Charlie Wilson's War (15)
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (15)
Published: 11 January 2008
Dan in Real Life (PG)
Published: 11 January 2008
Steve Carell proves, as he did in Little Miss Sunshine, that he can mix sadness into the slapstick in this gentle family comedy. He plays advice columnist Dan, a widower trying to keep his three daughters happy – two of them are teenagers – and now facing a challenge even his own moral reflex doesn't know how to handle. He has accidentally fallen in love with Marie (Juliette Binoche), who has just started going out with his jock brother (Dane Cook) – and now he must conceal his heartache during a family get-together.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (15)
Published: 11 January 2008
Sidney Lumet, now 83 and owner of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oscars, has defied age and expectation to make one of the greatest films of his long career. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead uses a botched robbery as a springboard into a family tragedy that invokes the shades of Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill.
The Lady Vanishes (U)
Published: 11 January 2008
One of the last films Hitchcock shot in England launches a season of Margaret Lockwood films at the NFT. She plays a fetching young miss on her way home via a trans-Europe express to be married in London. On board she is befriended by a genteel English governess, who then inexplicably disappears, and none of the other passengers will admit to having seen her – none but an eccentric musician (Michael Redgrave), who helps her unravel a dastardly conspiracy.
You write the reviews: I Am Legend (15)
Published: 11 January 2008
Would you want to survive the apocalypse? Isn't life hard enough already? From Soylent Green through to Waterworld, the worst part of the apocalypse is surviving it. Where would you propose to buy your dental floss after armageddon? Who'd have time to worry about personal hygiene with zombies on the loose? This (the zombie part) is the dilemma that confronts Will Smith in I Am Legend. He copes better than most would, but still, post-apocalyptic life is bleak.
Half Moon (uncertified)
Published: 06 January 2008
In this picaresque road movie from Bahman Ghobadi, the writer-director of 'A Time for Drunken Horses', a famous Kurdish-Iranian folk musician and his dozen sons are travelling by coach to Iraq to play a concert in celebration of their people's newfound, post-Saddam freedom. But the military checkpoints and American gunfire in their path suggest that this freedom might not be worth celebrating. As the men trundle through mountains and villages, the film passes through a perplexing range of genres, stopping off at absurdist comedy, dour realist drama, and cryptic, symbol-strewn fable along the way. There are enough powerful scenes and stunning panoramas to confirm Ghobadi's future as a leading international film-maker, but 'Half Moon' is hard going. It reminded me of 'El Topo', and like that seminal midnight movie it would probably make more sense through a fug of marijuana smoke.
El Violin (uncertified)
Published: 06 January 2008
'El Violin' isn't quite as depressing as its opening scenes of rape and torture might lead you to assume, but it's not far off. Its heroes are a group of Mexican rebels who return home from a mission to find that their families have been thrown out of their mountain village by military forces. The ammunition that the guerrillas need to continue their struggle is hidden in a field, and it's up to one old man and his mule to smuggle it out of the area by charming a music-loving captain with his violin-playing. Shot in black-and-white, this grim little tale has the harrowing immediacy of a news report, but it's difficult to believe that the old man's tuneless scraping would charm anyone.
Alice in the Cities (PG)
Published: 06 January 2008
'Alice in the Cities' is well worth rediscovering. It's an early Wim Wenders film from 1974, featuring a taciturn German journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) who has just driven across America, but is too darn angst-ridden to finish the article he's been commissioned to write. While waiting in New York to catch a plane back across the Atlantic, he meets two other Germans, a woman and her young daughter, Alice. The journalist is entrusted to accompany the girl to Europe, and as the odd couple share planes, trains and automobiles, they fall into a 'Paper Moon'-style relationship. 'Alice in the Cities' becomes unexpectedly warm and elegiac for a film that seems, initially, to have nothing more on its mind than moodily grainy black-and-white urban cinematography and existentialist ennui.
Lust, Caution (18)
Published: 06 January 2008
DVD: Sicko
Published: 06 January 2008
Optimum Michael Moore's latest documentary focuses on the iniquities of America's extortionate health-care system, and presents our own NHS, among other countries' equivalents, as a preferable alternative. The surprise is that 'Sicko' has almost none of the animated segments or the old-movie montages which are Moore's stock in trade, and the man and his baseball cap don't appear on screen for a full 45 minutes. 'Sicko' is still a lucid, wry polemic, and it's more at home on DVD than it was on the big screen, but it doesn't feel as lapel-grabbingly vital as Moore's other work.
Alice in the Cities (U)
Published: 04 January 2008
This reissue from 1974 harks back to the promising early years of Wim Wenders' career, before his studies in modern alienation became ponderous and self-important. A German photographer, Philip Winter (Rudiger Vogler), kicks around the US, half-bored, half-intrigued by its endless highways and radio fuzz; on his way back to Europe he falls in with a German woman, who leaves her nine-year-old daughter Alice (Yella Rottlander, below) in his care. Arriving in Amsterdam, Winter realises that he now has sole responsibility for the child, and sets about finding her grandmother.
El Violin (NC)
Published: 04 January 2008
Francisco Vargas's first feature, shown at Cannes two years ago, is a haunting beauty, a story of guerrilla resistance in Mexico that slowly gathers the force of myth. A remote village is seized by the military, who torture certain campesinos in order to discover the whereabouts of an ammunition cache. A humble musician, Genaro (Gerardo Taracena), tries to reach his kidnapped wife and child, while his aged father Don Plutarco (Angel Tavira), entertaining the army captain (Dagoberto Gama) with his violin-playing, is secretly plotting to recover the weapons for the resistance.
P.S. I Love You (12A)
Published: 04 January 2008
P.P.S. I hate this. A bereavement chick flick of egregious ickiness, it stars Hilary Swank as a young widow who learns that her considerate late spouse (Gerard Butler) has organised a whole raft of letters to prevent her wallowing in grief and to help her "move on".
Lust, Caution (18)
Published: 04 January 2008
DVD: 1408
Published: 23 December 2007
Cusack stars as a jaded ex-novelist who churns out travel guides to America's haunted houses. His next stop is room 1408 of a New York hotel managed by Samuel L Jackson, an establishment so terrifying that it's driven 56 guests to suicide. Adapted from a Stephen King story, the film soon runs out of places to go: there's only so much that can happen in a battle between a man and his hotel room. But it's nice to be reminded in the early, witty scenes that horror films don't always have to test our stomach for witnessing torture and mutilation. Sometimes they can be fun.
St Trinian's/I Am Legend/The Kite Runner
Published: 23 December 2007
Closing the Ring (12A)
Published: 21 December 2007
There are moments of great tenderness in Richard Attenborough's elegiac melodrama that shifts between Michigan during the Second World War and Belfast during the Troubles.
Don't Touch the Axe (PG)
Published: 21 December 2007
Not a serial-killer caper but Jacques Rivette's sombre and faintly exasperating romantic drama set in Paris of the 1820s. A young general (Guillaume Depardieu) meets a married beauty (Jeanne Balibar) and launches a courtship.
I Am Legend (15)
Published: 21 December 2007
This high-concept supernova begins with a news report that one Dr Krippin has found a cure for cancer. Only it's not, it's a deadly virus that has destroyed the entire human race, bar one man, an army scientist named Robert Neville (Will Smith). There are two remarkable things about this blockbuster.
P.S. I Love You (12A)
Published: 21 December 2007
P.P.S. I hate this. It stars Hilary Swank as a young widow who learns that her late spouse (Gerard Butler) has organised a series of letters to help her "move on". It defies belief, common sense and logic.
I'm Not There (15)
Published: 21 December 2007
Todd Haynes's hotly anticipated I'm Not There seems to take pride in what it is not – it's not a straight biopic, not a rock movie, not a proper narrative, not a love letter, not a crowd-pleaser, not even a film that mentions the name "Bob Dylan". Not a lot of fun? Well, that's a moot point. It is an ambitiously conceived and lovingly textured piece of work, a movie of images and distorted facts that will hang about your consciousness long after you've seen it. In that way it more readily approximates to the recollection of a dream whose meaning can be glimpsed in fragments but then suddenly recedes and dissolves. A bit like the man himself.
The Kite Runner (12A)
Published: 21 December 2007
Based on Khaled Hosseini's highly regarded novel, this story of exile, ambition and betrayal has an emotional power that outstrips its occasional implausibilities. In San Francisco a novelist, Amir (Khalid Abdalla), looks back on his childhood in Afghanistan, and his friendship with Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), the son of his father's servant and an expert kite-flyer.
Paranoid Park (15)
Published: 21 December 2007
Gus Van Sant returns to Portland, scene of his greatest film My Own Private Idaho, for this tale of moral delinquency. A teen skateboarder, Alex (Gabe Nevins), falls in with a dangerous crowd and finds himself involved in a fatal accident.
St Trinian's (12A)
Published: 21 December 2007
The old St Trinian's movies with Alistair Sim weren't exactly comedy classics, but they look like gold next to this feeble, sloppily written caper. Its main selling-point is the casting of Rupert Everett as the headmistress of the titular school, channeling the horsey spirit of Camilla Parker Bowles.
