Films Seen - January 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

CLOVERFIELD (43) (dir., Matt Reeves) Michael Stahl-David, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller Here's a "Cyprus Mail" piece on this and two other action/horror movies (all three opened on the same weekend), with unofficial thanks and kudos to Tim Lucas for the quote. Guess I might've liked this more if I thought it was genuinely critical of its heroes (as many claim), but the running commentary aims squarely at affectionate frat-boy humour and such details as ending the lovers' lives on exchanged "I love you"s before the bombs fall reek of contrivance, breaking any semblance of reality. Mostly, however, it's what I mention in the piece - home-video footage isn't that chilling, or dramatically meaningful, if we're not watching people losing their minds, i.e. if their inner world isn't being distorted to match the closed-off solipsism of the style. Doing a straightforward monster movie in YouTube style just looks like a gimmick. And it is.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT (62) (dir., David Slade) Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston Here's that "Cyprus Mail" piece again [see CLOVERFIELD], the link taking you about halfway through. Based on this and HARD CANDY, Slade does seem to have a certain style - a penchant for excess balanced by emphasis on behavioural detail, a talent for intensity, and a taste for tension in oppressive spaces. Also a black sense of humour; I'd like to see him try an out-and-out comedy, actually.

SMILEY FACE (62) (dir., Gregg Araki) Anna Faris, John Krasinski, Adam Brody Try reading this as a tale of a Marxist manquée who's lost her way, lost sight of her ideals and ended up at the mercy of the capitalist system, as deeply in thrall to the ways of the market - the tyranny of supply and demand - as the immigrant workers in a sausage factory; "Whoa, that was intense!". Faris is almost the whole show, fairly irresistible as she debates with her stoned self, turns on a dime from laid-back to hyper and somehow manages to get an entire busload of people mad at her ("Whew, that was a close one!"); she's more of a freak than Harold and Kumar - and wasting her life more obviously - which is why this is sharper and less smug, though its ultimate design as DVD-accessory of choice in the nation's dorm-rooms is obvious. I quote "rumen-maney" from Bulgaria at the IMDb: "The plot is rather easy to understand. The lack of complexity makes it a pleasant experience for everyone who would appreciate the humor in drug use. Anna Faris describes the condition of a high person more accurate than expected." Yes.

JOSHUA (72) (dir., George Ratliff) Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga, Jacob Kogan, Celia Weston As I wrote about THE OMEN two years ago: "There’s a more chilling film buried deep inside this lurid, foolish one, a horror film about loving parents trying to cope with a severely autistic child - the mystique of motherhood for Dynamic 00s Woman, and how it founders on the rock of the most ungrateful child ever." There's a lot of that in this creepy little number, though it's father- more than motherhood and the boy could be autistic, or crypto-gay ("You're playing like a little girl!" yells a soccer dad from the sidelines in the opening scene) or something else entirely, Dad's upward mobility and the personification of the gap between where he started and where he'd like to be (the reading that he's ended up with a devil-child after having turned away from God and married a "big fat Jew" should be taken with a grain of salt, given Ratliff's HELL HOUSE). Best of all, the boy is a scapegoat, even a solution to the problem of the imploding family, and the film's genius lies in piling on the everyday pressures - wife in post-partum depression, she and mother-in-law at each other's throats, couple's sexual life on the rocks, newborn baby endlessly crying, work going badly, unsympathetic boss making threats - then transferring all that intractable tension to the satisfying (even strangely reassuring) horror-film conceit that it's all being stage-managed by weird little Joshua; if THE OMEN was all text with suggestions of subtext, this is all subtext with the text acting as a foil and dramatic punchline. Ratliff plays an expert cat-and-mouse game, often switching the POV so we identify with the boy - see e.g. his secret little smile when he's introduced to the child psychologist - then switch back to his good-natured, slowly-crumbling father, so different to his stiff unemotional son; the big thriller set-pieces ('Hide and seek' is especially nail-biting) work because they're suffused with something more than threat, the creeping awareness that threat is shorthand for other kinds of emotional breakdown and miscommunication - and the sadness of knowing that what we ultimately have here is a failed family ("You know, you don't have to love me," pleads Joshua poignantly). Deeply disturbing, incredibly depressing; and I'm not even a parent.   

QUIET CITY (56) (dir., Aaron Katz) Erin Fisher, Cris Lankenau, Joe Swanberg Guess I only liked mumblecore for the comedy value after all, or maybe I liked its Rohmer aspects - i.e. tales of self-delusion - whereas this is more like BEFORE SUNRISE, a tale of fragile connection, down to its youthful duo bonding by playing games (a.k.a. avoidance techniques) together, the pinball machine in SUNRISE replaced by silly hats, a megaphone, a piano keyboard - "It sounds like a real song!" - or just grabbing any random prop and fooling around with it. More self-conscious than others of its ilk about being young and "our generation", though it's once again the tenuousness of these post-adolescents that's a little surprising, the frequent apologies and fierce respect for each other's space; guess I've never quite believed them to be real, which is why I prefer Bujalski and Swanberg's hints of desperate farce to this earnest observation - in fact I may even prefer those directors' non-style to Katz's semi-style, which often feels over-lit and aggressively colour-corrected. Mildly gripping nonetheless, but Lankenau's passing resemblance to Martin Donovan acts as a reminder that TRUST was doing the rough equivalent 17 years ago - and just look at it.   

MICHAEL CLAYTON (71) (dir., Tony Gilroy) George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack Maybe the producers are the real auteur(s) here, bracketing this with other Soderbergh-Clooney joints like KEANE and SYRIANA - films that flaunt their unsentimentality (perhaps a bit too strenuously), shy away from improving Messages or larger Statements, and maintain a brisk, workmanlike, slice-of-life tone from bustling beginning to memorably abrupt ending. Nothing too world-shattering here - I guess it's more of a 68 - but bonus points added for not being what I feared it would be, viz. a tale of a corporate hustler who Develops a Conscience; instead it's the tale of a corporate hustler who does what it takes to save his skin, incidentally (and perhaps inadvertently) does some good, and may, as the credits roll, be taking a look at his soiled empty life and finding a hollow shell (whether he'll ever do anything about it is another story). A film of hard-boiled dialogue, weathered professionals talking in no-nonsense tones - "I'm not arguing with you. I'm telling you how it is" - a film where a concerned father doesn't tell his young son he's special, or how much Daddy loves him, but simply reassures him that he's tough (not weak) so he'll be fine; a film of slick urban surfaces (neon lights, gleaming streets), a film - this is the good part - of insecurities beneath the show of confidence. The client-in-trouble played by Denis O'Hare blusters to conceal how scared he is, Swinton's ice-cold exec practises her speech endlessly in front of the mirror then talks in euphemisms ("our options") with the corporate hitman, and of course Michael Clayton himself wears a snappy George Clooney veneer to disguise the train-wreck of his life. Fluid, almost exposition-free first half-hour - background only starts flooding in at 35 minutes - by itself makes it worth seeing.  

RAMBO (56) (dir., Sylvester Stallone) Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze It's the final third of the "Cyprus Mail" piece, following on from CLOVERFIELD and 30 DAYS OF NIGHT [see above]. Rating doesn't really reflect my inappropriate glee at seeing something so unreconstructed and apparently Time-warped - and it's also I think quite well-made, in a "cinema fist" kind of way (the attack on the village is certainly vivid). Don't know if it's just the movie-star-director link but I kept thinking Mel Gibson, without the Catholic guilt but with much the same avowal of violence as inextricable part of human nature. Tasteless, problematic, crypto-racist (note how the Asian mercenary is the first to get it), generally wrong, and a guilty pleasure.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL (58) (dir., Craig Gillespie) Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner Is there some committee that decides these things, sending scripts back with neat red-inked scrawls reading "not clear enough" and "what's his motivation?"? This is surprisingly effective in the first half, when the town seems inclined (for no obvious reason, except Capraesque solidarity) to take Lars at his word, but gets steadily less interesting as an explanation for his weird behaviour becomes more explicit - viz. the whole sex-doll thing is his way of growing up, acting out a relationship in his head before he can launch himself on a real relationship. Increasingly tired, leavened only by good performances: Mortimer does wonders with a stock role, Schneider's way of changing course in mid-sentence is fast becoming one of Indiewood's secret pleasures, and Gosling himself - dapper moustache, polite blink and smile, mildly alarming eye-tic - comes off as Rupert Pupkin played by Chance the Gardener.

ATONEMENT (48) (dir., Joe Wright) James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai Rating may be unreliable, because I've read the Ian McEwan novel this is based on - a rare event for me these days; not only has my reading-time plummeted but the few books I read are mostly oldies, and hardly ever the Booker-fodder that translates into Oscar-fodder - and didn't think much of it, so the film just felt like a brisk-but-bland encapsulation of events I already knew about (and didn't find very interesting to begin with). Second viewing worked better but it's still bland, the sprightly wall-to-wall score (reminiscent of Richard Robbins' for Merchant-Ivory) underlining everything, a key line - "There is no Briony" - repeated just to make sure, even the good scenes slightly overdone (the Marshall-Lola conversation should've lost that silly "Bite it ... You have to bite it", McEwan or no); and of course the big Dunkirk travelling-shot is a disaster, second only to the lap-dance in DEATH PROOF for Year's Most Misjudged Sequence, calling attention to scale and spectacle when we need to stay in Robbie's fragmented consciousness; show-off cinema at its showiest. The ending works better than it did in the book - where it seemed rather bloodless and academic - and Wright does have a flair for simple melodrama (more poetic effects, like the "Clair de Lune" moment, are another matter); the meta-layers of writers and characters, an artist's responsibility to the world (s)he observes, the essential misanthropy of creation (Briony complaining that a play "depends on other people"), the suggestion that movie reality might all be a story taking place in a writer's head, are all intriguing if rather half-hearted - but the central romance is weak, Knightley's a flouncy well-spoken mannequin (whatever happened to that unexpected spark from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?), and her scene with McAvoy in the restaurant seems to me the worst kind of fake, moist-eyed emoting. In the end, a tempest in a teacup, the tale of a girl who does something thoughtless and later wishes she hadn't; watch for a surprise CHARIOTS OF FIRE-style Oscar victory as it fills the need for easily-assimilable 'classy' drama and the two fanboy faves split the edgy vote.       

CONTROL (51) (dir., Anton Corbijn) Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Alexandra Maria Lara Standard biopic with one fascinating slant, which may not even be part of the movie (in fact, it probably isn't) - viz. the suspicion that Deborah Curtis, the Cynthia Lennon type on whose memoir the film is based, either couldn't see how special her husband was or chose to bury his specialness out of rage at his betrayal and/or to burnish her own sense of Victimhood. Certainly, what we see of Ian Curtis is refreshingly ordinary - quiet and not too articulate, like the guy in LAST DAYS, but more socialised; a writer, basically, an observer from the sidelines, a fan of both Wordsworth and David Bowie - and the whole film agreeably understated, though also pretty boilerplate. Frustrated young hero, depressed Northern town in the 70s. The Sex Pistols. "Look, it's Tony Wilson!" "So you're looking for a singer, then?..." [pause for song] "'Joy Division', eh? What's that about?" [pause for song] Enter Belgian chick. Deborah looking worried: "Ian ... Please come to bed." Rock star life vs. new baby. "Got it, Ian, it's good ... It's fuckin' great, actually!" [pause for song] Epilepsy. "It's all coming apart." [poignant pause for song] "I have no control anymore. I don't know what to do." Stage show collapses. Marriage collapses. Depression. Alienation. Death.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (57) (second viewing: 62) (dir., Sidney Lumet) Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei "May you get to Heaven half an hour..." is the prelude to the title, but Heaven doesn't really come into it - at best it's the half-hour of not being found out, before everything goes completely to pieces. A better title might've been "The World is an Evil Place" - a line spoken by one of the characters, and a fair approximation of the film's self-conscious doominess; plays like a spiral of misery with everyone on the verge of exploding, sometimes powerful but curiously unmemorable, leaving just a few stray observations two weeks later. (1.) Is it just the knowledge of Lumet behind the camera that visually recalls his older work (esp. circa PRINCE OF THE CITY)? Light is hot, highlights often burned-out, soundtrack slightly muddy, compositions wide, often including such things as the neon lamps in the ceiling (looking like a newsroom or police station). (2.) Hawke and Hoffman really don't convince as brothers, and it's not (just) physical resemblance - the actors' expressions and body language suggest different backgrounds: Hawke's neurotic alertness always seems touchy-feely (and very urban), whereas Hoffman's slow-burning craftiness suggests hardier, more reserved, possibly more rural stock (maybe I'm just projecting on the actors' personae, but e.g. imagine the Ethan role played by an actor like Sam Rockwell, who's similarly squirrelly but closer to Hoffman's deliberate movements and slight air of vacancy). (3.) Not exactly news that Time-shuffling structure is trendy, but this variation - leaving a scene then returning a few minutes later, when we know what's at stake - seems especially popular this year, see also ATONEMENT. (4.) I've been racking my brain trying to recall where I've seen this editing gimmick before - transitions between scenes via short, repeated bursts of cross-cutting between the end of Scene A and the beginning of Scene B - and it finally came to me: EASY RIDER! Sidney Lumet is 82 years old...[Second viewing: Better on the big screen, maybe because it puts a little air in the oppressive images (they now seem artful, whereas watching on TV felt like walking through a swamp); combination of short scenes and cramped, boxed-in spaces - the way we keep moving from scene to scene, yet finding no relief - is impressively tight and claustrophobic, though it does hit the same note a few times too often. I look forward to many years of watching Michael Shannon enliven dull movies with his irreducible presence.] 

INTO THE WILD (52) (dir., Sean Penn) Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener, Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn Has there ever been a more admirable adventurer? Or a duller one? Forever interested in people, who in turn respond to his aura - a truck-driver gives him a pair of boots, a pair of hippies treat him like a son, a homeless-shelter woman thinks he's charming - because "being footloose has always exhilarated us". Forever pantheistically lusting after "new experience", from white-water rafting to riding the rails. Consciously confronting his fears, going against a life ruled by Reason - and splendidly responsible when it comes to statutory rape, even after several (apparently) sexless months on the road. Supposedly a case of Blame the Parents, but our hero has none of the emotional prickliness or withholding issues associated with growing up dysfunctional (it's suggested he learned to block it out, but even that should've left some scars, maybe a coldness or aloofness) - he gets along with everyone, from rowdy Vaughn to ornery geezer Holbrook, presumably because his real-life family wouldn't have signed off on the project unless they were happy with the portrayal (even his disappearance ended up helping them come to terms with their lives, claims the sister-narrator). Admittedly he doesn't commit to any of the friends he meets, admittedly he moves on, admittedly he ends up realising that the key to happiness is other people with whom to share it - and admittedly he stands for a great Romantic tradition, from Byron to Thoreau to Kerouac - but there should've been a Timothy Treadwell insanity in his obsessive quest, whereas he mostly comes off as an exuberant puppy. Penn finds an even, unvarying rhythm which doesn't really help, and the mountains look great if you like looking at mountains.      

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (66) (second viewing: 68) (dir., Paul Thomas Anderson) Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Kevin J. O'Connor My 1000 words for the "Cyprus Mail" turned out better than usual, so here it is; obviously inadequate to describe its visual majesty (especially - yes - on the big screen), though "majesty" shouldn't be confused with "complexity". I still like 20th-century PTA more than 21st-century PTA.

THE SAVAGES (59) (dir., Tamara Jenkins) Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman Meet the Savages. They're maladroit - turning up late for a support-group meeting (so that everyone stares) then eliciting further disapproval by munching prematurely on the snacks for the meeting; yelling vulgar imprecations at each other just as a nice old lady is being wheeled by in her wheelchair; inadvertently showing the offensive blackface number from THE JAZZ SINGER in a room full of deeply offended black people; trying to deal with their senile father in public places, like a plane or a restaurant. Guilt - and its hand-maiden, embarrassment - is a constant refrain, reflecting both the guilt of grown-up children putting half-crazy Dad in an institution (busily telling themselves it's For His Own Good, they're still compassionate people - not savages) and, more implicitly, the unhappy-childhood guilt of always feeling you've done something wrong - because of course unhappy childhood underlies it all, and the film's greatest achievement may be the negative one of not having the sibs open up about the (doubtless abusive) stuff that happened back in the day. Catharsis comes in more indirect ways (the life-affirming bit at the end is surprisingly touching) though it does come, which is slightly disappointing, especially when Linney's messed-up single woman is so smartly-written (her neurotic tug-of-war with her married but well-meaning lover - cling, push away, cling, push away - is a thing of beauty); Sundance indies need to lose this obsession with character trajectory if they're ever going to be truly indie. Thought I'd found some buried "Peter Pan" subtext with the realisation that the immature siblings' names are Wendy and John - just like the Darling kids! - but it seems everyone else found it too.  

GONE BABY GONE (74) (dir., Ben Affleck) Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan What d'you know, an honest-to-goodness film noir, albeit in the guise of an urban drama: a private eye, a set-up, a quest, and even the exact same ending as THE MALTESE FALCON (professional duty triumphant), only with romantic-love clichés replaced by the equally tired mantra 'for the sake of the children'. Actually quite wrong in a number of ways, once you think about it - it's wrong that it comes close to freakshow in its picture of working-class life (white-trash shouting matches, close-ups of barflies with bulbous noses, a child-molester who looks like the mutant offspring in THE GOONIES), and it's wrong that Movie Star Ben Affleck accentuates the callousness and grime in an effort to shed his pretty-boy image - but its lurid grip is undeniable and it also works as coded coming-of-age, our hero looking for a child but something of a child himself (everyone remarks on how young he looks). Initially he fits the wry V.O. observation that "it's the things you don't choose that make you who you are", his only asset in the investigation being that he happened to grow up in the neighbourhood - but he finally breaks through, making a conscious choice that defines his life then, in the very last scene, working through the consequences of his actions (unlike the irresponsible mother played by Ryan), incidentally giving meaning to the film's regional emphasis: being "from here" doesn't just mean reflecting your environment, it means giving shape to it - by affecting it, or e.g. by making a film about it. Affleck gets superb performances, and maybe his celebrity helped in that regard, making the actors feel protected - Ed Harris in particular seems more abandoned than usual, shedding his frequent shield of protective cool - but John Toll helps even more: a flicker of light in a pit of blackness makes the death of a child seem chillingly small and mysterious, and the hellish paedophile-den crackhouse, all dirty shadows and half-glimpsed sickening detail, is the stuff of nightmare. 

THE LAST LEGION (57) (dir., Doug Lefler) Colin Firth, Ben Kingsley, Thomas Sangster, Aishwarya Rai Un-ironical boys' adventure for un-ironical boys, featuring arm-wrestling ruffian soldiers, fierce bewhiskered Goths (the nationality, not the lifestyle choice), villainous kings cutting off minions' fingers to Teach Them A Lesson, etc. Lots of killing (but hardly any blood), very little portentous voice-over (just the first few minutes), sword-fights over CGI, peplum heroics over Tolkien-style whimsy - though the sword (Excalibur) is inscribed with the LOTR-sounding "One edge to defend, one to defeat", and it might actually have worked better if Merlin used more of his magic instead of just proclaiming stuff in a bad accent; the young boy is brave, Aishwarya Rai kicks ass Kerala-style, and Colin Firth rather hilariously plays his action hero in the buttoned-up style of his Darcy in BRIDGET JONES. Not exactly good, but nerdy tweens (and cinephiles of a certain age) should enjoy it.

LUST, CAUTION (62) (dir., Ang Lee) Wei Tang, Tony Leung, Joan Chen I'm letting the "Cyprus Mail" review pick up the slack here; blame it on pre-Skandie pandemonium. Besides, I think it covers most of the bases...

GOLDEN DOOR (73) (dir., Emanuele Crialese) Vincenzo Amato, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Francesco Casisa, Filippo Pucillo What will Crialese try next? Anyone who cares about film will gawp at a shot like the emigrants sailing off to the New World, shown as a sea of people literally parting as the ship leaves the dock - the high angle merges the people on deck with the people saying goodbye, so the departing vessel literally looks like a rupture in the fabric of Italian society (which of course is exactly what it was) - and will surely resolve to keep watching whatever this director makes, for as long as he keeps making movies. Plot isn't really his forte, and his ideas are sometimes flashy or done for effect, from the opening credits (in total silence) to the final shot, an extension and elaboration of the one in RESPIRO (crowds and sea, from an unexpected angle) - but the film works as a series of magical-realist coups before also succeeding as deliberately theatrical inversion of the American Dream: the Old World is the place of wide open spaces, the New a cramped warren of interview rooms, corridors and makeshift tribunals. The Old World is also a place of magic (America itself is a superstition, a dream - nurtured by questionable photos - of money trees and vegetables big as houses), Sicily a place - like Sardinia in PADRE PADRONE - where everything seems to be alive with spirits and voices; the New World is "modern", a place of bureaucracy and enforced eugenics - immigrants subjected to tests to ensure no "below-average people" make it in - and I don't know if it'd be more awesome to learn they really did that stuff at Ellis Island, or to learn that they didn't. Crialese, again like the Tavianis, combines a flair for flamboyantly imaginative set-pieces with a warm humorous interest in people (it's significant that he's kept most of the leads from RESPIRO, though the older boy's lost much of his expressiveness) - the salesmen and hustlers besieging the emigrants as they wait at the port, the ritual of formal introductions in the ship's ridiculously cramped living quarters, a line of women combing each other's hair. Started out Admiring Its Technique, then the end just left me reeling.

BLAME IT ON FIDEL (52) (dir., Julie Gavras) Nina Kervel-Bey, Julie Depardieu, Stefano Accorsi Two kinds of film co-existing in this so-so coming-of-ager: one is the kind where living with militantly ideological parents makes for a rough childhood, because militant ideologues tend to make lousy parents (best example: THE MOSQUITO COAST, though more book than film), and the other is the kind where a child grows up, learns to question the world and develops a political conscience. The first kind is apparent in Dad boycotting Disney because "Mickey Mouse is a fascist", or the daughter's increasing despair as the house fills up with glum-looking refugees and she's dragged along to demonstrations, torn between love of parents and hatred of her new life; the second takes over once reconciliation begins ("Dad, what's May '68?") and we get books with titles like "The Right to Live Differently" - and it's doubtless very worthy but nowhere near as dramatic or complex, especially since the little girl is a sharper cookie than the shaggy dissidents around her, or indeed her parents. The film never quite recovers from the moment when she innocently asks what's the difference between their beloved "group solidarity" and just plain groupthink, and they simply gape at her without an answer - making the film's implicit condescension (she's a child, she doesn't understand what it means to Fight for Freedom) seem a little off-putting, though Gavras, to her credit, makes both sides of the argument (even the nuns are nice, just a little closed-minded). Fair-minded and all kinds of sweet, but MOSQUITO COAST ended - like most militant ideologies - in violent conflict whereas this one ends with our little heroine embarking on her first day at a pointedly diverse, multi-culti school (The Right to Live Differently!) surrounded by  happy little classmates of all creeds and colours, and there's something underwhelming about that.

NO END IN SIGHT (60) (dir., Charles Ferguson) The rare documentary where the other side - Rumsfeld, Bremer, etc - is never heard, yet never missed (because we know it, or feel we know it); tells a remarkable story, likely to appear even more remarkable if sealed in a Time-capsule and opened in 50 years for people to gawp at the stuff that went down in Iraq 2003. In itself, thoroughly competent, though rather heavy on support-the-troops-ism - leaning on the James Stewart-like figure of Col. Paul Hughes ("Holy cow!") - and of course blessed with hindsight; not to take anything away from the Bushies' staggering post-war ineptitude, but I'm guessing most of these interviewees weren't quite as vehement in expressing their objections at the time, i.e. before they'd been proved right (it's only natural to have thought 'Who knows, maybe it'll work out' and/or 'Rumsfeld's in charge, I guess he knows what he's doing'). Raise the rating to 80 if you haven't been following the News much over the past five years.

HALF MOON (67) (dir., Bahman Ghobadi) Ismail Ghaffari, Allah-Morad Rashtian, Golshifteh Farahani Haven't watched Ghobadi since A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES, and I guess I've been missing out; somehow thought he was the miserablist-realist of the Iranian school but in fact he's their Kusturica, only more jaundiced and pessimistic than that drunken Yugoslav hellraiser. Sober, and indeed politically meaningful point at the heart of this freewheeling road movie - a Kurdish musician going back to play in Iraq for the first time since Saddam ("All these years they stopped my singing...") - soon gets derailed by a menagerie (incl. an ostrich), a singer whose voice has the power to raise the dead, 1334 women singers standing on the roofs of the barren hill town where they live in exile, etc - though also a harsh worldview where border guards abuse their power, (unseen) American troops are reputed to shoot on sight, and even benign leaders turn dictatorial (not to say homicidal) at the drop of a hat; Death is explicitly everywhere, hence the (presumably deliberate) nod to TASTE OF CHERRY. Ghobadi has a healthy dose of pessimism about things turning out OK (even now, with the dream of Kurdistan closer than ever), which prevents the fanciful stuff seeming too fanciful; the first 20 minutes - featuring cockfights, suspicious wives and Allah-Morad Rashtian as a moustachioed, Falstaffian, Kierkegaard-quoting hustler for the ages - alone makes it worth seeing. 

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (67) (dir., Mike Nichols) Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams A sly comedy, and admittedly it buries its punchline, viz. that the road to 9/11 is paved with Wilson's good intentions - a single shot of Osama bin-Laden might've been enough to make the point - but the tone of ironic amusement is obvious throughout and besides Nichols and Aaron Sorkin have another point to make, viz. that the difference between Then and Now isn't just the rise of militant Islamism but also the rise of American theocracy, the increased willingness (indeed, fervour) to fight a "religious war". The encroaching hand of the Moral Majority is clear in the (farcical) scene where Wilson's briefing on Afghanistan keeps getting sidetracked by the coke-and-strippers charge against him, while earlier he surprisingly refuses to help a religious Texan constituent in a fight against the ACLU, standing up for the separation of Church and State - maybe the bravest thing he does in the whole movie (since the Texan is a big campaign contributor), all the more significant for being extraneous to the plot; nor is there a reason to assume the far-right socialite played by Julia Roberts is supposed to be sympathetic, other than the fact that she's played by Julia Roberts ("Clearly, we're all supposed to find the Texan gal irresistible," claims Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, getting it completely wrong for once), and there's a world of scorn in PSH's low-key demurral when she starts talking God: "Reasonable people can disagree, but I don't see God anywhere within 100 miles of this." "This" is breezy real-world politics, where no-one bats an eyelid at the casual admission that Jewish money buys a lot of politicians for Israel - "Congressmen aren't elected by voters, they're elected by contributors" - or Wilson's convincing explanation for his success, viz. that coming from a sleepy podunk Texas district means he can do everyone else a lot of favours; that said, crediting him with high humanistic ideals is as dubious as the portrait of Zia flanked by Oxbridge-educated generals (the refugee-camp interlude isn't the film's shining moment), and it does protect Wilson at the end, showing that he tried to raise money for peace as well as war. Could've been devastating but it goes for smart entertainment, which is pretty much the worst you can say about it. Hoffman may or may not be a great actor, but the Academy's going to have the best collection of show-stopping scenes in its history when they give him that death's-door career Oscar.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS (52) (dir., Chris Weitz) Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott Not entirely what I expected. The much-hyped LOTR angle is a bust - much more of a straight adventure yarn, with flying airships, kidnapped children and evil scientists carrying out secret experiments in remote labs - and the much-touted atheistic angle is thin as well; if anything it's pro-religion, its villains being the ones who come across as atheists (they're out to conceal the existence of other worlds and deny human beings their souls, here called demons). Apparently a pale shadow of the book, though I doubt I could ever take one of these fantasy quests seriously as quasi-philosophical treatise (probably just an aversion to gigantism; anything with pomp and bombast tends to make me switch off in reaction); in itself, fairly entertaining, with eye-candy shots of e.g. a lone house in a snowy valley or a swarm of witches going to war, filling the sky like broomstick-shaped insects, as well as a cowboy, a baboon, a giant polar bear and a 'Luke I am your father!' moment out of STAR WARS (the demons are fun as well, especially in the battle scenes when they explode in cascades of golden sparks each time someone dies). Lively but uninspired, not even using the titular Compass very cleverly - it's supposed to be read by aligning mystical symbols in a special way to formulate one's question(s), but our heroine mostly 'reads' it by picking it up and seeing a vision of whatever needs to be seen, which is kind of a cop-out. General values impeccably liberal, with Gypsies sympathetic, colleges a last bastion of tolerance, and the "Magisterium" (a.k.a. the Church) a ragbag of hatchet-faced Spanish Inquisition types crying heresy.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS (50) (dir., Jon Turteltaub) Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren Pleasant enough, though every fun moment bumps against (at least) one bone-headed moment. The fun moments are mostly in the last half-hour, intricate action mechanisms - a platform precariously perched on the edge of a cliff, kept in balance by one intrepid explorer on each of its four corners lest they all tumble into the abyss - in the Lost City of Cibola (true confession: the Carl Barks story where Scrooge McDuck and his nephews go looking for Cibola is one of my major formative experiences). Bone-headed moments include, but are not limited to: a gratuitous exchange just before Cage and Co. use a traffic camera to take a photo - "Doesn't this phone have a camera?"; "No, it's broken" - obviously to forestall Joe Pedant asking 'But why didn't they use their phone?'; our hero trying different passwords in a Chinese-puzzle desk, at a juncture when every second counts, and shifting all four numbers when changing from "1819" to "1876" when of course he only has to shift the last two; Jon Voight's stilted line-readings, Diane Kruger's stiffness and Justin Bartha's meaningless role as audience-surrogate; Cage interpreting a vital message based on the key word "resolute" when in fact that's the one word that's been shown to be ambiguous (a pair of French goofy cops almost translate it as "determined", which of course would've stopped the plot right there); Cage straight-facedly declaring, apropos of the desk in the Oval Office, that "some of the brightest men in our country's history have sat at that desk" (maybe it's just fin-de-Bush optimism that fuels its old-fashioned reverence for the Chief Executive: "I believe you're an honourable man," says our hero, and when the President demurs that "No-one believes that anymore", adds "But they want to believe it!"). Just unexciting enough to make you think 'But how did they get the blueprints for Buckingham Palace?' instead of being engrossed in what they plan to do there; Cage's dead-animal haircut - set back on his head, receding hairline augmented by being cut short at the sides, like a monk's tonsure - is another kind of bone-head altogether.   

WE OWN THE NIGHT (70) (dir., James Gray) Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall Most of what I have to say is in the "Cyprus Mail" review, albeit sketchily (as usual), adding only a couple of details like e.g. how can Mark Wahlberg consistently leave the strongest impression in a movie while seeming to do less than anybody else? Also, you have to admire Gray's instincts when he redeems the inevitable Phoenix-Mendes bust-up by staging it with a lampshade obscuring both their faces. Also, thanks to Waz for giving me a handy in and out point.

LADY CHATTERLEY (58) (dir., Pascale Ferran) Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Culloc'h, Hippolyte Girardot Couldn't say how faithful this is to the source (another major gap in my reading), but slow-burning French politesse serves the story well, not to mention their expressively hierarchical language (her lover uses "tu" with Lady C., in mischievous defiance of the social order; her husband uses "vous", in grim acknowledgment of his own inadequacy). Nature - trees, squirrels, bubbling brooks - frames the passionate affair in significant close-ups, standing against all the unnatural things that lead to it - war, social bonds, sexual repression - but the film is too smart to make the gamekeeper a salt-of-the-earth bit of rough; more a case of Lady C. gradually civilising him, enabling their affair to flower into love, implicitly teaching him a thing or two about female pleasure - the emphasis in their first coupling is entirely on her face, looking detached and neglected as he thrusts and moans - at which point they can finally, symbolically get naked. Hopefully not a case of the film's acclaim boiling down to Female Director Subverts the Underlying Male-Gaze Sexism in D.H. Lawrence (because that would be lame), though Ferran's gender doubtless factors into the intimacy of the early scenes, observing our heroine in her private moments (e.g. checking out her body in the mirror) to establish a skilful complicity (she does seem surprisingly modern, e.g. when she cries over baby chicks - no big deal for someone living in the country - or talks with her husband about having a child with someone else; "Whose baby?" "My baby..."). Superbly controlled in the way the affair develops, but I admit I sat up in my chair whenever it (briefly) threatened to become surprising, e.g. the layers of suppressed amusement in the scene with the husband's mobile chair. The romantic ending feels like a mistake, but maybe that is Lawrence.

INTERVIEW (58) (dir., Steve Buscemi) Steve Buscemi, Sienna Miller A guilty pleasure almost to the end - in fact all the way to the end, at least till the closing credits reveal the homage to Theo Van Gogh (which I'd totally forgotten about) and make shallow fun feel misguided, and something of a travesty. You can't pay tribute to an artist killed for his beliefs by intolerant fundamentalists simply by remaking one of his films without further comment - and not just because he wasn't much of a filmmaker, though god knows he wasn't - especially when (a) the role of the media and (b) the West being too distracted by celebrity culture to pay attention to politics are both integral themes in the material; more was needed, not just clever tricks capped by a weak resolution. The pas de deux itself is very enjoyable, and yes it's talky but the talk is lively and performances are spiky, and yes Buscemi's style is glib by his standards but it fits the games-playing plot and besides the style (three-camera set-ups for every scene) is apparently modelled directly on TVG's (and may be more accomplished, judging by what I've seen of TGV). Then again I haven't seen the original, so maybe it's a shot-by-shot, Gus-Van-Sant-PSYCHO kind of remake, as if to say Van Gogh may be gone but his spirit survives undiluted. Which would be interesting.

HALLAM FOE (62) (dir., David Mackenzie) Jamie Bell, Sophia Myles, Ciaran Hinds, Claire Forlani Set in Scotland, but it feels like a Deep South melodrama when teenage Hallam watches a courtin' couple from his treehouse, takes out his little box of treasures then puts on makeup in tribute to his dear departed mama - all before we get to the opening credits (which are wittily animated, and wittily suggest that our hero may just be a bad egg). Carson McCullers would've added more of a payoff - the second half rambles, and Hallam seems a bit too cleansed and healthy at the end of his coming-of-age - but Jamie Bell's sullen dreamy quality is (for once) quite effective, Hallam an introverted boy watching inscrutably, fooling around for his private pleasure, putting on dress and earrings, waving surreally to his own watching self behind the window, sketching a baby suckling on a giant nipple with the creepy plaintive caption "BABY NEEDS BOTH". Also looks great, encased in a soft dusky shell of angle and shadow; is this really the same DP as in BATTLEFIELD EARTH?

AMERICAN GANGSTER (54) (dir., Ridley Scott) Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Josh Brolin, Chiwetel Ejiofor Two and a half hours in search of a theme, and I don't think it finds what it's looking for. Is it about Vietnam, the war that turned a nation upside-down - birthing a world of high-living crooks and impecunious cops (why else the cross-cut between them?), hard-working drug lords sitting down to family dinners while junkies OD on the fruits of their labour? Is it about America itself, forever found at the intersection of pleasure and business - Denzel anticipates corporate culture, establishing brand-names and buying direct from manufacturer - yet always with that undertow of Puritan probity? Is it about two very similar men on opposite sides of the law - a new kind of crook and a new kind of cop, together representing "progress"? Everything is touched on - incl. Denzel's race, and his paradoxical status as Empowered Black Man (*) - nothing is developed, and no-one would care if the film were compulsively watchable but in fact its rhythm is samey, dynamic and/or eye-popping set-pieces conspicuous by their absence (there's action, but nothing too original), and even Harris Savides' photography unremarkable beyond some ersatz 70s fuzziness and keeping Denzel's face strategically dark in some of the early scenes (the better to suggest his coiled hidden power). Never dull but seldom memorable, as well as confirmation that Scott is a bad influence on previously-indestructible Russell Crowe, giving a second tepid performance in two years. Also, did I mis-hear or does the radio commentary really single out "Woody Allen and Diane Keaton" among notable spectators at the Ali-Frazier fight? In 1971? When Woody and Diane were barely known, and wasn't he with Louise Lasser anyway? I'm surprised.

(*) Though he does act white in semi-conscious ways, e.g. bringing over his family to be his associates because that's how "the Italians" do it - except it doesn't work, because his clan are shiftless no-account sharecropper types. Not an irony pointed out by the movie (prone to racist implications, for one thing), but it's there I believe.  

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE (38) (dir., Shekhar Kapur) Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush, Abbie Cornish Elizabeth: The Shackled Years. A bird in a gilded cage, she peers at the world from behind white pancake makeup, longs for excitement ("You're my adventurer!" she tells Walter Raleigh; "You're free to have what I don't have!") even as she runs her court with the brisk efficiency of a headmistress and exchanges crypto-lesbian asides with a lady-in-waiting, makes short work of men yet can never be a Real Woman - as she seems to acknowledge when wistfully cradling someone else's baby - finally can only stand on a cliff-top, her long dress billowing behind her, facing the sea where the Spanish Armada is burning, regal yet impotent - a Virgin Queen - as she stands miles away from the action. The film itself is similarly hamstrung, seemingly unable to find a way into its characters - it's as though everyone involved has taken Elizabeth's advice and imagined a pane of glass between themselves and the audience: "They can see me, but they cannot touch me" - even unable to figure out how these ciphers interact with each other; the staging goes from dull to borderline-inept - when the four main characters have their confrontation you don't even know how they got there (was Raleigh passing by? standing behind the door? does he live in the adjoining room?) - meanwhile attempting to revive the perfumed corpse with regular shocks of random violence (mostly executions, with a little torture). Visually stylish, if people seen in silhouette behind a curtain counts as stylish.