Cross And Bothered

Antichrist, Odeon Telford, Tuesday October 6 2009, 8pm.

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009) is an everyday story of love, death, sex, grief, psychotherapy and genital mutilation. Not exactly obvious material for a date movie, then, and if that night's performance was anything to go by not the sort of movie of any kind for about 90% of moviegoers: several walked out, and there was a lot of sighing, snoring, giggling and tutting throughout. Come the closing credits and a dedication to legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky leads one disgruntled punter to chunter 'he should be shot!'. Which was a bit harsh on a poor fellow who's been dead fifteen years!

The film features a therapist (Willem Dafoe) and a writer (Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to come to terms with their grief when their young son falls out of a window to his death while they have sex against a washing machine. Defoe's character breaks his own professional beliefs by trying to treat his wife himself, leading to the couple confronting nature and their own natures in a secluded retreat in the woods.

(The trailer below contains contentious themes and simulated sex so is NOT WORK SAFE)



Antichrist isn't a conventional horror film, although its' isolated, claustrophobic atmosphere, and focus on the (mental and physical) violence that men and women do to each other and unto themselves, not to mention the supernatural overtones that envelop the second half of the film, ultimately gives it the feel of being one, even though it's a million miles removed from crass contemporary franchises in the medium.

The film is worth sticking with, despite some scenes which seem to have been deliberately rendered boring, some clumsy exposition here and there and occasionally unconvincing effects. This is mainly because at least it's a film that's actually about something, even if its own conclusions seem muddled and potentially offensive (ie. is it a film about misogyny that ultimately becomes mysogynistic?), and also because it's often beautiful to watch, the performances from Dafoe and Gainsbourg match their director for bravery, and the breathtaking audacity of what unspools leave you genuinely uncertain what Von Trier will come up with next. A film, ultimately, that has to be seen to be believed, even though 9 out of 10 of you hepcats will probably prefer the taste of something else entirely.

The Strife Of Brian

The Damned United, Odeon Telford, Monday April 13 2009, 8.45pm.

The makers of The Damned United decided that David Peace's dark brilliant fictionalisation of Brian Clough's doomed 44 day tenure as gaffer of 'dirty Leeds' clearly wanted bloody shooting, despite the structural difficulties of filming a novel that was driven by an increasingly despairing and hugely controversial internal monologue.

Lacking privy to Clough's imagined personal thoughts but having access to TV footage from the time, the film seems a little more factual and even-handed than Peace's book, and what is lost in terms of stylised psychological torment is replaced by a stronger focus on the on-off relationship between Clough and his assistant manager and scouting genius Peter Taylor.

The resulting film is not without its flaws (erratic casting in the supporting parts and slight tendency to sentimentalise being the major contributing factors to an occasionally uneven feel) but remains a highly entertaining addition to the footie film canon, with an astonishing recreation of Clough by the ubiquitous Michael Sheen and strong supporting turns by Timothy Spall as Taylor and Jim Broadbent as Cloughie's Derby chairman making this compulsive viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the green-jumpered gaffer.

Today My Heart Swings

Two Lovers, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Wednesday April 1 2009, 3pm.

Joaquin Phoenix's final role before his apparent personal meltdowndecision to make a career as a rapper, sees him play a bipolar dry cleaning assistant in his family business whose repeated suicide attempts are interrupted when he becomes part of a love triangle with two women - Vinessa Shaw's decent but predictable Sandra and Gwyneth Paltrow's flaky blonde neighbour Michelle. Phoenix swings between the two as rapidly as his moods change, but who will he ultimately choose? Or will the choice be taken out of his hands?

Director James Gray has made his name as director of dour but impressive thrillers (The Yards, We Own The Night) and in Two Lovers he retains his keen sense of milieu, familial ties and character study but elects to remove the crime out of the melodrama this time around. Whether this strategy is entirely successful will possibly depend on personal taste, with the film at times resembling a Hitchcock movie minus the murder but focussing on the mystery of an erotic erratic blonde whom neither the male lead or the audience truly get a grip on during the film's duration.

The result is a gloomy meditation on life, love and laundry that offers an almost fatalistic feel to its' resolution. And yet, despite this palpable lack of romance and thrills, Gray's film manages to charm through its' own resolute seriousness, aided by some powerful performances by Phoenix and Paltrow, and a determination from all involved not to patronise the audience with pat platitudes. But if Two Lovers stiffs at the box office, don't be too surprised if dead bodies start littering the doom and gloom of Gray's next venture.

Fertile Imagination

Puffball (directed by Nicolas Roeg), available on R2 DVD via Yume Pictures, 120mins.

In Nic Roeg's comeback film Puffball, the seemingly ubiquitous Kelly Reilly plays an ambitious architect who buys a rundown building in a remote Irish valley to transform and renovate. A spot of alfresco rumpty-pumpty later, she falls pregnant, much to the consternation of a neighbouring family who for reasons unknown other than their own belligerence and stupidity feel the unborn child belongs to them. Cue all sorts of nonsense involving dodgy wine, a glowing ball and an impenetrable cameo by Donald Sutherland.

A self-styled 'thriller about love, life, grief and sex', re-uniting director Roeg with star Donald Sutherland, it's not difficult to assume Puffball's backers were hoping for some of the magic of Don't Look Now to rub off on this latest project. While there's enough of Roeg's skills in evidence to just about keep the interest flowing through its' overlong 2hr running time, this latest tale of life, death and architecture, based on a Fay Weldon story, lacks the satisfying structure that made his earlier work such compelling viewing. The result is a vaguely beguiling misfire, mainly of interest to people keen on following the director's career, although to be fair that should include pretty much everybody with a regard for intelligent, handsome cinema.

Ring Stings

The Wrestler, Odeon Telford, Saturday January 17 2009, 3pm.

Mickey Rourke's drift from 80s sex symbol to bloated, washed-up self-parody finds possibly deliberate parallels with the story arc of Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, a big star in the hair-metal days now going through choreographed motions to dwindling numbers in Darren Aranofsky's The Wrestler (2008). This duality adds an extra level of pathos as the audience roots for The Ram to overcome the many obstacles (advancing years, worsening health, dysfunctional personal life) in the way of making his last redeeming shot of a return to the big-time.

Although the movie has been derided in some quarters as 'a poor man's Rocky', Aranofsky films proceedings in a downbeat documentary style that helps offset any tendencies to sentimentality the plot setup might offer. Aside from Rourke's colossal performance the film's other main strength is that no scene seems wasted, telling little details and nuances littering every shot. A hardcore underground wrestling bout in which Rourke and his combatant set at each other with various hardware items is an instant classic and if your life wouldn't be complete without seeing someone stab Rourke's face with a fork before attacking his chest with a staplegun then The Wrestler is definitely must-see entertainment.

Two other scenes that stand out take place on a deli counter where Randy works weekends during his retirement. His first day on the counter offers a brilliant example of how to make the best of a bad job, his initial consternation when faced with having to recommend the best type of smoked ham giving way to a more relaxed, humourous style as he finds the showman from within. Later in the film and during his darkest moments, Randy somehow rediscovers his mojo and quits his job in spectacular, riotous and predictably bloody fashion.

Much more than just a high-concept sports movie, The Wrestler feels like a tribute to what Iain Dowie once memorably dubbed 'bouncebackability'. The film never once shies away from the more unpleasant aspects of life or indeed the many flaws of its hero, but finds a savage nobility, something to warm to, something to root for, in Randy's erratic but stubborn striving for purpose, connection and redemption in the most unpromising of circumstances. Like many of the best movies, it leaves itself equally open to interpretation as a comedy or tragedy, and is all the better for that.

Robert DeNiro's Tailgating

Righteous Kill, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Sunday October 5 2008, 3.45pm.

Although they've shared screenbilling twice previously (in Godfather Part 2 and Heat) Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino for the first time share considerable amount of actual screentime in Jon Avnet's Righteous Kill. Turns out just as well that the movie has this USP going for it, as much else in the film seems sufficiently second-hand you find yourself looking for the name of Knock-off Nigel on the end credits.

The living screen legends play veteran NYPD detectives buddied up with a younger pair (the perennially under-used John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) to track down a serial killer. When the evidence starts piling up it seems increasingly likely that one of their number is the perp, the undertow of paranoia and recrimination not helped by an apparent love/lust triangle between DeNiro, Leguizamo and a kinky colleague (Carla Gugino, the unlikely recipient of a partially-seen rear-end pounding from Bobby).

The leads work hard at keeping the tension sufficiently charged to carry the audience through to a seemingly-rushed conclusion, but director Avnet's attempts at flashy direction (quick cuts, wonky camerawork, disorientating time shifts) and the gimmicky casting of Fiddy Cent in a supporting role fails to persuade that this is anything other than a straight-to-DVD plot made entertaining and watchable by the high-wattage star turns from the screen heavyweights.

The Strife Of Reilly

Eden Lake, Odeon Telford, Tuesday September 16 2008, 6.30pm.

A weekend break in the secluded beautyspot Eden Lake for Kelly Reilly's primary school teacher and her buff diver boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) gains nightmarish proportions when they become terrorised by a feral mob of local youths. James Watkins' thriller adopts the classic trick of using familiar horror movie tropes to address contemporary social concerns, in this case anti-social behaviour, knife culture, dangerous dogs and general all-round 'chav' fear.

The result is nasty, brutish and short, but nevertheless, in all senses, a bloody good film. The combo of social realism and intense, hyperdriven violence is an awkward one to pull off, but Watkins manages it superbly through ramping up the suspense and terror an extra level at judicious points. The film is also ably served by a starmaking turn from curvaceous ingenue Reilly, who manages to look magnificent even after being fully dunked in a tank of shit, and makes the audience care enough to carry them through to the heartstopping climax.

Grace Bothers

Savage Grace, Electric Cinema, Birmingham, Saturday July 26 2008, 4.30pm.

CAUTION: CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS.

This is your intrepid inquisitor's first visit to the Electric Cinema since it was re-opened to much blogging hullabuloo a few years back. It's now touted as the oldest operating cinema in the UK, and it is a grand building, although your long-in-the-tooth loafer remembers it rather differently in its' Tivoli guise in the 80s, when it was considered something of a sleazepit where we made furtive forays to see B-movies like James B Harris' Cop and Craig R Baxley's criminally-under-rated Action Jackson. Visiting the cinema now feels a much more welcoming, middle-brow experience, with plush sofas; pretty, friendly box-office staff and a silver spoon to go with your white chocolate and raspberry ice-cream.

Tom Kalin's Savage Grace is the cinematic fare this afternoon, a film that is apparently attempting to re-construct the events leading up to the savage murder of a socialite by her troubled young son in 1972 London. The film is pretty to look at and mostly watchable, contains some strong performances (notably Moore as the doomed diva) but has too many serious flaws to be considered a success. Any film of such relatively short length is going to suffer from the episodic structure imposed on it here, leaving the viewer to struggle to get their teeth into the filletted fare on offer, and as a psychological study it's a non-starter as we're left none the wiser at the end of the film why the son takes the knife to his mother then calmly orders a Chinese.

Wikipedia's references to the real-life case would suggest that the film has played fast-and-loose with many of the facts of the case, something that would have made more sense if it had made the story more interesting not less. As it is, Kalin has made a film that brings to mind past movies like Mommie Dearest; Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?; The Sheltering Sky and Ma Mere, but only serves to highlight their relative superiority to the shallow showboating on offer here. Although any film that reacquaints us with elfin curveball Elena Anaya from Sex and Lucia ain't all bad so gracias for that.

Related link: Moore happy to embarrass kids.

E Gore

Donkey Punch, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Tuesday June 22 2008, 7pm.

Who knew that Eli Roth's Hostel, in which hormonal Westerners are butchered abroad for their unethical behaviour, would be the single most influential film of the latter part of this decade? Goes to show that if you make a cheap film that brings in huge profits and critical kudos you instantly create a template for others to follow. Oliver Blackburn's Donkey Punch at least comes to the slightly different and entirely reasonable conclusion: Brits aboard are (quite literally) their own worst enemy.

So we have three girls from Leeds abroad on holiday hooking up with a British crew of likely lairy lads on a luxury yacht. Ecstasy and hardcore Russian drugs leads to orgiastic ecstasy and softcore sex, until things take a sudden swerve to the worse when the titular sex act leaves one of the participants in the fleshy fivesome experiencing the 'petit mort' a little too literally for everyone's comfort. It's then every lad and ladette for themselves as the bodycount piles up amidst recriminations, cover-ups and sheer lunatic bloody-mindedness.

Donkey Punch has been described as a kind of Dead Calm for the Ibiza set, benefitting from a decent soundtrack that includes Parallax View faves The Knife and Peter Bjorn and John. While there are numerous faults (banal, seemingly semi-improvised dialogue, wavering performance levels, all-over-the-place plot structure), some of these weaknesses actually help Donkey Punch overcome the main danger in making this type of movie: formulaic predictability. The result is a bloody mess from just about any perspective, but remains gripping, stylish entertainment, different from the norm but not so out-there that people won't get it, and seems destined for cult status when it finds its natural home on DVD.

Summer Night City

Richard Prince: Continuations @Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London, Sunday June 29 2008, 11am.
Female Agents, Odeon Covent Garden, Sunday June 29 2008, 6.25pm.

Spent the first weekend in a while down in London, the first couple of days mainly taken with meeting up with and getting to know a certain voluptuous Brazilian online friend of mine, who, amongst other things, introduced me to the delights of pacoquinha, an intensely sweet hit of peanut taste textured somewhere between biscuit and fudge, good with tea or coffee as long as long as you have a sweet tooth!

Sunday represented an opportunity to soak up some culture, and went along to see the Richard Prince exhibition Continuations at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. Prince may be best known to alt.music fans for providing the striking sleeve art to Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse, but, although there were a few of his nurse paintings included, as well as a drumhead autographed by Thurston, Kim and Lee from SY, the exhibition presented a broader overview of his work that spans over four decades.

Just as the nurse pictures are appropriated images from pulp novel covers subverted and fetishised by Prince, much of the rest of his work involves customising found objects such as car hoods, and in one stunning case, an entire Buick adorned with objectified images of naked women. Elsewhere, there are a series of photographs of cowboys and biker chicks, and Prince isn't even beyond appropriating other peoples' jokes, with stylised paintings featuring looped one-liner gags. The result is an impressive, arresting collection worth a half-hour's browse for anyone in London with an interest in modern art.

Then headed off on the District Line to Brick Lane, where visited Rough Trade East for the first time, renewed my taste for octopus, wine and chocolate dessert at a tapas festival and wandered into 93 Feet East where there was supposed to be an all-dayer happening, but found no punters to be seen or music to be heard!

A quick change at the hotel later and then into the West End to see Female Agents, which follows in the sly, saucy footsteps of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book by looking at the derring-do of undercover female resistance agents in World War Two. In this case, Sophie Marceau's crackshot recruits/conscripts some dodgy distaff divas into the SOE's female operative branch (known as, we shit ye not, FANY) to distract the Nazis in France long enough for them to help the escape of an Allied geologist doing important groundwork paving the way for D-Day.

It's fairly derivate stuff, suffering from some erratic levels of characterisation that means you don't always care as much during episodes of jeopardy as perhaps you ought, but it says much for the zip of the production and the committed performances from the game, gallic cast that, despite some obvious flaws, the resulting film manages to be thrilling and poignant for the most part, particularly recommended for filmgoers with equal levels of passion for wartime heroics and the female form.

Turned out to be a bad time of it for Germans all round, as got back to the pub beneath the hotel in time to watch the second half of the Euro2008 final in which Spain vanquished the 1996 champions 1-0 to become worthy winners of a surprisingly entertaining competition, a particularly welcome result given that many of the bar's patrons seemed to be Spanish or Portugese speakers.

Memories Of A Geezer

Flashbacks Of A Fool, Odeon Telford, Saturday April 19 2008, 2.45pm.

CAUTION: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS.

In Baillie Walsh's Flashbacks Of A Fool Daniel Craig plays a washed-up Hollywood star who's woken up by his housemaid (Eve, in a breakthrough bit of casting for a black woman) after a coke-and-hookers orgy and wonders where it all went wrong. Thanks to the titular flashbacks to his youth we find it all started with a few quick schoolboy bangs with Jodhi May's bored, busty housewife that lead to a more explosive climax elsewhere. Discussing where the movie went tits-up, however, may take slightly longer to explain.

The film is pretty to look at, but is dreadfully dull for the most part, and some strong, serviceable performances are often hamstrung by the fact that too much screentime is given to characters that don't move the plot forward while pivotal parts are marginalised to the extent that the whole story premise is fatally undermined. Aside from Jodhi May and a striking Felicity Jones as the glam racket-loving schooldays sweetheart, few come out of the film with any credit, which often looks like a vanity project to enable British actors like Mark Strong and Emilia Fox to showcase their American accents, and sees producer/star Craig packing more wood in his performance than he does inside his tight-fitting trunks. Indeed, just thinking about Flashbacks Of A Fool in any detail is enough to induce Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in any mug punter silly enough to part with their hard-earned six quid for this flat farrago. A word to the wise, then: avoid.

Mister Derrick

There Will Be Blood, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Wednesday March 5 2008, 4.45pm.

The last time we remember cinema looking into what happens when a prospector strikes lucky, Nicolas Roeg's neglected masterpiece Eureka (1983) asked the question: what happens when a man gets everything he wants? In contrast to Gene Hackman's self-made man Jack ('I've Never Made A Nickel From Another Man's Sweat') McCann in that film, however, Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Painview in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2008) is less a rounded personality than a physical manifestation of the will to power, a relentless one-man force of capitalist growth that can never by definition be satiated. Plainview is portrayed as a virtually sexless man, with only the vaguest yearnings for family bonding occasionally softening his edge, who seeks to impose his masculinity on the earth through his big fuck-off drills that are ultimately superceded by his big fuck-off pipeline that pulses and disseminates his oil.

Religion, in the shape of Paul Dano's preacher Eli, attempts to establish a moral conscience on Plainview, but succeeds only in nipping at his ankles, a nuisance too easily swatted away because you can never bullshit a bullshitter with total success, and the man-of-the-cloth's lies, hypocrisy and greed are all too easily seen through by the prospector for whom the truth is never acknowledged or spoken if there's any chance of it hindering profit and progress.

In many ways There Will Be Blood should have won the Best Film Oscar along with the Best Actor nod for Daniel Day-Lewis. It's rare indeed that a film with one such dominant role could reverberate with such political and historical resonance, and you could boil this movie down for eternity and still not find an ounce of fat - everything you see and hear serves a purpose of exposition, and that's even more scarce during a 150-min. running time. But given that There Will Be Blood holds up a mirror to the lies and corruption that helped lay the foundations of modern California, perhaps it's not so surprising that the Hollywood heirarchy found the Coen Brothers' admittedly marvellous but nevertheless relatively unfocused No Country For Old Men a more palatable prospect.

Hell Is Other People

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday February 2, 2008, 1.10pm.

Sidney Lumet may now be an octegenarian, but the opening scene in his latest film Before The Devil Knows You're Dead featuring the doughy gluteus maximus of Philip Seymour Hoffman as he gives a rear-end pounding to a very naked Marisa Tomei, reveals the veteran director has no intention of his work growing old gracefully.

Hoffman plays a real estate accountant in need of a cash injection in the light of an upcoming IRS audit, his various drug addictions and an escape plan to head off to Rio with his stunning wife (the aforementioned Tomei). He enlists his younger brother (Ethan Hawke), who is better looking but similarly cash-strapped, to rob a 'Mom and Pop' jewellery store and clear their debts. The Mom and Pop store he has in mind is their own parents' (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) but the family betrayal doesn't end there as his younger brother is also banging his wife behind his back. The 'victimless crime' with 'no guns' predictably gets bungled and Mom gets fatally wounded in the melee. Pop sets out to find out whodunnit, uncovering some messy family business in the process.

Lumet returns to the heist-gone-wrong genre he pretty much nailed down in 'Dog Day Afternoon' back in the day, but whereas the film's seedy lowlife feel definitely gives off a 70s vibe, the time-sequence shifts, multiple points-of-view and brisk, racy pacing manage to maintain a contemporary edge. Hoffman is superb as the troubled eldest son more in need of counselling than heroin, particularly in a scene where he explodes in frustration driving home after his mother's funeral. Ethan Hawke really disappears into his character as the shifty younger brother, all nervous tics and rat's teeth, light years from his earlier, cockier roles, while Albert Finney is mostly subdued until the veritably eye-popping climax. Marisa Tomei is also on good form and in great shape, but the script poorly serves her character who in effect is used as little more than a sperm repository for the two bungling brothers.

The film is less misogynistic, than it is misanthropic, with 'life is evil' and 'there's no telling what people will do for money' being two messages the Albert Finney character learns all too late in proceedings. The underwritten female roles aside, however, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead makes for great Saturday Night entertainment with potent ingredients of violence, sex, drugs and plot twists masterfully concocted by Lumet into a tense, thoughtful thriller of note.

Chigurh Hit

No Country For Old Men, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday January 26 2007, 12.15.

Set in Rio Grande in 1980, The Coen Brothers' multi-award nominated No Country For Old Men features Josh Brolin as a local ne'er-do-well Vietnam vet who stumbles upon a grisly crime scene and makes off with 2 million dollars worth of drug money. Soon on his trail are some murderous Mexicans, a cocksure Woody Harrelson and a taciturn hitman with a cattle gun and ridiculous Three Stooges moptop haircut called Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem). 'It's a real mess, ain't it' states the deputy to Tommy Lee Jones' lawman, who drawls in reply, 'Well, if it ain't, it'll sure do 'til the real mess comes along'. The real mess duly obliges.

The first two thirds of this movie represents Hollywood's finest slam-dunk thriller dynamics since Scorcese's The Departed, a straightforward enough chase set-up offering up a memorable river pursuit, elaborate survivalist stunts and an explosive shootout that had your jaded jobbing-blogger jumping in his seat not once, not twice, but three times in a sequence that had the old pacemaker working overtime. So far, so exciting then, but the film slowly but surely shows its hand as having something more on its mind than mere multiplex mayhem, emerging as something of a meditation on mortality and a requiem for decency seen through the fearful eyes of a never-before-more-vulnerable looking Tommy Lee Jones' lawman. This knockout combination of visceral thrills and metaphysical dread, heightened by the Coens' trademark black humour and an odd but undeniably stunning turn by Bardem as 'the messenger of fate' marks out No Country For Old Men as a genuinely terrific must-see masterpiece.

Comma Chameleon

Lust, Caution: Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday January 12 2008, 4.40pm.

Just as Paul Schrader's tricksy political thriller The Walker (2007, out as of last week on DVD) begins with a genteel game of cards, Ang Lee's erotically-charged spy story Lust, Caution has a lengthy opening scene featuring a game of Mahjong, an inscrutable pastime which seems to be a kind of combination of Yahtzee and Dungeons and Dragons played with small slabs that resemble white chocolate Bendick's Mingles.

Set in Japanese-occupied Shangai during World War Two, nothing is quite what it seems underneath the civilised veneer of small-talk and drawing-room games. The importer's wife introduced to the gentleman of the house Mr Yee (played by Tony Leung) is a poor player of Mahjong for the reason she's too busy concentrating on keeping up her cover to study the nuances of the game, as the film's flashback structure reveals her to be a young actress hired to seduce the high-ranking collaborator and lead him towards his assassination.

Mr Yee, however, is an understandably cautious man, and there's plenty of human chess moves, not to mention betrayal and bloodshed, before the film's well-publicised explicit sex scenes explode upon the screen. The result is a slow-burning pot-boiler with plenty to reward the patient viewer, not least the two lead performances. Relative unknown Tang Wei is bewitching both as the radical student and troubled spy lost in lust with her smouldering prey, while Tony Leung impressively conveys the brooding passion beneath his character's buttoned-up exterior with a quiet, dignified subtlety that helps raise the material above mere melodrama.

Parallax View Films Of The Year 2007

Our pick of what we saw that was released in cinemas for the first time in UK in 2007.

1. CONTROL (directed by Anton Corbijn)
2. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)
3. Zodiac (David Fincher)
4. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
5. Dans Paris (Christophe Honore)
6. Hallam Foe (David Mackenzie)
7. The Lives Of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmark)
8. The Walker (Paul Schrader)
9. Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick)
10. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Serious Moonlight

We Own The Night, Odeon Telford, Saturday December 15 2007, 3.45pm.

It's already been noted that James Gray's We Own The Night is a kind of Godfather in reverse, with Joaquin Phoenix as a hedonistic nightclub owner fast-tracked into the family cop business to right a wrong and settle a crime war. The presence of Robert Duvall as the plain-speaking patriarch reinforces the 70s feel, while the soundtrack (Blondie; Bowie's Let's Dance and Coati Mundi!) is early 80s Studio 54 chic, so it's slightly disconcerting to find the film's purported setting is a 1988 New York where an influx of a new wave of drugs from Eastern Europe sees top cop Mark Wahlberg (still wearing that ridiculous side-parting from The Departed) coaxing his errant brother into helping in The War On Drugs. Initially, the bon viveur just says no, but when bro gets mown down outside his home, Phoenix rises to the occasion.

Aside from having amoral Russians with dodgy haircuts cast as the villains of the piece, writer/director Gray's picture seems almost determinedly unfashionable with a slowish pace and uncompromising seriousness unlikely to sit well with younger viewers. We Own The Night may be indebted to 70s policiers but crucially lacks the cinematic sweep and social realism that distinguished and enlivened the genre films of that era. But if the movie more closely resembles a better-than-average Kojak episode that's not to say there isn't plenty to like here. Phoenix has piled on some pounds for the role but has never looked so comfortable in his skin on screen before, while a car chase sequence in the driving rain manages the near-impossible feat of seeming fresh, vivid and genuinely in-the-moment.

And any film that starts with Eva Mendes feeling herself up to Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass' can't be all bad. Phoenix joins her on the sofa, only for their coitus to get interruptus, so we guess it's a case of from whacking off to Joaquin off?

All Milla, No Filler

Resident Evil: Extinction, Odeon Telford, Wednesday October 31 2007, 6.10pm.

Whatever you might think about zombie movies, it's the genre that refuses to stay dead. Despite the critical kicking the first two films in the Resident Evil computer game spin-off series received, the third installment is now upon us, with Highlander director Russell Mulcahy jumping aboard to try to breathe new life into his own stalling career.

While Mulcahy's films aren't often remembered for their intelligence, cultural significance and socio-political insight, one thing he can normally be relied upon is to deliver retina-scorching cinematic sweep, and true to form he delivers with the shit-kicking action taking place in post-apocalyptic desert vistas that sometimes recall the Mad Max pictures (although in place of Tina Turner, we get Ashanti - progress of sorts, we guess).

The result is a bright, glossy, sexy piece of entertainment which eschews pretension in favour of the superficial thrills of Milla Jovovich slicing and dicing zombies while wearing a wide range of wet and clingy outfits. For once, we have a zombie film that's quite happy to admit it's mindless fun, and this refreshing change allied to the stunning visuals gives more enjoyment than the hipper, edgier stylings of 28 Weeks Later. Milla's tale's worth following.

Russian Ruffians

Eastern Promises, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday October 27 2007, 6.10pm.

Let's get the trivia out of the way first: Eastern Promises is the first film that David Cronenberg has directed outside of his home country Canada. It also re-unites him with his A History Of Violence leading man Viggo Mortensen in a tale set amongst the bloc-rocking beasts of Russian mobsters running amok in a gangland war in London.

Brummie Steven Knight's screenplay eschews potential topical twists of football-club takeovers and atomic dust cappuccino sprinklings for the more old-school thrills of knives, tattoos and family loyalty. The use of set-pieces such as barber-shop throat-slittings and bath-house brawls threaten to plunge the project into mundane, anachronistic territory but the film is salvaged by the usual stylistic sang-froid Cronenberg delivers to the gory violence, and another iconic performance from Mortensen. The latter relishes a role which gives him the opportunity to display both physical and moral superiority while beating and stabbing the shit out of everyone who dares cross his path, recalling the stoic splendour of a Charles Bronson or Burt Lancaster in their pomp as he does so.

Naomi Watts, on the other hand, is an actress you'd consider destined to play a memorable role in a Cronenberg film, but this isn't it as she tries hard but gets lost in a thankless role of a curious and compassionate midwife that's the kind of one-dimensional ingenue turn she should by rights have left behind her after Mulholland Dr.. This under-written role and the sparsity of memorable whip-smart dialogue works against a film which manages to keep the interest going throughout, sparks into genuine excitement here and there, but lacks the clean, formal brilliance of its predecessor A History Of Violence.

Nic's 'Snatch' Not Quite Up To Scratch

The Invasion, Odeon Telford, Saturday October 13 2007, 1pm.

Why bother going to see a fourth screen adaptation of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers? Good question, and one which the makers of The Invasion (2007) seek to answer by placing it in the milieu of a post-Iraq America beset by a curious combination of paranoia and self-loathing, acutely agitated by the prospect of enemies within yet troubled by their own violent tendencies revealed as they defend through offence.

In fact, the film-makers busy themselves so much in justifying the remake in terms of topical relevance, referencing not just Iraq several times but also the break-up of the Soviet Bloc, the use of anti-depressants to flatline emotions and the near-pornographic fetish for 24/7 news saturation that other, equally crucial elements to make the film come alive are fatally neglected. Namely, there's an acute shortage of credible romance, thrills or suspense. The lack of chemistry between an often uncomfortable Nicole Kidman and a worryingly wooden Daniel Craig is worthy of a sci-fi investigation in itself, the tension never quite builds to anything you might call excitement and the action sequences barely rise above competent and fail at any stage to quicken the pulse.

Still, at least Nicole Kidman remains easy on the eye, and even though her blonde bob, bleached visage, pinched nose and heavily arched eyebrows make her so unrecognisable from the freckle-faced redhead who made such an impact in Dead Calm that it might suggest a bodysnatching exercise worthy of a thriller plot in itself, it's reassuring to know she still looks good running around in a range of tight-fitting tops whilst in deadly peril. Yet if it seems harsh in this day and age to criticise an action blockbuster for having too many ideas in its head to concentrate properly on the staple action dynamics, no thrills + no suspense = nobody paying at the box-office in this or any other known universe.

Factory Fodder

Control, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday October 6 2007, 11.30pm.

Given the chequered history of rock star biopics whose heart didn't sink when the project was announced to do a cinematic adaption of the short life and times of tragic Joy Division singer Ian Curtis? And yet the wildcard choice of selecting Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn to helm this as his first picture, a man who helped more than most to define our perception of the band with his dark and iconic portraits of the group for NME, ensures an authentic feel and the luminous B&W photography to provide a fitting tribute to this troubled soul.

Basing the screenplay on the Curtis biography from his widow Deborah also helps this film become the best rock biopic ever precisely because the music and the music business is seen within the perspective of Curtis' wider life and broader range of issues. With contemporaries such as Anton Corbijn and Deborah Curtis playing such a strong hand in the project, we're spared lazy journalism and Madchester myths in favour of something that feels more true - it's manic manager Rob Gretton who provides the comic foil not Tony Wilson, and the young Hookeh is portrayed less as a loveable rogue and more a surly careerist.

Newcomer Sam Riley looks the part as Ian Curtis with his lanky frame and faraway gaze, but also has some of the cheeky sex appeal and little-boy-lost demeanour of icon du jour Pete Doherty for topical piquancy. He comes into his own during the second half of the film as Curtis' slow, desperate descent into depression is revealed through the steadily more haunted expression in his eyes. Seeing someone with outwardly so much going for him in his life slowly but surely have the spark snuffed out of him is so credibly portrayed to be deeply troubling to watch as the denouement enfolds.

Control presents a complex and compelling explanation of what drove Curtis to suicide as he becomes an increasingly isolated figure. Facing pressures to please both women in his life and fulfil the increasing demands of the band to deliver success in America and ease financial troubles, his final devastating seizure caused by unmedicated epilepsy triggers a final, desperate solution. Maybe it's the ultimate act of petulance but as your widescreen-eyed writer made his weary, near-sober way through Birmingham's Broad Street at 1.50am, striding stealthily through so much wanton human debris there's a timely reminder that there are many ways to descend into joyless oblivion. No chance of walking away in silence here, then.

You're Gorgers

Feast Of Love, Odeon Birmingham, Friday October 5 2007, 3.15pm.

Based on the popular novel by Charles Baxter, Robert Benton's Feast Of Love features several attractive people falling in and out of love in the hip location of Portland, Oregon under the watchful eye of Morgan Freeman's character, a university professor taking a leave of absence to recover from the loss of his only son who died as a result of a heroin addiction he knew nothing about.

The ensemble set-up, interlocking stories and casual nude setpieces gives an impression of a film that's reaching for the feel of the work of Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph, but sadly Benton's more commercial sensibilities means that Feast Of Love feels glossy and superficial in comparison to those auteurs at their best. In particular, you never get the feeling that these characters have a life outside of the scenes we watch, the missing shades and depth leaving the viewer with little to relate to their emotional trials and tribulations. The lesbian romance that kickstarts the plot suffers more than most with the simplistic shorthand treatment dictated by multiple plotlines, culminating in a comically brief sex scene then promptly forgotten about for the rest of the movie - cold feet in the cutting-room, maybe?

Where Benton's commercial sensibilities do work in the favour of the film is the strong hand taken to tie up the story strands towards a genuinely moving climax. Feast Of Love does almost a good enough job of this to convince you the rest of the movie was more of a cohesive whole than it was. Almost, but not quite, meaning this feast will leave you wanting more substantial fare at your next sitting. But no film is all bad that gives us a new catchprase to use for calming down an agitated person with a dubious past - 'Easy, Sleazy!'.

Must Do Better

Atonement, Odeon Telford, Saturday September 22 2007, 2.45pm.

Joe Wright's film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement (2007) is seemingly this season's middle-brow must-see on the multiplex menu. If, like your clueless correspondent, you haven't read the book, it's difficult to neatly summarise the plot, which spans from the 30s to the late 90s, taking in decadence, Dunkirk and duplicity in its tale of thwarted love, sexual mores and laboured revisionism.

Wright aims to pull off a literary adaptation with as much visual flair as fierce intelligence, and the first half of the film, set in a sumptuous country mansion (Shropshire's Stokesay Court, film location fact fans) on a hot summer's day, shows an acute attention to detail that builds up a palpable sense of dread more in keeping with a noir thriller than a period piece. Unfortunately, for this viewer at least, the tension steadily dissipates through the second half, the lack of authoritive narrative voice necessitated by the project's tricksy conceit resulting in a reduced punch to the wartime scenes. Also, the film's climax, designed no doubt to drain you of every tear, left your head-scratching hack with mixed feelings difficult to describe without revealing the 'twist'.

This isn't to say the film isn't worth watching - the first half is brilliantly enough executed to merit the ticket cost alone, James McEvoy is often sensational as the passionate private and Keira Knightley delivers her most effective performance to date, as well as looking suitably fetching in a wet slip. Would also add another rider that this may be a movie that merits a second or third viewing to fully appreciate all the nuances in a script that strives to work on several levels, so perhaps it should be a case of least said, soonest mended.

Lo-Fi Foe Fun

Hallam Foe, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday September 1 2007, 1.20pm.

If we take our binoculars to the cinematic past, we can trace the theme of the voyeur who becomes inextricably drawn into the lives of those he observes right back to Hitchcock's Rear Window through to Antonioni's Blow Up; Coppola's The Conversation and dePalma's American Psycho-inspiring Body Double. But whereas Jimmy Stewart's crippled detective, David Hemmings' flash photographer, Gene Hackman's crumpled surveillance expert and Craig Wasson's knicker-sniffing perv were all men of a certain age who'd lost their way, David MacKenzie's Hallam Foe (2007) seeks to realign the conceit within the context of a coming-of-age story.

Jamie Bell plays the seventeen-year-old title character who has responded to the mysterious death by drowning of his mother so badly he lives in a treehouse where he spies on his family, neighbours and also courting couples, whom he sometimes descends upon and frightens wearing a badger's head. His eccentric behaviour is more or less tolerated until the departure of his sister backpacking and a clumsy fumble with his possibly sinister stepmum (Claire Forlani) see him packed off to Edinburgh where he spies a young woman (Sophia Myles) who is a doppelganger of his late mum. In true cinematic stalking style he connives his way into a job as a kitchen porter in the hotel where the woman works in Human Resources, and finds a convenient clocktower vantage point to point his binoculars into the bedroom window of her flat. Can Foe keep a grip on his sanity and his feet on the ground long enough to make a proper connection with this troubled woman and find the answer as to what really happened to his mother?

That Hallam Foe is a difficult film to categorise is both its biggest weakness and greatest strength. While it makes the film a difficult sell, the tension that's created by the uncertainty right until the very end as to whether the movie will climax darkly or larkily gives the project the requisite edge to co-exist with a soundtrack drenched in Domino Records' back-catalogue (with the bonus of a fresh Franz Ferdinand track that plays over the end credits). Jamie Bell is convincing enough in his character's transformation from puzzled perv to lupine lothario to make his relationship with an older woman plausible, although there are other co-incidences required by the script that are considerably more difficult to swallow. Ultimately however, the film shares with its title character an undeniable oddball charm that helps assuage reasonable reservations, succeeding where MacKenzie's previous effort Young Adam failed in making you care for the consequences of the troubled protagonists. I spy a winner.

Some Dandy Talking

The Walker, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday August 25 2007 4.35pm.

Paul Schrader's The Walker (2007) features Woody Harrelson as Carter Page III, the son of a famous politician who acts as an escort to a number of rich, bored housewives in Washington DC, liberally sprinkling his conversation with bon mots and tittle-tattle during the games of bridge and cultural excursions that the women's husbands can't be bothered with. Underneath the surface of this existence, however, Carter is gay, balding beneath his toupe and insecure in terms of his relationship with a would-be artist and the shadow cast by his father's reputation. 'I'm not naive, just superficial', he states in his own defence, but this cocooned existence unravels when one of the ladies (senator's wife Kristin Scott Thomas) walks him straight into a murder mystery. Doors are closed in his face as he is forced to choose between disloyalty and dishonesty, in the process having to get to grips with who he is and what he stands for.

Schrader returns to directing one of his own scripts with The Walker and if for no other reason is a must-see for fans of the legendary screenwriter given the multiple references and allusions to his previous work. The most obvious comparison would be American Gigolo given a blue-rinse makeover, with Harrelson's character dispensing not sex but company, an in-demand commodity in a community where relationships are calculated and using rather than steeped in love and empathy. Like Willem Dafoe's drug runner in Light Sleeper he finds his usefulness shortlived and his relationships found wanting when the shit hits the pan. And like Nick Nolte's character in Affliction, Carter Page III finds his life defined in terms of his relationship with his own father and through a murder mystery finds some resolve to do something about it.

Schrader's film begins in unlikely fashion with a genteel game of bridge, but whodunnit tradition would suggest one of his playing partners (performed by Scott-Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and Schrader regular Mary Beth Hurt) are guilty of more than cheating at cards. Yet in a Washington where the senator (another Schrader regular Willem Dafoe) himself states that his wife has a much over-inflated view of her importance within 'the bigger picture', it steadily emerges that it's less a case of 'cherchez la femme' and more a case of 'follow the money'.

So what we have is rogue Schrader business as usual - there is a murder, and there's a mystery, but to all intents they're mutually exclusive, with the former acting as the 'red herring' to allow an exploration of the latter. To clarify, the murder itself ultimately has a predictably mundane explanation, but the deeper mystery Harrelson's character contends with is 'what makes a man what he is' and what he can do about it. Not your obvious multiplex fodder then, but with Schrader's judicious use of music and a script rammed with (political and cinematic) subtext and sharp, incisive dialogue, it's a crackling and defining addition to the oeuvre for one of the few directors left in Hollywood who can be genuinely considered an auteur. And Harrelson breathes new life into his stalling career with a bold and commanding central performance as the titular walker, which could see him take a stroll up the red carpet come Oscartime.

Why Make A Simpsons Movie? D'Ough!

The Simpsons Movie, Odeon Telford, Sunday August 19 2007, 8.15pm.

First off, let's make it clear your cool-on-cartoons correspondent is no Simpsons obsessive. Have laughed along to many a show, and would generally concur it's one of the landmark programmes of our era, but when pubtalk moves to matching gags to particular episodes your huffy hack will quickly look to shift it back to music, football or girls. Yet in what seems a weak summer season, The Simpsons Movie appeared to offer the most palatable blend of brainfood and pop(culture)corn on the multiplex menu.

Belly-laughs start early with an inspired Itchy and Scratchy toon that sets the tone for a satisfying stirfry of slapstick and subversion, although the laugh-o-meter settles down to a steady stream of chucklesome moments without quite ever spilling over into wet-your-pants hilarity. The storyline quite comfortably reaches the running time without feeling like an over-long episode but there's a softer centre to proceedings than usual and a slight tendency to sentimentality probably explained by the need to pander to a broader audience taste than normal.

Most disappointing, perhaps, is that the linear plotline doesn't allow for meatier subplots concerning the fantastic range of supporting characters that have built up over the series. Having typed that, the Simpson movie of my dreams, that would owe as much to Altman and Pynchon than Hanna and Barbera in its holistic and hilarious debunking of a corrupt age, would never get made, let alone released, despite the potential hinted at during some of the best episodes over the years. And so, we're left with the best Simpsons movie we could hope for that would also earn over 100 million bucks at the box office, a pretty good way to spend 90 minutes without ever approaching the greatness of landmark cinematic toons like Toy Story or The Incredibles.

Body Doublin' in Bloddy Dublin

The Tiger's Tail, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Sunday June 10 2007, 3.50pm.

One of those films that have stuck in your correspondent's mind from his youth, as much for the premise as the execution, is Basil Dearden's The Man Who Haunted Himself(1970) in which Roger Moore plays a man who becomes drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with an identical double following a high-speed car crash. The doppelganger steadily infiltrates himself into the man's life, impersonating him at home and at work, infuriatingly becoming more popular and charismatic than his victim before ultimately displacing his alter ego.

It's an idea which veteran director John Boorman has returned to in The Tiger's Tail (2006), opting to play for laughs rather than search for thrills by using the premise as a broad satire on contemporary Dublin, which as well as being the home of Twenty and Arseblogger, has the biggest divide between rich and poor in Europe. The film is bookended by two huge traffic jams, and it's in the first of these where Brendan Gleeson's avaricious business developer gets the initial glimpse of his double. Troubled by thoughts that this vision is a portend of imminent death, his life and sanity steadily unravel as the usual comic complications lead to him trading places with his doppelganger, sending him on a quest to get to the bottom of the mystery and in the process uncovering the lies, hypocrisy, peccadillos and corruption of modern Dublin.

Notionally a comedy, The Tiger's Tail works hard to incorporate some serious themes but present them in a likeable, inclusive manner. This ambition ultimately works against the film, however, as the breezy pace dictates a lack of subtlety which will leave some viewers feeling patronised, and indeed, in the case of the ill-conceived scene where Kim Cattrall's character joyfully acquiesces to the usurper's 'rape', mortally offended. A shame, because there's much to like about the film, and with a straighter telling and more thoughtful plotting there would have been potential for a something near to Boorman at his best. As it is, though, Dead Kenny is afraid to report the arrival of nothing more significant than an interesting misfire.

Tiswas

Various fashion, music, multimedia retail outlets, Birmingham, Saturday June 2 2007, 11am-4pm.
Lisa Milroy/Steven Shearer, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Saturday June 2 2007, 4.15pm approx.
Zodiac, Cineworld, Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday June 2 2007, 5.15pm.
Actress and Bishop, Birmingham, Saturday June 2 2007, 9.30pm-2am.

Having stopped overnight in Brum following the Emily Haines gig and with only the vaguest plans for meeting up with people this evening, your correspondent finds himself in the unusual but not unwelcome situation of having some time to spare to mooch around the Second City at leisure. With payday just having passed, this inevitably means checking out record shops, in this case picking up the debut album by The Pigeon Detectives (as big, dumb, and fun as you'd ever want a big dumb fun record to be) and the latest by The Cribs (better than we'd ever have given them credit for being capable of achieving) and searching for that perfect pair of trainers that probably only exist inside our own twisted imaginations.

Then take a stroll alongside the canals in the glorious sunshine before popping into the always civilised prospect of the Ikon Gallery. Lisa Milroy's exhibition is pleasant enough but in your philistine hack's view her art would be better suited to posh greetings cards than prestigious galleryspace. Canadian Steven Shearer's exhibition on the top floor was more involving, kind of like Tracy Emin had she been brought up an androgynous metalhead in 70s Canada with a Lief Garret fixation. The photocollages are a bit like browsing a schizoid's scrapbook, which is probably what all modern art should be like, don't you think?

Head to the Cineworld with a bit of time to spare for a drink but find the bar upstairs closed, so have to queue up for half an hour for an ice-cream while a disorientated woman gets personal tuition from the bemused attendant on how to write a cheque before discovering she doesn't have a relevant bankcard. This for £12's worth of chocolates and fizzy drink! So end up only just getting into the auditorium on time to see David Fincher's Zodiac which follows the investigations by detectives Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards plus maverick journalist Robert Downey Jr and geeky cartoonist Jake Gylenhaal into the identity of a serial killer in the late 60s/early 70s. Fincher makes an avowed point of not exploring the motivations of these clearly obsessed individuals in favour of meticulous attention to the details of this fascinating case that was never properly resolved. His direction is less self-consciously edgy than previous efforts like Fight Club and Se7eN but this more straightforward mise-en-scene only accentuates the creepy and cold-blooded nature of the murders, making for an utterly engrossing thriller that'll keep you properly gripped throughout the epic length.

Get some food on the go before heading back to the hotel to freshen up then meet up with Ben, Jenni, Alison, Kirsten, Jim, Adam and several other fine people, for drinks outside the Actress and Bishop, during which time your swaying hack gets everybody's names mixed up (even inventing a few) and stabs a hole right through Jenni's foot with a metal chair. Then most of us head chez Kirsten for drunken karaoke, at which point Dead Kenny would like to say if you were woken up near Birmingham in the wee small hours by some berk bellowing Chesney Hawkes' 'The One And Only' and/or Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' he's really very, very sorry.

Week Sequel

28 Weeks Later, Odeon Telford, Wednesday 23 May 2007, 5.20pm.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later is the belated sequel to Danny Boyle's britzombie hit 28 Days Later, in which the US military supervise the reintegration of the population into a UK given the all-clear after that dashed inconvenient plague we witnessed in the earlier film. Your correspondent feels it doesn't exactly spoil the plot to advise things go very hairy-pear-shaped before too long.

This sequel shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of the original - the photography, effects and acting are first-rate throughout and the action moves with commendable zip, but after a brilliant opening set-up, you find your interest steadily dissipating despite the steady gorestream of thrills, spills and faceaches. A major reason for this is the fact that none of the characters ever feel fully developed before they meet their icky end - although this builds suspense in one sense (you're never sure who's going to get infected next), ultimately it works against the film's effectiveness by breeding apathy in the viewer for the fate of the individuals concerned.

The cumulative effect feels like being immersed in a technically impressive live-action shoot-em-up video game, and after a while the audience becomes inevitably deadened to the viscera and entrails flung at them with increasing frequency. You couldn't really blame any of them for hankering for some interaction and popping out for a Wii.

Family Circles

Dans Paris, Curzon Soho, London, Saturday May 12 2007, 12 noon.
That Face, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, Saturday May 12 2007, 4pm.

Christophe Honore follows up his impressive, if controversial, adaptation of Georges Bataille's Ma Mere with a friskier, more accessible look at similar themes in the recently released Dans Paris. Gallic thesps Louis Garrel and Romain Duris play two brothers who react in dramatically divergent ways to their sister's suicide under the morose but watchful gaze of their chain-smoking dad (played by veteran Guy Marchand).

With editing, atmospherics and an impish sense of fun redolent of the Nouvelle Vague, Honore has succeeded in making a heartwarming film about loss and a charming film about depression. These things shouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the fact your correspondent watched it with his very own eyes, an indefinable treat offering another cinematic love letter to the French capital city as well as introducing us to the restorative powers of Kim Wilde's 'Cambodia' and the veritable va va vroom of Helena Noguerra as the Scooter Girl.

Later that afternoon mooched over to the Royal Court Theatre to see Polly Stenham's debut play That Face which has something of Ma Mere about it, given the semi-incestuous nature of the relationship between a drunken woman (Lindsay Duncan) and her intense son (Matt Smith) following the family's abandonment by her husband for foreign climes and an exotic new bride.

The play begins with the younger sister (the diminuitive but dynamic Fliss Jones, playing below age) using her mother's drugs to assist her head of dorm (Catherine Steadman, stealing every scene she's in so much one half expected to see her exit stage left with a veritable swag bag) in an initiation ceremony that borders on Guantanamo-style torture, but as the play builds it's pretty clear she's the saner one in the family. In the second half of the play the absent father returns as a kind of self-styled deus ex machina, a tidy man come to tidy them up and away, but can the debris from this broken family be swept under the carpet that easily?

Staged in the Jerwood Theatre upstairs in 'the round', there's no hiding place for the cast and 40-capacity audience alike, giving your hack a ringside seat to the melodramatics that don't even allow a let-up during the scene changes (although we do get Sleater-Kinney, The Pipettes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs via an onstage iPod during the intermission, a welcome first). The boxing analogy is in fact a good way of describing the strengths and weaknesses of the characters and the play itself, with lots of good points being scored without ever quite delivering that knockout punch. Despite these flaws, the 20-year-old playwright Stenham and the hugely committed cast and production team should be applauded for providing a genuinely unforgettable experience.

Love, Death, etc.

Terry Johnson's Hysteria, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham, Saturday May 5 2007, 2.30pm.
The Painted Veil, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday May 5 2007, 5.40pm.
StrangeTime, The Spotted Dog, Digbeth, Birmingham, Saturday May 5 2007, 9.30pm.

Having seen Terry Johnson's last couple of plays (Hitchcock Blonde, Piano/Forte) down in London, your correspondent was curious to see the Brum Rep's revival of an older play of his, namely Hysteria, a farcical fictionalisation of a brief meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali during the twilight of the psychologist's years. Johnson again blends highbrow and lowbrow elements, with crude and anachronistic farce set against philosophical and moral musings on religion, psychotherapy and familial abuse. Despite some committed performances and brilliant set design, however, Dead Kenny remained unconvinced that these disparate elements gelled. There is a staggering sequence where the whole set 'melts' into a nightmarish Daliesque tableau vivant that is worth the price of admission alone, but it's just a shame that the play that wraps around it is often so deeply silly.

Then popped across the street to a sports bar to check on West Ham's result against Bolton (a 3-1 victory, ta for asking, but more about the footie after the season's over) where the barstaff seemed more intent on playfighting than serving your anxious hack (they were both uncommonly attractive so it was a pleasing enough distraction as our eyes darted across the multiple Sky Sports screens to establish the necessary scoreline). The Hammers lived to fight another day, on the pitch or in the court still to be decided, so a calming bottle of Bud was dispatched before heading to Cineworld.

John Curran's The Painted Veil (2006), adapted from a Somerset Maugham book, starts off as a study of the passive aggression that lies behind the stiff upper lip of the repressed Englishman, before offering up some hope that redemption can be found in just, y'know, trying to get on a bit better. Edward Norton does a good job of an English accent as the prissy cuckolded biologist who insists on taking his errant wife (Naomi Watts) to cholera-infested Shanghai with slightly unpredictable results. As perhaps could be expected, the film's not exactly a barrel of giggles, but emerged as that rarest of period-piece literary adaptations - something with a whiff of real life about it.

Having stomached a day of death and disease, your cultural correspondent was in the mood for hard liquour, good company and some rattling guitar tunes, so braved the daunting mugger's paradise of the bridge by Moor St Station to reach the oasis of The Spotted Dog (just off Bordesley Street, second city geography fact fans) in time to catch StrangeTime enthralling the Barfly-feeder pub's clientele with a fiesty and engaging set. The rumbling menace of newish song 'Sirens'(?) and spiky splendour of 'Magnet' (pulled from the Kate Finch solo oeuvre) nestled flirtatiously with older numbers like 'Lust' and 'Ex-Boyfriend', before debut single 'Personality Disorder' (available for download from just about evey reputable download source from May 24, record release fact afficionados) gave us the happiest of happy finishes.

Hysteria runs at the Birmingham Rep until May 12. The Painted Veil on general release at cinemas nationwide now. StrangeTime next play live at The Actress & Bishop in Birmingham on May 25.

Shropshire Blue

Straightheads, Telford Odeon, Saturday April 28 2007, 4.30pm.

So the truth is finally out there: The X Files' Gillian Anderson has nipples you can hang your overcoat upon. Little else stands out in Dan Reed's debut feature Straightheads, however, leaving you with the impression of watching a Cronenberg with all the cleverness, subtlety and characterisation surgically removed.

Filmed in Bridgnorth, Shropshire (close to the Parallax View homestead), Anderson stars as a posh businesswoman who improbably takes her bit-of-rough CCTV installer (Danny Dyer, laughably playing 23) to a country-house party. Afterwards they indulge in some al fresco rumpy-pumpy before driving home, their enjoyable evening rudely interrupted by a collision with a deer followed by a vicious beating and gruesome rape at the hands and loins of some uniquely banal goons. The next morning the deer gets up and walks away, Dyer's lost an eye and his sex-drive while Anderson is left shaken but stirred into vengeance.

We suppose the warning signs were there with the lack of pre-publicity for this film and the unusually short (80m) running time, hinting at as much panic and confusion behind the scenes as there is up on screen. To be fair, up until the halfway mark you feel there is a decent chance the movie will morph into something gripping and surreal but the plot reveals itself as something of a bulimic breakfast, wanting its cake (Gillian buttfucks a baddie with a shotgun) and to take everything back (there's a half-hearted anti-violence message tacked on at the end). Clearly wanting to be a controversial psychological thriller in the mould of Straw Dogs; Irreversible and Switchblade Romance, the lack of an original idea in its' head just leaves it seeming merely strange - not so much a horror movie as simply unpleasant.

Blondes Have More Hun

Black Book, Telford Odeon, Tuesday April 17 2007.

Mention director Paul Verhoeven's name and most people will think of the sci-fi satires (Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers) and fulsome fleshfeasts (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) that characterised his Hollywood output for the best part of the last 20 years. And yet the Dutch director initially made his name in his homeland with World War 2 epics like 1979's Soldier Of Orange, and he's used his tinseltown thump to return to another wartime romp in the Netherlands, but this time with a budget to match its' scope. Whereas Verhoeven's last film, Hollow Man (2000), was widely derided for being a largely empty vessel signifying nothing, his new work Black Book manages the difficult trick of feeling weighty while keeping the action and plot twists running at breakneck pace throughout.

The story features Carice van Houten as a wealthy Jewish singer who sees her entire family slaughtered in an SS trap during a botched escape to Belgium. She falls in with the local resistance movement, and one all-over peroxide makeover later, passes herself off as a blonde and soon has the local Gestapo chief slobbering over her stamp collection. Before you can say Allo, Allo, she's working undercover (and indeed, under the covers) at the Gestapo HQ, and then things start getting really complicated when some Resistance colleagues are captured and tortured. Can she help rescue her compatriots without blowing her cover? Will she fall in love with the cultured, compassionate Gestapo chief or the dashing but decidedly cold crackshot doctor working for the Resistance? Will she be able to convince the nation of her good intentions when working undercover, or will she be slurred as a collaborator, and will she ever found out how and why her family were led to their slaughter?

Black Book manages to tie up all these plot points and more in a hugely satisfying manner without ever feeling facile. While never doubting the evil of the Nazi regime or the noble stoicism of the Resistance cause, the film isn't afraid to portray some of the Gestapo as gregarious and fun-loving, nor members of the Resistance as opportunistic and self-serving, with the level of double and triple-crossing dizzying by the denouement. The result is a film as simultaneously thrilling and sobering as war itself, with the starring role providing the astonishing van Houten with the biggest breakout since The Great Escape. As for Verhoeven, he may well have just made the film of his fascinating career, perhaps sharing in common with his heroine the belief that the end will always justify the means.

Black Book will be available in the UK to buy or rent on DVD from April 30.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Sunshine, Odeon Telford, Saturday April 7 2007, 1pm.

Set so far in the future that concerns about global warming are so last century, Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007) sees a crack team of pan-global specialists sent into space to explode a star into the golden-oldie sun to give it a bit of a kick-start after it shows signs of being a little poorly and thus scheduled to condemn Planet Earth to a dark, cold future uninhabitable by mankind.

Therefore, to summarise, we're in a future where folks are either so clever they've devised ways of defying the laws of physics, or there's simply just better access to a greater range of mind-bending drugs. Maybe it's the latter, because all this bright science stuff notwithstanding, multitasking clearly isn't possible - there's only one person on board who actually knows how to press the few buttons needed to detonate 'the payload' so just as well that the puny physicist concerned is played by the film's best known star (28DL's Cillian Murphy).

I know what you're thinking - Dead Kenny, you're not taking this movie anywhere near seriously enough! And you're probably right, because Sunshine is best enjoyed as the live-action equivalent of a particularly po-faced episode of Fireball XL5. The acting is competent, the visuals suitably stunning, the special effects appropriately retina-scorching and the action is moderately gripping throughout without ever quite setting the heart pacing. This is at least partly due to the lack of real depth given to any of the jeopardised characters, the absence of foregrounding seriously damaging the film's attempted volte-face into theological/spiritual areas towards the genuinely strange denouement.

The result is a movie which supplies efficient entertainment but whose surface sheen and shorthand cool can only mask for so long a fundamental lack of brains, heart and soul. This proves a fatal flaw, condemning Sunshine to forever remain in the shadow of superior space operas like 2001, Solaris and Silent Running.

A Slow, Uncomfortable Screw

Inland Empire, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, Monday April 2nd, 2.30pm.

The taxi driver hurtling me away from the Midlands Art Centre is in a talkative mood. He asks me what I've been up to, and I tell him I've been to see a film, Inland Empire. The conversation doesn't stop there, as he asks me what it was about. He had to ask me this one, and about this particular film.

It's about an old Polish gypsy story, the film adaptation of which was abandoned when the two leads got murdered. Now director Jeremy Irons is trying to get the project off the ground again, casting Laura Dern in the lead, only she doesn't know that yet because it doesn't happen until tomorrow. Laura's husband's the jealous type, but her romantic lead-to-be (played by Justin Theroux) is a priapic playboy with a glint in his eye and wandering hands. Laura's batty neighbour (Grace Zabriskie) foretells trouble and murder. There's also a rabbit sitcom going down, a chorus line of finger-clicking hookers dancing to 'The Locomotion', various Eastern European gangsters scowling menacingly, and a mesmerised Julia Ormond looking to stick a screwdriver into somebody, although she hasn't been told who or when yet.

In other words, David Lynch is back up to his usual tricks. And yet this is a pure and powerful hit of the writer/director at his most wilfully indulgent, unsugared by the lush cinematography, memorable villains and graphic nudity that kept mainstream audiences gripped to previous works like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. At 3hr 9min it's his longest film since Dune, set at a very deliberate pace that some might describe as 'slow' and is mostly shot with poor-definition digital camera that almost give it a 'home movie' feel. As with Mulholland Dr., at its centre is an actress in jeopardy in the dense and hazardous Wonderland of Hollywood, a film within a film which may well be a within a further film, where time, location, identity and perspective can shift from one scene to the next.

Of course I say none of these things, and decide to fall back on Lynch's own plot summary. So I shrug my shoulders and say 'it's about a woman in trouble'. The driver seems relieved with this answer, maybe my earlier silence was disturbing him. But the holiday traffic is thick so his interlocution continues.

'But is it any good?'

A difficult one to measure. As defiant an arthouse picture as anything Lynch has done since Eraserhead, how you will respond to this film will depend on how you feel about sitting through a 3hr film where the nearest thing to plot structure is 'a woman in trouble' and very little else will make sense at first sitting. And yet is there a more compelling premise in the history of narrative than a pretty lady in peril? In truth, Lynch challenges our patience to the optimum level, but does succeed in pulling together a compelling film from unlikely constituent parts, the ineffable quality of much of the periphery proving once again not to be his flaw but his genius.

The driver reminds me the meter's still running as I shrug again. 'Probably for hardcore fans only', I tell him.

'Hardcore, eh? I'll definitely be checking it out then!' he laughs, as he keeps my change.

Confused? He certainly will be.