The producers and distributors of Precious faced an Everest-sized obstacle in making such miserable subject matter palatable. The story of an obese, illiterate and unloved girl growing up in conditions of horrible abuse in Harlem, Precious is a hard sell for audiences. The character of Precious, pregnant at 16 with the second child to her father, living a virtual servant under the bitterly resentful eye of her mother, is that of a damaged psyche, a girl with no self esteem. She speaks, in the film, in monosyllable monotone, and escapes the wretched misery of her life into a serious of daydreams of a feted and glamorous life. (more…)
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Unquestionably the best film I saw at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury (better known as coming second), A Prophet is an extraordinary prison-based crime drama that is destined to be one of the finest works of the decade. In a year with little top-class French cinema to be found, this is exhilarating, intelligent, gritty and ruthlessly surprising - managing to capture the harrowing and detailed complexities of a young man’s life behind bars, and his rise through the criminal hierarchy. (more…)
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Like the country music that runs through its blood, actor-turned-first-time-director Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart is awash with clichés. Every day is a new town and another show for country music legend Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). He never met a glass of whisky he didn’t like, and with every glass, that faded San Antonio Rose sitting in the front row of his show looks better and better. He’s a mean of son of a gun who ran out on his wife and son twenty years earlier and has been running ever since. In fact, short of his dog dying, his life pretty much is a country song. (more…)
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The dramatic opening scene of the 1995 film Strange Days features Ralph Fiennes plugging himself into another man’s reality. Whilst sitting on his bed with his eyes closed, Fiennes starts up a special device that enables him to take a vivid ride through someone else’s memory of a violent armed hold-up that ends with a wild chase across the rooftops.
Strange Days was written by James Cameron (who’s latest film Avatar has just been nominated for nine Oscars), and was directed by Kathryn Bigelow (who’s latest film The Hurt Locker has also been nominated for nine Oscars). The two filmmakers – who go head to head with their films (more…)
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A remake, done well, can be a splendid thing, and for a while there it appears that The Wolfman is indeed splendid. But only for a while. Revisiting the 1941 classic starring Lon Cheney, the film’s writers, Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, stay true to its B-movie origins, dripping in atmosphere. Between them they have an impeccable pedigree, including Sleepy Hollow, Se7en and The Road to Perdition, and there are touches of all these films in this tight work, especially the overt torture porn of Se7en.
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A soulful and savagely beautiful meditation on the end of the world, Australian director John Hillcoat adapts Cormac McCarthy’s tale of despair and faith with great delicacy and care. At the opposite end of the movie spectrum from the other recent apocalypse tale, 2012, this is simple and bleak, intimate and touching and follows the straggling journey of a father and son as they wander through a grey and shattered landscape in search of some kind of significance for their desolate existence. (more…)
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In a scenario that sounds eerily familiar, the sparkling British satire In The Loop begins with the British Prime Minister and the United States President unofficially keen on launching a war (with whom isn’t important) despite the protestations of their respective advisers, Minister for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) and Lieutenant General Miller (James Gandolfini). (more…)
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Boasting an incredible female cast, Rob Marshall’s film of a musical of a film (Fellini’s classic 8 1/2) has moments of drama (in particular its promising cinematic opening), moments of sassy sexiness (for some Penelope Cruz’ solo dance number might be worth the ticket price alone), and moments of tenderness, thanks to a sensitive performance from Marion Cotillard. Yet it lacks the sense of passion, mystery and pain that should accompany any journey into the imagination of frustrated artistic genius. (more…)
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It may seem that an Italian-Glaswegian who spent three years working on a failed doctoral thesis about Milton’s Paradise Lost is the least likely person to put in charge of a biting contemporary film about transatlantic politics, but Armando Iannucci has long been observing and parodying the behaviour of those in charge. “At school I was always the one who impersonated the teachers and did the jokes at the Christmas concert,” he says, “and when I did a degree in English literature, I was known to be good at writing quick parodies of any style - from Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad.” (more…)
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The word ‘departures’, the leaving for places new, could easily be the title of the George Clooney comedy currently playing in cinemas, but in the case of the Japanese film and 2008 Foreign Language Oscar winner, Departures, the word represents much more weighty subject matter – death. Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a struggling cello player in a private orchestra in Tokyo, with a loving and understanding wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue). When the orchestra closes, Daigo is forced to admit to himself he hasn’t the talent to find new work, or to make the repayments on his wildly expensive cello. Daigo and Mika up stumps for a new life in the house left to him by his mother in the small town he grew up in. (more…)
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