Cast: Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Albert Dupontel

Director: Gaspar Noé

Screenplay: Gaspar Noé

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Seeing, or more appropriately enduring, halfway through Irréversible, you’d think Gaspar Noé is barking mad. This Argentinian-born French filmmaker has clearly, perceptibly pushed the hot button of audience discomfort and catapulted the limits of cinematic extremities that this became the most booed movie in Cannes and the most walked-out film of 2003, or possibly the entire celluloid history. Such response would’ve detonated any filmmaker’s career – but then Noé isn’t any other filmmaker. Kubrickian in a sense that he braves criticism and backlash, and carries out cinematic indulgences that may be absolute pants and brain-fucking to many, but perhaps genius to some.


Whilst obviously flawed, Irréversible remains a mystery. And it's deliberately better off that way. It is extremely violent, where the aforementioned half-hour launches into a bleak Memento-like time-play, employed with surreal, outlandish and disorienting camerawork, swooping and soaring around the urban nightscape causing temporary vertigo. Then it plunges us deeply into the seedy underworld of sadomasochism, inside the labyrinthine lair of a gay nightclub called “Rectum”, with its red, hellish pulsating lights. The effect is claustrophobic, the setting nauseating. Vincent Cassel’s Marcus is on a hunt for the “Tapeworm”, and soon enough somebody’s face gets brutally smashed with a fire extinguisher in front of our eyes. It’s a cruel, unbearably excruciating scene to watch. No wonder people have stood up and gave the film a pass. But when things seem to have breathed air, the camera lands on an underpass ground for an unflinching 20-minute unbroken rape scene, with Monica Bellucci’s Alex fighting from a sexual assault – the result is technically jarring, as juxtaposed to a previous camera ploy, and the scene that unfolds is both a visual and psychological onslaught.


Those who had walked out at the middle of this would’ve never discovered the deep, befuddling ethos of Irréversible. Noé has played around with the gears of clockwork here, reversing an incident that has irreparable consequences to the lives of these characters. He initiates this film with a visual excess, with almost pornographic torture and bordering the exploitative territory, a form of violence on the unremittingly grim side of humanity – then he sheds out these grungy layers and peels the implications, impulses and reasons to the very core of this film by going back to the beginning. Like the many masters in literature and film art who had dabbled with time, figures like Vonnegut, Nolan and F. Scott Fitzgerald transposed by Fincher in the screen, these people understood that time is irrevocable. Noé means to undo a truly horrific crime in this revenge-tragedy tale, and ends in a self-conscious utopia with nods to Beethoven’s Allegretto and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. We see Bellucci lying on the grass, pregnant with a child that could change the paths of their lives, experiencing a blissful daydream. Whereas in real life – this backward-state cannot happen. That’s why cinema is here for us to elucidate many of life’s mysteries.


VERDICT:

Gaspar Noé has created something here that is arcane, nightmarish and self-consciously unsettling work of art. Many will find this nasty. Some will see it as profound. And a very few will think Irréversible is a work of an audacious artist who had the guts to make a bleak yet powerful statement about the futility of life, that “Time destroys everything.” It is a hyper-violent film that unpredictably advocates against violence. Nothing will prepare you for this. This is strictly not a film to like. It is a soul-battering, brutalising experience one will never forget.



RATING: A

Cast: Judie Dench, Billy Connolly

Director: John Madden

Screenplay: Jeremy Brock

Running time: 1 hr 45 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


The outer palette of Mrs Brown is a gloomy, depressing drama in the shades of some Swedish miserablism in the vein of Ingmar Bergman. To think of it, if Bergman had made a British film, it would be this. A widow buried deep in grief even years after her husband’s passing, and seemingly, eternally clothed in black. Except that she’s Queen Victoria, the longest reigning monarch in British history to date, and despite of being followed by ladies and vexed by the politics of the time, she had self-barricaded in inconsolable mourning that, according to Benjamin Disraeli, she’s a sovereign “running a country 600 miles north of civilisation”. But John Madden, pre-Shakespeare in Love, makes sure the politics of the tale take a minor seat and injects some style to evade the all-consuming unhappiness of its protagonist. For Mrs Brown is really a poignant story of friendship amid all sense of loss, a provenance of calm in an eye of a storm – a factual account of the platonic relationship between HRH Vicky and her late-husband’s servant John Brown. The interplay between the two is remarkably observed, touching tender and graceful moments as its magnificent leads share an electrifying onscreen connection. And where would a British production be without Judi Dench? Her Victoria, at the onset, is a woman so pregnant with loss and enormous anguish that one can feel her piteous emotions emanating, and Dench portrays her with a deft combination of starchiness and brittleness, that at a single inopportune remark, she’d break down into a lament. She finds solace in her scenes with the brilliant Billy Connolly as the Scottish highlander, a stomping, barnstorming performance that blends muscle, humour and sensitivity.


VERDICT:

Not your mundane, bound-for-afternoon-telly royal costume drama. Mrs Brown makes for a compelling dissertation of grief and loss, and a friendship that can repair them. A compassionate picture delivered with richly nuanced performances by Dench and Connolly.



RATING: A-

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Broderick, Kevin Kline

Director: Alexander Payne

Screenplay: Alexander Payne

Running time: 1 hr 43 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Never underestimate the genre of high school movie. The territory that usually harbours fluffy teen romances, raging hormones at Prom night and sexual angst can also be a vehicle for something intelligent, razor-sharp and as incisive as Dr. Strangelove to American politics. You’ll never expect Kubrick’s brilliant definitive satire to be mentioned alongside the genre populated by John Hughes stereotypes, but Alexander Payne’s Election may rightfully be the Dr. Strangelove of high-school movies. It gleefully lambasts the manoeuvrings of American politics in the form of school government, but never lets the satire too ruthless that it leaves its pesky politicians underexplored.


Told in a quartet of narratives, Reese Witherspoon’s megawatt overachiever Tracy Flick, Matthew Broderick’s scheming teacher Jim McAllister, Kevin Kline’s kind-hearted idiot Paul Meltzer and Jessica Campbell’s lesbian spitfire Tammy, Paul’s younger rebellious half-sister, we’re set in a turbulent cinematic high-school presidential election ever. But this is really Witherspoon and Broderick’s show, standing as polar opposites, the former accomplishing her Martha-Stewart efficiency, baking cupcakes and manufacturing badges to win votes whilst the latter try to sabotage it all. The genius of Payne’s screenplay is that it never pits bias on a single character, developing pathos and insights on both sides of the arena. Flick’s smile, which can turn on and off like a lightbulb, is actually a facade of a misunderstood crusader, an ambitious eel wanting to become a monster politician, and McAllister is actually very jealous of her spot-on effectiveness, in contrast to his incompetence and fucked-up personal life. We may think that Tracy Flick is such a wicked go-getter, but Payne gives her a surprising character arc that would find ourselves sympathising for this high-pitched, pushy vixen.


VERDICT:

Pitched wonderfully between comedy and satire, Election’s real star is the screenplay: bitingly perceptive, ruthlessly funny and teeming with intelligence, wit and pathos. It is also performed to startling effect, with Witherspoon and Broderick spewing out bard-wired dialogues.



RATING: A-

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody, Jared Leto, George Clooney, Elias Koteas, John Cusack, John Travolta, Woody
Harrelson

Director: Terrence Malick

Screenplay: Terrence Malick

Running time: 2 hr 50 mins

Genre: War/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Terrence Malick’s slow-burning, almost structureless war film proves to be a hard sell to mainstream audience. Given that it flirts around nearly a three-hour running-time, told in various character perspectives, virtually roots for no central hero and provides no resolved conclusions, it takes resilience to sit through The Thin Red Line. But then Malick is no mainstream director. To many others, it might appear that he’s frittering away with monologues about the moralities of war rather than a slam-bang, grit-blowing action sequences that’s worthy of a Saving Private Ryan opener. His characters with mudded faces and looking very grim launch into epiphanies, poetic voice-overs, ruminating about their lives, fate, disasters and asking big questions like “Where does this evil come from?” whilst these American GI soldiers assault a hut-village of armed Japanese men. It also boasts an impressive star ensemble only Robert Altman can convene together, top-billing actors on top of their games, but mostly either utilised in cameo roles or die right away in the battlefront. Malick must be out of his mind.


Except that he is not, in so many ways. The Thin Red Line is, above all, a war film that exceptionally achieves an art form. Whilst its narrative construction is almost formless (this is more a narrative account of the American siege in the Pacific than a tightly-wrapped tale, free from external insights of the going-ons from the other side of the globe circa WWII), it manages a linear flow with intermittent interruptions of characters getting lost in the psychological and emotional wilderness. Suffice to say, this is a film that dismounts that braves-soldiers-on-the-front gaffe that portrays frightened men, terribly afraid at the panorama of death. One soldier runs away after having witnessed the death of 18 of his men at one go. Sean Penn’s Sgt. Welsh hardens himself to a kind of emotional freezing, as to not feel pain and loss. Jim Caviezel’s meditative Private Witt empathises with the killings of his supposed enemies. Ben Chaplin’s Private Bell holds on to the memories of his wife, his only driving impetus at the futility of war. Elias Kotas’ noble Capt. Staros flouts military commands from his commander Nick Nolte’s brutish Colonel Tall out of fear of losing his men, his surrogate sons. All these characters’ inner torment collectively gathers together and pins down an emotional fulcrum that is deeply profound.


And its striking poetry is visualised in a sumptuous, eye-popping cinematography. Capturing the lush tropical forests, the beach hut-village, the rolling hills and ridges – the camera suddenly takes luminous life, sweeping and swooping over the hillsides, Steadycams smoothly gliding through grasslands in perfect sun-dappled, or rain-washed, landscapes. That standout action sequence of the attack of the hills is a visual, technical accomplishment, achieving a supreme nuance in editing and cadence. It’s a sequence, for any self-confessed cinephile, that is worth the prise admission alone.


VERDICT:

This may be one of the greatest modern war films ever made, in stark comparison to Coppola’s majestic Apocalypse Now. Malick’s vision of chaos is ironically aching with sublime beauty, lyricism and a pulsating sense of loss. The Thin Red Line breaks any hard fast rules of filmmaking, snubbing the pieties of plot and achieving that rare form of cinematic meditation, art and poetic refinement.



RATING: A+

What in the name of Zeus’ butthole does James Cameron think he is? He made a film about a ship as big as his ego, sunk it, declared himself ‘King of the World’ at Oscars in front of thousands of gawping audience and then disappears for a decade-and-a-half without the slightest trace. It isn’t that he’s an underachieving director, he’s made two of the finest action films Hollywood had ever seen i.e. Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Now he’s suddenly pouncing back in tinseltown, bringing along with him a messianic prophecy that in the not-too-distant future Hollywood will turn three-dee. That’s like declaring that all your DVDs and Blu-Rays sitting pretty on your shelves are pretty much becoming obsolete.

Cast: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook

Director: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Screenplay: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Running time: 2 hr 16 mins

Genre: Drama/Dance



CRITIQUE:


Fashioned during a period when the European vogue centred on Italian neorealism and the Hollywood trend lavished in gangster noirs, British film The Red Shoes begged to differ. Legendary filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger of the Black Narcissus fame indulge in the power of theatre, ballet, sumptuous sets and gorgeous artifice to convey a scintillating kind of cinema. In other words, sod to the rest of the world. They were comfortable in their own art. That is not to say the deliberate aestheticism is without a point: its Technicolour cinematography (courtesy of another legend behind the lens, Jack Cardiff), sound, light and design are employed to astonishing effect, enhancing the film’s emotional intensity. Half a century onwards, now canonised by latter-day movie pontiffs Scorcese and Coppola, and recently celebrated its digital restoration at Cannes this year – it only shows that none of the decades past had dulled its luminous sparkle. This dark, beautiful and tragic Hans Christian Andersen-inspired fairy tale of a ballerina doomed to dance forever until her death will remain to be one of the finest things ever committed to celluloid.


Structured as a story-within-a-story, this is not only about the fairy tale heroine’s ill-omened dance when she acquires the titular ballet shoes from a sinister shoemaker. Anyone who had seen it would recognise this as a metaphor to the bigger picture of its story, which is really about the aspiring ballerina Victoria Page and her crisis between love and ambition, tortured between her romantic yearning and her impresario’s cruel, despotic grip to achieve glory. On paper it appears to be a simple story, but it achieves stunning complexity through its characters: Moira Shearer’s Page could easily quit her job and dance somewhere else, but to renounce an ambition and artistic desire proves to be the hardest choice, and Anton Walbrook’s calculating, slippery theatre mogul Boris Lermontov offers the summit of her career whilst furtively impinging his own desire for Page. A high passion for the art, music, visuals and storytelling may be taken for overindulgence by those less imaginative, but there’s no denying The Red Shoes’ spectacular authority in filmmaking. Seen through its many meticulously composed scenes, in particular that unbroken 20-minute ballet sequence where the stage dissolves into an exquisitely stylised netherworld, where the ballerina flashes her blood-coloured dancing shoes through an assemblage of deeply expressionistic, often surrealistic and nightmarish images, illusions and dream sequences. There’s not a better way to perfectly capture the heroine’s inner torment and the imminent tragedy looming on the horizon.


VERDICT:

A one-of-a-kind, bravura feat of filmmaking. Exquisitely performed, exceptionally framed from start to finish. The Red Shoes is a beautiful, poignant vista to revel in, with Powell and Pressburger paying devotion to art, beauty, love and loss. This is not just a film. It’s an experience.



RATING: A+

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky

Running time: 1 hr 42 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


There is not a more suitable title for a film as grim, as disheartening, as ultra-depressing as Requiem for a Dream. When many films of the escapist order allows us to close our eyes and feast on the power of imagination, this one wrenches our eyes open to the cold shock of reality, as the title aptly suggests, the end of a dream. It literally, and unrepentantly, explores the abyss of drug addiction in the point of view of four related characters, a quartet of lives going through hellish mental, psychological ordeals. One thing is certain here, Darren Aronofsky’s uncompromising sophomore effort is not an easy film to stomach. Themes of decay, loneliness and the death of hope are projected through these characters, four Brooklyn residents whose seemingly ordinary day-to-day dalliances with drugs turn into a spectacle of human horror. A miserable retired widower desires for television fame and social acceptance through diet pills; two lovers embark on a recreational drug use; and a friend involves himself in drug-trafficking. These people are, in every sense of the compounded words, fucked-up. Rendered with fine performances all around, Leto, Connelly, and surprisingly Wayans, all give their sheer best, but it is really Ellen Burstyn’s astonishing performance here that stands out. Her Sarah is a truly haunting figure, whose transformation from a mere old widow to a shell-shocked, semi-corpse will not leave your mind for weeks.


Just when drug movie clichés threaten to appear, where cinema verité is pretty much the employer of grittiness, Aronofsky heightens his cinematic techniques – razor-sharp editing entails rapid succession of images, the dilating of pupils and molecular photography – it’s a cinematic language that effectively condenses (and disperses) time and space, comparable to the effects of drugs. And when things become too fast, he allows a breathing space in the form of hallucinatory sequences, characters envisioning postcard-picture scenes through windows. But these are all transitory. It’s a brutal reminder of these characters’ ill-fated future. If you last all the way through its gripping cross-cutting finale, a merciless depiction of hellhole on Earth, you’d desperately want for some comic relief.


VERDICT:

A gut-wrenching descent into human darkness as we witness a quartet of characters’ downward spiral into drug hell. Aronofsky’s treatise on drug addiction is a masterclass on the use of editing, sound and visual onslaught. It’s also a harrowing nightmare to brave through.



RATING: A

Cast: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall

Director: William Wyler

Screenplay: Howard Koch

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir



CRITIQUE:


Bette Davis glitteringly radiates in this dark, noirish drama The Letter, set in the harsh plantations of the Orient. Singapore, to be precise. It’s a performance that defies categorisations: her Leslie Crosbie is neither a full-on, raging bitch nor a blameless middle-class housewife. As the stunningly staged opener harbours (kudos to William Wyler’s taut and stylish direction), everything is not what it seems. A door bursts open and a woman comes out, firing ferocious bullets into a man. This is Leslie, a British expatriate’s wife, and she spends the entirety of the film feigning for her innocence of the murder. There are wondrous tics to her personality; she demonstrates a finely clocked narrative in the investigation scenes, a white kerchief in a hand, and then faints on the floor when verbally rounded up in a corner. She’s surreptitious, cold, damnably calculating – and sometimes, with its audience almost sympathising for her smothered domestic existence. The complexity of this performance rise up above many other in Davis’ entire gallery of work, powerfully restrained and glove-fit, precisely measured. Set aside a somewhat less thrilling middle-half, as it turns into a courtroom drama, it’s more effective as a character study, drawing a portrait of a virago. There is a scene where Leslie faces her match in Gale Sondergaard’s Mrs Hammond, a wordless face-off, Davis draped in a virginal white knitwork and Sondergaard in tiger-like stare as the former bends down on the floor, the latter twitches as though in an animalistic instinct to leap and claw the other to death.


VERDICT:

Wyler's camerawork glides effortlessly and his direction is impeccable in this noirish South-Asian backdrop, guiding The Letter from a showstopping opener to a solid conclusion. But this is really Bette Davis' show, drawing a performance within a performance, a rotten, calculating bitch masquerading as a middle-class housewife. A technically ingenuous piece of acting.



RATING: A-