, at the Almeida, might be my favourite performance on the London stage since Bill Irwin in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or at least Douglas Hodge in the Menier's Cage aux Folles. He's that good. To those who only know Patrick Hamilton's soiree-murder nailbiter from the Hitchcock movie, this is the Jimmy Stewart role -- but who knew Rupert Cadell could be such a peach of a part for a young actor? (He's 33.) The last to arrive on stage, he makes his entrance count, hobbling in with a gilded cane, an expression of distaste at the octagonal chest serving as a canape table centre stage, and a hissily accented drawl -- part Gordon Kaye, part Anton Walbrook -- which he sustains quite immaculately for the next hour and a half. When he turns his withering sarcasm on each of the party guests in turn -- they include the droll Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a bluff, hearty athletics champ, and the priceless Phoebe Waller-Bridge, turning the excitable flapper Leila into the very model of a gangly Max Beerbohm caricature -- it's a controlled torrent of contemptuous aestheticism. And there's a sadness to him: the war wound causing that limp has curdled his worldview into bitter desolation. His only comfort is in catching others out, which is to say smelling an instant rat at the whole complexion of the evening.

Roger Michell's production isn't perfect. The leads have their individual moments: Blake Ritson's Brandon, a brittle charmer with a dead soul, is an energetically conceited MC, and Alex Waldmann plays Granillo as a small, querulous schoolboy -- an also-ran. In tandem, though, the sense of duet is missing: they don't communicate enough eye-flashing anxiety across the stage, and Waldmann goes OTT at least twice with the screeching hysteria, as Michell allows the tone of the piece to tip over too precipitously into macabre farce. Their fate is never felt to matter, because they are second-class citizens, particularly under the shriveling gaze of Carvel's Rupert, who lurks by the fireplace watching their whole charade play out, and prodding it occasionally with his line of suspicious questioning. The last scenes are fascinating, because Michell and Carvel have built enough ambiguity into the character that you forget whether he's going to let them off the hook or not. We hold our breath while morality and cold logic conduct a duel in his head. The tortured physicality that Carvel brings to his whole performance -- the sheer effort it takes him to cross his legs, his brusque, impatient but clomping progress across the room -- pay off beautifully when he gets his tiny glimpse at what's in the chest, and just stands there. He'd already guessed, but the full measure of what they've done stops him in his tracks. Brandon and Granillo may have lifted the corpse inside, but it's Rupert's job -- and Carvel's job, pulled off just tremendously -- to weigh it.

Viewing log: 15/1/10

2010-01-15T15:07:00.012Z

New Releases

44 Inch Chest C+
Hurt & McShane really get their teeth in, Winstone tries. But why so curtailed?

All About Steve D+

Some gags fly, and go Sandy, but it's too often maddeningly garish and random

The Book of Eli D

Carts around its old-hat ideas with an impressive lack of humour or credibility

Crude B–

Could have been shaped more forcefully, but bitter and cogent all the same

OSS 117 : Lost in Rio D+

A smirkfest amusing itself rather than us -- doubt I'll race to see Nest of Spies

Still Walking B

Ozu-lite? Kind of, but limpid and lovely in its simple way

Up in the Air* B–

Glib and opportunistic, I'll admit, but the Vera/George stuff still delights

Other Adventures

See How They Fall (1994) B–

A very uneven rough draft of a movie; does tip daringly into outright man-love

Dinner at Eight (1933)* B+

House champagne, with cracking turns from Dressler and the good Barrymore

Fata Morgana (1971) B

Herzog at full noodle; off-puttingly spare and opaque, but oddly resonant

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) C+

Not enough grit, except from Day-Lewis, to make its conflicts reverberate

The Sorcerers (1967) C+

No Witchfinder, but the hokey plot is staged with some style and integrity

Bent (1997) D+

An Important Play stultified with makeshift editing and mainly rotten acting

*denotes a repeat viewing