Cast: Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet

Director: Christophe Honoré

Screenplay: Christophe Honoré

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: French Film/Musical/Drama



CRITIQUE:

There’s a blinking charm in Christophe Honoré’s musical that’s hard to shrug off. With the leads’ appeal and the unashamedly quixotic songs, it’s almost sinful not to like it, at least. But with an uneven storyline and preposterous characters, we are mainly reminded that the French love being in love, with a substantially little emotional focus. A ménage-à-trois of all sorts, of all sexes, this is Honoré honouring a Truffaut-esque complexity of romance, tinge with grief and dark themes of death and depression. The main flaws of this film are the characters, who are humans which are difficult to psychologically pin down, and they are people whom we can’t emotionally invest in. The primary player in a love triangle, Ismaël (the reliable Louis Garrel) encounters a tragic loss of his girlfriend, becoming sorrow-stricken, breaks bonds with the second woman, and begins a love affair with a homosexual college student as his way of overcoming misery. We are also to be reminded that is a musical, people, so characters get to break out into a song (there are 13 of them). Whilst sensitive in its delivery of music, it’s an unpretentious modern musical that doesn’t stage or over-elaborate set pieces or sequences. The handheld look is natural and confident, and opts for a bleak, chilly atmosphere, rather than a shimmery-postcard-perfect Paris.


VERDICT:

A bleakly-themed, tune-coated French romance(s). Unassuming as a modern musical, uneven as a film.



RATING: B-

Cast: Jeanne-Piere Léaud, Albert Rémy

Director: François Truffaut

Screenplay: François Truffaut

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Genre: French Film/Drama



CRITIQUE:

Right up the pantheon of French New Wave cream-of-the-crop is this supremely made semi-autobiographical childhood tale of auteur François Truffaut himself, Les Quatre Cents Coups (which literally means “to raise hell”) or The 400 Blows, its English title counterpart. His debut film, which won him Best Director at Cannes Film Festival, charters a fresh-faced yet delinquently rebellious child Antoine Doinel (a wonderful central performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud), as he meanders around Paris away from the clutch of his indifferent mother and ham-fisted step-father, and even becomes a renegade at school. He may appear like a younger James Dean, but he is a rebel with poignancy. Writing on walls, stealing a typewriter from an office, from a disregarded kid to a delinquent institution detainee, Truffaut does not glorify the story and rather tells it straightforwardly without over-sentimentality, drawing a portrait of juvenile delinquency in naturalistic strokes. He captures Paris beautifully in a mobile cinematography that uses an array of filmic techniques: panning, tilting and tracking, a plethora of visual panache. Standout shots are the restrained camera movements in the classroom scenes, the amusing dissolution of a PE class in the streets, Antoine and Remy’s nostalgic escapade around Paris, and that striking, affecting shot of Antoine’s silent tears falling into the night behind the bars of a police van – a pure magic of cinema rarely seen in celluloid. Along with Godard’s sassy and revolutionary Á Bout De Souffle, this embodies the spirit of the nouvelle vague, masterful, emancipated, reflective, witty, blissful and beautiful.


VERDICT:

For the record, this is one of the greatest childhood films ever captured. That wonderful feeling after watching this film is the pure joy of cinema.



RATING: A+

Cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich

Director: Clint Eastwood

Screenplay: Michael Strasynzky

Running time: 2 hrs 21 mins

Genre: Drama/Crime/Thriller



CRITIQUE:

With the social relevance of recent-day child abduction cases, a film like Changeling should struck a nerve. Although set in the 1920s, with the burnished look and shaded cinematic feel, it’s the public concern that resonates the most. From a simple tale of a mother looking for a lost child, the film astonishingly evolves into a riveting mixture of a high-strung crime drama, a gripping noir, and a compelling exhibit on corruption and social justice. It is inevitable that this can stand alongside the likes of L. A. Confidential as a critique to Los Angeles’ moral rot, where it shows the birth of an inherently inept and dark-hearted guardians of the modern City of Angels. Yet despite of the complex rudiments that tower over the film, it is, in full circle, a shattering chronicle of a mother’s torment, which raises the bar to a personal level for a common Eastwood film. And yes, it is genuine tearjerker. Any mother who holds great love to a child would emerge from cinemas with a sniff.


At the heart of this film are two immense profiles, Eastwood and Jolie. The main man Clint himself renders subtlety to this work and at 78, he shows no sign of slowing down. Running with a copious length of more than two hours, he directs with enough dramatic focus and tension, as the mystery unfolds about the lost child. Although nearly saddling with the serial-killer territory, he wisely sidesteps the eerie murderer’s background and roots for the inexplicable-evil depiction and rather keeps the story’s attention to the anguished central character Christine Collins. Which brings us to Mother Gaia herself, Angelina Jolie. Undoubtedly having the charismatic presence of old Hollywood glamour, she does not only sheds her magazine personality but embodies a woman in distraught, last seen in her depth in Girl, Interrupted and her tenacious pathos in A Mighty Heart. She might have been cruelly Oscar-snubbed in the latter, but in Changeling, depriving her at least a nom is a crime. She is the nucleus, the beating pulse of this tale, which not only drives the plot forwards, but through her convincing character arc, we are able to feel her grief, a performance that draws audience’s compassion. It reminds us of her chameleonic accomplishment that this is also the same year she brought us the crazy-sexy-cool Fox in the daredevil Wanted.


Even the supporting performances are of impressive flair, John Malkovich’s mighty Reverend, a priest driven by a justifiable vendetta against the police rather than faith and gospel-mongers, and Amy Ryan’s prostitute in the mental ward, that even in brief time, she provides human depth. There may be some advances by certain critics that this lacks the knockout force of Million Dollar Baby, but testaments of scenes from the chilling moment Collins realises that the boy returned to her isn’t her son, to her confinement in the psychotic ward, and her steely resolve to bare the black soul of LAPD – it’s the anger and pain of this tale that leaves a lingering throb, accompanied by Eastwood’s own beautiful score.



VERDICT:

Eastwood drawing a dark, depressing yet mesmerising drama nailed perfectly by Jolie’s tour-de-force of a performance, making this a fiercely unforgettable film.



RATING: A+

Cast: Sissy Spacek, John Travolta

Director: Brian De Palma

Screenplay: Lawrence Cohen

Running time: 1 hr 41 mins

Genre: Horror/Thriller



CRITIQUE:

Anyone branding Carrie a ‘horror film’ is committing a dodgy mistake. Brian De Palma’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s classic debut novel is so exquisitely rendered to the screen that it launched a thousand high-school-set teenage slasher films, typically epitomised by dumb blondes getting chased by a masked murderer. But in Carrie, there is no carnage, no bloodshed of human blood – but a bloodbath of a different sort, the massacre of a student-filled auditorium. Yet audience sympathy does not lie on them but rather on its blood-soaked prom queen protagonist, who is actually Shiva the Destroyer, setting the prom night literally ablaze. This is where De Palma succeeds because he’s not set to shape a horror film, but a psychologically disturbing portrait of teenage brutality and religious fanaticism, and alongside creating an ode to social misfits.


The film shoulders some elements that could easily stray into the territory of silliness, i.e. teenagers, high school, prom night, but De Palma’s craft borders on the artistic, the beautifully-shot set-pieces of a familiar puberty setting. That slow-mo capture of nude girls running around a steamy shower room is visually nuanced, one you wouldn’t expect in a high school movie! And that flawlessly realised prom night sequence, building drama and tension with a use of a heartbreaking score and slow motion. Where it could have resulted as amusing, the effect is riveting, a well-mounted tension in the shades of Hitchcock, with the addition of De Palma’s now famous split-screen storytelling of vengeance, capturing the magnificent Sissy Spacek in her raging glory.


VERDICT:

An essential horror film, one that’s now steeped in pop culture parody but Carrie still retains its shocking impact and its exceptional handling of Hitchcockian suspense. One of the finest and darkest ‘high school’ films ever made.



RATING: A

Cast: Jean Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut

Running time: 90 mins

Genre: French Film/Gangster/Romance



CRITIQUE:

Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature is nothing short of revolutionary. Of the films that populated the surge of nouvelle vague, Breathless is the iconography of the cool, the arty and the influential. It is an undeniably very French film, reverberating to the recent French cinema where mostly filmic exercise is anti-Hollywood, and it is here where exclaim of freedom is laid down. Throwing the whole Hollywood filmmaking rulebook straight out of the window, Godard breaks all conventions; 180 degree rule shattered, continuity editing snubbed, studio shooting sidestepped, and plot mechanics were treated as foul creatures. And rather opts for real locations, unknown actors, cinéma vérité documentary-feel shots, jump-cut editing, and psychological probing – that means more talk than walk, which would surely bore those that live across the Atlantic.


But this is artistic cinema, a postmodernist exercise of filmmaking, where Godard, ironically, parades his odium of the American milieu. Although anti-Hollywood, there are nods dispersed everywhere in this film, from gangster to cars, from women to Bogart. At the heart of this piece of cinema is a story about a gangster in love. Michel is a gangster wannabe, idolising the legendary noir figure of Humphrey Bogart, and even dresses and drags cigarette like him. The love object is the graceful form of Patricia, who delivers the tale’s surprising twist, a homage to the cinematic femme fatale. Here lucky unknowns Jean Paul Belmondo and American Jean Seberg are thrust to iconic stardom; Belmondo, with his lip-wiping, smooth-talking demeanour, and Seberg, blasé in her fashion statement (black-and-white stripes) and sporting a major haircut of the 60s, pre-empting Posh Spice, appear so cool you can’t resist staring at them more. As straightforward the story is, commencing with Michel’s runamok around France and concluding in a memorable tracking shot of him, literally in every sense, there’s the wordy middle half that would make people like Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino smoulder in envy – a 24-minute bed scene. No sex, just conversation. The result is artsy-fartsy cinema, but a wonderful interplay between the two characters’ psyches, leaving audience guessing who is betraying whom.


VERDICT:

Incendiary, astoundingly important French film. This is Godard putting out two fingers against anything Americana, a fine kickstart to the French New Wave.


RATING: A+

Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck

Director: Billy Wilder

Screenplay: Raymond Chandler

Running time: 1 hr 47 mins

Genre: Film Noir/Crime/Thriller



CRITIQUE:

Cast: Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Michael Palin

Director: Terry Gilliam

Screenplay: The Monty Pythons

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Comedy


CRITIQUE:

Surreal, subversive, incredibly silly – that’s what makes Monty Python and the Holy Grail such a timeless comedy of brio. Humorists Monty Python showcases the British eccentric sense of humour in this send-up of the Arthurian legend, beginning with one of the funniest comedy openings of all-time, a marching King Arthur with a slave thumping coconut shells on his tail. From then on, it doesn’t let the audience gasp some air from riotous laughs. It viscerally mixes gut-wrenchingly hilarious jokes with visual style, cacophony of medieval jesting with happy-go-lucky editing, a certain cartoon sequence of a dragon chase (no budget for stone-age CGI!) and a quick cut due to the dying of the graphic artist is absolutely ridiculous but supremely snigger-worthy. Worth to note, this was made way before Hollywood released relentless parodies, mostly unamusing, and certainly, the Monty Python’s are the still the ones to watch. In Holy Grail, it can never get more absurd than a homicidal bunny, the knights who say “Ni!”, the filthy-mouthed French castle guard, and the fantastically decided finale. It could even, ingeniously, serve as a biting social satire about class divisions, the self-proclamation of historical royalty, and a shout to people with no sense of humour at all!


VERDICT:

Comic relief, pure genius, gold standard. Don’t take this seriously because you’ll never know what you’re missing so sorely – one of the most brilliant parodies of all-time.



RATING: A+

Cast: Peter Lorrie, Otto Wernicke

Director: Fritz Lang

Screenplay: Thea von Harbou

Running time: 1 hr 51 mins

Genre: German Expressionism/Crime/Drama



CRITIQUE:

This has to be Fritz Lang’s finest cinematic oeuvre. One of film history’s best directors has created such a compelling psychological portrait that it pre-empts the serial killer genre and crime thrillers, highly influencing the likes of Silence of the Lambs. Lang’s first venture into the “talkie” cinema period has never taken more extraordinarily. In fact, there’s less use of music and rather opts for a ominous, echoing silence throughout empty spaces and shadowy corners, making the children’s rhyme chanting and the murderer’s whistle stand out like heebie-jeebies. Since this is also one of German expressionism’s impeccable filmmaking paradigms, it is elevated as a visual art. The stylistic use of shadows, the interplay of light and shade, is unforgettable. See the murderer’s shadow set against the white poster, classic. It doesn’t even sacrifice the complexity of its tale, tackling a very controversial matter even today, the abduction of children. Peter Lorrie’s portrayal of the demented serial killer is ingrained so much on his pulling of an excellent character arc that would require sympathy. After all, he’s a tormented soul, deeply, mentally disturbed. Remarkably, Lang fuses a compelling social message from the film’s heart in this city’s dark underbelly ridden with petty criminals and gangsters, justice is served poignantly.


VERDICT:

Probably one of the most significant films ever made, inspiring genres from serial killer to film noir. M stands for masterpiece and masterclass.



RATING: A+

Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Judi Dench, Matheiu Almaric

Director: Marc Foster

Screenplay: Paul Haggis

Running time: 1 hr 45 mins

Genre: Action/Spy



CRITIQUE:

The first official 007 sequel in history has its angels and demons. On this side of the light, it’s a rip-roaring, dizzying, revenge-driven action flick that requires no pity. And on the dark side, it is an impetuously crafted, if not uneven, odyssey into the film’s emotional core. Such was the ground-shaking brilliance of Casino Royale, arguably one of the finest in the franchise, that it completely rebooted the growingly ridiculous spy escapade. So when Daniel Craig landed the role and raised many eyebrows, he then silenced moaners by consolidating a grittier Bond on this side of reality. And perhaps the cliché lay down that sequels should be “darker”, Quantum of Solace deserves the moniker. It is indeed darker, with so many issues burning beneath its shiny commercialism, grittier, rougher and hard-edged. Half an hour in, and we’ve already plunged to an Aston Martin being crashed, people being shot, Bond leaping over rooftops, chasing baddies and beating ‘em up mercilessly. After all, Bourne’s main fight-man Dan Bradley was employed to make the crashing-and-banging more dynamic.


So it shows. There is fantastic editing in here, people. It leaves you breathless and giddy. Bond’s both personal and professional mission seems very urgent as the plot globe-trots (as usual) from Italy to Haiti to London and Bolivia and everywhere in between. And amidst shoot-outs, there’s also a sense of artistry here, showcased in a perfectly-timed opera-accompanied slow-mo chase in Austria. Marc Foster has done a generous job, slicing arthouse into the franchise, but couldn’t quite generate a forceful impact. But to set these elements aside, the main gripe is the development of its plot. The title refers to a ghostly organisation Quantum in which no one knew it exists, not even MI6 or CIA, drifting through scenes without an iota of believability. As Bond blames Quantum for Vesper Lynd’s demise, his journey is an intermittent vengeance saga that you just want him to get to the end and finish his business. Don’t expect for Royale’s stylishness and glamour because they are at day-off here. The quips are still present, thanks to Paul Haggis’ taut writing, and the intelligent jabbering between Craig’s Bond and Judi Dench’s M is masterclass. Even Gemma Arterton’s Agent Fields (sophisticated and effortless) delivers an out-of-kilter yet enjoyable one-liner.


This leads us to Craig as Bond. There is no doubt he is one of the best actors to play Bond, his roguish demeanour makes him all the more a convincing killer, and here in Quantum he is a brute force. This resolute, damaged hero meets the feisty, emotionally wounded heroine Camille in the sultry shape of Olga Kurylenko. Her vendetta for his murdered family sub-plot works, making her an equal ally to Bond, but she is no Eva Green. That’s perhaps because Camille is not a Bond girl; she has her own issues and crosses road with a man who’s fiercely set to bring justice. Surprisingly, it’s the scenes between Craig and Kurylenko that brings the film’s tenderness, as she became Bond’s eye-opener to the art of letting go and the true consequence of revenge.


VERDICT:

Bond is out in rogue and pissed off but Quantum of Solace is a slightly jagged whiplash of an actioner that couldn’t quite nail a forceful storyline. Don’t expect a Casino Royale punch. It will leave you only shaken and stirred.



RATING: B

Cast: Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Screenplay: Catherine Johnson

Running time: 1 hr 48 mins

Genre: Musical



CRITIQUE:

Mamma Mia!, for all its worth, is the cinematic equivalent of Red Bull. The first swig is mighty zesty, but whence you have too much of it, it’ll knock out your nerves. Clearly for a film that grossed bigger than The Dark Knight in UK (yes, people, bigger moolah than The Dark Knight – The – Dark – Knight!), there’s a seemingly unavoidable, inevitable appeal to this adult chick flick. If High School Musical is the most exciting thing that ever happened to all thirteen-year olds and under, Mamma Mia! might very well be the same for anyone over forty, and very female. Well, that cinema stampede and sing-along you hear consists of women who delegated the night’s washing up to their husbands for a time of a girlie night-out. And all hell breaks loose. And that hell you see is full of sunshine and rainbow colours.


That’s how exactly Mamma Mia! works. It pleases and gives a damn good time, and making you forget that there’s a lot of ironing to do later. If you’re looking for some Oscar-worthy attention here, this is not the right place. It is squeaky clean, campy fun, and as morally ambiguous as the clear blue sea. The stage musical, worldly famous, gets the cinematic treatment and the result is encompassing of all shades of rainbow. And there’s a whole list of Abba songbook to squeeze in between dramatic sighs, romantic misadventures and a plot ridden with clichés. Three fathers turn up for the blasted wedding (really?), girl tries to question identity through her wedding day (really?) – this is probably the most outrageous wedding on Earth ever filmed. Of course, there are huge dance numbers and karaoke-inducing, toe-thumping, song-breaking musical sequences; one ridiculous but amusing “Dancing Queen” with Meryl Streep leading the whole village to shake some booty. However, there are musical misfires, look at the cloyingly silly boys on flippers, and since this flick is so centred on women that when the lads get to sing, it emerges as unintentionally hilarious. The blokes are just backdrops, since this feels like a hen party. Amanda Seyfried is cute and sweet as the lead, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski take comedic turns as the girlpower sidekicks, but it’s Meryl Streep that conquers all though and through, since the world’s greatest actress alive has some good lungs, and thankfully, good acting.


VERDICT:

The cinematic counterpart of Abba karaoke songbook, fun, agreeable, but that’s about it. It feels forced and nothing special. This is High School Musical for the middle-aged, although only Streep runs away with its success.



RATING: C

Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola

Running time: 1 hr 53 mins

Genre: Thriller/Drama



CRITIQUE:

Basking in the dazzling acclaim of The Godfather and recently The Godfather II, in this 70s era of Hollywood gold, maestro Coppola takes a break and makes a film of different genre. However, the result is a testament that he is a man that doesn’t rest on his laurels. The Conversation turns out to be an electrifying composition about the Big Brother morality of contemporary America, as much as The Godfather was a human dissertation on the Italian mafias on Uncle Sam’s land. It is an early wake-up call to the advancement of modern technology, the intrusion of privacy on citizens and questions on moral obligations on this era when the Watergate scandal broke out. It does ring true.


Gene Hackman, one of his finest career performances up there with his patriarchal figure of Royal in The Royal Tenenbaums, draws an employment-driven blue-collared eavesdropper with a heavy guilt-complex, when he realises his subjects, a couple, might end up in a murderous plot. From its zooming opening, a wide aerial shot of a public square, and a fuzzy technical manipulation of sound, we are reminded that we are an audience witnessing an unfolding dilemma in the privilege of secrecy. And just like Coppola’s mafia story, he doesn’t rush to his conclusions and patiently and slowly penetrates into the psyche of his characters, as Hackman unravels the truth and his moral change of mind, a crumbling conscience within him. Then, snap! Coppola then sets the trap shut, as along with Hackman, we are being deceived yet bedazzled with a denouement of a conspiracy that is as complex as it is brilliant and annoyingly intelligent. For anyone who has seen the remarkable German Oscar-winner The Lives of Others, the influence can be traced here.



VERDICT:

An all-important film about political paranoia and social insecurity, The Conversation may be Francis Ford Coppolla’s most enduring masterpieces along with The Godfather.



RATING: A+

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

Director: Nicholas Roeg

Screenplay: Chris Bryant

Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

Genre: Horror/Drama



CRITIQUE:

Nicholas Roeg’s unsettling Don’t Look Now is not an easy horror film. It’s not an all-out screamfest. The terror is not explicit. There are no sudden split-second frights. The trauma is all implied, and that is why this movie, branded is a horror film, is all the more effective because it plays on your subconscious. This is more on psychological prodding rather than shameless audience terror campaign. The use of imagery here is complex and symbolic: rain lashing on puddles of water, the child figure in a red raincoat and broken mirrors – these are ordinary things made extraordinary in its built-up of a brilliant plot. Technically superb, it also employs a nuanced skill on crosscutting editing, as seen in the premise, the drowning of the daughter (in an emotionally shattering slow-motion), and the notoriously intimate sex scene, showing the couple in a heated tryst whilst cut-backing with them in post-lovemaking bliss. This is a scene that cinema boards would have been harrumphing for censorship nowadays.


But Roeg is not here to make a film for light viewing. The tale of a couple on a holiday in Venice is not what it seems to be. Laura and John Baxter (amazing performances by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, one of cinema’s highly convincing couples) are actually grieving for the loss of their daughter, and a trip in Venice is their way of overcoming the tragedy. Dread is just everywhere in the mouldy, grimy setting of Venice. But at its bitter core, this is about grief and psychological disturbance. Moments of supernatural occurrence suggests that the only ghosts that exist are ghosts of the past. So when John begins his visions of the girl in red, he is mystified and befuddled yet his rationality pins him down. What starts as a spooky chiller turns into a psychological drama, then a supernatural study, and ends in a shockingly human tragedy with a serial killer twist.


VERDICT:

A bitter, piercing study of grief and loss that haunts rather than jolts, which makes Don’t Look Now all the more petrifying and effective. This is horror on a very human level.



RATING: A

Cast: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black

Director: Ben Stiller

Screenplay: Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux

Running time: 1 hr 47 mins

Genre: Comedy/War



CRITIQUE:

Film parodies were once hot topics. From pop culture to famous flicks, from celebrity moments to embarrassing stunts, referencing seemed to have been a business goldmine. Airplane, Hot Shots, and Scary Movie were a few paradigms. That’s until it loses steam. Sequels upon sequels came rolling, and the parody wasn’t funny anymore. Everything now seems to spin around fart, sex, genitalia, drugs and racist jokes. Meanwhile, when Tropic Thunder’s trailer arrived, it came with a promise: to reinvent the parody genre. Now the finished product is three sardonically funny-ish fake trailers, a good first ten-minute in, and a whole movie of wasted sweat, mock blood and set explosives. The concept is ambitious, a pisstake on the Vietnam War genre, forking out homage to Platoon and Apocalypse Now, while retaining its own plot about filmmaking of a movie within a movie – but perhaps it became too ambitious that the makers bang more bucks on the “look” and “appeal” and forgot about the script. Whilst this is sold-out as a comedy, it comes out as a farce on an actioner that couldn’t quite deliver the hilarity it intends. Guts spilling out. Not funny. Jack Black after a snort on crack. Not funny. A Vietnamese toddler as the main villain. Not funny, at all. It tries very hard to make its audience chuckle. It even milked the sketch of Stiller’s “Simple Jack”, which was squeezed the juice out too much. The laughs come from the terrain of the contrived, and like its over-scaled ‘Nam war backdrop, it’s bloated and sopping, putting more explosions rather than explosive laughs. Although gorgeously shot and expensively made, Mister Stiller the Director should realise genuine comedy doesn’t have to cost millions and a swarm of Vietnamese people.


If there’s anything that works in here, it’s the performance panache of Robert Downey Jr., who pushes the envelope further and embodies the Method, multi-Oscar-nabbing actor, donning the black dude. Even Tom Cruise gets a career revival as the exclamation-ridden, spit-bursting studio exec Len Grossman (which makes you forget he’d been jumping on Oprah’s settee some years ago), hardly recognisable beneath the shiny head and hairy arms. The rest borders on mediocrity. Ben Stiller the Actor remains the same hapless, moronic bloke he’s known to play before in his films; Jack Black is an appallingly useless sidekick; and Nick Nolte looks like he wanted to be somewhere else instead. When the dust settles, the film provides us the message that wars are ridiculous, filmmaking can be shambolic, actors are obsessive-compulsive, Hollywood is vicious, and studio bosses are fat, abhorrent and dances to rap music rather disturbingly.


VERDICT:

If not for Downey Jr., this is shambles. The appeal is present but it still generally feels as an extended episode of an MTV skit. It’s over-sold, over-hyped, and over-written, and ends in exhaustion rather than invigoration.



RATING: C

Cast: John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton

Director: The Coen Brothers

Screenplay: The Coen Brothers

Running time: 1 hr 36 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:

To dismiss the Coen brothers’ latest cinematic serving Burn After Reading as a bland follow-up to their masterpiece-branded, Oscar-hailed No Country For Old Men is just plain folly. No one would surely expect these siblings to produce another film of the same strand of DNA. What they have conceived in here is a retrace to their roots, when they were famous for absurdist comedy. Burn After Reading is an eclectic mix of lampoonery, absurd characters, and a very silly plot that basically revolves around nothing and ends in nothing – that turns out to be an ingenious satire on human idiocy and the paranoia of overloaded intelligence.


Here, like most Coens films, there is savagery and viciousness wrapped in a foil of tar-black humour: characters die out of impulse, people running around after money, and everyone sleeps with everybody. Their fondness for bizarre characters is palpable. Their love for plot mechanics and snappy dialogue is crucial. You come out of the cinema wondering whether the whole thing makes sense, and strangely enough, it does. The whole storyline seems like a fart in the wind. Two idiots, gym-workers Frances McDormand in twitchy mode and Brad Pitt in ecstatically cutesy blockhead, stumbles into a disc supposedly loaded with “highly classified shit”. It belongs to John Malkovich’s ex-CIA agent, recently fired for being a hate-figure and ranting with excessive expletives, whose wife, Tilda Swinton secretly sleeps with George Clooney’s totally clueless clot, who, in turn, beds with the physically insecure McDormand. Criss-crosses around an entangled web of people, mistaken identities, and incidents, this is a loud shout to America’s listlessness, a wake-up call to the modern day idiocy. This is the Coens firing sharply at bull’s eye towards the unsatisfied society, to political paranoia (does CIA really function? so how come there are no nuclear weapons in Iraq?), and the greed for green paper. All of these elements fit like tight gloves to a parody of the spy genre, where editing is maximised to create thrills, butt-quivering music usually familiar to spy thrillers is in full use, all supplementing situations in the film where nothing is virtually happening.


There’s no denying this is a slighter fare compared to No Country For Old Men’s gnarling brilliance, but Burn After Reading stands on its own ground. Whilst Hollywood continues replicating spoofs and flat-nosed comedies, here is something that turns out to be genuinely laughably funny. There’s dark, grimy humanity beneath the coil of these characters, but we can’t help laugh at them idiotically. After all, that’s the point of the film.


VERDICT:

A comedic farce of a plot miraculously shunted to higher echelon by the verve
and wit of the Coens. It’s black, biting, and sarcastic – all beneath the amusing canvas about the lack of human common sense.



RATING: A-

Cast: Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Screenplay: John Lindqvist

Running time: 1 hr 54 mins

Genre: Horror/Romance/Foreign



CRITIQUE:


If there is ever a vampire flick to watch in 2008, it has to be Tomas Alfredson’s darkly atmospheric LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (a strangely protean title for a film of many faces). TWILIGHT seem to have been amassing a storm of buzz, especially lusty teenage girls of virtually anywhere, and gets the Hollywood treatment this month, but it’s this film of the same hybrid that feels like a superior piece. Sure, as a Swedish film, it’s not hard to predict this to end up as underseen, as subtitles-reading puts off anyone under seventeen. Bastards who keeled away from PAN’S LABYRINTH and APOCALYPTO don’t know what they’re missing. Whilst, this may not be on the level of the aforementioned Oscar-nominated films, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN will remain as a reminder that a dying genre will always have an elixir of life. For one, it’s an unconventional effort with European sensibilities, infusing anti-Hollywood techniques (storytelling over spectacle), and secondly, it takes the vampire genre into a wholly distinct territory. This tale of a misplaced boy, Oskar, easily bullied and fragile, meeting his femme fatale Eli, a vampire trapped inside a 12-year old girl’s body, seems a familiar ground but its filmmaking takes this into new heights. What could easily turn into an all-out gore blood-lusty carnage attached to vampire films has been restrained by a pitch-perfect use of poetic visuals and impeccable framings. The use of the almost bare Swedish snow landscape may appear as minimalist, but it creates a chilling atmosphere that mirrors the soul of the two major protagonists. Sentimentality sidestepped, as the body count increases, the odd romance grows, as this two 12-year-old outsiders search for belongingness – and the story’s result is a hymn to adolescence and the pangs of young, impossible love.


VERDICT:

Let not the bloodsucking, slow-burning narrative fool you, this is a wisely created film that injects a much-needed intelligent storytelling to a genre that’s losing its own blood. The visuals are superb and the tale works as an eerie fable, chilling and darkly elegiac.


RATING: A-