With Bond’s action to the left of you and Baz’s epic to the right, you might want to take a dip into this thoughtful and intimate portrait of a man slowly warming to the beauty of life as he shakes off the ghosts of a family lost in the Holocaust.
Based on an award-winning novel by Canadian poet, Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces opens with Jakob – a small boy (Robbie Kay) - hiding in a house in Poland watching secretly as his family is dragged away by barely-seen Nazi soldiers. The moment is forever etched in the young boy’s mind, along with a handful of warmer memories of childhood – playing piano with his sister Bella & cooking with his mother. (more…)
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Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai is well known for his lush stylistics, and the opening sequence of My Blueberry Nights is an exercise in texture, with deeply layered, slow shutter cinematography shot through glass and fabric, all in a glow of reds and oranges and neon blues. Lost in the steam bath of colour and light is Elizabeth (Nora Jones), unlucky in love, who’s come to a small café in New York run by Jeremy (Jude Law) in case her ex might drop by. Of course he doesn’t, and she gets talking to Jeremy who always has a slice of blueberry pie left at the end of the night for a hungry soul. (more…)
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More than any other, the horror and supernatural thriller genres spawn movie franchises, with brands like Friday the 13th, Saw, and The Omen as difficult to kill off as the evil power that lurks at the heart of their stories. Much of the attraction for filmmakers is their immunity to poor reviews: despite what the critics say, people still line up in their thousands for a rush of fear-induced adrenalin. Enter what surely must have been designed as a new product line - Mirrors – a stylishly made supernatural thriller with a few good frights, a woeful screenplay, and an id-like force that lies on the other side of reflective surfaces. (more…)
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French film director Claude LeLouch definitely has a thing about cars. In his most celebrated feature film A Man And A Woman - released in 1966 - much of the story takes place in moving vehicles, and the ‘man’ of the story (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a racing car driver. After the film won LeLouche the Palme D’Or at Cannes, two Golden Globe awards, and two Oscars – as well as a healthy box-office return – the 29 year old LeLouche bought himself a Ferrari. Ten years later he caused a stir with a ten-minute, single shot film that he made by strapping a camera low to the ground on the front of a Mercedes, which he then drove at high speed across Paris. (more…)
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Does Guy Ritchie – audacious creator of cockney gangster films Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch – have anything more to say to the world? Not much. RocknRolla is a self conscious re-working of his now familiar style and storyworld – but this time without the charm that pervaded the central characters of those two earlier films. It’s a hardened affair, twenty minutes too long – but studded nevertheless with some of the wonderfully cynical dialogue that Ritchie can deliver when at his best. (more…)
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Gary Sweet’s first film role – in a John Lamond slasher film called Nightmares is not one that “has a big asterisk next to it on my resume” says Sweet with a huge laugh. “I was diabolical.” The role came just before a stint on The Sullivans which Sweet says was more of a dare than a planned career move. “I used to play football for Glenelg in South Australia, and we were on local television at that stage. Me and a few mates were always trying to outdo each other, so I thought if I could get on national television, I would win. I went to an audition with Crawford Productions at the end of my final year at Uni, and they called me and said they had a role for me for about three weeks. It lasted two and half years.” (more…)
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Condensing Evelyn Waugh’s complex study of class, faith and the longing for grace was never going to be an easy task. In 1981, Grenada Television took a memorable 11 hours to cover Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and it became the launching pad for a number of careers – including Jeremy Irons who played the middle class atheist Charles Ryder, seduced and lost in the upper class, catholic world of the Flyte family and their stately home Brideshead. (more…)
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More than ten years ago, English journalist Toby Young managed to weasel a job at New York’s Vanity Fair magazine after insulting the editor. Three years later he was let go, with little or nothing to show for what had been (in his own words) “a career cul-de-sac”. Determined to make something of his time hobnobbing with stars, artists and supermodels, he wrote a satirical book about his experience, and it hit the best-seller lists after being rejected by 22 publishers. This is the film of the book of the real story that probably wasn’t that funny in the first place. (more…)
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Based on a Finnish shoot-em up video game, Max Payne is all style and little story, cheerless detective Max (Mark Wahlberg) drifting through a washed out and snowy New York in search of his wife’s killer. Raking over old files and long cold clues, Max is a man in an emotional coma, shunning his cop buddies B.B. (Beau Bridges) and Alex (Donal Logue), and even managing to resist the charms of scantily clad and long-limbed Natasha (Olga Kurylenko), a Russian underworld girl with a strange tattoo who wiggles her way into his bed. (more…)
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Any film starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich is surely going to be of interest. But when you throw in written, directed and produced by Ethan and Joel Coen – well, you’ve got a smash hit before you start. After the dark and enigmatic No Country For Old Men, this is a return to pure entertainment – a light, black comedy in the best traditions of cinematic farce - with a couple of surprising moments of random violence thrown in for good measure. (more…)
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