BABY MAMA
***
USA
Gratifying though it is to see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler headline a buddy
comedy, you do spend half the running time wishing it had been something
with a sharper, preferably satirical edge.
wr/dir: Michael McCullers
cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany
Malco, Sigourney Weaver, Steve Martin, Maura Tierney
BALLAST
***
USA
wr/dir: Lance Hammer
cast: Micheal J. Smith Sr., JimMyron Ross, Tarra Riggs, Johnny
McPhail
BE LIKE OTHERS
***½
Canada/Iran/UK/USA
dir: Tanaz Eshaghian
BOOGIE
***½
Romania
Due to the unfussy low-key-ness and principal cast of unlikable slackers
at quarter-life-crisis, it's too easy to miss out on the caustic insight
and preciseness with which Radu Muntean and his script team capture the
mindset of crushing disappointment at having inherited the paralysis that
is responsibility towards others, which seems to be defining a generation
throughout contemporary Eastern Europe, and probably further.
dir: Radu Muntean
wr: Alexandru Baciu, Radu Muntean, Razvan Radulescu
cast: Dragos Bucur, Anamaria Marinca, Mimi Branescu,
Adrian Vancica, Vlad Muntean, Geanina Varga, Roxana Iancu
BURN AFTER READING
****
USA
A bunch of tenacious lunatics with low emotional IQ's and single-minded
pursuits run around Washington D.C. with an inflated sense of their own
importance in the way the world runs. This leads to many hilarious and
convoluted mishaps and a sneaky grand statement about the moral
relativism, paranoia and blinding self-interest that have defined the
decade.
wr/dir: Joel and Ethan Coen
ph: Emmanuel Lubezki
m: Carter Burwell
cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Brad
Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons
CHANGELING
***
USA
If the world were a Clint Eastwood picture, it would run very very
smoothly, since any prospective threat to the system would announce itself
efficiently, whether by slurring their words, smirking lasciviously,
breaking into a loony grin, resembling a lesbian or adopting an irregular,
indecipherable yet malevolent accent while sending a bereft mother to the
nuthouse for undermining their power.
Despite Eastwood's harried tactics, it's impossible not to
get drawn into this tale of true and sensational events surrounding the
disappearance of 9-year-old Walter Collins from his mother's home in
late-20s California. The two face expressions - half-stifled anger and
wrenching cries - which Angelina Jolie selects to represent Christine
Collins do win over your sympathy, inextricably linked as they are to the
fact that there once truly was a Christine Collins, whose child really was
abducted, who - with frightening conviction - was saddled with a dodgy
replacement, and who - for habitual reasons of convenience and patriarchy
- was committed to a psychiatric ward when crying foul.
dir: Clint Eastwood
cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Michael
Kelly, Colm Feore, Jason Butler Harner, Amy Ryan, Geoff Pierson, Denis
O'Hare, Gattlin Griffith
A CHRISTMAS
TALE
*****
France
Raw, unwieldy, rambunctious gorgeousness. Other than Almodovar, no one in
the world makes movies as rich and alive as Arnaud Desplechin's. He sends
you off on several bubbly tangents at any one time and inundates you with
a generosity of spirit and novelistic detail, so that you're caught
completely off-guard every time either of these tangents evolves into a
complex revelation (and they all do). For two and a half hours (not nearly
long enough, I say!) he gives you life at a higher register. You can only
leave the cinema in a gratified stupor. You won't want to shake it off.
dir: Arnaud Desplechin
wr: Emmanuel Bourdieu
ph: Eric Gautier
ed: Laurence Biraud
m: Grégoire Hetzel
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, Mathieu
Amalric, Anne Consigny, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmannuelle Devos, Melvil
Poupaud, Laurent Capelluto, Emile Berling, Hippolyte Girardot,
Françoise Bertin, Samir Guesmi
THE CLASS
*****
France
dir: Laurent Cantet
wr: François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo, Laurent Cantet
cast: François Bégaudeau, Franck Keïta, Esméralda
Ouertani, Rachel Régulier, Wei Huang, Nassim Amrabt, Laura Baquela,
Cherif Bounaïdja Rachedi, Juliette Demaille, Dalla Doucoure, Arthur Fogel,
Damien Gomes, Louise Grinberg, Qifei Huang, Henriette Kasaruhanda, Lucie
Landrevie, Agame Malembo-Emene, Rabah Naït Oufella, Carl Nanor, Burak
Özyilmaz, Eva Paradiso, Angélica Sancio, Samantha Soupirot, Boubacar
Touré, Justine Wu, Fatoumata Kanté
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
***
USA
dir: David Fincher
cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond,
Jason Flemyng, Tilda Swinton, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Jared Harris, Elias
Koteas, Elle Fanning
THE DARK KNIGHT
***½
USA
dir: Christopher Nolan
cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie
Gullenhaal, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman
DOUBT
***½
USA
wr/dir: John Patrick Shanley
cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis
ELEGY
***
USA
Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Dennis
Hopper portray several basic facets of Philip Roth's neurosis. Isabel
Coixet oppresses you with good taste in the sincere hope that you'll
overlook the white middle-aged male over-privileged egomaniac's festival
of self-pity which she is facilitating. It isn't subtle, or incisive, or
in any sense productive, but while it's on, it's sufficiently engaging.
This is in part due to the shock of experiencing marketable faces in
unapologetically adult-oriented fare, as well as partly to the sensitivity
and questions with which said faces imbue the rather harried material.
dir: Isabel Coixet
cast: Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson,
Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard, Deborah Harry
FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL
***
USA
dir: Nicholas Stoller
cast: Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand, Bill
Hader, Liz Cackowski, Maria Thayer, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd
FROST/NIXON
**
USA
dir: Ron Howard
cast: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon,
Rebecca Hall, Matthew Macfadyen, Oliver Platt, Toby Jones
FROZEN RIVER
***
USA
Melissa Leo is so down on her luck that she has to forego hair product,
transport illegal aliens across a frozen river connecting the state of New
York to Canada and participate in increasingly implausible plot
contrivances in order to make sure her movie takes you exactly where you
very quickly figure out it is going. In case you aren't entirely sure
where that is, writer-director Courtney Hunt's unremittingly dour
aesthetic will give you some extra heads-up. That said, Hunt does keep
things relatively tight, the principals are all very very good and her
protagonists are afforded more dignity than they generally get away with
in festival-prize-shovelling liberal-guilt-driven indie
crossover-hopefuls.
wr/dir: Courtney Hunt
cast: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone
Junior, Michael O'Keefe, Jay Klaitz, Bernie Littlewolf
GOMORRAH
***
Italy
dir: Matteo Garrone
cast: Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco,
Vincenzo Fabricino, Vincenzo Altamura, Italo Renda
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
****½
UK
For a purportedly sunny trifle about a terminally chirpy primary school
teacher, this pastel-coloured Mike Leigh joint cranks up some remarkable
tension. Even if the film leaves an aftertaste of something airy,
sweet and authentically lovely, it's unsettling in a primal way to watch
the morbidly optimistic Sally Hawkins float from mild irritations to eerie
threats to impending fiascos. Considering her optimism is only as much a
sign of innocence as it is of desperation, to see it quashed would be
devastating to the core. With charm and subtle mastery, Hawkins walks the
fine line between irresistible and exasperating. She gets great support
from an ensemble of brilliant, beautifully orchestrated character players.
The film has an aura of honesty and lives lived without much outward fuss.
Even after the credits, it's difficult to snap out of it.
wr/dir: Mike Leigh
cast: Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Eddie Marsan, Andrea
Rieseborough, Samuel Roukin, Sinead Matthews, Kate O'Flynn, Sarah Niles,
Joseph Kloska, Karina Fernandez
HORTON HEARS A
WHO!
***½
USA
One of the happier Dr. Seuss adaptations as well as one of the warmer
contemporary cartoons about talking animals with spurts of 'attitood'.
Even the aggressively postmodern snippets like the erratic anime parody,
although jarring, are never quite grating since they're never
mean-spirited. The voice-work by an unusually well-behaved Jim Carrey and
the always lovable Steve Carell helps enormously. That said, here's hoping
the overbearing-dad-alienated-teen dynamic never becomes a cartoon subplot
again.
dir: Steve Martino, Jimmy Hayward
voices: Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Seth Rogen, Will
Arnett, Isla Fisher, Dan Fogler, Amy Poehler
HUNGER
***½
UK
dir: Steve McQueen
ph: Sean Bobbitt
cast: Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Helena Bereen,
Larry Cowan, Liam Cunningham, Dennis McCambridge, Liam McMahon, Laine
Megaw
I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG
***
France
dir: Philippe Claudel
cast: Kristin Scott-Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge
Hazanavicius, Laurent Grévill, Lise Ségur, Frédéric Pierrot,
Jean-Claude Arnaud, Mouss Zouheyri, Souad Mouchrik
IN BRUGES
***½
UK/USA
wr/dir: Martin McDonagh
cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes,
Clémence Poésy, Jérémie Renier, Thekla Reuten, Jordan Prentice, Zeljko
Ivanek
IRON MAN
***
USA
dir: Jon Favreau
cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges,
Terrence Howard, Leslie Bibb, Shaun Toub, Faran Tahir, Paul Bettany, Jon
Favreau
KUNG FU PANDA
***½
USA
dir: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson
voices: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane,
Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, Michael
Clarke Duncan, Wayne Knight
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
***½
Sweden
dir: Tomas Alfredson
ph: Hoyte Van Hoytema
cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik
Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg, Ika Nord, Mikael Rahm, Karl-Robert
Lindgren
LION'S DEN
***
Argentina/South Korea/Brazil
dir: Pablo Trapero
cast: Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros, Rodrigo Santoro, Laura Garcia,
Tomás Plotinsky, Leonardo Sauma
LORNA'S SILENCE
***
Belgium/France/Italy/France
wr/dir: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
cast: Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione,
Alban Ukaj, Morgan Marinne, Olivier Gourmet
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MAMMA MIA!
*½
UK/USA/Germany
dir: Phyllida Lloyd
cast: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski, Colin
Firth, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgård, Amanda Seyfried, Dominic West
MAN ON WIRE
***
UK/USA
dir: James Marsh
MILK
***
USA
It's difficult to criticise this hagiography of the patron saint of gay
rights in times when said rights are taking a fresh trashing. But Harvey
Milk's legacy has nothing to do with an ensemble of earnest,
nobly-intentioned actors purging hefty chunks of exposition to try reduce
an unwieldy man's life into a two-hour running time.
That said, for as long as you're watching Sean Penn, it's as
though you're watching a much better movie. Beyond the fact that he sells
the exposition and manages a phenomenal bit of mimicry, and beyond the
fact that nothing about his posture and cadences and goofy grinning is
remotely recognisable from previous Sean Penn joints, it's always
gratifying to follow a generous, wonderfully tactile and vibrant character
thriving over the
my-personality-is-defined-by-a-neat-chronology-of-unceasing-dignity creed
of the biopic.
dir: Gus Van Sant
ph: Harris Savides
cast: Sean Penn, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin,
Diego Luna, Alison Pill, Victor Garber, Denis O'Hare, Joseph Cross
MOMMA'S MAN
***½
USA
wr/dir: Azazel Jacobs
cast: Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Richard Edson,
Piero Arcilesi
OF TIME AND THE CITY
****
UK
wr/dir: Terence Davies
THE ORDER OF MYTHS
***
USA
wr/dir: Margaret Brown
THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL
*½
USA
dir: Justin Chadwick
cast: Natalie Portman, Scarlet Johansson, Eric Bana, Jim Sturgess,
Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas, David Morrissey, Ana Torrent
PRIVATE LESSONS
**½
Belgium/France
dir: Joachim Lafosse
cast: Jonas Bloquet, Jonathan Zaccaï, Claire Bodson, Yannick
Renier, Pauline Etienne
QUANTUM OF
SOLACE
***
UK/USA
Dubious psychoanalysis and fluffed-up topicality have infiltrated the
superhero genre, so that now Daniel Craig has to play Jason Bourne playing
James Bond. Fortunately no one told Mathieu Amalric about the series'
gloomy-sexy revamp. It's a shame he didn't grow a moustache in time so he
could twirl it and also that no one passed him a fluffy white cat so he
could stroke it. He resurrects a brand of hysterical Eurotrash villain
that I at least presumed extinct since the 70s. He's either playing in a
different movie to the rest of the cast or he is the only one among them
to pinpoint the cheap and shiny and delightfully convoluted bit of
trash hiding behind the murky hand-held world-economy-referencing gloss.
dir: Marc Forster
cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench,
Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, David Harbour, Jesper
Christensen
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
****½
USA
Jonathan Demme and Jenny Lumet assemble a dysfunctional-family-sized
lunatic orgy of profoundly insulated, self-absorbed people and simmer it into a sober, pulsing, humanist slice of
Dogme. Effortlessly they secure your patience and compassion even for several flaky personages
you wouldn't hesitate to punch in real life. In fact, it's downright
disorienting that nobody seems to be excoriating the Buchmans for
their over-privilege and hollow pretences to multi-culti-exoticism. But
then the core of this elegant rarity among indie
dramedies that set out to wage war on
contemporary American upper-financial-bracket living isn't a collection of hipster jabs at
the expensive and irrelevant surface. It's about
the multitude of often contradictory notes that define a family dynamic. The delicate and the volatile,
the cautious and the explosive, the healing and the scarring, the generous
and the chilling: Demme,
Lumet and their incandescent cast find ways to encompass it all.
dir: Jonathan Demme
wr: Jenny Lumet
ph: Declan Quinn
ed: Tim Squyres
cast: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde
Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deveare Smith, Anisa George, Debra Winger
THE READER
**½
USA/Germany
Bernhard Schlink’s novel was a solid, moderately
sophisticated, resolutely commercial exploration of enduring German
post-Holocaust guilt, with its primary strength being its sifting of a prestige-packaged-out topic
through the repercussions of an illicit erotic attachment between a
pubescent wimp and an erratic cipher twice his age.
None of the book’s
sincere questioning or sense of time and place survives this ossified,
atrociously directed adaptation, whose chief reason for existing is
several people’s ravenous Oscar-hunger. It’s a relief that the
otherwise lovely Kate Winslet finally has hers, so that she can stop
selecting parts based on their FYC-campaigns. But the performance itself
is all wrong from her first tentative spurts of a flaky Tscherman akcent
through to her insistence on emphasising the cuddly, misunderstood
simpleton behind the outwardly cold Nazi and all the way through to her
uneasy pitching of a youthful timbre against the dazzlingly
1930s-biopic-pasty aging make-up.
dir: Stephen Daldry
wr: David Hare
ph: Roger Deakins, Chris Menges
cast: Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin, Bruno
Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara
REVOLUTIONARY
ROAD
***
USA
In order to warrant putting your name across one of the great literary
works of a given century, you have to bring to it life, something fresh -
something more. And Sam Mendes' adaptation is unquestionably something
less. The context of the harsh idyll of 1950s Connecticutt and the notion
of whether this is the culprit that has oppressed the Wheelers or whether
the Wheelers have done their own oppressing but blame only their
environment: that is, the crux of Richard Yates' wrenching novel - well,
that is gone. The notion of Frank Wheeler being prematurely shoved into
marriage and his dad's job, and of April Wheeler's life amounting to the
perpetual crushing of a horrific cry of anguish. Fractions of these do translate, and
there are glimmers of an authentic-seeming and telling dynamic between the
Wheelers that hints at something bigger and shattering, but inevitably
they are something of a pale copy. The majority of the film is pale, and
also stiff.
dir: Sam Mendes
ph: Roger Deakins
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Michael
Shannon, Kathryn Hahn, David Harbour, Dylan Baker, Richard Easton, Zoe
Kazan
ROMAN POLANSKI:
WANTED AND DESIRED
***
USA
Marina Zenovich digs up the facts on the notorious case that's kept one of
the world's most hallowed living auteurs in exile from Hollywood for three
decades. She focuses mostly on the legal implications of the event (and
the surrounding media circus) and tries to distract you with half-relevant
subplots any time the moral implications come up (he's survived
unfathomable trauma! lots of people screw minors without doing jail
time!). While it's certainly engaging for the issues it tackles, her film
feels somewhat minor for the issues it skirts around.
dir: Marina Zenovich
SITA SINGS THE BLUES
***
USA
dir: Nina Paley
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
**½
UK
Life
in the slums of Mumbai is a video clip, the citizens of Mumbai communicate
in expository dialogue and when Dev Patel tenses up his face in an
expression that uncannily resembles other, lesser actors struggling to
disguise their self-consciousness at being asked to emote before a camera
and a 20+ person crew, it’s merely a sign of his time- [and
logic-]defying love for an orphan that has blossomed into the face of
Estee Lauder.
dir: Danny Boyle
cast: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan
Khan
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE
***½
USA
dir: Errol Morris
SUMMER HOURS
***
France
wr/dir: Olivier Assayas
cast:
THREE MONKEYS
***
Turkey/France/Italy
dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
ph: Gökhan Tiryaki
cast: Yavuz Bingol, Hatice Aslan, Rifat Sungar, Ercan Kesal, Cafer
Köse, Gürkan Aydin
TROPIC THUNDER
***
USA
dir: Ben Stiller
cast: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Nick
Nolte, Steve Coogan, Jay Baruchel, Brandon T. Jackson, Tom Cruise, Matthew
McConaughey, Brandon Soo Hoo, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Reggie Lee, Trieu
Tran
24 CITY
***½
China/Hong Kong/Japan
dir: Jia Zhang Ke
cast: Chen Jianbin, Joan Chen, Lü Liping, Zhao Tao
VICKY CRISTINA
BARCELONA
****
USA
Even at their most piercing, Woody Allen's nervous fantasias romanticised
every chunk of grit and ethnicity out of New York, so it's not unsettling that he sets this breezy
cynical jaunt in a Barcelona straight out of a Lonely Planet guide. Even
if the settings feel vaguely inauthentic (since you get the sense this
isn't by accident, you can still suck in all their touristy splendour
without feeling guilty), the same can't be said about the neuroses.
Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, an annihilating Penélope Cruz and an
out-of-her-league Scarlett Johansson exchange fluids in a heightened rom-com
key, but there is a deft, acute seventy-something-year-old
orchestrating their shenanigans, with his mind on something real and
fascinating. As for those pesky, inevitable cries of misogyny, they seem
particularly out of place in this study of a thinking and layered woman
with a conscience scrounging to keep afloat in a [unisex] sea of charming
idiots.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
ph: Javier Aguirresarobe
cast: Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penélope
Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, Christopher Evan Welch
WALL·E
****
USA
The title is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class,
and it refers to a lonely, diminutive cross between E.T. and Chaplin's
Tramp, only ten times more adorable and a robot. For the most part, the
Pixar team eschew dialogue, and with it the stale snark and pandering that
plagues much of contemporary animation. Their film is as imaginative,
melancholy-joyous and entrancing as anything since at least Toy Story 2,
and what's more, in theatres at least, it is preceded by Presto,
the most ingenious piece of animation (forgive all this hyperbole) since
the Looney Tunes.
dir: Andrew Stanton
wr: Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter
cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard,
John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
****
Israel/Germany/France/USA
wr/dir: Ari Folman
WENDY AND LUCY
***
USA
dir: Kelly Reichardt
cast: Michelle Williams, Walter Dalton, Will Patton, John
Robinson, Will Oldham, Larry Fessenden
THE WRESTLER
****
USA
dir: Darren Aronofsky
wr: Robert D. Siegel
ph: Maryse Alberti
cast: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood,
Mark Margolis, Todd Barry, Wass Stevens, Judah Friedlander, Ernest
Miller
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