Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson

Director: James Ivory

Screenplay: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Running time: 2 hrs 14 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


When you're watching British period dramas, chances are, you're very likely to find recurring themes of stiff upper-lippery, the commotions that run through upstairs and downstairs, populated by people usually in costumes, all bearing the gloomiest of faces. It's easy to be cynical, as perhaps films like these have been dulled in the contemporary age of television costume-drama fodder. But it's undoubtedly hard to dismiss the intensity of this Merchant Ivory's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's story of blind loyalty, class divide and repressed love. At its heart is a character study of a dutiful butler, the impeccable Mr Stevens, in his servitude to the Lord of Darlington Hall during the pre-WWII Britain. His faculties deny him to function as a human being, whose emotional suppression is so strong his disposition to the relationships around the hall always appear a matter-of-fact. There are moments when serious personal tragedies such as his father's demise become overshadowed and unattended due to his sense of daily servitude to his lordship. And he is even blase with his master's conspiracy with the forebidding Nazis in the house.


Anthony Hopkins exquisitely embody this painfully wretched character, with a consistent, often haunting presence. For a character that is supposedly devoid of human feelings, Hopkins is able to portray a face simmering with complex emotions, and yet also able to wither them away by a mere solidifying or blanking of his expressions. His unfulfilled relationship with the housekeeper Miss Kenton, played by a fine-cut Emma Thompson, is studied through a series of flashbacks that intercuts from Stevens' pursuit of a personal redemption in the present and his muted servitude in the past. Here the past collides with the present, so when that finale arrives, the effect is all the more devastating.


VERDICT:

Its unfocused narrative structure aside - this is a seriously contemplative study about people whose responsibilities deny them the right to their happiness. Remains of the Day has a quiet, brooding power, with Hopkins and Thompson's piercing performances, that makes it superior to many other less-accomplished British costume dramas.



RATING: A-

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Genre: Horror/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Good holy grief. Out of nowhere, or from deep down south of Lars von Trier’s self-confessed depression rather, Antichrist lashes itself out of Danish soil, detonated at Cannes this year and blasted off all over both sides of the Atlantic with headline-grabbing precision. It had audiences walking out of cinemas, critics vilifying at the top of lungs (or rather tip of their pens) and had the Cannes’ panel branding it “the most shocking film in the film festival’s history”. It wouldn’t be surprising if it would make the Pope go apeshit.


Anyone unacquainted of the cinema of von Trier will be in for a visual and psychological confrontation. Pundits calling this one “torture porn” seem to have been missing the entire point of the auteur’s oeuvre. His films are essentially torture porn, in a way that they depict intense human sufferings, creatures being tormented in a godforsaken Earth – from the dissolution of an innocent believer in Breaking the Waves, the infernal struggle of a near-sightless woman in Dancer in the Dark to a small-town’s torture on a guest in Dogville – these are movies that confront audiences with bleak subject matters no matter how devastating they are. Only that Antichrist is the pinnacle of von Trier’s extreme depiction of human agony. One can easily dismiss that von Trier has picked up the Eli Roth material and wrap it up with the aesthetic of Tarkovsky, and we have an artistic package. That the controversial scenes of self-mutilation, hardcore sex, upfront penetration, penile shots ejaculating with blood and worst of all, a do-it-yourself clitoridectomy push the boundaries to what cinema can expose onscreen. They might seem unnecessary to some, but at the subtext of Antichrist, which is actually a brooding, complex meditation on grief, self-destruction and culpability, these depictions, disturbing as they may be, are only appropriate.


For a tale of a couple’s anguish over the loss of their child, it portrays such an intense psychological exploration on both the husband and wife’s psyches. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who both give fearless performances, are He and She who flee to their cabin in the woods called Eden to recuperate after losing their child on an accident whilst they were having sex (this is rendered through beautiful monochrome, using ultra-slow-motion, accompanied by an aria). Losing an offspring is a parent’s horror story – and von Trier self-consciously nods to Nicholas Roeg’s seminal Don’t Look Now. Whilst in the woods, the episode is interspersed with dream sequences, as though we are meandering through the minds, fears and subconscious of the protagonists, and as He tries to break down her defences, strips away her guards, belittles her to a childlike state, He psychologically pins her down to the ground. Being unable to fight back psychologically, She locks herself into a physical ordeal She’s capable of inflicting. Cue one celluloid history’s most orgiastic, unrestrained presentation of violence. Not even the 20-minute rape scene in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible can match Antichrist’s stomach-churning scene with a drill and a scissor.


Von Trier’s detractors would point out a very excessive representation of sex here. If one has to look closer, Antichrist is ridden, almost burdened with Christian symbols that it would leave audience connecting mental dots (The Three Beggars = The Three Kings, and Eden is the Biblical garden, geddit?), and it seems to reverse the Christian ideology. Antichrist provides an alternative world, one which is created by Satan, not God, and that man is inherently evil, not good. Von Trier suggests here whilst sex is the Original Sin, the forbidden fruit, it is also man’s most basic need. Sexuality is deeply ingrained in this picture. And since the couple has betrothed in the sinful act pre-empting them from saving their child from falling out of the window, She bears an irrepressible guilt, blaming her coitus, her basic function as a woman, hence her self-mutilation later. After watching this, you’ll definitely need a good splash of cold water on your face.


VERDICT:

An altogether harrowing, frustrating and gut-churning experience – it’s a kind of cinema that would have audiences bolting out of movie theatres for its uninhibited depiction of carnal violence. It’s easy to dismiss Antichrist’s aestheticsm of what is essentially torture porn, but one cannot deny Von Trier’s uncanny ability to portray disturbing human situations with a terrible beauty. For this is really like glimpsing into the dark abyss of humanity, once seen, never forgotten.



RATING: B+

Cast: Gloria Swanson, William Holden

Director: Billy Wilder

Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder

Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir



CRITIQUE:


The year was 1950. Hollywood had produced two glitteringly black celebrity satires that would not only become classics but continue today as the two most definitive studies on celebrity culture. On one hand, there’s Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s extraordinarily razor-sharp All About Eve and on the other, there’s Billy Wilder’s cold-blooded Sunset Boulevard. The two works battled it out at Oscars, and however colossal Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson’s performances were, they both lost out to a chirruping Billy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Where Eve was a tightly constructed drama about the obsession of fame, Boulevard explores the corrosive power of fame set against human decay and dark moralities via the noir alley. Not that Wilder is unknown to this sinister territory; he directed one of the greatest film noirs ever made, Double Indemnity. And here, he fuses the underbelly of noir whilst satirising Hollywood itself and its merciless ageism. William Holden’s decrepit screen scribe sells his talent and dashing good looks to Gloria Swanson’s faded silent movie star Norma Desmond, and becomes her boy-toy in her ivy-crawled, overgrown mansion. Poised for a comeback, she resurrects a script with him that would bring her back to the silverscreen. The only problem is that her lustre has faded “10,000 midnights ago”, and Hollywood has surpassed the silent era and moved to sound.


Norma Desmond is such a peach of a character, utterly submerged in her own glamour and delusions, and Swanson plays her with both vitriol and effusive sweetness. It’s easy to dismiss that Swanson plays her own personality, but in the subtext of Boulevard, her larger-than-life presence, melodramatic speeches – she embodies an archaic icon left behind from the fast chugging vehicle of modernity. She really is a Miss Havisham caricature, sunken in her own disillusionment and gloom. Holden, meanwhile, seem to underplay but only rightly so, as he alleviates Swanson’s overt histrionics. His Gillis is a calculating hero, believing he could manipulate Desmond into submission. And in the seedy world of noir, nothing goes right. When Norma descends from a staircase in what appeared to her as a return to the limelight, her audience know it’s her descent to madness.


VERDICT:

A ruthless deglamorisation of the movie factory that's built to give its stars their sparkle, Sunset Boulevard rebuffs Tinseltown as an all-glittering haven, and exposes Hollywood as an underworld lair of fading stars, decaying moralities and misguided talents. Wilder's bleak vision is at times ominous, darkly funny and unremittingly sad, with Holden and the has-been Swanson delivering biting, vindictive performances that lingers for long after the fade-out.



RATING: A

Cast: Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins

Director: David Jones

Screenplay: Hugh Whitmore

Running time: 1 hr 40 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


The history of cinema has witnessed numerous unconsummated romances. From the grand old epic (Gone with the Wind) to the intimate (Brief Encounter), from the tragic (Titanic) to the matter-of-fact, real-world practicality (Casablanca) – they are specially designed to make women swoon, men pucker their lips and your mothers weep an ocean the size of Atlantic. For as much as realism is concerned, that you-and-me-against-the-world dogma is really bullshit and lovers don’t really end up together as they do in Disney world (romantic diehards will be reminded that even Romeo and Juliet didn’t even make it at the end). Throughout the moviegoing decades, audience had grown to be more cynical and sharp, as Bob Dylan once crooned, “Times they are a-changin’.” But in 84 Charing Cross Road, a low-key, unassuming drama of an unusual relationship between two people, the lovers do not even get to meet, neither battle with sinking ships and tragic circumstances (although here, there’s the post-World War II recuperation in the backdrop) nor proclaim wistful, bittersweet lines like they do in those black-and-white celluloid, usually followed by a sigh, a clinch and the requisite smooch. None of that is present here. The main constraint that stakes between these two engrossed individuals is distance; she an avid reader and lover of second-hand, less-read books and he a bookseller engaged in a quiet marriage. The love of literature launches them both into a correspondence that develops from business letters to a shared communication that explores hopes, dreams and longings.


We ask ourselves, why didn’t one of them just get on a damn boat and see the other? Well, why do they have to? As intelligent, thoughtful romances go, it’s all easier said than done. Anne Bancroft’s bibliophile Helene is comfortable with her singlehood, and Anthony Hopkin’s repressed Frank avows nary a complaint to his marriage with Judi Dench’s Nora, whose table conversation never goes beyond his compliments to her prepared dinner as “tasty”. The transatlantic distance practically holds them back for many unspoken reasons – and in a way, it strengthens the film because it does not need to speak things loud. The two key players are superb in expressing their thoughts. Bancroft makes sure that her strident, feisty character, who often absurdly talks to herself whilst typing, has moments of quiet sincerity, whilst the always brilliant Hopkins sustains an almost expressionless face throughout broken by transitory hints of sorrow, disappointment and acquiescence of the status quo. His wordless reaction when he reads the letter that Helene cannot make it to London is a fine measurement in acting.


VERDICT:

An unassuming, unpretentious look at communication and unfulfilled romance, with nuanced performances by Bancroft, Hopkins and Dench. What might appear as a You’ve Got Mail for the middle-aged turns out to be a thoughtful, well-performed film that does not pretend to be more than what it is – a gentle relationship between two misplaced humans with an ocean in between.



RATING: B+

Cast: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgaard

Director: Ron Howard

Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman

Running time: 2 hrs 18 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


If the Vatican were the National Board of Film Critics and condemns The Da Vinci Code, we’d agree with them. After that dreadful, slapdash cinematic debut of a Dan Brown adaptation, there isn’t much to look forward for a material that portends running around holy sites, worriedly gawping at sculptures/paintings, following clues and breaking hokum codes whilst we’re escorted with a hero who’s so devoid of any persona, whose facial expression seem to be automatically set in an eternal scowl. Robert Langdon is really a cross between a charmless Indiana Jones and an irritatingly encyclopaedic documentary commentator. And since we’re done with suicidal albino monks, now we’ve progressed into the granddaddy of all religions – the Vatican. Here we witness red-robed cardinals, as we dash around CGI-generated Vatican halls and studio-built vaults (the mother of all dioceses forbade Angels & Demons to film on site) complete with Tom Hanks’ tourist-guide epithets. Because we are completely uninformed, if not stupid, we are told about the obvious state of affairs in the film’s opener where a journalistic narrator broodingly elaborates the process of papal election. Cue abduction of four cardinals, the resurrection of an ancient anti-religion cult the Illuminati, and the chase around the churches of Rome begins. At least this is a dramatic development from its heavy-lidded predecessor, where Ron Howard clearly realises that a popular fodder like this does not need a mile-length scroll of expositions. While Langdon’s walk-and-talk is considerably lesser, this is still ridden with some clunky, self-explanatory lines that one can’t help to snort on their popcorns with “the Illuminati is seeking retribution!” For something that is hellbent on destroying the Catholicism, this movie does not really quite make its mind up whether it’s for or against the Church.


VERDICT:

Angels & Demons works as a fast-paced thriller, but only that. It is ridiculously ridden with plotholes and filled with as many deux ex machinas as Langdon’s trivia expositions. Whilst we can peer through deadly-serious looking cardinals, we can’t overcome the fact that when four of their colleagues were kidnapped, they don’t give a damn and just get on with the bloody election. And the Church hates Langdon’s skin so much that they have to recruit him for some Scooby Doo mystery tour around their own headquarters.



RATING: C

Cast: Nicholas Cage, Elizabeth Shue

Director: Mike Figgis

Screenplay: Mike Figgis

Running time: 1 hr 55 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


There’s certainly something going on beneath this alcoholic-meets-prostitute tale when its author of the based novel John O’Brien committed suicide two weeks into production of the film. With its semi-autobiographical trappings, one couldn’t help but wonder what utter despair this story is rooted upon. And it is very depressing indeed. Its protagonist Ben Sanderson is a failed screenwriter who intends to drink himself to death. Here there is no redemption, no last-minute rescue, and even his platonic love affair with Sera, a hardened, streetwise prostitute, provides no optimism and neat happy-ending. This is a love story that accepts flaws from both parties, yet never attempts to rectify them. And this is the strength of the film; it refuses to adhere with the sloppiness usually inherent in this kind of material. Instead, it is gritty, relentlessly grim and does not moralise on its audience. The self-destructiveness of Ben is portrayed by Nicholas Cage with stunning perception, sometimes sardonic and often hard-hitting. This reminds of those days when Cage can prove he can actually perform, and not just scampering around with a heavy frown on his face in lowbrow action flicks. Elizabeth Shue is also superlative, providing Sera some surprising gentility and humanity to an otherwise bland and hackneyed prostitute-with-a-heart character.


VERDICT:

A compelling and sometimes moving portrait of human deterioration onscreen. This dark, unassuming love story of two wounded individuals offers no recuperation and kitsch conclusions. Best watched when you’re sober – and stay away from sharp objects afterwards.



RATING: B+

Cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgaard

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier

Running time: 2 hrs 36 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Danish cinematic iconoclast Lars von Trier’s first English-language film Breaking the Waves subverts the genre of romantic melodrama (read: women’s weepie) into something entirely on its own. A tragedy filmed in a quasi-documentary, home-video look washed out of any primary colours into monotonous shades of sepia, bleak browns and unfiltered light. A sweeping romance worthy of a Wuthering Heights (here it’s the windswept Scottish highlands), yet does not easily offer some stiff vertical morals from its central protagonists. Like the title, this breaks genre definitions and surf in the wave of the iconoclasm of cinema. After all, von Trier is one of the progenitors of the famous Dogme 95 Manifesto. Although steeped with Dogme principles, Waves isn’t officially a Dogme film (Von Trier’s follow-up The Idiots was his first entry to the manifesto), but it’s easy to recognise the techniques in this pre-movement work: raw style, handheld cameras, less artifice, more realism. Basically, a big two-finger to Hollywood. There are even instances throughout the film when the heroine, Emily Watson’s Bess, surreptitiously and swiftly looks into the camera, as though glancing to her audience. It allows a self-conscious performance, and what a performance it is. Count Emily Watson’s rendition of a good-hearted, small-town, virginal Scottish lass as one of the finest debut screen acting by any actor committed to celluloid. And put it up there with Björk in also Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark as simultaneously naturalistic and heartbreaking.


Here Von Trier explores religion, guilt, redemption and the all-consuming power of love. Watson’s Bess is suddenly thrown into an off-kilter world of dissipated behaviour in the eyes of her local church pulpit community when her paralysed husband asks her to sleep with other men to fulfil her sexual liberation. It’s a cringingly weird set-up, but both Watson and Skargaard’s chemistry make us understand their situation. Sacrifice ensues and Bess commits herself to what seem to be self-humiliation all for the name of redemption and healing. And like real life, more or less, only very little is healed.


VERDICT:

Von Trier does not settle for comfort viewing. He undertakes religion, guilt, redemption, sex and the all-consuming power of love in what might be a muddled affair. But it makes sense, and it’s told with daring, panache and power. Watson’s superb performance should be in the history books of screen acting.



RATING: A-

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, John Goodman

Director: Joel Coen

Screenplay: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Running time: 1 hr 58 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Fargo has trumpeted the brilliant if bizarre talents of the Coen brothers. But even Oscars have decorated these siblings with so much praise, it’s palpable in their follow-up to Fargo, the surreally trippy and purposefully hilarious The Big Lebowski, they don’t really give a fuck to the Academy. What is now trademarked as ‘Coenesque’, they write screenplays that barely anyone in America can come up with, tales about both physically and intellectually challenged individuals (usually, in the Coen canon, the misfit and slacker prototypes) that has surprising moral bites to their denouements. Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski is one simplistic slacker that may be one of the Coens’ most unforgettable creations. A total ennui-ridden LA time waster, who goes around supermarkets at night in a bathrobe with a pair of shades, pays tills with cheques (even for a pint of milk) – this is a guy who means no one harm and would rather go for bowling than messing any one about. So when a mistaken identity crisis arrives, he takes an insanely simple viewpoint of the otherwise very complicated affair, as he gets sucked down into the seedy world of gangsters, porn stars and other immoral exploitations in the LA underworld. It sounds familiar, indeed. The Big Lebowski is really the Coens’ take on Raymond Chandler’s pulp noirs, most especially The Big Sleep. Both share thematic DNAs of rich, vindictive fathers with sleazy, renegade daughters and shady gang men. Only in the Coens world, the protagonists are absolutely inept, the trio comprised of The Dude (Jeff Bridges having a whale of a time for this role), the vociferous ex-‘Nam vet Walter (a terrific Goodman) and the mellifluous Donny (an unsual Steve Buscemi), and The Dude is far from the detective capabilities of Humphrey Bogart. Which it makes it even funnier, rattling from one chutzpah and shenanigan to another, with Julianne Moore’s unabashedly forthright femme-fatale Maude complicating things up. She’s the Lauren Bacall with more sex and artsy-fartsy disposition, who just really hunts The Dude for baby-making purposes. But in true Coens fashion, almost nothing in the entire plot gets a resolution.


VERDICT:

This is the Coens’ reimagining of the Raymond Chandler pulp-fiction noirs, yet remains in very Coenesque territory –completely clumsy central characters sucked into a meticulous, seedy world of LA pornography business. Despite a somewhat fuzzy resolution, it’s a genuinely funny absurdist-comedy, wonderfully photographed by Roger Deakins whilst boasting a verbally colourful screenplay courtesy of the brothers.



RATING: B+

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel

Director: Marc Webb

Screenplay: Scott Neustadter, Michael Weber

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Romance/Comedy



CRITIQUE:


The genre of contemporary romantic comedy usually comes with labels that could easily put-off pundits. Films of this category flogged by mainstayers such as Kate Hudson, Katherine Heigl or the now-resurrected Sandra Bullock easily have the effect of curdled milk on the face of anyone with an inch of a brain. The formula and plot are typically very linear and as predictable as a Richard Curtis screenplay, where everyone hails for a taxi and quickly dashes to the airport to save a romantic possibility at the last minute. All of that obligatory formula is dispensed with in (500) Days of Summer, a refreshing, zesty burst of fresh air in the stale, rotten stinkers of your average rom-coms. The “boy-meets-girl” is still present, but it invents its own daring and creative narrative, jumbling the plot chronology into a Memento-like time-play, where the boy Tom (a groovy, pleasing Joseph Gordon-Levitt) recollects his 500-day relationship with the eponymous Summer (Zooey Deschanel in quirky yet painfully brusque mode). Non-linear narrative might appear as a gimmick, but it’s arguably far from one: it strays from the clear-cut conventions of its genre, and whence we see each joyous sequence juxtaposed with its counteracting melancholic bite of a lost relationship, we discover this film has a point – it balances every single high state with an opposing low. And the concept of a protagonist looking back to the good moments, as well as understanding how it all failed, seems plausible.


It also has a disarmingly honest worldview about relationships that could be worthy of a Woody Allen. Tom’s belief of a true romance is sharply contrasted by Summer’s beguiling and baffling casualness, whose persistence of a ‘friendship’ status is always a blow to the male pride. It’s refreshing to see a woman behaving this way. And Deschanel perfectly channels this impression of ethereal quality, something so grounded yet so unattainable, her gaze often has this spacey look that’s both charming and perceptive, as though she’s always studying everyone around her.


Eschewing formula and sentimentality aside, it doesn’t root for the mawkish types. This is supposed to be a feel-bad film, but strangely enough, it wraps itself up with such warmth and heart-tugging tenderness that made indie-winners Little Miss Sunshine and Once excel. Watch that bravura split-screen sequence at a roof party, where expectations versus reality occur, it manages to brilliantly oppose a romantic trajectory with a cynical pang of real-life credibility.


VERDICT:

A genuine surprise. This is a smart revival of the romcom genre that is otherwise brain-dead on arrival. It harks back to the wry wit of Annie Hall, told in a non-linear, memory-rummaging style of Memento. The result is a painful/wonderful, self-conscious look at contemporary relationships that has more truth and brains and sensibilities that defy the genre's dull conventions. That split-screen finale alone is an accomplishment.



RATING: A-