AFTER THE WEDDING
***½
Denmark
Essentially a soap opera dressed up in Dogme aesthetics for street cred, but it works, damn it! Absorbing, affecting and exceptionally well acted.
dir: Susanne Bier
cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Stine Fischer Christensen, Rolf Lassgård, Mona Malm, Christian Tafdrup, Niels Anders Thorn

AWAY FROM HER
***½
Canada
Talented actress Sarah Polley's first feature as director charts Julie Christie's gradual succumbing to Alzheimer's as well as its ramifications on her 44-year marriage to Gordon Pinsent. And though it does tread on Hallmark-friendly waters, it's much more nutritious than that synopsis would suggest. Much of the crafting is basic, almost prosaic (the arbitrary, soulless flashbacks in particular), yet rather than telemovie-triteness, it leads towards a sense of intimacy, placing the focus as it does squarely on the warm and weathered characters. The dialogue is rich and literate, providing for a terrific showcase for the ever-graceful Christie. In the less showy but more layered role of the supportive husband, Pinsent is just as impressive.
wr/dir: Sarah Polley
cast: Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Kristen Thomson, Michael Murphy, Wendy Crewson

BABEL
**
USA
Writer-director team Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu had nowhere to go after this, the climax in their celebrated series of connect-the-dots challenges with a progressively inflated sense of heft. From the get-go the picture takes up a pitch of grandiosely hushed hysteria - children! with guns! - and holds on to it like a destitute mother to her still-born child.
   So much happens across the four interconnected stories in this movie - every photogenic kind of pain and suffering - and in the end the feeling is that nothing really happened. All of the various sufferings come off as interchangable - not because of any slap-my-forehead we-are-all-connected epiphany, but because every batch of violent sobbing and high misery is driven by the same person's (or persons') sadistic, self-aggrandising urge to look profound.
dir: Alejandro González Iñárritu
ph: Rodrigo Prieto
m: Gustavo Santaolalla
cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi, Gael García Bernal, Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble, Koji Yakusho, Mahima Chaudhry, Shilpa Shetty, Said Tarchani

BAMAKO
**
Mali/USA/France
Abderrahmane Sissako's highly, confoundingly admired dialectic on the West's history of exploitation of the African people and soil. Sissako is working off two principal strands: an impassioned, allegorical rhetoric-heavy mock-trial staged in the middle of an apathetic Mali village, with the World Bank standing in as the accused for the greater Western world; as well as tortuously long stretches of 'ordinary' impoverished African life, in which Sissako mistakes the mundane for the evocative.
   A half-assed parody sequence of the American Western pops up half-way through the movie, featuring Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman.
wr/dir: Abderrahmane Sissako
cast: Aïssa Maïga, Tiécoura Traoré, Maimouna Hélène Dembélé, Balla Habib Dembélé, Djénéba Koné, Danny Glover, Elia Souleiman

BEAUTY IN TROUBLE
***½
Czech Republic
In Jan Hrebejk's family dramedy, Anna Geislerová ditches her virile but ineffectual husband just before he gets sent to prison, then gets involved with a much older, much richer man.
   Hrebejk never heard a sensitive-new-age-adult-alternative track too maudlin, and he never saw a montage too insurance-ad-like. But he can spot a sharp script. Furthermore he can build a portrait of unrelenting evil of caricaturish proportions and, enormously aided as he is by his actors, render it completely life-like and convincing (ditto angelic good-heartedness). A lot of his skill in these situations stems from his understanding that lives which to the average comfortably well-off filmmaker would appear strange and messy, to the people living them are, if anything, plain and mundane.
dir: Jan Hrebejk
wr: Petr Jarchovský
cast: Anna Geislerová, Roman Luknár, Jana Brejchová, Jirí Schmitzer, Emília Vásáryová

BELLA
*
USA
Essentially a sloppy, blindly derivative undergrad assignment stretched to feature-length, this cloying, feeble-minded mediocrity about a New York waitress who discovers she's pregnant (and who is portrayed as a saint because she gets fired from work for showing up an hour late two days in a row) and a failed football star who provides a shoulder to cry on (and whose years of stoic mourning over a mysterious tragedy have broken out into a bushy, Jesus-like beard) inexplicably won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival.
dir: Alejandro Gomez Monteverde
cast: Tammy Blanchard, Eduardo Verástegui, Manny Perez, Ali Landry, Angélica Aragón, Jaime Tirelli, Ramon Rodriguez

BIG BANG LOVE: JUVENILE A
***
Japan
The unlikely helmer of this opaque, homoerotic prison drama is Takashi Miike, better known for his swag of Japanese cult horrors. But then it's hard to determine whether this slow-paced oddity with random alternating outbursts of first-class martial arts and majestic, surrealist imagery could fit very neatly within any other director's oeuvre.
dir: Takashi Miike
ph: Masahito Kaneko
cast: Ryuhei Matsuda, Masanobu Ando, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Jo Kanamori, Kenichi Endo, Renji Ishibashi, Ryo Ishibashi

BLACK BOOK
****½
Netherlands/Belgium/UK/Germany
It's such a release to see a great filmmaker bail Hollywood and breathe again. To be fair though, Paul Verhoeven does retain all the positive aspects of the Old Hollywood instincts for action, pacing and tension buildup in presenting this cheeky thriller about a Jewish woman who joins the Dutch Resistance and starts sleeping with a Nazi towards the end of WWII. This may be why several people who should know better dismissed the film as an enjoyable but empty genre feature. But how many empty genre features present a noble Nazi, undermine the heroics of the Resistance, equate a choral hymn with a barrel of shit, question the automatic vilification and easy branding of collaborators and point out how comfortably a mob mentality can devolve into fascism while ostensibly celebrating its downfall. With terrific, subversive intelligence Verhoeven mixes genre with things that genre traditionally avoids or confuses, and even as he threatens to tie history into an insufferably neat end, he chooses to finish on an ambiguous, unsettling image that provokes some urgent thought.
   Also keeping in line with the movie's credo of deeper things bubbling beneath the gloss, the star, Carice Van Houten, reveals beneath her soft, porcelain, 1940s-screen-siren features, a guile, tenacity and ferocity to be reckoned with.
dir: Paul Verhoeven
wr: Gerard Soeteman, Paul Verhoeven
m: Anne Dudley
cast: Carice Van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn, Waldemar Kobus, Derek de Lint, Christian Berkel, Dolf de Vries, Peter Blok, Michiel Huisman, Ronald Armbrust

THE BLACK DAHLIA
**½
USA
It's strange that a filmmaker as ordinarily flashy and operatic as Brian De Palma could have come up with such a gutless, anonymous adaptation of James Ellroy's book about the sadistic 1947 murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short. And it's positively confounding that a film so discordant and schizoid - one that appears to be taking on a new shape roughly every five minutes - would ultimately offer up so very few hints of personality (or personalities).
   De Palma lifts a few bits from Ellroy's plot, races past the bits that connect them, and misses out entirely on the overarching drive: one cop's twisted psycho-sexual relationship to a dead woman he's trying to do good by. When a jealous Scarlett Johansson - looking like a teenager trying far too hard to act like a grown-up - accuses the ostensibly-jaded-but-effectively-vacant Josh Hartnett of screwing a woman that "looks like that dead girl", rather than a morbid pointer, it comes off as a schoolyard insult.
   Fortunately, the script allows for some juicy supporting roles for a bunch of savvy women. All the best bits have something to do with an absurdly yet compellingly cast Hilary Swank taking on an evasive, faintly retro-sounding accent as the femme fatale, a perilously unhinged Fiona Shaw as an unstable matron, and the hypnotically big, liquid eyes of Mia Kirshner playing the Dahlia in flashback.
dir: Brian De Palma
ph: Vilmos Szigmond
cast: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Mia Kirshner, Fiona Shaw, MIke Starr, John Kavanagh, Rachel Miner

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
****½
USA
Kazakhstani ambassador Borat Sagdiyev's half-doco movie film is sincerely nutty in a way that far too few American comedies have been seen the heyday of the Marx Bros. Beyond Sacha Baron Cohen & co.'s skilled skewering of an America that would gleefully lynch gays and Iraqi babies (as well as an America that would patiently tutor a guileless foreigner on the proper system for dispensing with faeces), it's a joy to watch a flamboyantly moustached funnyman wreak havoc on a mass scale with flawless timing and wide-eyed delirium.
dir: Larry Charles
wr: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, Todd Phillips
cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian, Pamela Anderson, Pat Haggerty, Alan Keyes

THE BOSS OF IT ALL
****
Denmark
With trademark guile and mischief, Lars Von Trier pretty much sticks to the Dogme aesthetic as he presents a comedy (!) - which he brands harmless, as such - wherein the owner of an IT company decides to sell up, except he's forced to present to his employees the CEO, whom he himself invented as a scapegoat for his own unpopular decisions. So he hires a nutty, pseudo-intellectual actor. It's a screwy plot and an ensemble's worth of genial, pitch-perfect actors take on it with screwball conviction.
   The unconventional and often clever framing of the shots is reportedly the result of a computer program called Automavision, which, once the camera was placed in position, randomly selected when to zoom, pan or tilt. Automavision takes all the credit for the film's cinematography.
wr/dir: Lars von Trier
cast: Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, Benedikt Erlingsson, Iben Hjejle, Henrik Prip, Mia Lyhne, Casper Christensen, Louise Mieritz, Jean-Marc Barr

THE BREAK-UP
**
USA
It’s an interesting conceit: a mainstream-oriented, aggressively marketed romantic comedy that skips the courtship and details the break-up instead. The problem though is that for a comedy it’s conspicuously low on jokes and these very few it offers up are awfully contrived.
   The drama – which gradually ends up dominating – seems to be coming from a more honest place, though not necessarily a wise one. As far as relationship dissolutions go, this is a generic one – with charmless leads.
dir: Peyton Reed
cast: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Joey Lauren Adams, Ann-Margret, Judy Davis, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jon Favreau, John Michael Higgins

THE BUBBLE
***
Israel
There were bits of artifice in Eytan Fox's previous films, but the characters were so vivid and engaging that it was easy to overlook the numerous plot contrivances. This is also the case with a large chunk of his latest film, concerning a gay relationship that sparks up between a Palestinian and an Israeli Jew. Even if the characters are idealised, sitcom-friendly variations on breathing people and the dialogue is for the most part either expository or trite, you're eager to forgive Fox because their affection for each other is palpable and, honestly now, how many directors thusfar have offered up a twenty-something-dating-hipster perspective on the Palestinian issue? But as the coincidences start piling up, the characters' actions grow increasingly erratic and contradictory, and the plot takes roughly six too many hysterical detours, the film's unsteady topicality veers into exploitation.
dir: Eytan Fox
cast: Ohad Knoller, Yousef 'Joe' Sweid, Daniela Virtzer, Alon Friedman, Zohar Liba, Tzion Baruch, Oded Leopold, Roba Blal, Lior Ashkenazi

CARS
**
USA
A Pixar cartoon feature set in an alternate universe populated exclusively by anthropomorphic cars. The protagonist is a racing car, who's let overnight success get to his head. Fortunately for his soul however, one night he gets lost on his way to a big race and ends up stuck in a sleepy small town, where he gets a chance to learn some good old-fashioned mid-Western values.
  The animation is consistently attractive - the town of Radiator Springs is charmingly designed, it oozes nostalgia. But there is no joy to the storytelling. "Don't you big city cars ever stop and just go out for a drive?" wonders Sally the love interest - a Porsche who had grown tired of being a hot-shot L.A. lawyer (yes, these cars can have corporate lives) and moved to the country. No one with a love for what they do could settle for such lazy rehashing. This isn't scriptwriting, it's strictly a matter of meeting deadlines.
   It's also disconcerting to see Pixar resort to soul-numbing DreamWorks tactics like references to real-life celebrities and bubble-gum radio 'rock' songs.
dir: John Lasseter
voices of: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Larry The Cable Guy, Cheech Marin, George Carlin, Richard Petty, Michael Keaton, Tony Shalhoub

CASINO ROYALE
***½
USA/UK/Germany/Czech Republic
Seeing as every screen superhero of late has been getting a down-and-dirty makeover (adopting an earnest, Jung-inflected persona in the process and discarding his sense of humour), it isn't surprising to see the trend befall Mr. Bond. What is surprising is how well it works. The fight sequences are no longer trashily entertaining like big budget musical numbers are - they carry a dramatic urgency. Bond himself is no longer a smarmy aging sleazebag who's surely never had to take a punch - he's steely, he's determined and frighteningly vicious. And even the Bond girl is bestowed a personality not entirely defined in relation to Mr. Bond or her cup size.
dir: Martin Campbell
cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Caterina Murino, Simon Abkarian, Jesper Christensen, Ivana Milicevic

CHILDREN OF MEN
****
USA/UK
A political chase thriller set in a terrifying near future where women have become infertile and strongholds of Western capitalism have started to resemble news footage from the Middle East. What gives it a raw power is that it looks familiar enough to be intensely frightening. Cuarón does display a tendency to add an exclamation point where the dramatic urgency of a given situation has rendered one redundant. But overall, he is to be commended for building a tricky sci-fi premise into a palatable and thought-provoking vision of the future.
dir: Alfonso Cuarón
ph: Emmanuel Lubezki
cast: Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Pam Ferris, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Peter Mullan, Danny Huston

THE DA VINCI CODE
**
USA
Dan Brown's forte as a writer of prose is the exhaustive research he puts into the breathless exposition that accounts for close to seventy-five percent of his novel (the rest is breathless cliffhangers). In their book-to-film translation, the personality-deficit duo of director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman abide by this ratio quite faithfully. The narrating of pseudo-historical facts - along with the sporting of a super-sleazy Eurotrash hairdo - is all the acting that is required of Tom Hanks. He furrows his brow, he bites his lower lip and that's the end of that. He looks airless more than breathless.
   The grand ambition behind Brown's novel ultimately turned out to be to condense centuries of the questioning of faith down to a conclusion that there is no point to the questioning of faith. Howard doesn't deem it fitting to build on this observation. But he does strive to hold on to the air of having come up with something exceptionally profound. Reportedly, he turned to things like "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby" to 'inspire' his direction. But the world would have been a happier place had he opted to rip off an Indiana Jones movie instead.
   To the plebeians among us (who have yet to catch up with one of the 20 million copies sold of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail"), the 'history' is the picture's selling point. Even the strictly pedestrian CGI-reconstructions of things like the Crusades, the Inquisition and pagan worship in ancient Rome won't necessarily stunt a healthy imagination and appetite for conspiracy theories. The grandeur of the historical context resists the reductionism of the hack authors. In fact it overwhelms everything else in the picture, namely the suspenseless setpieces, the pat deductions and the anti-philosophical debates that always seem to favour the hero's quiet, subtle Catholicism.
dir: Ron Howard
wr: Akiva Goldsman
cast: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean-Yves Berteloot, Etienne Chicot

DELIVER US FROM EVIL
***½
USA
A look into the case history of cheery and disarmingly open Father Oliver O'Grady and his conviction on charges of child molestation, coming as it did after years of abuse strategically covered up by the Catholic church. It's a sober, enraging denigration of a religious institution that expressly justifies the stonewalling of child rape victims in order to protect its good name. Director Amy Berg collects damning and devastating confessions from now-adult victims and their families, though she doesn't delve anywhere near deeply enough into her interviewees' surviving faith.
dir: Amy Berg

THE DEPARTED
****
USA
With this remake of Andrew Lau’s well-regarded “Infernal Affairs”, Martin Scorsese returns to a path he has trodden many a time before – gang wars – but with a freshness. From the elaborate cross-cutting and camera-swirling you can sense that he’s seriously toiling at it, but there is a crapshoot looseness to his style that is actually quite relaxing to follow.
   It’s a flawed film. It’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic and its resolution is preposterous.
   But it’s richly entertaining and well-acted by a cast of heavyweights.
dir: Martin Scorsese
wr: William Monahan
ph: Michael Ballhaus
ed: Thelma Schoonmaker
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Vera Farmiga, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin, Anthony Anderson, Kevin Corrigan

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
**
USA
A glorified make-over movie with mild pretensions of a fashion world satire, which are quickly smothered by the makers' fetish for trashy but expensive-looking couture (as well as a crummy sense for comic timing). Anne Hathaway tries very hard to pretend she isn't plucky and puppy-hungry for your love as she plays an aspiring journalist who loses touch with her true self while working for a major fashion magazine. As the boss from hell, Meryl Streep attempts multiple variations on the one note. The only time she's particularly interesting to watch is a brief patch where she's stripped of make-up and her destitute middle-aged-ness is underlined. And even then she's on auto-pilot.
dir: David Frankel
cast: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker, Adrian Grenier, Tracie Thoms, Daniel Sunjata

DRY SEASON
**½
Chad/France/Belgium/Austria
This parched, austere parable detailing a 16-year-old's frustrated vendetta on his father's killer is a particularly frustrating experience in that it has about as many significant strengths as it does weaknesses. Chadian writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun develops his observations regarding the legacy of Chad's 40-year civil war with exemplary subtlety and consideration, building up to a moving finale. At the same time however, Haroun shows the tendency of a worrying amount of contemporary film festival staples in that he mistakes oppressive minimalism, a dearth of dialogue and a glacial pace for irreproachably artful, evocative naturalism.
wr/dir: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
cast: Abderamane Abakar, Ali Barkai, Khayar Oumar Defallah, Youssouf Djaoro

FALLING
***
Austria/Germany
A palatable if not terribly fresh deliberation on the diverging paths taken by five formerly very close women when they're reuinted in their hometown at their teacher's funeral, fourteen years after high school. They exchange believably awkward pleasantries, get believably drunk, shed believable tears and divulge believable secrets that aren't necessarily as striking or enlightening as they're intended to be.
wr/dir: Barbara Albert
cast: Nina Proll, Birgit Minichmayr, Kathrin Resetarits, Urusla Strauss, Gabriela Hegedus

FAY GRIM
***½
USA
A welcome return to form for Hal Hartley. He lifts the characters from his lovely Henry Fool (1998) and relocates them in a wacky universe of breathless intrigue, exclusively canted frames and intercontinental espionage. He presents the international political stage with the same slant he used to present New Jersey, and in a similar fashion, the cheeky surface quirk gradually gives way to the much more substantial, much more resonant stuff spiking out from beneath. It's a shame that Hartley's work is so often dismissed as screwy, hollow fantasia - it's no such thing. Hartley is a hardcore humanist and this is his gentle, witty and thoroughly switched-on interpretation of an increasingly screwy, but very real universe.
wr/dir: Hal Hartley
cast: Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Jeff Goldblum, Elina Lowensohn, Leo Fitzpatrick, Liam Aiken, Saffron Burrows, Chuck Montgomery, Thomas Jay Ryan

A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER
**½
Italy/France/Portugal
A European espionage thriller with political pretensions (it takes place in the week leading up to 9/11). It's watchable enough in that it has arthouse staples like Juliette Binoche and John Turturro playing things like spies and assassins, though you don't for a moment believe that writer-director Santiago Amigorrena has any informed idea about the weighty matters he pretends to be addressing.
wr/dir: Santiago Amigorrena
cast: Juliette Binoche, John Turturro, Sara Forestier, Tom Riley, Nick Nolte

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
***
USA
Christopher Guest and his troupe abandon the mockumentary angle with this slippery poke at Hollywood’s hype machinery, but their jokes feel more crudely improvised than before. They come up with some pearls – particularly the women – but overall the script reads like a first draft. Everybody’s giddy but not quite committed.
dir: Christopher Guest
cast: Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, Jennifer Coolidge, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Ricky Gervais, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley, Sandra Oh

4 ELEMENTS
**
Netherlands
The title hints at grandiose ambitions and is an unfortunate choice as such. Had Jiska Rickel's fashionably impressionistic doco been christened "Filthy Men Performing Soul-Numbing Labour in Isolated Regions of the World", it would have seemed less of a failure. Rickel deserves kudos for eschewing the National Geographic postcard aesthetic, though the ugly, shapeless point-and-shoot visual style she adopts instead makes for a lazy alternative. The sullen new-age score signals you to watch out for the mystery and majesty of the four elements, though none of it is captured in the images. Rickel may provide moderate insight into male camaraderie in grueling, high-risk working environments, but she has nothing new - in fact, nothing at all to say about man's present relationship to them pesky elements.
dir: Jiska Rickel

FRIENDS WITH MONEY
**
USA
Nicole Holofcenter invites you for a peek into the nervous lives of four hollow characters, played by three excellent actresses and an inexpressive sitcom star out for some street cred.
wr/dir: Nicole Holofcenter
cast: Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, Scott Caan, Jason Isaacs, Greg Germann, Simon McBurney, Bob Stephenson

FROZEN CITY
****
Finland
One of the year's strongest European films, Aku Louhimies' gritty-melancholy portrait of the inevitable meltdown of a Helsinki taxi driver, never made it out of festival purgatory (its predecessor, 'Frozen Land' [2005] was also restricted to the festival circuit).
   Though it begins in a worryingly familiar fashion with clumsy Travis Bickle referencing, it very quickly ditches the hipster homage angle and evolves into something much meatier and more resonant. Unlike most excitable young male filmmakers, Louhimies isn't interested in the fetishising of antisocial macho vendettas. His particular anti-hero, as played by the sensitive, amiable Janne Virtanen, is a recently divorced Dad scrambling to balance alimony duties and a paltry paycheck. When he finally does go berserk - in circumstances as messy and obscure as only real life could ever deliver - there is no sense of release or exhilaration, only the suffocation of the last remaining glimmer of hope. It's a sincerely dark, devastating picture.
dir: Aku Louhimies
wr: Mikko Kouki, Aku Louhimies, Paavo Westerberg
cast: Janne Virtanen, Susanna Anteroinen, Aada Hämes, Hannele Lauri, Santeru Nuutinen, Jari Pehkonen, Vivi Hämes

GLUE
**½
Argentina/UK
A wise man once said, "Just because it happened to me, that doesn't make it interesting" - a concept that is yet to reach the moderately talented Alexis Dos Santos. There's no questioning his film's authenticity, or its careful observation, or the natural performances of the pubescent leads - only the world's necessity for another sensitive, leisurely low-budget account of a teen's sexual awakening.
wr/dir: Alexis Dos Santos
cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Inés Efron, Nahuel Viale, Verónica Llinás, Héctor Díaz, Florencia Braier

GRBAVICA
***½
Bosnia
In her account of festering secrets still leaking out nearly a decade after the Bosnian civil war, writer-director Jasmila Zbanic isn't above employing the more schematic weapons of melodrama, but she's skilled at evoking how this now-decade-old trauma maintains an increasingly unacknowledged powerhold over humble, outwardly quiet lives.
wr/dir: Jasmila Zbanic
cast: Mirjana Karanovic, Luna Mijovic, Leon Lucev, Kenan Catic, Jasna Beri, Dejan Acimovic, Bogdan Diklic, Emir Hadzifahisbegovic

HALF-MOON
***½
Iran/Iraq/Austria/France
Bahman Ghobadi mounts another odd, mournful, casually astonishing and remarkably well-acted (by non-actors) ode to his fellow oppressed Kurds.
dir: Bahman Ghobadi
cast: Ismail Ghaffari, Allah-Morad Rashtian, Hedyey Tehrani, Golshifteh Farahani

HALF-NELSON
***
USA
Something like 'Dead Poets Society' given the squalid indie crack-addict treatment. What sets this one above standard inspirational teacher dross however, aren't the jump cuts, the grimy lensing, the fidgety camerawork or the crack, but rather a confident, magnetic Ryan Gosling in the lead. The entire cast really, is quietly impressive.
dir: Ryan Fleck
wr: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
cast: Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie, Monique Curnen, Deborah Rush, Jay O. Sanders, Tina Holmes

HANA
**
Japan
Hirokazu Kore-eda swerves mainstream with this pat, decidedly conventional samurai story, with very little swordplay, bits of folksy humour and lots of irreproachably lovely people. Whereas Hirokazu's langurous pacing was justifiable in his artsy endeavors, in this case it's wearying.
wr/dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda
cast: Junichi Okada, Rie Miyazawa, Arata Furuta, Jun Kunimura, Katsuo Nakamura, Tadanobu Asano, Yoshio Harada

HAPPY FEET
***½
Australia/USA
A strange, oddly paced cartoon about a toe-tapping penguin's identity crisis in an all-singing penguin society. It starts off on a shaky note: the awkward, tuneless celebrity voices don't gel with the characters and, while an awful lot appears to be happening very quickly, none of it runs very smoothly or makes very much sense. It's only about an hour into the picture that the story kicks into high gear and morphs into an exciting - entrancing even - adventure, with grand, awe-inspiring visuals along with some left-field but uncannily effective messages about things like religious fundamentalism and keeping the planet happy.
dir: George Miller, Warren Coleman, Judy Morris
voices of: Elijah Wood, Brittany Murphy, Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Hugo Weaving, Anthony LaPaglia, Miriam Margolyes, Magda Szubanski, Elizabeth Daily, Steve Irwin

THE HOST
****
South Korea
The cleverest, most exciting monster movie in decades, it pits a dysfunctional family and the city of Seoul against a nasty amphibian that emerges from the radium-infested river. Along with old-fashioned spectacle Writer Director Boon Jong-ho finds time for parody and a pointed attack at US imperialism. And the creature itself is as beguiling as any other created since the onset of CGI.
dir: Bong Joon-ho
wr: Baek hul-hyun, Bong Joon-ho, Ha Won-jun
cast: Song Kang-ho, Byeon Hie-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Du-na, Ko Ah-sung

I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE
***
Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria
Another Tsai Ming-liang joint where very little happens; the little that does involves a bunch of mute, unfulfilled souls (two of whom may be the same person) in Kuala Lumpur, and is only occasionally at all significant, though always really lovely to look at.
wr/dir: Tsai Ming-liang
cast: Norman Atun, Chen Shiang-chyi, Pearlly Chua, Lee Kang-sheng

I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND
**
Czech Republic/Slovakia
The man who made Closely Watched Trains has evidently run out of inspiration, resorting as he has to this cutesy, hollow quirkfest about a Czech Nazi collaborator.
wr/dir: Jirí Menzel
cast: Ivan Barnev, Oldrich Kaiser, Julia Jentsch, Martin Huba, Marián Labuda, Milan Lasica

THE ILLUSIONIST
*½
USA
With a German poolboy's accent and screen presence, Edward Norton creates CGI-assisted optical illusions and wows turn-of-the-century Vienna. But really none of his fame and fortune can satisfy the void left by his first love - taken from him before he reached puberty and brought back over a decade later in the stacked shape of Jessica Biel, promised though she may be to a powerful and psychotic aristocrat. After all this time and volumes of acquired wisdom, muses Norton, "The only mystery I have never solved is why my love for you can never stop." It's how he talks throughout the movie.
wr/dir: Neil Burger
cast: Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, Paul Giamatti, Rufus Sewell, Eddie Marsan

IN BETWEEN DAYS
**½
USA/Canada/South Korea
A sensitive, moderately thoughtful, essentially generic summation of a South Korean teenage immigrant's experience. She falls in love with her best friend, who in turn falls in love with an Americanised Korean girl. The actors, though likable, are clearly not experienced, and director So Yong Kim's insight, though appreciated, is overwhelmed by the feature length.
dir: So Yong Kim
cast: Taegu Andy Kang, Bokja Kim, Gina Kim, Jiseon Kim, Mike Park, Nathan Rodriguez, Virginia Wu

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
***½
USA
Davis Guggenheim's account of Al Gore's global warming awareness campaign is essentially a glorified Powerpoint presentation that doesn't offer much along the way of a productive analysis of the conservatives' counter-arguments. But its plum obvious together-we-can-save-the-world message is so slickly presented as to feel like a revelation. It's convinced millions of people around the world to start behaving more responsibly. It's undoubtedly an important achievement in that sense.
dir: Davis Guggenheim

INLAND EMPIRE
****
USA
David Lynch introduces you to another peppy Hollywood starlet familiarly mixing an illicit romance with a Hollywood project shrouded in intrigue and Eastern European curses. Then he has his characteristically seedy avant-garde conceptual epic do all those phrases people use to describe films they can’t get a handle on: obliterating conventions, overthrowing narrative, fragmenting, bifurcating, refracting upon itself, embracing dream logic, temporal what-not etc.
   So yes, first and foremost, this three-hour cryptic-ominous sensory offensive is an unwieldy thing – exhilaratingly so for at least one full hour, before it starts veering back and forth between visceral absorbing horror and commendable experimentation falling embarrassingly flat (often due to crude miscasting). At all times however, it offers you the singular, enthralling experience of watching Laura Dern hit notes of astonishing force and rawness and clarity in phenomenally dodgy mini-DV resolution.
  It’s hard to conclude on Lynch’s ultimate and core point, but it may very well have something to do with how assembling a glamourous identity (the prime Western commodity?) is only half-living, and how you must not only shed (and asphyxiate and disembowel and pulverise) this identity but embrace and transcend the absolute nadir of human experience (Hollywood Boulevard whoredom, some more disembowelling, oblivion) if you are to rise to a state of completeness and really live.
   So, all in all, proceed with caution, but by all means, proceed.
wr/dir: David Lynch
cast: Laura Dern, Karolina Gruszka, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton, Scott Coffey, Grace Zabriskie, Ian Abercrombie, Diane Ladd, Julia Ormond, William H. Macy, Nastassja Kinski, Nae Yukki, Mary Steenburgen, Mikhaila Aeseng, Jeremy Alter, Scout Alter, Laura Herring, Naomi Watts

INSIDE MAN
***½
USA
This mega-star-driven bank-heist thriller is a surprising venture for avowed maverick Spike Lee to undertake. Maybe he was attracted to the political subtext about making money off the death and suffering of big numbers of innocent people. However, even though this underlining moral is quite relevant to currently ongoing world affairs, it's also a touch half-assed. It's only explored in as much as it can serve the plot.
   Lee initially has some trouble getting things going as well as later when it comes to wrapping them up, but he's good at keeping them moving in the main body of the picture, which is when it matters most. It's at this point that you would object to the how the plot is becoming thoroughly implausible, except you're having too much fun. It may be hackwork, but - even at a length of 2-hours-plus - it's the leanest thing that Lee has done in a long time. Getting back to the basics with a genre piece was a healthy thing for him to do.
   As the police detective fighting corrupt officials, a criminal mastermind and a nagging girlfriend, Denzel Washington is more relaxed than usual (you'd hope he would be by now seeing as he's been taking on this role every year since the mid-90s). Of the three leads, he's also the most natural. Clive Owen is a talented actor but here he seems confused about how the Arnie-style empty catch phrases are meant to fuse with his righteous crook's conscience. Jodie Foster similarly finds herself outside her comfort zone. She's very good at her particular brand of earnest conviction, but her range doesn't seem to extend terribly far beyond that. She's meant to be crafty and lascivious here. It's not a flattering look for her.
dir: Spike Lee
cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Willem Dafoe

INSIDE PARIS
***
France
A very French tale of two brothers, one a morose depressive, the other an airy bed-hopper. It gets snarky and cutesy at its worst, but it's breezy fun for the most part.
dir: Christophe Honoré
cast: Romain Duris, Louis Garrel, Joanna Preiss, Guy Marchand, Marie-France Pisier, Alice Butaud, Helena Noguerra

IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS
***
USA/Iraq
The situation in freshly liberated Iraq presented in three artfully photographed impressionistic vignettes. The first two meander without having anything very new to say, though the closing section, centred around an ongoing identity crisis among Kurdish farmers, is both thought-provoking and subtly wrenching.
dir: James Longley
ph: James Longley

JESUS CAMP
***
USA
When they begin their documentary on children raised in Evangelical Christian environments (with political implications), Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are trying very hard to clutch onto an observational, non-judgmental perspective. It's only once the kids are packed off to Jesus Camp in North Dakota, instilled with a potent sense of shame, guilt and self-hate, and then subjected to further appalling practices that the sombre music descends and their anger seeps through the verité aesthetic. Compared to the rage of any viewer with a conscience though, theirs is kept relatively in check. Even if they don't necessarily tell you anything new about the world, they at least demonstrate good judgment in taking on a humanist rather than a sensationalist approach.
dir: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady

JINDABYNE
***
Australia
Gabriel Byrne plays one of four small towners who discover the body of a dead woman while on a holiday trip upriver and decide to keep fishing for a couple days before reporting the crime. If this sounds familiar, that's because Robert Altman adapted the same Raymond Carver story (along with many others) for "Short Cuts" (1993) but here it's given the full feature-length treatment by Australian filmmaker Ray Lawrence.
   The four men's utter lack of reason is difficult to swallow initially, but it proves to be only the catalyst for an extensive and compelling probing into the dynamics of a small community pressed under the repercussions of a tragic event. Since the murder victim is of Aboriginal descent, Lawrence further advances his concerns regarding Australia's legacy of racial prejudice before he settles for a nervous copout of a resolution.
   The performances - maybe the picture's primary strength - are uniformly solid and natural, with the two Hollywood imports in the lead acquitting themselves particularly well.
dir: Ray Lawrence
cast: Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Deborra Lee-Furness, John Howard, Leah Purcell, Stelios Yiakmis, Simon Stone, Sean Rees-Wemyss, Eva Lazzaro

KHADAK
**
Belgium/Germany
It's a fine line between elegy and ponderousness. Directors Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth mourn the suppression of Mongolian nomadism with photogenic, literal metaphors. Their picture ends on the image of a tree crying. A tree. Crying.
wr/dir: Peter Brosens, Jessica Hope Woodworth
cast: Tsetsegee Byamba, Dugarsuren Dagvadorj, Banzar Damchaa, Tserendarizav Dashnyam, Batzul Khayankhyarvaa

LADY CHATTERLEY
**½
France
Much of the force of Lawrence's novel stems from the hedging of passion and raw sexuality against the suffocating outward primness of English society. If you take the basic plot and regravitate it around a tittering Francophone Lady Chatterley who shows no signs of inhibition to begin with, that force is lost, as is much of the point. For an exploration into animal desire, the desire depicted feels oddly arbitrary.
dir: Pascale Ferran
cast: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, Hippolyte Girardot, Helen Alexadridis, Helene Fillieres

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
**½
USA
Part Two of Clint Eastwood's ambitious exploration of the battle of Iwo Jima, this time focusing on the Japanese perspective. It features Japanese actors speaking in the Japanese language, and the lesson is that Japanese war movie characters are as cardboard heroic as American movie characters and Japanese war movie mothers are as saintly, mute and long-suffering as American war movie mothers.
dir: Clint Eastwood
wr: Iris Yamashita, Paul Haggis
cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Shido Nakamura, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Yuki Matsuzaki, Hiroshi Watanabe, Takumi Bando

LIGHTS IN THE DUSK
***
Finland
The third chapter in Aki Kaurismäki's loose 'loser' trilogy is likable but lacks the freshness and wisdom of the first two. It's a scramble between all the funny, warm deadpan quirks of quintessential-Kaurismäki, as well as the chilly dearth of feeling of Kaurismäki-by-numbers.
wr/dir: Aki Kaurismäki
cast: Janne Hyytiäinen, Maria Järvenhelmi, Maria Heiskanen, Ilkka Koivula, Sergei Doudko, Andrei Gennadiev

LITTLE CHILDREN
**
USA
Kate Winslet has never been as limp and predictable as she is here, playing an adulterous suburban housewife, who mid-way through the film delivers a symbolic monologue on the woman-empowering attributes of Emma Bovary. She also gets to have several unconvincing sex scenes with Patrick Wilson, who spends the movie looking confused and uncomfortable at having to show off his recently toned, glistening torso. For two hours we watch these people repeatedly fuck up their and everybody else's lives in an effort to free themselves from a feeling of smothering brought on by circumstances increasingly beyond their control. Then in the final few minutes they each experience a random epiphany that magically restores them to a state of contentment - almost bliss - and entirely negates any hint of authenticity you thought you may have spotted in their characters.
dir: Todd Field
wr: Todd Field, Tom Perrotta
cast: Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Jackie Earle Haley

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
**½
USA
The Hoovers are the kind of family that only exists in overbaked indie movies. Every single member is so fabulously quirky and self-centred that you wonder how they could conceivably interrelate with one another for longer than five minutes once the cameras stop rolling.
   The youngest in the clan aspires to win a pre-teen beauty pageant and this is enough to cram the whole dysfunctional lot into a dysfunctional van on the road from Albuquerque to California, where the fascinatingly grotesque Little Miss Sunshine pageant is held.
   The main reason the picture ends up largely watchable is the cast (with the exception of Greg Kinnear, who is given an impossible non-character to work with), who, in a remarkable collective feat, manage to set their performances at a recognizably human pitch.
dir: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
cast: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin, Paul Dano, Marc Turtletaub, Jill Talley

THE LIVES OF OTHERS
***½
Germany
A solemn tale about the GDR Stasi forces wire-tapping the apartment of a potentially subversive playwright and his actress girlfriend in the mid-80s. On the level of a suspense thriller it delivers unquestionably, but first-time helmer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has greater ambitions. He wants you to come away from his movie pondering the political responsibilities of an artist as well as the creeping erosion of human rights in our current political climate. And inevitably you do end up pondering these matters, along with the unfortunate tendency of von Donnersmarck's characters to communicate in expository dialogue as well as his valiant conceit to pursue his plotline a good 20 minutes after it stops being relevant.
wr/dir: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
cast: Ulrich Mühe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Volkmar Kleinert, Matthias Brenner, Thomas Arnold, Ludwig Blochberger

LONGING
*½
Germany
Writer-director Valeska Grisebach evidently has a strong feel for the mundane, for actors with weathered, lived-in faces and authentically grimy, working-class settings. Unfortunately she equates a glacial pace with psychological precision. And she doesn't realise that the more time she gives the viewer to consider the story in between things of any discernible interest happening on screen, the more time the viewer has to see through her hollow, melodramatic plot machinations.
wr/dir: Valeska Grisebach
cast: Andreas Müller, Ilka Welz, Anett Dornbusch, Erika Lemke, Markus Werner, Doritha Richter, Detlef Baumann

LUXURY CAR
***
China/France
A rich-coloured neon-filled family-secrets melodrama revolving around a Chinese intellectual long exiled to the country, who ventures into the big city to visit his exceptionally pretty daughter (without realising that she's begun prostituting herself) and go in search of his missing son. It's a modest though accomplished piece of work, more valuable for affording a look into contemporary, increasingly Westernised China than for its characterisations.
wr/dir: Chao Wang
cast: He Huang, Yiqing Li, Yuan Tian, Youcai Wu

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**
USA
What's jarring about Sofia Coppola's misguided biopic isn't the casting of people like Molly Shannon and Jason Schwartzman as an 18th-century French aristocrat and king respectively (along with a potential Abercrombie & Fitch block of wood as a dashing Swedish soldier and love interest to the scandalous queen). It isn't the American cheerleader small-talk exchanged between the iconic Dauphine and her ladies in waiting; and it isn't the inclusion of such 80s pop culture staples as Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" on the soundtrack. What's genuinely jarring and disheartening is that a picture that combines all of these elements has ended up so lifeless and generic. At its best, Coppola's direction recalls a film school undergrad aping Terrence Malick. At its worst, it resembles a bloated perfume ad. And Lance Acord photography has never looked so kitschy or constrained.
wr/dir: Sofia Coppola
ph: Lance Acord
cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Steve Coogan, Danny Huston, Marianne Faithfull, Mary Nighy

MEN AT WORK
***
Iran
Writer-director Mani Haghighi adapted a story by Abbas Kiarostami for this small-scale comedy/allegory, where a bunch of middle-aged men stumble upon an odd boulder teetering on the edge of a cliff and spend hours trying to tip it over. Nicely observed, wonderfully well acted and perfectly forgettable.
wr/dir: Mani Haghighi
cast: Mahnaz Afshar, Ahmad Hamed, Mahmoud Kalari, Reza Kianian, Fatemah Motamed-Aria, Atila Pesiani, Omid Roohani

MONSTER HOUSE
***
USA
A scary-cuddly Dreamworks cartoon that bears the heavy imprint of executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. It's slight and sometimes awkward but the titular villain is a clever invention and the voice work - Maggie Gyllenhaal's in particular - is spot-on.
dir: Gil Kenan
voices: Steve Buscemi, Nick Cannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jon Heder, Kevin James, Jason Lee, Sam Lerner, Spencer Locke, Kathleen Turner

NIGHT OF THE SUNFLOWERS
***½
Spain
It's disturbing that the satisfying feeling that a clever, tightly plotted, thoroughly entertaining thriller gives is today rare enough to make it a revelation. In stark contrast to the worryingly fashionable multiple-storyline Latin-flavoured melodramas that deliver a number of half-developed storylines in lieu of a single honestly developed one, Spaniard Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo comes up with this intricate, cleverly structured thriller, wherein six tight, meaty subplots (with each bringing to the fore and solidifying a separate character) contribute towards a single, gripping, overarching one. It involves a pair of speleologists, superstition, rape and misguided vengeance as well as a Spanish rural setting used to great effect.
wr/dir: Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo
cast: Carmelo Gomez, Judith Diakhate, Celso Bugallo, Manuel Moron, Mariano Alameda, Vincente Romero, Walter Vidarte, Cesareo Estebanez

NOTES ON A SCANDAL
***
UK
A melodrama from a mindset where a married teacher who screws her 15-year-old student is a woman misunderstood, while an aging lonely lesbian is a monstrosity. The Philip Glass score is a dangerous one - it invites you to take the picture seriously. At the same time however, it complements and amplifies the hysteria to a pitch that forces you to sit back and spot the overwhelming silliness of the premise. It helps you understand that it's entirely possible to have fun with the movie if you let the lunacy wash over you and ensure that none of it sticks behind for afterthought.
   As the adulteress Cate Blanchett is predictable and flimsy, but as the crazed dyke Judi Dench is unleashed under no pressure to be lovable. The bizarreness of the role encourages her to let loose with it. She remains fiercely committed as ever, but she's also much more creative. She's magnificent.
dir: Richard Eyre
wr: Patrick Marber
cast: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson, Juno Temple, Emma Kennedy

OFFSIDE
***½
Iran
Jafar Panahi's comparatively light though typically biting comedy revovles around the arrest of a bunch of teenage girls attempting to sneak into a major football match in Tehran's Azadi Stadium. There is a subtle, subversive trace of optimism to it - an element previously absent from Panahi's work. It ends on a note of unlikely though ferocious celebration, hinting at a bubbling, left-field rebellion. There isn't a false note in the performances of the young women and non-professional Safdar Samandar as the bewildered soldier assigned to guard them.
dir: Jafar Panahi
wr: Jafar Panahi, Shadmehr Rastin
cast: Sima Mobarak-Shahi, Shayesteh Irani, Ayda Sadeqi, Golnaz Farmani, Mahnaz Zabihi, Nazanin Sediq-Zadeh, Melika Shafahi, Safdar Samandar

ONCE
***
Ireland
A low-key Irish arthouse musical: a bunch of slick, heart-on-the-sleeve, grand indie ballads with the emotional IQ of an undergrad (though perfectly attuned to contemporary revival-clothes-wearing standards of gritty urban hip) strung together with a vague romantic non-plot going on in the quiet bits, wherein a couple of angsty, scruffy, melancholy though perfectly amiable songwriters make music together on second-hand instruments, put together a low-budget record over a weekend and go out to throw Frisbees on the beach at dawn.
wr/dir: John Carney
cast: Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, Danuse Ktrestova

1:1
***½
Denmark
Danish writer-director Annette K. Olesen is one of the most urgent undiscovered talents in European cinema. In this examination of a casual ethnic conflict that arises in a Copenhagen housing project, she employs some unfortunate melodrama tactics and a tinkly score, but beyond that she paints a convincing milieu and tackles a prickly issue with terrific economy and insight. Her film gained a further unsettling resonance as it played the festival circuit roughly around the time of the violent Muslim reactions towards the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper.
dir: Annette K. Olesen
wr: Kim Fupz Aakeson
cast: Mohammed Al-Bakier, Joy Petersen, Hassim Al-Dogom, Khalid Alssubeihi, Trine Appel, Jonas Busekist, Rose Copty

OVER THE HEDGE
**½
USA
There have certainly been worse and more hollow examples of the presently very profitable snarky-celebrity-voiced-talking-animal cartoon, but the world will be an infinitely happier and more wondrous place when this craze finally ends.
dir: Tim Johnson, Karey Kirkpatrick
voices of: Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Steve Carell, Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, Nick Nolte, Thomas Haden Church, Alison Janney, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Avril Lavigne, Omid Djalili

PAN'S LABYRINTH
****
Mexico/Spain/USA
With her father dead and her pregnant mother married to a sadistic captain, young Ofelia is forced to grow up surrounded by the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. It is her singular fortune however to be the reincarnation of an immortal princess of a subterranean land and to be able to congregate with some beguiling creatures from Guillermo del Toro's warped-Gothic imagination. Through various deaths, killings, mutilations and armed conflicts, every hope for a decent childhood for Ofelia is obliterated. And it becomes increasingly wrenching to watch her slip into fantasy as a means of dealing with unimaginable pain.
wr/dir: Guillermo del Toro
ph: Guillermo Navarro
cast: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ariadna Gil, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo, Manolo Solo, César Vea, Roger Casamajor

PAPRIKA
***½
Japan
A sophisticated, very Western-audience-friendly anime on matters of man, machine and invading dream lives. The plot gets a bit busier and more ambitious than is strictly necessary, but the visuals are consistently astounding.
dir: Satoshi Kon
voices of: Megumi Hayashibara, Toru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Toru Furuya

PARIS, JE T'AIME
***
France/Germany/Switzerland/Liechtenstein
The short film format is a deceptively challenging one and it's a humbling experience to watch several of the world's best contemporary filmmakers tackle it and, quite often, fail. 
   The most irritating chapters in this omnibus of roughly-five-minute odes to the city of love are Christopher Doyle's film-school-undergrad effort at avant-gardism set in a Chinese quarter, Sylvain Chomet's cutesy-quirky romance between two mimes and (the absolute nadir!) Wes Craven's vulgar patchwork of crude exposition and awkward sarcasm exchanged between a British couple visiting Oscar Wilde's grave.
   Among the agreeable-if-facile contributions, you can count Gurinder Chadha's pro-hijab dialectic, Tom Tykwer's frenetic love story about Natalie Portman and a blind boy and Gus Van Sant's gimmicky account of a sleeveless Gaspard Ulliel chatting up a shy gallery assistant.
   Among the more effective snippets are the Coen Brothers' sardonic pitting of Steve Buscemi's nebbish against raging Parisian hormones, the Gena Rowlands-penned, Gérard Depardieu and Frédéric Auburtin-directed meeting between two septuagenarian divorcés and Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas' simple, startlingly clever evocation of an immigrant worker's experience.
   And finally, the collection's true gem comes at the end: Alexander Payne's witty, generous essay of a dowdy Denver-mailwoman's six-day holiday trip. 
dir: Olivier Assayas, Frédéric Auburtin, Emmanuel Benbihy, Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Isabel Coixet, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Gérard Depardieu, Christopher Doyle, Richard LaGravanese, Vincenzo Natali, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydès, Walter Salles, Oliver Schmitz, Nobuhiro Suwa, Daniela Thomas, Tom Tykwer, Gus Van Sant
cast: Bruno Podalydès, Florence Müller, Leila Bekhti, Cyril Descours, Marianne Faithfull, Gaspard Ulliel, Elias McConnell, Steve Buscemi, Julie Bataille, Axel Kiener, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Barbet Schroeder, Li Xin, Sergio Castelito, Miranda Richardson, Leonor Watling, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Hippolyte Girardot, Paul Putner, Yolande Moreau, Nick Nolte, Ludivine Sagnier, Bob Hoskins, Fanny Ardant, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lionel Dray, Aissa Maiga, Seydou Boro, Elijah Wood, Olga Kurylenko, Natalie Portman, Melchior Beslon, Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Margot Martindale

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
**½
USA
There is a poignancy to every great director's final picture, particularly one so preoccupied with death - though on the surface, this hit-and-mostly-miss ensemble comedy is purely a freewheeling record of the last performance of a fictional radio variety show. Most of the bits that work involve John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson's brazen improvs. But most of the bits don't work, and the worst of them involve Kevin Kline's grating private eye and Virginia Madsen's blank-faced angel of death.
dir: Robert Altman
cast: Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Maya Rudolph, Tommy Lee Jones, Marylouise Burke, Linda Williams, Tim Russell, Garrison Keillor

THE PRESTIGE
***
USA
A compelling enough look into the rivalry of two turn-of-the-century London magicians, though it's too solemn to be much fun and too taken with itself to be taken seriously.
dir: Christopher Nolan
cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Piper Perabo, Rebecca Hall, Samantha Mahurin, Andy Serkis, David Bowie

PRINCESS
****
Denmark
It's tempting to brand Anders Morgenthaler's first feature a 'dogme-meets-anime', but it's too bracing and startling to be reduced to a 'something-meets-something'. It has the flaws you'd expect of any movie about a priest out to avenge his dead porn star of a sister as well as the rape of her five-year-old daughter (and Morgenthaler does routinely veer into sensationalism and exploitation). But its minor (and, for that matter, major) imperfections are overwhelmed by an overarching, galvanising vision.
dir: Anders Morgenthaler
voices of: Thure Lindhardt, Mira Hilli Mølle Hallund, Stine Fischer Christensen, Liv Corfixen, Tommy Kenter, Margrethe Koytu

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES
***
France
The traces of zest and resonance in this dramedy about six desperately lonely, interconnected Parisians have less to do with the slight and slightly pretentious source play by Alan Ayckbourn than with Alain Resnais' playful, often inspired handling of it. The characters and their various connections and disconnections feel very much 'written', but at least for as long as the movie lasts, the actors convey enough warmth and charm to distract you from this.
dir: Alain Resnais
ph: Eric Gautier
m: Michael Snow
cast: Sabine Azéma, Isabelle Carré, Laura Morante, Pierre Arditi, André Dussollier, Lambert Wilson, Claude Rich

THE QUEEN
***
UK/France/Italy
A disappointingly literal imagining of the conversations between Elizabeth II and the then-recently elected Tony Blair in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death. The intention is to strip the royal family off their regalia and zoom in on their underlying average-ness - they gather around the TV at night and wear frumpy pyjamas together. Unfortunately, in the world of scriptwriter Peter Morgan, average people like Blair, his missus and Her Majesty communicate in lazy exposition.
   "Why are you so nervous, darling? You've met her before, haven't you?" "Well, yes, but she is, you know - The Queen." Cue double take.
   There is no subtext to the dialogue - which may very well be a blessing since Morgan's idea of subtext in terms of narrative is having Princess Diana symbolically reincarnate into a deer who gets decapitated.
   The actors however, know how to mix dignity with absurdity. And Helen Mirren communicates the Queen's devastation at discovering her disconnect from her people through subtle gestures and inflections where Morgan's writing fails to.
dir: Stephen Frears
wr: Peter Morgan
cast: Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Sylvia Syms, Alex Jennings, Helen McCrory, Roger Allam, Paul Barrett

QUINCEAÑERA
**
USA
"My Big Fat Mexican Quinceañera" would have made for a more appropriate title. The family depicted in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's clunky coming-of-age tale is as rambunctious and funny-talking as Nia Vardalos', albeit with a darker edge. The central figures are an ostracised pregnant teen and her gay brother, adequately well-played by a pair of young unknowns. They are supported by an ensemble of people, valiantly - and often unsuccessfully - resisting the urge not to smile at the camera.
   You'll be surprised to find that Todd Haynes was the executive producer, and the movie was deemed worthy of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize.
wr/dir: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
cast: Emily Rios, Jesse Garcia, Chalo Gonzalez, J.R. Cruz, Araceli Guzmán-Rico, Jesus Castaños-Chima, David W. Ross

REPRISE
***½
Norway
Norwegian hipsters in their early 20s - even when they're manic-depressive writers who wear The Smiths T-shirts - are far less pretentious and arrogant than their American (and, for that matter, Australian) counterparts. Much more likable too, and infinitely more natural actors. I'll always be dreading the notion of first-time filmmakers exploring the lives of twentysomething writers/painters/photographers/performance artists. But this was a lovely surprise.
dir: Joachim Trier
wr: Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt
cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman-Høiner, Viktoria Winge, Henrik Elvestad, Christian Rubeck, Odd Magnus Williamson, Rebekka Karijord, Henrik Mestad, Pål Stokka, Sigmund Sæverud

THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO
***½
UK
Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom's unwieldy, distressing, enraging docudrama covers the stories of three British Guantanamo detainees who were held for two years without an official charge. Based on Whitecross' interviews with the three men, Winterbottom recreates their accounts of their experiences, which imply disgusting abuse of human rights on the part of the US government.
   The film has major shortcomings. The reconstructions are creaky - the American soldiers, for one, all move and sound like bad actors (which, while arguably true to life, doesn't come off as intentional in this context); and it's difficult to keep track of who's whose alter ego. More worryingly, despite gaping plot holes, the 'Tipton Three's testimonies are not once challenged (a misstep that is that much more glaring since in 2007 one of them admitted to his involvement with an Islamist training camp).
   But Whitecross and Winterbottom's implicit - and, yes, misjudged - assertion of the men's innocence pales in force and urgency beside their revolt at the unchecked monstrousness of Guantanamo as an institution. If these men's account of the treatment of detainees is at least partially factual - and no viable evidence has so far come up to undermine it - it is vital and horrific proof of humanity's regression in recent years. Ultimately, whatever its misgivings, a film that instigates debate and involvement in an elemental and ongoing injustice as well as documents and probes potentially one of mankind's gravest mistakes of the 21st century ought to be treasured and scrutinised.
dir: Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom
cast: Riz Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Arfan Usman, Waqar Siddiqui 

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
**½
USA
Augusten Burroughs' memories of his hyper-dysfunctional adolescence are barely believable as it is - it's what makes them compulsive - but in his movie adaptation writer-director Ryan Murphy chooses to further amplify and gaudify them. The more seasoned among his performers lend honesty to scenes they are allowed to play in minor key, while Murphy himself seeks out moments of schlocky transcendence - and in all the wrong places at that.
wr/dir: Ryan Murphy
cast: Joseph Cross, Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Evan Rachel Wood, Jill Clayburgh, Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Alec Baldwin, Gabrielle Union, Patrick Wilson 

SCARY MOVIE 4
**
USA
One of the taglines announced this as "the fourth and final chapter of the trilogy" but fans must not despair just yet - the taglines have lied before.
   This time around the prime targets for ridicule are "War of the Worlds", "Saw", "The Grudge", "The Village", George Bush and "Oprah". You wouldn't expect either of these to prove difficult and, it seems, neither did David Zucker and his team. A lot of the time they're content to bring up scenes from the above without attempting to work up much of a joke. There's more pop culture recycling going on than active parody. But there are some hits along with the misses, chief among them a subtitled conversation between Anna Faris and a Japanese ghost child.
dir: David Zucker
cast: Anna Faris, Craig Bierko, Regina Hall, Leslie Nielsen, Simon Rex, Chingy, Carmen Electra, Bill Pullman, Chris Elliott, Molly Shannon, Michael Madsen, Charlie Sheen

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
***
France/Italy
Gael García Bernal has trouble distinguishing his dream-life from his day-to-day. Michel Gondry (directing his first feature script) is half-fascinated by this condition, but mostly he just wants to make a feature-length video clip with trippy effects. It's Bernal - in a refreshingly unaffected performance - who brings in some humanity.
wr/dir: Michel Gondry
cast: Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou, Pierre Vaneck, Emma de Caunes, Aurélia Petit, Sacha Bourdo, Stéphane Metzger

SHERRYBABY
***½
USA
A generic recovering-junkie indie, elevated into something considerably more absorbing by Maggie Gyllenhaal's blistering performance. In a role that most actresses would approach as misty-eyed Oscarbait, she is fierce, she is comfortably vulgar and she refuses to submit to the junkie-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotype. She lends the picture some grit, resonance and conviction that very likely didn't exist in the original draft.
wr/dir: Laurie Collyer
cast: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Brad William Henke, Sam Bottoms, Danny Trejo, Kate Burton, Giancarlo Esposito, Ryan Simpkins, Rio Hackford

SHORTBUS
***
USA
John Cameron Mitchell uses explicit sex to reveal character – e.g. in the opening sequence an angsty, narcissistic gay guy films himself swallowing his own semen – and propose that screwing on screen can be as free and fun and uninhibited as screwing in real life. His movie is yet another superficial, self-consciously hip dramedy about how cool and quirkily glamourous twenty- and thirty-something New Yorkers have become since the decline of Woody Allen. What sets it apart from sitcom mediocrity is its cheeky, clever depictions of sex and sexuality. What tends to bring it down – particularly in the closing stretch – is the way Mitchell strains to promote his characters’ angst and narcissism as something much more profound.
dir: John Cameron Mitchell
wr: John Cameron Mitchell (in collaboration with his cast)
cast: Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Lindsay Beamish, PJ DeBoy, Raphael Barker, Peter Stickles, Jay Brannan

THE SINGER
**½
France
A thoroughly inoffensive, arthouse-grandma-friendly concoction about a middle-aged performer in rural dance-halls and a much-younger single Mum who has a one-night-stand with him and gradually grows to regret it less and less. The intelligent, professional performers turn in intelligent, professional performances and writer-director Xavier Giannoli's overarching mission is to send you home content and mildly chipper at having witnessed another thoroughly neat, thoroughly redundant May-December romance.
wr/dir: Xavier Giannoli
cast: Gérard Depardieu, Cécile De France, Mathieu Amalric, Christine Citti, Patrick Pineau, Alaine Chanone, Christophe

SLUMMING
***½
Austria/Switzerland/Germany
A rare foray into fiction for well-regarded documentarian Michael Glawogger, it concerns the crossed fates of, among others, an alcoholic bum and a couple of bored rich kids with a taste for degrading every person they meet. Glawogger shows great skill in drawing up and piercing complex, unconventional psychologies as well as an infectious sense of adventure. He directs his film with a youthful energy, while at the same time displaying a refreshing awareness of a greater world existing beyond the twenty-something slacker milieu that transfixes the vast majority of young filmmakers.
dir: Michael Glawogger
wr: Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger
cast: August Diehl, Paulus Manker, Michael Ostrowski, Pia Hierzegger, Maria Bill, Martina Zinner, Brogitte Kren, Loretta Pflaum, Martina Poel, Andreas Kiendl, Dragana Mirkovic

A SOAP
**½
Denmark
A quirky-melancholic melo-dramedy that challenges you to believe in the courtship between a pre-op transsexual and a beautician coming off a dull hetero relationship. That it works to the moderate extent that it does has a lot to do with the grounded, committed performances from the leads.
   A cutesy, barritone voiceover interrupts the picture every twenty minutes or so for a soap-opera style recap of the dramatic progressions - hence the title. That and the transsexual is a fan of soapies.
dir: Pernille Fischer Christensen
cast: Trine Dyrholm, David Dencik, Frank Thiel, Elsebeth Steentoft

STEPHANIE DALEY
***
USA
As a writer particularly, Hilary Brougher is thoroughly overwhelmed by the concept of a 16-year-old hiding her pregnancy and killing her newborn on a ski-trip, though her very accomplished actresses make things easier to swallow.
wr/dir: Hilary Brougher
cast: Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, Timothy Hutton, Denis O'Hare, Jim Gaffigan, Deirdre O'Connell, Halley Feiffer

STILL LIFE
***½
China/Hong Kong
Jia Zhang-ke's Golden Lion winner is underdeveloped in the script and characterisation departments, but its visuals are startling. The evocative gorgeousness of every frame of every composition catches you offguard because it's so low-key and unshowy.
dir: Jia Zhang-ke
ph: Lik Wai Yu
cast: Zhao Tao, Han Sanming

SUBURBAN MAYHEM
***
Australia
A flashy, sassy and very black Aussie comedy about a teenage mother who wears cheap mini-skirts, says 'cunt' a lot, dispenses blowjobs to the neighbourhood and is essentially an amalgam of the most despicable characteristics of every coke-sniffing femme fatale in the post-Tarantino punk-music-fueled anti-PC indie scene. The movie is more engaging than it has any right to be, but even at 95 minutes it's overlong and bloated by a clumsy mockumentary angle.
dir: Paul Goldman
wr: Alice Bell
cast: Emily Barclay, Michael Dorman, Robert Morgan, Anthony Hayes, Laurence Breuls, Steve Bastoni, Mia Wasikowska, Geneviève Lemon

SUMMER 04
***½
Germany
There is something strongly reminiscent of Eric Rohmer to the early sections of this account of an unorthodox family holiday by German filmmaker Stefan Krohmer: the beachside setting, the precocious teens, the partner-swapping, the hyper-civilised discussion of matters of sex and capitalism. However, it's driven by a subtle, finely tuned sense of menace that could never exist in any of Rohmer's Moral Tales - what with a 40-year-old wife and mother having to compete with her son's 12-year-old girlfriend for the romantic attention of a handsome stranger. Things take a particularly grave turn around the one-hour mark and the picture more or less comes undone, but most of it is an absorbing, slow-burning thriller handled with impressive confidence.
dir: Stefan Krohmer
wr: Daniel Nocke
cast: Martina Gedeck, Robert Seeliger, Svea Lohde, Peter Davor, Lucas Kotarinin

SUPERMAN RETURNS
**½
USA
Bryan Singer's attempt to do for the Superman franchise what Christopher Nolan did for the Batman one. It isn't as joyless as Nolan's picture - Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey camp it up with terrific zeal as Lex Luthor and his sidekick - but neither is it as compelling.
   Brandon Routh brings a non-presence to the title role that works for Clark Kent (since it's unusually easy to believe that nobody would pick him for a superhero) but sucks the air out of the icon. Kate Bosworth, whose hair has gone brown from earnestness, brings a cheerleader's conviction to Lois Lane. She's meant to be a Pulitzer-prize-winner in this one.
dir: Bryan Singer
cast: Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Frank Langella, Sam Huntington, Eva Marie Saint

SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
**½
Thailand/France/Austria
Ostensibly another bifurcated, semi-opaque tone poem from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with a nervous courtship half-taking place in a serene country clinic in the 70s, then not taking place at all when the same characters and dialogue pop up in a contemporary, antiseptic one. One of Weerasethakul's (multiple, variously elliptical) ambitions here is to explore the impact of environment (shifting as ours is increasingly towards the sterile and non-personal) on human interaction and personal histories - and it's a worthy, intriguing one. He manages it most successfully in the contrast he establishes in the bond that sparks up between a dentist and a monk in the first variation (surely the warmest, most subtly sensual scene ever set in a dental ward) and doesn't in the second.
   But in contrast to the lush, sultry visuals in Tropical Malady, the tranquil-generic imagery in this case does nothing for the atmosphere. And while the earlier scenes are pleasant enough, the half that takes place in modern day is as stifling and soul-depleting as the medical set-up it depicts. This was very likely Weerasethakul's intention, but it's up to the viewer to infer whether the insight they gauge from it (which, in my case, wasn't an awful lot) justifies over a half-hour's worth of airless tedium.
wr/dir: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
cast: Arkanae Cherkam, Jaruchai Iamaram, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Nu Nimsomboon, Jenjira Pongpas, Sophon Pukanok, Nantarat Sawaddikul

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY
**
USA
Will Ferrell plays a fiercely asinine NASCAR-driver, with Sacha Baron Cohen as his rival. Both Ferrell and the comedy are less self-involved than is standard for a frat-pack joint. But the plot is too insistent to be ignored and too half-assed to be worth following.
dir: Adam McKay
cast: Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen, John C. Reilly, Amy Adams, Gary Cole, Leslie Bibb, Jane Lynch, Michael Clarke Duncan, Andy Richter, Greg Germann, Molly Shannon

TAXIDERMIA
**½
Hungary/Austria/France
György Pálfi's triptych, following three generations of grotesque men, is an indescribably nasty piece of work, entirely and gleefully caught up in filthy viscous substances, mangled body parts, mutant appendages and vomit - both that spewed up on screen as well as that Pálfi wants to induce out of you.
dir: György Pálfi
cast: Csaba Czene, Gergely Trócsányi, Piroska Molnár, Adél Stanczel, Marc Bischoff, Gábor Máté, Zoltán Koppány

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED
***½
USA
Director Kirby Dick's documentation of his valiant efforts to uncover the hidden identities of the members of the American ratings board. It's a neat exposé - as entertaining as it is thought-provoking - of the frightening level of power wielded over a mass medium by one tiny, tiny, obscure bunch of decidedly unqualified-looking people. Inevitably, it was slammed with an NC-17 badge of it own purely for featuring scenes from other NC-17-rated films.
dir: Kirby Dick

TEN CANOES
**
Australia
The first Australian feature to focus on Aborigines as not necessarily a problem issue, it unfolds in two timeframes: the first based on a tribesmen's goose-hunting expedition in the 1930s; and the second, a cautionary tale of sorts set a thousand years ago.
   All of the dialogue is spoken in Aboriginal languages, while respected indigenous actor David Gulpilil narrates in English vernacular. His voice-over starts off as agreeably jovial, but soon becomes intrusive. He refuses to keep quiet for a whole minute at a time, frequently offering an anthropological breakdown of otherwise perfectly coherent imagery. The effect is suffocating. A bit like having to walk through a museum stuck with a pair of those increasingly fashionable tourist-friendly headphones, which explain the history and use of each exhibit, and which you never requested in the first place.
   Furthermore, the framing device involving the goose-hunters serves purely to spread the picture thinner. It further highlights the story's essential aimlessness and lack of directorial focus.
dir: Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr
cast: Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin, Johnny Buniyira, Peter Djigirr, Frances Djulibing, David Gulpilil

TIME
***½
South Korea
Kim Ki-duk abandons his newfound state of zen for this metaphysical horror wherein a hysterical girlfriend becomes adamant that plastic surgery will save her relationship. There are complications, of course, only involving a lot more conversation than you'd expect and a lot less gore.
   As in much of Kim's work, plausibility is a non-issue - and when the girlfriend goes under the knife (and morphs into a different, though no less arresting, actress), it isn't entirely clear whether or not you're supposed to accept that the man who had been sleeping with her for two years is unable to recognise her even once he starts sleeping with her again. But even at its most disorienting, the film is never less than intriguing. The impact that the self-mutilation has on the lovers' shifting neuroses goes well beyond the basic identity crisis, and brings up issues regarding both contemporary romancing as well as some basic, rarely acknowledged hangups that have been haunting relationships a fair bit longer than cosmetic surgery has. Hangups to do with obsessiveness, possessiveness, dueling egos/pathologies, the [insert-number]-year-itch etc. etc.
   Also, perhaps for the first time in his career, Kim is working towards social commentary, since roughly half of Korea's population of women in their twenties is estimated to have turned to a plastic surgeon.
wr/dir: Kim Ki-duk
cast: Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-Yeon, Seo Yeong-hwa, Kim Ji-heon, Kim Sung-min

TIMES AND WINDS
*½
Turkey
Writer-director Reha Erdem is working with subject matter very rich in potential - the generations-worth of strained father-son relationships that tend to haunt patriarchal cultures - and he's all too aware of it. Every composition is swelling, positively dripping with high, ponderous sentiment, and in order that you don't miss out on any of it, he has organised for a portentous, perennially grieving orchestra to cue your heartstrings. The photography - capturing what ought to be the cleanest village in all Turkey - is immaculate, relentlessly beautiful; and every shot, every cut, every action and line of dialogue has had the last drop of oxygen studied out of it.
   It all amounts to the perfect afternoon for your arthouse-loving grandma: solemn fathers, cute children, an exotic but thoroughly hygenic setting and antiseptic postcard imagery.
wr/dir: Reha Erdem
cast: Taner Birsel, Nihan Asli Elmas, Köksal Engür, Sevinç Erbulak, Selma Ergeç, Elit Iscan, Ali Bey Kayali

TUYA'S MARRIAGE
****
China
Wang Quanan's delicate, textured ode to resilient womanhood weathering male idiocy in rural Mongolia is a thing of rare beauty. It inspires awe before both the majestic Mongolian landscape and Tuya's thankless but ferocious battles to hold together a crumbling household as determined by a no less crumbling way of life.
   Having just barely skimmed the (no doubt worthy) competition titles at this year's Berlin Film Festival, I already feel comfortable in asserting the Golden Lion went to the best film.
dir/ed: Wang Quanan
wr: Wang Quanan, Lu Wei
ph: Lutz Reitemeier
cast: Nan Yu, Bater, Sen'ge, Zhaya

UNITED 93
***½
USA
Paul Greengrass, his cast and crew have researched the events surrounding flight UA93 so thoroughly and attempted to reconstruct them so meticulously and naturalistically that to criticise their film would have to be perceived as not only unpatriotic but downright inhumane. Their film however, isn’t flawless. Any claim to an accurate reconstruction of – and absolute fidelity – to a factual event is inherently problematic. Furthermore, Greengrass gets carried away with the factual reconstructing in the earthbound stretches, when all of the interest lies at the scene of the imminent hijacking (when the box-cutters finally emerge, it’s almost a relief – you can stop dreading the inevitable).
   That said, special care is taken not to exploit the tragic aura of 9/11 – as well as not to have the likes of Tom Cruise or Nicolas Cage don a fireman uniform in honour of the human spirit’s endurance – and the hefty emotional impact that materialises in the closing stretch feels honestly earned.
dir: Paul Greengrass
cast: Johnson Tsao, Meghan Heffern, Khalid Abdalla, Omar Berdouni, Christian Clemenson, Gary Commock, Polly Adams, Opal Alladin

V FOR VENDETTA
***
USA
Left-wing propaganda played as a futuristic thriller. The story is about the daughter of two slain activists in a London which has become suspiciously similar to what George Orwell described as Oceania in "1984". She gets involved with a masked revolutionary, who regularly emerges from his overdecorated underground abode to commit acts deemed terrorist by the totalitarian government.
   The political concepts are radical and very directly pointed at contemporary regimes. The tactics are crude and dirty - one of the villains is a pedophile, another has a Hitler haircut, news coverage is presented as blatantly falsified and the hero gets to deliver an assortment of didactic expository monologues that go unchecked. But you don't have to agree with the makers' attitudes to find their statements thought-provoking. Plus, the story moves fast enough to at least be entertaining on a base level.
   Six years after "The Matrix", The Wachowski brothers are yet to develop an ear for speakable dialogue. But the actors in this case are better-equipped than most when it comes to tackling it. Sheltered from George Lucas' stunting touch, Natalie Portman is warm, emotive and fully warrants your empathy as the heroine.
dir: James McTeigue
wr: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
cast: Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt, Rupert Graves, Sinead Cusack, Stephen Fry

VENUS
***½
UK
As he prepares himself for death, a wistful, septuagenarian Peter O'Toole - charming and seductive as ever - plays an actor who finds everything he will miss about life personified in his dear friend's grandniece, played with great confidence by newcomer Jodie Whittaker. The picture, taking off from a terrific script by novelist Hanif Kureishi, is as brash and bawdy as it is tender and melancholy. Though at all times firmly grounded in its protagonist's pasty day-to-day reality, it's suffused in reverie.
dir: Roger Michell
wr: Hanif Kureishi
cast: Peter O'Toole, Jodie Whittaker, Leslie Phillips, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Griffiths

VOLVER
*****
Spain
Penélope Cruz does a mean earth mother for Pedro Almodóvar, who is revisiting familiar themes but with new zest and panache. This time there are no trannies or horny housewives, but there is an ensemble’s worth of savvy, sassy women with a tigress' maternal instincts. They slobber all over each other, they strut and jiggle, and squabble and make up at such a breathless rate that the picture is over by the time its emotional impact – which is considerable – sinks in.
wr/dir: Pedro Almodóvar
cast: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, Chus Lampreave, Antonio de la Torre, Carlos Blanco, María Isabel Díaz, Neus Sanz

THE WAR TAPES
****
USA
Deborah Scranton's urgent, thought-provoking documentary, where with great care and deliberation she assembles footage shot by several members of the National Guard, while on service in Iraq. It benefits enormously from not being yet another variation on the self-serving, aggressively leftist, preaching-to-the-converted Iraq doc (which has now become a genre in itself).
dir: Deborah Scranton

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY
***
UK
An ostensibly no-frills look into the formative days of the IRA, it centres on a Shakesperean-level tragedy involving two brothers with increasingly conflicting convictions, and is marred by the depiction of British soldiers as exclusively barking sadists. It beat a couple of much richer pictures (along with a couple of paltry ones) to win the Palme d'or.
dir: Ken Loach
cast: Cillian Murphy, Padraic Delaney, Liam Cunningham, Orla Fitzgerald, Mary O'Riordan, Mary Murphy, Laurence Barry, Damien Kearney, Frank Bourke

WOMAN ON THE BEACH
***
South Korea
A typically talky, observant, gentle poke at contemporary romantic neuroses by Hong Sang-soo, with ripe, well-rounded performances (from the women, in particular). But as its running time bloats, its insights begin to feel increasingly superficial.
wr/dir: Hong Sang-soo
cast: Kim Seung-woo, Go Hyun-jung, Song Seon-min, Kim Tae-woo

YET TO SEE:

BUBBLE;
BUG;
CLIMATES;
COLOSSAL YOUTH;
DREAMGIRLS;
EXILED;
FALL, THE;
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS;
FRÄULEIN, DAS:
GOLDEN DOOR, THE;
GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS, A;
LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, THE;
MANDERLAY;
MIAMI VICE;
OLD JOY;
OUR DAILY BREAD;
PERFUME;
POISON FRIENDS;
SCANNER DARKLY, A;
SON OF RAMBOW;
SOUTHLAND TALES;
TELL NO ONE;
THIS IS ENGLAND;
TRIAD ELECTION;
12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST



TOP 10 TO SEE:
12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST*
OLD JOY*
A SCANNER DARKLY*
CLIMATES*
THIS IS ENGLAND*
EXILED*
THE FALL
THE GOLDEN DOOR
BUBBLE

Film:
Volver
Black Book
Borat
Tuya's Marriage
The Host

Director:
Pedro Almodovar (Volver)
Paul Verhoeven (Black Book)
Martin Scorsese (The Departed)
Wang Quanan (Tuya's Marriage)
Bong Joon-ho (The Host)

Performance:
Carice Van Houten (Black Book)
Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal)
Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat)
Penelope Cruz (Volver)
Laura Dern (Inland Empire)

Supp. Performance:
Blanca Portillo (Volver)
Carmen Maura (Volver)
Lola Dueñas (Volver)
Safdar Samandar (Offside)
Vera Farmiga (The Departed)

Script:
Volver
Black Book
Borat
Frozen City
Summer 04

Cinematography:
Children of Men
Still Life
The Departed
Volver
Iraq in Fragments