Total Film Reviews

Bruno

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:39:38 GMT

Sacha Baron Cohen conceived Ali-G and Borat as idiot-innocents to expose casual racism and xenophobia. Bruno is an idiot-innocent designed to shake out latent homophobia.

Next up: Baron Cohen in camp but convincing drag (Brenda? Bridget?) taking on institutionalised sexism…

Maybe not, but rather than evolve and set up a different gag, Baron Cohen continues to move sideways – tweaking his tried and trusted raw material until it’s surface-fresh.

As a movie, Bruno is funny, filthy and lands a few sharp punches on the noses of facile media whores, preening fashionistas, and bearpit talk-show hosts. But as a character who already feels vaguely familiar (catchphrases, stupid outfits, whipping-boy sidekick), 90-odd minutes in his company is a big ask.

Ali-G and Borat began life as bite-sized regular TV slots. Bruno has more or less arrived fully formed – but, as with his predecessors, less would definitely be more.

Baron Cohen has smartly tried to keep the conceit alive by refusing to do interviews out of character. But as a result, Bruno’s barbs have been blunted by over-exposure - the joke feels old barely half-way through.

Three years ago, Borat was a series of fused-together TV sketches that just about hung together as a feature. Bruno is like browsing through a bunch of YouTube videos – most of them individually hilarious, but stodgy and bloating in a single sitting.

Baron Cohen’s strength is in his suicidal commitment: taunting a cage-fighting crowd about their hetero credentials, graphically simulating analingus in front of a mortified ‘psychic’, interviewing the leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs and insisting that Osama Bin Laden looks like “a homeless Santa Claus”…

But for every edgy showpiece stunt, there’s a clearly scripted (or at least pre-arranged) prank that clunks – and a cut to a pointless, filler sub-plot that tracks Bruno’s relationship with his dour handler.

The writing is tight and Baron Cohen breezes through the shonky sections on sheer audacity, but it’s a film of great bits – not a great film.

“Al Qaeda is so 2001!” Bruno informs the Al-Aqsa guy. Uhuh. And Bruno is all very 2006...

Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:40:57 GMT

Come the evolution: bouncing buoyantly onto the 3-D bandwagon, Ice Age 3 looks slicker than permafrost.

Fox’s multi-dimensional do-over gives a well-judged shot in the arm for the cosy, kid-friendly franchise, and makes a neat fit (unlike Bolt’s bolted-on heroics) for a series whose forte has always been cleverly calibrated Chuck Jones-style chase sequences.

So Scrat the squirrel’s never-ending acorn hunt gets a jaw-flooring new lease of life from the vertiginous cliff-hanging, chasm-plunging 3D sequences, particularly as he’s also grappling with sexy female rival, Scratte.

Plot-wise, however, it’s a slow starter, as Manny the Mammoth’s (voiced by Ray Romano) upcoming parenthood (shades of Shrek The Third) prompts gormless sloth Sid (John Leguizamo) to adopt three dinosaur eggs from an ice cavern.

Slapstick and schmaltz follow until an enraged Mama Dinosaur sweeps Sid and her cuddly carnivorous brood back to a tropical dinoworld hidden deep under the surface.

Cue, inevitably, a rescue mission – albeit one given a wacky, welcome, high-energy edge by Simon Pegg’s batshit-crazy weasel adventure Buck, who’s locked in Captain Ahab-style feuding with a humungous T-Rex.

Director Carlos Saldanha puts the 3-D visual depth charges to good use too. Keeping the adrenalin soaring, barfing Venus fly-trap and giant dinosaur jaws snapping out over the audience will have the tinies shrieking with delight.

Then there’s the swooping pterodactyl chase over a lava river that threatens to put your eye out.

Granted, in between the thrills, there’s the usual Ice Age mix of anthropomorphic mush, Romano’s patented lugubriousness and some wholesome life-lessons, though this time mercifully leavened with mordant quips (“I used a sharpened clam-shell to turn a T-Rex into a T-Rachel,” boasts Buck).

Tragically, jabbering possums Crash (Seann William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck) survive the Palaeolithic peril, but hey, there’s always next time…

Public Enemies

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:40:24 GMT

“I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?”

What, indeed? The short, fast life of ’30s American gangster John Dillinger is legend: he robbed banks that robbed the public, becoming a media sensation, a Depression-era folk hero and the fi rst Public Enemy Number One of J Edgar Hoover’s new FBI.

After breaking out of every jail that held him, he was chased across America by G-man Melvin Purvis and at last famously shot dead by police outside the Biograph cinema in Chicago after watching a Clark Gable crime fl ick.

We know this. Michael Mann knows this. And, throughout his “true story”, you can’t help feeling that Johnny Depp’s Dillinger knows it too. He’s a dead man walking from the moment we meet him. Meaning Mann’s movie isn’t a biopic, it’s an elegy – one long dying breath. When we do meet Dillinger, he’s already a Tommy-Gun-blazing master criminal, busting his men out of Indiana State Prison and roaring away under an epic blue-sky to a heroic soundtrack.

A better title might have been The Man Who Shot John Dillinger. Like John Ford before him, Michael Mann loves to print the legend, turning cops and crims into duelling demi-Gods. Thing is, John Ford never printed the legend on HD.

Armed with hyper-real, hi-def video cameras, Mann and Heat cinematographer Dante Spinotti make mythic movie-drama look like faux-documentary. This is not American Gangster. This is something else. Something much more startling in which ordinary scenes become electrifying experiences as Mann takes an old story and makes it feel new and unexpected.

Framed in thrilling deep focus, Depp moves through familiar spaces – banks, restaurants, prisons, press conferences, wood cabins, cars, cinemas – that suddenly feel packed with fresh tension and atmosphere.

Despite moving like a getaway wagon, the plot is the least interesting thing about Mann’s latest crime epic. This tale is really about the telling. Beyond the wild chases, daring jailbreaks and bank robberies, much of the movie unfolds in a weird twilight zone between docu-style reality and gorgeous mythmaking.

Long before the breathlessly poignant final moments outside the Biograph, an eerie sequence sees Dillinger walking alone through a deserted police station. Better still is the surreal, funny scene in a packed cinema, where Dillinger sits sweating under the hot lights as a giant image of his face appears on screen while a public service announcement asks the packed auditorium to stay vigilant (“He could be the man sat next to you!”). It might be the movie’s best scene – try finding a better snapshot of the fame game’s seductive danger and dazzle.

Public Enemies gets its coffee-shop moment, too, FBI hotshot Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and Dillinger staring at each other through prison bars in an exchange of sharp lines and even more piercing silences. Initially looking too physically small to play a violent bank robber, Depp fills out the role of Dillinger with effortless charisma, authority and – most important of all – star wattage.

But this is not Heat: we never sink into the life of Purvis or his rivalry with the gangster. Exploiting Bale’s trademark intensity, Mann keeps him a cipher. Same goes for Billy Crudup’s unctuous J Edgar Hoover and Stephen Graham as the sociopathic Baby Face Nelson. Like Crockett and Tubbs in Miami Vice, these characters actually have almost no real personality at all. But as we watch them attack their work with brutal efficiency, we have to take them deadly seriously.

Not least because guns in a Michael Mann movie really sound like guns. Each deafening blam from characters’ pistols, rifles and submachine guns reverberates through your body as if you’d taken the bullet yourself.

Public Enemies’ gun battles erupt with sudden, visceral force – never more so than in a woodland shootout between Purvis’ FBI hit squad and Dillinger’s crew, lensed by Mann at the infamous Little Bohemia Lodge where it actually took place. Hot lead thwacks into tree bark. Desperate breath and muzzle smoke fill the night air. Bodies are wrecked by the carnage.

But as ever in Mann’s world, the real heat around the corner is the romance that’s just out of reach. From Manhunter to The Last Of The Mohicans to Heat to Miami Vice, Mann’s career is a secret string of beautiful, impossible love stories. Here it’s La Vie En Rose Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard as Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette.

It’s their story that gives Public Enemies its touching, tragic heartbeat, as she and Depp become two lost souls clinging to moments of a freedom they know can’t last. As the man says, “What else do you need to know?”

Red Mist

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:14:31 GMT

Beep, beep, wooooooo…: this moronic medical horror's so awful, you'll be willing yourself to flatline.

After her obnoxious med student mates leave an autistic janitor in a coma, The Uninvited’s Arielle Kebbel tries to resuscitate him in a highly dubious drug trial.

Suddenly he's having out-of-body experiences and murdering the over-privileged House, M.D. rejects who fucked him up.

Director Paddy Breathnach (Shrooms) apparently rented Ozploitation fave Patrick one too many times then rehashed it as a bargain-basement slasher full of cruddy production design and dim dialogue.

The result gives new meaning to the term 'persistent vegetative state'.

Blood: The Last Vampire

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:13:46 GMT

Stop us if you've heard this one before... In the shadows of our world, a lone warrior fights vampire hordes to save humanity despite being a half-breed Drac herself.

No Wes in black leather or Kate in Skin Two bondage gear here. Blood: The Last Vampire instead features Korean starlet Gianna Jun in a schoolgirl sailor uniform, pigtails flapping as she twirls her katana (hello fetishists...)

The plot's the usual Vampires Vs. Humans fight for supremacy - yadda, yadda, yadda - although with a good pedigree, since it's based on a superior, if little seen, anime that debuted in 2000.

Reheated in live action, the lean original gets padded out with new characters and backstory (did we really need an American teen sidekick?)

It's the action that really suffers, the anime's dynamism fizzling out as every samurai duel falls back on fake-looking CG squibs and a blur of fast-cut, see-nothing camera angles.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:43:37 GMT

It’s tough being gorgeous, rich and blonde; at first glance that seems to be the queasy, distancing theme at the heart of Rebecca Miller’s fourth feature.

Has her own family history – Miller’s playwright-legend father Arthur divorced Marilyn Monroe the year before she was born – rubbed off on her tale of a placid housewife (Robin Wright Penn) quietly suffocating in the shadow of her brilliant husband?

Only Miller knows the truth, but she’s obviously captivated by the travails of a beautiful woman heading for a mid-life breakdown (fridgeraiding, sleepwalking, accepting lifts from Keanu Reeves).

While her heroine is misunderstood (until her event-ridden past unravels in flashback), she’s not going to melt too many moviegoers’ hearts.

Wright Penn is probably a tad young for the role, while seeing crinkly screen hubby Alan Arkin (a hugely celebrated publisher, no less) slipping tongue sandwiches to Gossip Girl Blake Lively, the leggy teenage version of Pippa Lee, isn’t recommended for viewers with weak stomachs.

What Miller’s movie does possess in spades is a spry, oddball streak of humour and an assembly line of funky character parts for cool, charisma-packed actresses like Maria Bello, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore and Monica Bellucci, who keep the blood pumping as, respectively, Pippa’s fucked-up mum, neurotic pal, aunt’s bad-girl lover and Arkin love rival.

Pippa’s teenagedirtbag escapades ward off apathy and Wright Penn makes her glassy-eyed ennui a sly comment on trapped-wife syndrome. But even as we watch Pippa Lee grow a backbone, Miller never quite finds her hidden depths.

Cloud 9

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:40:36 GMT

The premise seems conventional enough: one summer in East Berlin a married woman deliberates over whether or not she should tell her husband about her affair with another man.

What’s unusual about this tender drama is that the lady in question, Inge (Ursula Werner), is a seamstress in her mid-60s who has been married to Werner (Horst Rehberg) for over three decades, while her new lover Karl (Horst Westphal) is a sprightly 76-year-old.

Avoiding superfluous sub-plots and back-stories and dispensing with a musical score, German writer-director Andreas Dresden sticks tight to his actors, who respond with powerfully naturalistic performances.

To its credit Cloud 9 doesn’t shy away from the physical intimacy experienced by its characters, nor the profound emotions which are unleashed by the extramarital affair.

Whatever one’s age, it seems, falling in love brings both joy and pain.

Echoes Of Home

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:36:53 GMT

The hills are alive with the sound of yodelling in Stefan Schwietert’s documentary.

Its core question, “What does Switzerland sound like?”, is probed via three devoted yelpers – the traditionally inclined Noldi Alder and the more experimental Christian Zehnder and Erika Stucky.

Despite their differences, they share a poetic take on their country-song, seeing it as an aesthetic echo chamber in which ideas about art, identity, landscape and history bounce off each other and evolve.

There’s nothing dry about this study in tradition: Schwietert stresses the freedom and spontaneity in avant yelping, qualities his lead trio embrace with palpable passion.

35 Shots Of Rhum

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:34:33 GMT

After the mysterious globetrotting of The Intruder, French director Claire Denis returns to suburban Paris with this affecting portrayal of a loving father-daughter relationship, which is partly inspired by the sublime domestic dramas of Ozu.

Widowed train-driver Lionel (Alex Descas) lives contentedly with his university student daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), and in their spare time they see friends from their apartment block, including one of his ex-girlfriends Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and the orphaned Noé (Grégoire Colin).

Lionel, however, realizes that it’s time for Josephine to move on in her life.

The key events in this low-key film occur off-screen, but Denis and regular cinematographer Agnès Godard have the priceless ability to infuse the everyday with a magical dimension: nowhere is this better illustrated than when the characters, stranded at a cafe in the early hours, dance to The Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’. A wonderful film.

Soul Power

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:31:56 GMT

Busting with footage left in legal limbo for over three decades, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary is uproarious and uplifting.

A worthy companion piece to When We Were Kings (which Levy-Hinte edited), Soul Power chronicles the three day Zaire ’74 concert that accompanied Mohammad Ali’s ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ clash with George Foreman.

With American acts The Spinners, BB King and, naturally, James Brown all “going home” to perform alongside their African kinsmen, the playlist is fiercely diverse and stirring.

But off-stage antics are equally riveting, with Ali’s ring-bound tussle with a Spinner and a plane-set jam session but two highlights.

The Innocent Sleep

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:08:20 GMT

A young homeless man (Rupert Graves) gets mixed up in murder in a moody British thriller that’s most notable for Michael Gambon’s scenery-chewing turn as the sadistic villain determined to silence him.

Extras limited to a brief Making Of.

The Scarlet Tunic

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:01:10 GMT

A betrothed merchant’s daughter falls for Jean-Marc Barr’s poetry-reading cavalryman in this Thomas Hardy adaptation.

Typical of Tommo, everything that can go tragically wrong, does.

It’s clearly done on the cheap but elegantly shot, with generous add-ons, too.

Doubt

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:54:54 GMT

Does great theatre make a great movie?

John Patrick Shanley’s adap of his play about a priest’s suspected paedophilia over-eggs the visuals with distracting Gothic mannerisms. But it’s easy to give the benefit of Doubt when the story’s driven by four outstanding performances.

Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman are titanic but the revelations are fellow Oscar-nominees Amy Adams and Viola Davis.

Solid extras add confidence.

S. Darko

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:48:58 GMT

In the pantheon of pointless sequels, from The Great Escape II: The Untold [And Untrue] Story to Highlander II (“There can only be one – more!”), this Richard Kellyless cash-in really takes the stinky biscuit.

But it’s not the gall of exploring the Donnie Darko universe without a qualified guide that grates so much as the vertiginous drop in quality between the two films. Where once there was Drew Barrymore cameoing, now we have Elizabeth Berkeley. Enough said.

As a self-important opening crawl informs us, it’s been seven years since her elder brother bit the big one, and Samantha Darko (original actress Daveigh Chase) is driving across the desert to California with best mate Briana Evigan (daughter of My Two Dads’ Greg) when they get caught up in some apocalyptic nonsense about falling stars and missing children.

While Donnie had the faintest tang of teenagers drinking too much coffee then staying up all night talking about God, S. Darko is shriekingly pretentious, with jobbing director Chris Fisher using slo-mo, fastmo and music-video symbolism to coat every inexplicable event with undeserved significance.

Even the extras rattle with uncertainty. “Honestly, why dramatically does there need to be another Donnie Darko?” asks screenwriter Nathan Atkins in the Making Of. He never offers an answer, because there isn’t one.

At the start, the annoying Samantha lies down on the baking highway. “I’m roadkill,” she squawks insufferably. So’s the movie.

Bronson

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:40:33 GMT

Hard to say what’s more audacious.

That director Nicolas Winding Refn frames his anti-biopic of Britain’s most notorious prisoner as a 21st Century Clockwork Orange?
Or that he damn near pulls it off?

Galvanised by Tom Hardy’s extraordinary performance, it’s ferocious, funny, radical and totally gripping.

Marley & Me

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:36:42 GMT

Forget Jennifer Aniston. Marley (a golden Labrador, rambunctious) & Me (a golden Owen Wilson, rambunctious) is a love story between man and mutt – thinly crafted, barkingly sincere.

When the blond-on-blond action comes with this much chemistry, it’s hard to resist; tears will be shed.

Revolutionary Road

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:09:20 GMT

Behind those Identikit picket fences of Eisenhower’s America, a ‘perfect marriage’ is crumbling… Again.

There’s an aura of déjà vu about Revolutionary Road, not only in echoes of period neighbours Far From Heaven and TV’s Mad Men, but the nagging reminder that Sam Mendes already did the ’burbs in American Beauty.

But, as that film’s tagline suggested, look closer. Four films in, Mendes is zeroing in on what might be his big subject: disappointment. Just as Jarhead targeted a war-movie geek childishly bored by the real thing, so Revolutionary Road is tough enough to blame psychology, not society, for its characters’ failings.

The thwarted dreams of Frank and April Wheeler stand for every couple whose love has grown stale on compromise and mutual contempt. “It’s a contemporary story to me,” admits Mendes in the accompanying doc, insisting on naturalism – not one frame was filmed on a soundstage – to agitate the churning emotions at Road’s core.

Then again, maybe Mendes just wants to keep his own missus content. It’s clear this is Kate Winslet’s Raging Bull moment. As the film’s chief cheerleader, she’s even convinced Leonardo DiCaprio to sour the dewy-eyed memories of Titanic groupies by recasting their iconic romance as a two-hour row.

Leo summons untapped depths of anguish, but it’s Kate, seeing April as a wannabe Winslet restrained by self-consciousness, who touches head and heart.

Did Oscar reward the right actress? Certainly. Right performance? Possibly not.

Year One

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:09:36 GMT

You can’t laugh for 100 minutes straight. Hence the hermetic perfection of the half-hour sitcom. Hence the humour droughts midway through loads of comedies. Hence the stop-start, sketch-show format pioneered by the Pythons.

Plonking us into prehistory like a less-imaginative Lynx ad, this Judd Apatow- Harold Ramis (Mc)love-in begins as genial Flintstones-y fun.

Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) are tribesmen shunned for their less-than-satisfactory hunter-gathering skills – a comic scenario as ripe as the forbidden fruit on the Tree Of Knowledge.

But when Zed snaffles one of the aforementioned apples, the pair are banished from this brave, barely explored new world into a Biblical era plundered to death in The Life Of Brian.

Whereas Brian had the greatest story (n)ever told to satirise, this is just pick’n’mix puerility. En route to Sodom (“Best thing about Sodom? The sodomy.”), our heroes encounter a series of Old Testament types, some nifty (Hank Azaria as a foreskin-obsessed Abraham), some naff (Oliver Platt channelling Uncle Monty as a camp priest).

It’s amiable enough, like an anally fixated Asterix adventure, but the material’s thinner than the Turin Shroud, and the quality plummets whenever Cera’s offscreen or Platt’s on it. Surely the last thing anyone needs is another inadequately attired fat man overacting?

Pile-driving gags into submission like a loincloth-clad Nacho Libre, Black’s performance is manic and wearying – bad news in a buddy-buddy comedy.

It’s left to the adorable Cera to provide most of the laughs and all of the pathos. “Why all the genital mutilation?” he asks in that deflated fall-guy falsetto. Um, maybe because the writers ran out of ideas?

Between them, the filmmakers had a hand in Groundhog Day, Superbad and The Office USA, so they should know that when the knob gags tire, as they eventually must, the audience has to want to see what happens next. After all, you can’t laugh for 100 minutes, but you can care.

The Class

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:27:54 GMT

Have you ever doubted that school is a battleground? This film should set you straight.

Laurent Cantet’s Palme d’Or winner The Class muddies reality-fiction divisions further but cuts closer still to the school-desk grain.

The setting is a Paris state school and the pupils aged 14 to 15. François Bégaudeau, a teacher, plays a version of himself; real pupils play versions of themselves.

The film is no fly-on-the-blackboard documentary but Cantet, who directed Time Out, plays it like one. Classroom tussles chime with truth and complexity. François is a good, idealistic teacher wrestling with rebellious kids, but this is no Dead Poets Society: his class needle him and his liberalism is speared on grounds of race and gender.

When he loses his cool and calls two girls “skanks”, the fallout creates a situation in which he learns a lesson or two. We do, too, but the bustling life of the film enlightens without hectoring.

These kids might be alright in the long haul but their states of turmoil engender respect for their struggles, uncertainties and anxieties.

It’s testament to this movie that it leaves you wanting to gatecrash a class reunion 10 years down the line.

American Teen

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:24:46 GMT

Have you ever doubted that school is a battleground? This film should set you straight.

Nanette Burstein’s American Teen doc cherry-picks five teen-flick archetypes from a Midwest high: school: geek, jock, alt gal, hunk, queen bee. It sounds contrived, but Teen’s selfconsciousness is apt – the kids are acutely aware of their place. Besides, much here rings with authenticity, like the cruelty with which mobile phones (good for dumping) and email (good for circulating one girl’s topless photo) can become weapons of mass emotional destruction.

Bile-attracting psycho-princess aside, you warm to these kids. Indie chick Hannah draws the most sympathy – though whether that’s because she’s part-deliberately staged as Burstein’s stand-in or because her emotional bruising elicits genuine empathy is debatable.

If the film’s muddying of reality and performance is unclear, that confusion is mirrored in the kids’ reflections on their own identities. As Hannah puts it, “All we have to do is figure out who we really are… Holy shit!”.

The bustling life of the film enlightens without hectoring. These kids might be alright in the long haul but their states of turmoil engender respect for their struggles, uncertainties and anxieties.

Extras-wise, the sole and all-too-brief interviews offer no resolutions. It’s testament to this movie that it leaves you wanting to gatecrash a class reunion 10 years down the line.

Gran Torino

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:13:23 GMT

It’s the growl that does it. A catarrh-thick snarl accompanied by a gob of spit, the corners of the mouth turned sharply downwards until they resemble a graph of General Motors’ share price. Like his favourite car – a ’72 Ford Gran Torino – retired Detroit autoworker Walt Kowalski is a relic from a different era.

But, as Clint Eastwood explains in one of two blink-and-you’ll-miss-it featurettes on this extras-lite DVD, “It’s not really a car picture. The car is really just a symbol of part of Walt. He sort of is the Gran Torino. He worked on it in the factory and he’s pretty much as antique as they are…”

Widely rumoured to be Clint’s final acting outing, his Kowalski is every iconic Man With No Name, Dirty Harry, William Munny performance rolled into one. It’s vintage Eastwood, distilled to perfection: the scowl, the growl and the instantly-quotable lines (“Get off my lawn!” or “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn’t have fucked with? That’s me.”)

He’s also a bigot who greets the arrival of a Hmong family next-door with a stream of non- PC epithets (“slopes”, “gooks” – but hey, it’s OK as he’s an equal opportunities bigot who hates “spooks”, “micks” and “dagos”, too). We’re invited to laugh with him as he slurs everyone he comes across. No wonder the Academy’s liberals snubbed this offering in favour of Changeling.

The tension heats up when the neighbours’ fatherless son Thao (Bee Vang) attempts to steal Kowalski’s prized Torino, egged on by nasty Asian gangbangers. Suddenly the Korean War vet breaks out his M1 Garand – .30 calibre, gas-powered, 450ft range – and kills the bad guys, Dirty Harry style.

That’s what you’d expect, right? Except Clint doesn’t go to that place. Sure, he brings the pain – 78 years and a Simon Cowell waistband is no impediment to giving gangsters a kicking – but vigilantism isn’t the theme here. Instead, as he’s slowly won over by his new neighbours (including mawkish Ahney Her as Thao’s big sis) and some spicy pork, the craggy racist discovers his gooey soft-centre. Sound like Hollywood formula? Well, it is. And not even the star’s smooth direction can disguise the by-the-numbers schtick.

However, this is an Eastwood vehicle – perhaps the last ever – and his iconic presence gives the Catholic theme (sin and salvation) some unexpected horsepower. Laced with an awareness that the way of the gun is a dead end, Gran Torino is Eastwood’s belated atonement for his .44 Magnum-stroking Harry Callahan or his six-shooting Blondie.

It’s an old man’s picture: fuzzily sentimental, for sure. But just as Detroit don’t make Fords like the Torino no more, so Hollywood don’t make old men like Clint Eastwood…

Che - Part One and Two - The Complete Story

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:06:20 GMT

In July 1964, a few months before Ernesto Che Guevara arrived in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, Andy Warhol set up a camera on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building. Over one long summer night, the avant-garde artist shot eight hours of uninterrupted footage of the Empire State Building.

The movie – a single, immobile real-time shot of the steel and granite needle towering over the city – was a landmark in minimalism. It boldly asked audiences to ignore boredom and bum-freeze and study the (then) tallest building in the world as both a concrete object and a towering symbol.

Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Part One And Two may have a hell of a lot more action (and editing) than Warhol’s architectural epic but it shares the same sense of monolithic presence. Che is a perverse, perhaps even revolutionary, biopic that refuses to shoot the iconic T-shirt image of the martyred Argentine guerrilla leader.

Instead it asks us to observe and contemplate him over time, its two parts tied to each other – glory in Cuba then an inexorable march towards defeat in Bolivia – as surely as darkness follows sunset over Warhol’s skyscraper.

“I was trying to avoid the conceits of the biographical film,” elaborates Soderbergh in a lightweight junket interview bundled on this two-disc set. “I wasn’t interested in the traditional, big movie moments – the things that they show as clips on television... I’m not going to have the scene where his hat falls off and someone hands him a beret.”

Having battled for eight years alongside star Benicio Del Toro to get the project bankrolled – two movies, four hours, shot in Spanish; who’d touch that with a $60 million bargepole? – the filmmaker apparently didn’t see the point in turning in an approachable biopic like Milk, W., or the crowd-friendly verbal parry of Frost/Nixon.

Che offers no hand-holding. Even its opening image is a cheeky affront to the idea of spoonfeeding the audience – a map of Cuba’s different zones hanging on the screen for what seems like an age without telling us anything we desperately need to know. There’s no neat summary of the Batista regime, or Cuba’s history, just that map.

Then we’re thrown into Che as Guevara attends the United Nations, scattershot black-and-white newsreel-style close-ups (the boots, the cigar, the beard) warning us that this won’t be a rounded portrait of the man but a jagged, fractured glimpse of a life in the process of being lived.

It’s a movie easier to define by what’s missing than what isn’t. There’s no subplot; Che’s family is barely seen; his relationship with Castro is sketchy; his years in Cuba’s government getting his hands bloody with political executions or leading a failed uprising in the Congo completely excised.

Even the movie’s meat, the guerrilla fighting that Che leads through Cuba and, later, the scrub forest of Bolivia, lacks any sort of punctuation. Indistinct incidents – battles, injuries, hardships – elide into one another without giving any sense of the bigger picture.

Yet the action is immersive. Urban street fighting captures the zing of bullets on masonry while the all-new digital RED camera lets Soderbergh, who doubled as cinematographer using his usual Peter Andrews pseudonym, jog along behind the rebels or hunker down with them in the dirt as they come under fire.

Seen as a whole, over four hours, Che becomes an incredible experience. Del Toro deserves huge credit for that, his ebullient charisma investing this historical personage with a presence that leaves us in no doubt how he convinced men to spend years in the jungle fighting for a revolutionary principle that was ahead of its time.

The more we’re left to observe him, the more real he seems. Throwaway incidents become deeply affecting, as when an old peasant woman visits one of his impromptu pueblo clinics simply because she’s never seen a doctor before. There, in Del Toro’s reaction, is the soul of this man – his Marxist belief in social equality rendered living and breathing in a flash of human sympathy. In a single scene Che does what it took Walter Salles a whole movie to do in The Motorcycle Diaries.

“We didn’t have a motive of trying to make him more likeable or less likeable,” explains Del Toro in another of the discs’ disappointingly thin talkingheaders. “We tried to stay as impartial as possible. Our goal was to make sure, what we filmed, no one could tell us that didn’t happen.” Stripped of hackneyed emotional arcs and cheap biopic tics, Che becomes neither a character nor an icon but a man – as unknowable as we all are to one another.

In the interview, Soderbergh recalls a telling comment from one of Che’s comrades-in-arms about the distant guerrilla leader: “You had to love him for free.” The same could be said of the director’s austere anti-biopic, a film that doesn’t try to praise or bury Che, just lets him be.

Embodiment Of Evil

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:41:13 GMT

Released from a mental hospital after 40 years, hellfire-spouting Charles Manson-alike Coffin Joe (writer/director/star José Mojica Marins) sets out to spread his evil seed through the favelas of São Paulo, “even if it means imploding the cosmos”.

The third instalment in a 45-year franchise, this bonkers Brazilian shocker plays like City Of God remade by Hammer.

Highly sadistic one minute (one victim is forced to eat her own bottom) and silly the next (ditto), it’s like a Vincent Price film for the torture porn generation, albeit closer to the grand guignol of Dr Phibes than the genuine distress of Witchfinder General.

The Last Thakur

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:24:28 GMT

After spaghetti westerns and macaroni westerns comes perhaps the first tikka masala western.

The setting is a small Bangladeshi town where two men contend for power. One is the Thakur, or Hindu landlord, aging and crippled, whose influence is waning. His rival is the Muslim village boss known as the Chairman.

Into this tense situation comes a stranger armed with a rifle, seeking the truth about his mother’s rape and murder.

Sadik Ahmed’s debut feature expends a bit too much time on talk, with all the action shoehorned into the last few minutes. But it doesn’t lack for atmosphere or vivid performances.

Shirin

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:20:27 GMT

Next time you go to the flicks, turn around and spend the whole film staring at the audience.

You’re sure to have as rewarding an experience as that offered by Abbas Kiarostami in this austere experiment, an interminable series of close-ups of a hundred-odd Iranian actresses – plus a tearful Juliette Binoche – wordlessly reacting to an adaptation of a 12th Century poem we hear but never see.

Admittedly, there is a hypnotic quality to the women’s rapt expressions that initially proves beguiling.

Once the curiosity factor’s gone, though, you’re left with 90 minutes of unmitigated tedium that’s really one long art installation.