2008's Top 50

"Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees. How did he do it?

A. He cheated
B. He's lucky
C. He's a genius
D. It is written"



Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is the film world's first globalized masterpiece. This extravagantly eager romantic fable is set in contemporary Mumbai, the former Bombay, but it draws freely, often rapturously, from Dickens, Dumas, Hollywood, Bollywood, the giddiness of Americanized TV, the cross-cultural craziness of outsourced call centres and the zoominess of Google Earth. It's mostly in English, partly in Hindi and is directed by a Brit, with the help of an Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan. The young hero, Jamal Malik, is a dirt-poor orphan from the Mumbai slums. "Is this heaven?," Jamal asks after tumbling from a train and looking up to see the Taj Mahal. I had the same feeling after watching the first few astonishing scenes: Was this film heaven? The answer, as I watched it again and again, turned out to be yes.

Yes because of what Slumdog Millionaire does - gives the film medium a jolt of cyclonic power - and yes because of what it is: a timeless story of unswerving love that's been married to a madly extravagant Hindi version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Simon Beaufoy's screenplay was inspired by "Q & A," a modest though ingenious first novel by an Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup, and inspiration is the right word. Nothing else could explain the daring and sweep of Beaufoy's writing, which takes off from the book's premise, leaps from genre to genre with a Parkour athlete's agility, and evokes the rags, riches, horror, hope and irrepressible energy of "Third World" life with a zest that honours "Oliver Twist."

The premise is simple. As a plucky quiz-show contestant - a slumdog underdog - Jamal keeps giving correct answers to obscure questions and winning more and more rupees. This raises the question of how he could know what he seems to know, since the 18-year-old kid has grown up in grinding poverty. For the show's producers, and the police, the answer is he must be cheating. That's the wrong answer, and the wrong question. The right question is whether poverty and knowledge are mutually exclusive, and the answer given by Jamal's example is no, they are not, provided the knowledge is based on experience. This quiet, passionate, whipsmart kid has lived almost every answer he gives; the questions he needs are provided by destiny.



In another filmmaker's hands, this could have been the stuff of turgid melodrama, the story's contrivances laid bare. But Boyle directs with such enthusiasm and exuberance that his energy lifts the film to the clouds. Slumdog Millionaire is incredibly colourful, fast-paced and thrilling to watch as cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's frequent DP) uses film cameras, digital cameras, even the video function of a small, unobtrusive still camera, and his images come at you like light itself, in waves and pulsing clusters captures. He captures India's vibrancy with a lens that constantly roves Mumbai's teeming streets or hovers overhead, capturing the country's eye-popping colours. Boyle's storytelling is economical; a tale with the sweep of an epic comes in at exactly two hours, set to the evocative rhythms of A.R. Rahman's phenomenal score and the propulsive beat of the hip-hop-infused soundtrack.

It's funny, when you look at the role destiny plays in Slumdog Millionaire, and then at its director's career. Danny Boyle seems to have enjoyed an equally happy fate as the one of Jamal. Many of his previous films, from Shallow Grave through Trainspotting to the beguiling and under-appreciated Millions, are infused with the sheer joy of filmmaking, and all aswirl with ecstatic techniques. A now-infamous scene in Trainspotting is all aswirl with the same stuff that makes for a hideously funny sequence in Slumdog. Still, Boyle had been having his ups and downs - The Beach was a classic downer - and he'd done his most distinctive work on a relatively small scale.

Then destiny, in the form of smart and non-greedy producers (people who still understand that cinema isn't a fucking business, that it shouldn't be made inside fake studios), put him together with Simon Beaufoy's screenplay - the writer's best-known script to that point had been The Full Monty - and the result will make film history. The scale of Slumdog Millionaire is close to cosmic. Jamal's fate transcends the slums; it transcends India. He really is an Oliver Twist for the 21st century, just as his beloved Latika is a multinational mingling of Juliet, Lara and the Vivien Leigh of Waterloo Bridge. In fact, their shared fate plays out in the midst of such crowds as to suggest that every citizen of Mumbai found work as an extra. Jamal and Latika are also two of three Third World musketeers who banded together for self-protection in childhood. The third is Salim, Jamal's brother and the source of a harrowing sibling rivalry.



The children in the film come from Mumbai's slums, and their performances would put Hollywood moppets to shame. Jamal is played as an adult by Dev Patel, a second-generation Indian born in London, still most famous (until now) for his role as Anwar Kharral in E4's fabulous series "Skins." Those who were addicted to that show know that he's a hugely appealing young star, not conventionally handsome, who has mastered the art of suggesting by withholding - you can almost see Jamal's thoughts in process - along with the risky business of putting his character heedlessly out there when love or danger demand it. Great, great things are coming for him.

Then there's Freida Pinto, an Indian model in her first prominent feature role, who's exquisite as Latika, an apparently tragic heroine whose destiny is brighter than she can know. Anil Kapoor, a Bollywood veteran, plays the quiz-show host, Prem, as a supremely smarmy snake. And another legend, Irrfan Khan, adds a lot as a police inspector with a heavy hand but a quick, mercurial mind. A very special mention, too, to all the children who play the three characters at various ages. Particularly touching is Ayush Mahesh Kedekar, who plays Jamal at 7, a little boy who retains his sweetness and innocence amidst the squalor of his existence. After the marvel that was the performance of the young Alex Etel in Millions, Boyle proves once again just how adept he is in working with children.

There's sadness and tragedy within Slumdog Millionaire - starvation, genocide, child prostitution and overwhelming oppression - but there's humour, humanity and dignity as well. Boyle, 12 years after Trainspotting, a film that could be described as the polar opposite of this one, seems to have freed himself here to bring his brilliance as a director to its fullest fruition. This is Boyle's best film to date, which is saying quite a lot; He's made a joyous, fun, and wonderfully accessible film that should be able to be witnessed by everyone at least once. I can honestly say I've never seen anything like Slumdog Millionaire, and I welcomed it with open arms and eyes. In these worsening times for feature films, timidity and mediocrity bickering for bottom honours at the multiplex, Slumdog Millionaire breaks through to the top. It's the best film of 2008. It's a masterpiece.

"D. It is written."

"It's a schemer who put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. Look where it got you. I just did what I do best - I took your plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple bullets. Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair."



When The Dark Knight's credits began to roll at the theatre I attended, you could've heard a pin drop. Rarely have I ever heard a film greeted with such a pregnant silence. The buzz on Christopher Nolan's sequel to Batman Begins has reached a feverish level, which in itself is kind of neat. Not just because it's nice to see people getting excited about going to the movies at a time when there's been loads of handwringing over the demise of the ritual, but because Nolan, who made his feature début with a tricky little indie called Following, is a filmmaker worth paying attention to. As for The Dark Knight, it's everything you've heard so far and then some more. We should all feel happy to have had the chance to witness this film. It will break records, it will win Oscars, it will go down in history as the greatest "comic book film" ever made.

Among the details that have stuck with me from Batman Begins is the fact that Nolan's is a Batman who wakes up bruised in the morning, and that sobering current of realism is expanded here. No other Batman film has felt so much like a gritty crime drama, albeit one with some memorably phantasmagoric flourishes. This is miles from the Adam West film I remember waiting all day to watch on TV with my parents, but I'm of the opinion that there's no one way to tell this story. And what a mad story it turns out to be when played out the way Nolan imagines it. One of the notorious elements of Tim Burton's Batman is how it occupies an uneasy place between art and commerce. (With that Prince soundtrack shoehorned in, you can almost hear Burton and the studio execs fighting.) But Nolan appears to have had close to free rein here, and the result is something almost never seen before: a film of an otherworldly grandeur, an unabashed, unashamedly great film.

Opening with a brilliantly choreographed bank robbery, the film soon establishes Batman's (Christian Bale) struggle to bring peace to Gotham City. As the media accuse Batman of being an all-powerful vigilante, the Mafia have tightened their grip on the underworld, with the help of malevolent outside influences disguised as investment capitalists. But even the collected criminal gangs are unprepared for a new threat, the dangerously psychotic Joker (Heath Ledger), an amoral criminal who believes in nothing but disorder. While the Joker hatches his plans to destroy the city and its masked hero, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) are positioning themselves to affect a political solution to the crime wave, with the help of Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman).

Seeing an opportunity to rescue Batman from the camp excesses of the '90s, Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan haven't simply rescued the superhero from the doldrums of genre-bound familiarity. They've done something much more important: redefined blockbuster entertainment. This is a film that takes the mythology and accoutrements of its familiar central character and turns it into a meditation on bleak themes and unsettling politics that speaks directly to how the world is today.

The Dark Knight isn't a summer popcorn flick. It's a morality play that casts good against evil, order against chaos but more than that, it comprehensively blurs the lines between right and wrong, carefully measuring out how far the good can go to do the right thing, and directly questioning the morality of those methods. These are not issues the malevolent Joker is overly concerned with, as Alfred says "some people just want to watch the world burn," these are aspects of Batman's own consciousness, closely wrapped in his own struggle with his identity, his motivations and his reasoning. Nolan has created a shadowed world where being a hero is a Sisyphean struggle, where triumph is snatched away as soon as it is won and order is impossible.

Batman is only as strong as the villain that opposes him, and Ledger provides an unforgettable, indelible bad guy. Arriving fully formed and unexplained, The Joker is a creation of pure untrammelled evil, a creepy sadist in an unsettling green suit, flashing his favoured knives ("so I can savour the moment") and compulsively licking his torn lips. From behind his greasy white make-up, smudged black eyes and livid red scars, Ledger gives a chillingly hypnotic performance; frightening and violent but also intimate and occasionally sympathetic and hilarious. More than what he looks like, it is what he represents that is the true horror of The Joker and Ledger clearly revels in becoming the unknowable engineer of bedlam, who believes in nothing other than himself. He has no morals, no conscience, no ambition beyond anarchy, no scheme to foil. He is the ultimate terrorist, and Batman can only stop him by, in part, becoming like him.

Batman: "Why do you want to kill me?
The Joker: [laughs] Kill you? I don't want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, you... you complete me."

Faced with this powerhouse, Bale's Batman is reduced, relying on a hoarse rasping delivery and all-powerful physicality when suited up and the actor's easy charm and confidence when playing the playboy Bruce Wayne. The rest of the cast are again perfectly chosen. Michael Caine returns as the desert-dry butler Alfred and Gary Oldman reprises his honest cop Gordon, now promoted to Commissioner. Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over for the hapless Katie Holmes, playing the lost-love Rachel as a smart lawyer determined to fight for good while Aaron Eckhart is outstanding in the thanklessly straight role of Harvey Dent - a key character - aided by a stomach-churning transformation into the half-mad Two-Face.

More than his skill with the actors, Nolan has a consummate sense of place, creating a Gotham where even daylight is cast in a sombre blue, a beautifully realised place of towering skyscrapers and ash-blown cellars. Shot in a real city - not in front of a fucking screen - even in gloom, this is a beautiful production, emphatically photographed, edited with skill and precision and underlined with a driving score of throbbing chords and abstracted heavy metal. Six of the film's most elaborate special effects sequences have been shot in the 65 millimetre IMAX format, adding a breathtaking sense of scale and pin-point visual precision to the already hyper-kinetic action.

The Dark Knight is scattered, confused and frightening. It unfolds in fits and starts, breaking from one carefully positioned dramatic moment to rain chaos down on its characters. If Batman Begins showed us that in Nolan's hands, this material is not just for the comic books, TDK underlines that ambition. This is a haunted tragedy that recasts the ancient myths of the hero in an ultramodern nihilism, achieving a complexity of feeling that is difficult to achieve in any kind of art, let alone the multi-million dollar American studio summer film. A tremendous achievement, a true cinematic spectacle, a future classic. And yes, a masterpiece. I know I use the word too often, but here anything less seems ridiculously insufficient.

"He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now... and so we'll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector... a dark knight. "

Oskar: "Are you a vampire?
Eli: I live off blood...
[pause]
Eli: Yes.
Oskar: Are you...
[pause]
Oskar: Dead?
Eli: No. Can't you tell?"



Like so many films from that cold and great nation that is Sweden, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In is a film of extraordinary mood and wildly inventive directorial potency. It's a hushed, gentle story of provisional friendship, the ordeal of adolescence, and the curse of vampiric immortality. A hypnotic motion picture from beginning to end, Let the Right One In is a marvel: an ingenious genre film that manages to terrify and endear in the same instant, deftly erecting one of the most persuasive, haunting film experiences of 2008.

Based on the 2004 vampire fiction novel by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (and adapted by Lindqvist himself), Let the Right One In tells the story of a 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) who dreams of revenge on his classmates who bully him at school, and spends his hours wandering around his snowbound apartment complex. One night he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), a mysterious girl of the same age with whom he strikes up a tentative friendship. As the two learn more about each other, it becomes clear that something is killing off the paranoid residents of the community, but to Oskar, Eli is his friend and confidant, with powers and history he doesn't understand. To Eli, Oskar is a rare innocent soul worth protecting, finding peace in his company and encouraging the boy to stand up to his enemies. Together they bond while the world around them quickly spirals out of control.

I'm sure some of you have heard, Let the Right One In is already targeted for a U.S. remake. Relax, I won't attack the Hollywood machine, I'm beyond that phase, but I will say this: this film holds a distinct European - and Scandinavian - appeal that could never withstand an attempt at Americanization. It observes brutality and naive sensuality involving pre-teens, it treats death with a certain frightening visual poetry, and I'm convinced this Swedish film is something of a masterpiece, directed with exceptional tonal control by Tomas Alfredson. The plot concerns vampires and blood-spattered splendours of the flesh, but I swear it's one of the most endearing and sweetest films I've ever seen, embracing hesitant friendship with total commitment to character nuance and storytelling serenity.

The film is consumed with mood, drinking in long takes of behaviour and staging the action around stark snowscapes, photographed with brilliant menace by Hoyte Van Hoytema. Fearful of losing his audience at the first sign of distress, Alfredson brings Oskar and Eli together gradually, introducing bloodshed without proper explanation to drill the proper psychological holes that pay off later in the film. Eli being a vampire is not the twist of Let the Right One In, it's the opening chapter for Alfredson to play extensively with images of fright and themes of isolation, revealing the girl to be an ancient soul longing for companionship within a life that requires immediate viciousness. The director lets the uneasy sympathy grow from there, enhanced by the heavenly performances from Hedebrant and Leandersson, who never betray their years, making the central relationship awkward, exploratory, and enduring in ways that tap directly into the senses.



Alfredson (again, in the great tradition of Nordic filmmaking) places great emphasis on the unspoken, using inference and oblique approaches to get his point across. Eli's supernatural abilities are rendered through nifty camerawork and old fashioned sleight-of-hand (seeing her knocking on Oskar's window before revealing that it's two stories up, for example) and while the violence is ugly, it largely takes place off-camera. Let the Right One In also embraces the classic checklist of vampiric mythology - sunlight is fatal, if you're bitten and survive you'll become a vampire yourself, etc. - but conveys the particulars solely in visual terms. Scenes such as the morning-after surprise of one of Eli's wounded victims or the effect on Eli when she steps into a home where she hasn't been invited make a blessedly welcome break from the usual expository dialogue which most vampire films indulge in.

Then Alfredson bolsters it with a starkly silent atmosphere. The snow-covered ground is always lit up like a city park, while the sky above is pitch black, suspending the characters between two perfectly bisected halves. In contrast, the story itself entails myriad shades of grey: no heroes or monsters, but a familiar, messy reality heightened by the fact that one of these characters drinks blood to stay alive. Rather than conflicting with the imagery, it forms an almost perfect counterpoint, allowing the film's visual distinction to enhance and accentuate the plot. Let the Right One In contains few moments of overt terror, relying instead on an undercurrent of edginess to convey its supernatural tone.

The aftereffects of violence can be striking and there are tons of brilliant sequences to delight fans of the genre (a terrific shot in a municipal swimming pool towards the end had me speechless), but Alfredson has no interest in scares for the sake of scares. Instead, he combines Eli's gruesome lifestyle with a slice of adolescent sweetness that, supposedly, has nothing to do with vampires. Oskar's helpless anger hides a supremely thoughtful boy, ignored by adults and brutalized by his peers. Eli, for her part, is painfully aware of her tenuous grip on humanity, constantly threatened by animal instincts which demand that she kill to survive. Their connection to each other comes with none of the forbidden sensuality so often associated with vampires. Instead, it conveys simpler links of kindred emotions and shared understanding... coloured by the ominous, unnerving possibility that Eli may be manipulating Oskar for her own ends.

Let the Right One In has such an appealing, candid purity about it that contrasts with the violence on a spellbinding scale. The film takes astounding chances with characters, asking viewers to accept a form of evil (a child, no less) as a welcome presence worthy of compassion. It has a quiet lyricism which sets it apart from its contemporaries, settling over the viewer in alternating layers of creepiness, nostalgia, loneliness, and fulfillment. It never manipulates us or thrusts itself upon us, content to let us discover its treasures on our own. In the process, it quietly pushes the envelope of what stories like this are supposed to be: a feat more shocking than a thousand Hollywood monsters or boogeymen.

Grotesque, unnervingly gentle, forbidding, and ethereally beautiful, Let the Right On In not only re-energizes vampire cinema, but it also restores faith in the concerns of pre-teens. It seats right now on number 3 on my favourites of 2008, and anyone feeling a little punch-drunk from the stale art-house norm owes it to themselves to seek out this stupendous, bizarrely heart-warming genre bender.

Oskar: "You smell weird. Aren't you cold?
Eli: No.
Oskar: Why not?
Eli: I forget."

"How do you make fun of her when you can't do better?"

In Laurent Cantet's edgy, semi-improvised drama Entre les Murs, real-life high-school teacher François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself, a teacher at a Paris high school in a poor neighbourhood, and every class he leads is a juggling act that's deeply disillusioning - then inspiring - then frustrating to the point of despair - then unexpectedly touching - then a god-awful mess. I'd hate to have to diagram it.



Okay, let me try: Bégaudeau writes on the blackboard and behind him a student fixes on a word - half out of curiosity, half to insolently break his teacher's train of thought - and makes him stop and define it. The trim, buoyant Bégaudeau is an idealist who refuses to be swayed from his appointed task, and instead of expressing annoyance he patiently answers questions, tugging his pupils back to the lesson at hand. He finally does get a rhythm going, back and forth, and then an especially surly student interrupts to ask if it's true what they say in the yard, that Bégaudeau likes men. And so the teacher has to set aside his plan and say, first, "What would be wrong with that?" and then no, it isn't true - and by then the lesson has been derailed.

Later, when Bégaudeau arrives at the faculty lounge, several of his colleagues appear shell-shocked, ready to pack it in: These kids don't deserve to be educated; they're like animals in heat; let them rot in their dead-end low-class jobs. Somehow Bégaudeau maintains his equilibrium, even when asserting his authority and reprimanding his students for their disrespect; he argues that a teacher's job is "to bring kids out." And he does - until, about an hour and a half into the film, he's upended and it all goes to hell.

Entre les Murs is just over two hours, but feels even longer because Cantet shoots the class in something like real time; there's no relief from the ticking clock and the need to engage, engage, engage these kids to keep chaos at bay. There are some white students, but most are children of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, many with parents who can barely speak French. They trade racist insults and argue over football teams, and Bégaudeau tries to mediate - but he's a white male authority figure from a more prosperous class, and when he presses them too hard on, say, a point of grammar, his pupils parrot Marxist maxims and maintain that he can never understand their perspectives. They're not entirely wrong, but Bégaudeau at least keeps at it. What finally rouses his students is an assignment to write self-portraits. Suddenly out pour their hopes and fears - about their bodies, their families, their struggles to adapt in a country that hasn't made them welcome. For a brief spell, they seem younger, more open, and ready to learn.



The young actors, Bégaudeau's former students, are all essentially playing themselves (most use their own first names), clearly enjoying the spotlight, and it might be that some of them are insufficiently apathetic - too on. But they seem as real as anything I've ever seen, as real as the subjects in a Frederick Wiseman documentary. You see them through Bégaudeau's eyes, as destabilizing forces, but you also recognize their too-ready defences, their terror of losing face in front of their peers.

The only one who made me want to sock her in the kisser (sorry, that's why I'm not a high-school teacher) was Esmeralda, who meets every request with an anti-authoritarian sneer, and righteously stirs up discord. It's Esmeralda who finally breaks Bégaudeau, who prompts his transformation from a liberal defender of an unruly African student named Souleymane into an obstinate authoritarian. The scene, before the school system's disciplinary committee, in which the proud, taciturn teen must translate his mum's pleas to forgive her son, is a coup de théâtre - ironic, terrible, heart-rending. Souleymane is at once defiant and scared, sunk into himself, and the only teacher with a hope of easing him to the surface is now his worst enemy.

It can be argued that Cantet condescends toward underclass immigrant kids, and that Entre les Murs - which is based on a memoir by Bégaudeau published in 2006 that will be published in English this month - can be used to justify the system's failures. It's true that the film's few industrious students are upstaged by their obnoxiously oppositional classmates, and that the film ends on a bitter note that feels especially so one week after the inauguration of the first African-American president of the United States. Now that anything is possible, everyone of every race will be inspired to study hard - right? But I think it's more important than ever to see - and to brood on - Entre les Murs.

The threats to liberalism don't just come from without, from the racists and reactionaries. They're also from within, when do-gooders' ideals are tested by the real world, when the underprivileged don't show the gratitude displayed on TV shows and instead spit on your face. Cantet's real-time classroom scenes are utter revelations: They make you understand that teaching is moment to moment, an endless series of negotiations that hang on intangibles - on imagination and empathy and the struggle to stay centered. This is a remarkable film.

"To me, it's really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope."



In 1974, a detachment of international desperadoes carrying a bow and arrow sneaked into the World Trade Center in New York City intent on committing an illegal act of beauty. What exactly they succeeded in doing might not have been clear until the arrival of Man on Wire, James Marsh's sublime docudrama about a 135 pound serving of undiluted mischief who dreamt of walking across the sky.

Phillippe Petit was the rubbery athlete who strung a cable between the Twin Towers that August day in 1974, and then gracefully danced across it - with no safety net or harness. His tale - a giddy dream, a suspenser, a harrowing surreal comedy of the possible - is like Dog Day Afternoon as told by Amélie. The teen Petit was sitting in a dentist's office when he read an article about the gestating World Trade Center and met his destiny. Eight years would go by, but he would - must - figure out how to sneak into the buildings, how to case the joint, recruit accomplices and fling a steel cable across 200 feet of nothing to connect the two towers. Walking the wire - despite the ruthless winds that swirl through the area - would be the easy part. He called it" The Coup."

On his team were an inside man with a Dali mustache and a fellow known as Alan who took the deep cover of the code name Albert. One co-conspirator, Petit's best friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, adopted a cunning disguise: "To look like an American I had lots of pens in my pocket." An accomplice confesses that he was high while the team was still on the ground floor, having taken to smoking grass every day for 35 years.

The beauty and ultimate brilliance of Marsh's scheme sneaks up on you; he begins with mock-epic music and straight-faced bank-job details of the Petit gang's plan to heist New York's attention. He relies on intentionally comic reenactments shot in black and white - smudgy, heady, expressionistic black and white sequences like something out of Fritz Lang. Somewhere along the line, though, you realize what you've been offered. The story isn't a mock epic, it's a real, if miniature, one, about a son of Icarus who would salute the gods on their own level. Petit is not a madman or a conman but a Frenchman. "If I die," he thought, "what a beautiful death." When asked "why" by one of the hundreds of reason-obsessed journalists, he said, "There is no why."

The footage of the Trade Center being pieced together in the late '60s is itself a thing of splendor, as is the scene showing Petit, who in the 1970s looked like Malcolm McDowell, training in an impossibly bucolic meadow in France. He capers across a practice wire as his friends gleefully yank and jostle either end to simulate the moods of unkind winds.

The fate of the buildings need not be mentioned, and is not. This film is stuck in a moment when the Trade Center was not quite finished, when overwhelmed-looking cops wore fluffy mustaches and Richard Nixon shrank into a fetal position in his lonely bunker. We see New York City through impish French eyes: the dreary Criminal Court is promoted to "Palais de Justice," and even the all-night police sirens, the pulse of crime, seem bracingly strange. A friend of mine who lives in France once tried to explain to me that New York is like their Paris, but I never really understood that, until today. Man on Wire may be, above all, the story of Petit, but it also may very well be the greatest love letter to New York since Woody Allen turned his back on America.

Petit didn't just walk across the wire, he spent 45 minutes on it. 45 minutes! He did eight laps, lay down in the middle, got down on his knee and saluted the crowd, smiled at the cops and finally returned to the planet only when threatened with a helicopter assault. We observe the grand act from several points of view, notably that of his girlfriend, Annie Allix, who was left complaining on the ground so as not to provide additional distraction. To rip her words out of the original would be like putting Sweet-N-Low in the Chateau Latour, so here they are as she speaks them: "C'était tellement, tellement beau. C'était comme il marchait sur un nuage." For Phillipe Petit, the clouds were his sidewalk.

"It's always the same dream. Always 26 dogs coming for me.

Ari Folman's brilliant and harrowing Waltz with Bashir does something incredible: it captures the surreal reality of war in an oddly apt medium: animation. In an interview, Folman, who also wrote and produced the autobiographical film, said he never considered telling his story through "real-life video." The moving drawings quite literally illustrate the inexpressible anguish of loss, not only of human life, but of memory, identity and, for want of a better term, humanness.



Folman was a conscript during the 1982 Lebanon war which was sullied by the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although it was the Christian Phalangist militiamen who carried out the atrocity, they were allowed into the camps by an Israeli army content to stand guard outside. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defence minister of the time, was informed of the danger of this but did nothing about it, and the killings remain a distinct wound to the nation's self-image and international reputation.

Though this is discussed with some horror, it is not what Waltz With Bashir is principally about. It is more about Folman's memories of being a soldier in the war and the way those memories seemed to have been expunged from his mind for some 20 years. He interviewed his friends, witnesses of the war and fellow soldiers to try to fill in the black hole in his past. Having done that, he had many of the film's real characters painted in outline and animated. The result was always going to be risky but it succeeds brilliantly as both art and a document for future generations.

The film opens with a pack of ferocious gray dogs charging down a city street, the cloudy night sky the same ominous yellow that glints in the creatures' eyes and teeth. We soon learn that this is the recurrent nightmare of Folman's friend, Boaz, but that unlike in most dreams, the dogs are not symbolic, but represent the 26 dogs the young soldier was forced to shoot during the war in Lebanon. Boaz recounts this experience at a bar with Folman, and asks his friend what haunts him about that time. When Folman realizes he has no answer, he is shocked into seeking the very details his psyche has so successfully blocked.

Folman eventually remembers a scene, though he cannot determine if it's a dream or memory, in which he and several Israeli soldiers float corpse-like at night in the sea near Beirut. Together they open their eyes and rise up naked, walking toward the shore of a high-rise city. This enigmatic vision will recur throughout the film. One of these soldiers, Carmi, now lives in Holland, so Folman travels to ask him about it. Cold and austere as the snow-covered fields he owns, Carmi cannot corroborate the event, but recalls a fantasy he had aboard his navy ship heading to war, in which he's rescued by a beautiful, naked giantess, and floated out to sea. Here, as in the rest of the film, the detailed animation allows a fluid transition between reality and fantasy, the frightened young soldier hugging the voluptuous goddess as she backstrokes him to safety.

Returning to Israel, Folman interviews other participants, including the famous Israeli war correspondent Ron Ben Yisahi, who had covered the street fighting in Beirut. In September 1982, the Israeli Army entered West Beirut to support the Christian Phalangists upon the assassination of their leader, the charismatic Bashir Gemayel, who had recently been elected President of Lebanon. Israeli troops surrounded the Sabra and Shatila camps, and at night provided illumination rounds, as the Phalangist forces entered the camps, presumably to find Palestinian combat fighters. In fact, a truce had allowed these men safe passage to Tunisia two weeks earlier. After two days of fighting, it became clear that an estimated 3,000 refugees had been massacred.

The climactic waltz with Bashir occurs late in the film when an Israeli soldier, Shmuel Frenkel, exposing himself to a barrage of sniper fire, leaps into a West Beirut intersection plastered with posters of Bashir Gemayel and starts shooting - or waltzing - like a madman. He's like a crazed superhero, even more so because he's animated, but the nuanced style, with its noir-ish contrasts and subtle colours, places him firmly on the ground. Folman's choice to keep the animation realistic never lets us forget that these are real people, whose traumas linger more than 20 years later. And at the film's close, when Folman remembers where he had really been in September 1982, the director switches to actual documentary footage of screaming women fleeing the refugee camps toward the Israeli troops outside. And it breaks your heart.

If the animation weren't so powerfully dramatic, even magical at times, Folman, an ordinary man rather than an overtly political grunt, could never have swung all this and also included some humour and irony. His footage speaks for itself. It suggests a haunted conscience; Folman - the son of parents who survived Auschwitz - thinks this was why the memory of his time in the army were blanked out for so long. What is astonishing is how vividly it has now been brought back to life and how it links with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this David Polonsky, the film's chief illustrator, and Yoni Goodman, its head animator, deserve as much praise as Folman. Max Richter's score is also of tremendous brilliance.

Painting each frame of Waltz With Bashir took almost four years and many doubted it could be done. But there is no question that the result is one of the most resonant films of its year from any source, and quite probably a landmark in animation. It combines hallucinatory dreamscapes, the horrors of hard truth and a natural beauty of expression that has not often been matched before. Never mind that some in Israel thought it not radical enough.

And in the end it remains a soldier's story, not a polemic and, watching it, you see a view of the war that sticks in the back of your head not because it is a political diatribe but because it is an intensely human document that seeks to be true to one man's view of what has come to be known as Israel's Vietnam.

Extraordinary.

"Wait, that doesn't look like Earth. Where's the blue sky? Where's the-the grass?"

Andrew Stanton's WALL·E opens in outer space. The camera zooms further, showing a familiar planet, our Earth, only this time, the emerald splendour that defined its continents has been replaced by a rusty gleam with the planet's surrounding space being dotted by useless satellites. Seven centuries into the future, our Earth has lost all of its former lustre. That lasting image from outer space no longer evokes that sense of wonderment, but a foreboding query of what became of the lone planet in the galaxy that can support life? Stanton explores further, zooming in past the detritus and into Earth, giving us an aerial glimpse of the world. The view he grants us is breathtaking.



Humanity has left Earth, which has been rendered uninhabitable due to the accumulation of trash and other pollutants over several centuries of unabated consumerism. The task of cleaning up Earth belongs to these robots called WALL·E, which is short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-class. All of these WALL·E robots, save for one, have stopped from functioning, becoming permanent fixtures of the junk-filled world. Lined up with the skyscrapers are towers made from rubbish, processed into cubes and stacked to form those imposing yet majestic structures by the lone surviving WALL·E on Earth.

WALL·E is the last remnant of the humans that abandoned Earth centuries ago. His work ethic resembles that of a blue collar worker, where several centuries' worth of the routine that has characterized his daily existence. His nights are spent tending to the small human treasures like rubber duckies and other ornaments he unearthed from the rubbles, before capping his work day by viewing his favourite scene from Hello, Dolly!, where the two lovers from the film hold hands while dreaming in singsong fashion of a world outside their little town of Yonkers.

With only an indestructible cockroach to keep him company, it is therefore unsurprising that when EVE, short for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, lands in Earth for an undisclosed directive, WALL·E tries his best to woo the seemingly hostile female robot into fancying him, even to the point of utter desperation, as shown by the times when EVE is floating dormant causing WALL·E to patiently tend to his precious friend. When a spacecraft suddenly collects EVE from Earth, WALL·E is forced to follow her through space to Axiom, where humanity, ever since they left Earth, lived, bred, and evolved into immobile slobs who communicate with each other through computers and mindlessly travel to and from their destinations by hovercraft.

The greatest challenge animation faces is to stop being seen as simply children's fare. Persepolis accomplished that last year, and so does WALL·E. It contemplates on humanity, what it is, what it has become, and what it is capable of achieving. The story is deceptively simple: a love story between two robots separated by time, space, and their respective missions. The first forty minutes of the film is nearly wordless, where WALL·E, which is basically a rusty cube from which mechanized arms, wheels and a pair of binocular-like eyes jot out, traverse the rubbish-laden landscape, with the adorably curious antics inherited directly from the great Charlie Chaplin.

WALL·E's Chaplin travels to Axiom, and becomes the impetus of humanity's delayed reunion with planet Earth. From that point, the film expands into a brilliant, flagrant satire of the faults of modern life, with Stanton portraying the future of humanity as a severely bloated version of the present, where the excesses of contemporary living have been visualized into something that is disturbingly familiar. While WALL·E is undoubtedly a Pixar product with its dutiful mix of technical brilliance, graceful storytelling, and unabashed sentimentality, beneath that instructive use of the Pixar formula is a daring spirit, one that ultimately rewards any unassuming viewer who watches the film by sheer chance.

WARNING: This review will probably contain spoilers.

Ángela: "We have to tape everything, Pablo. For fuck's sake!"

This year's big horror trend (aside from more miserable remakes) seems to be cinéma-vérité with fake documentary, "footage found" flicks like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Zombie Diaries bursting from the indie floodgates. But unlike a certain 86-minute cult film which started this nine years ago called The Blair Witch Project, most of these titles have delivered the goods, which put extra pressure on [Rec], a Spanish film so hyped and loved back home that the Hollywood remake is already under way.



The concept couldn't be more straightforward: Ángela (Manuela Velasco) is a Barcelona TV reporter and the host of a segment called "When You're Asleep." Ángela and her camera man, Pablo (Pablo Rosso, also the cinematographer), film people and things active in the city while most of the inhabitants are sleeping. On this particular night, Ángela and Pablo will be filming a group of fire-fighters at their station and on any calls they may have to go on. After a fireman's typical night of waiting and participating in boring activities such as eating, sleeping and a game of basketball, the station finally gets a call from a nearby apartment building, much to Ángela's relief. Residents have reported that an old lady is locked in her apartment and is screaming like a crazy person. When the firemen get to the location, with Ángela and Pablo tagged along, they find that the police are also there and the building's residents are all gathered on the ground floor lobby.

With Ángela reporting on the events as they transpire, and Pablo continually filming, the situation turns from mundane to hellish in the blink of an eye as we watch the old lady take a meaty bite out of one of her rescuers. It gets even worse when everyone in the building, including the police and firemen who initially answered the call, are all quarantined inside the building. Any attempt to escape would offer certain death from the military who are now outside guarding the building, and staying inside could mean an even worse fate. Ángela, Pablo, the fire-fighter Manu, an unnamed police officer and the other residents of the apartment building must try and survive the zombie outbreak and ultimately find a way out. And so begins [Rec]. A roller coaster ride of a film - if the roller coaster consisted only of a slow, 30 minute roller coaster ride up a hill and then proceeded into a 45 minute, haunting, nightmarish, horrifying, break-neck free fall.

While the premise may be derivative of other films and the hand-held style is hardly unique, [Rec] remains an incredibly engrossing and utterly terrifying experience thanks to credible performances and strong direction. In its flying 75-minute runtime [Rec] contains a high scare rate which becomes increasingly relentless towards the end of the film. The undead are more 28 Days Later's rage-infected than Romero's shuffling zombies, made scarier by the claustrophobic apartment block setting, and [Rec] employs all manner of shocks from falling bodies to terrors in the dark to some impressively choreographed brutal attacks.

[Rec] is directed by Spanish Filmax regulars and horror-heads Jaume (Darkness) Balagueró and Paco (Romasanta) Plaza, which automatically raised a few red flags. Both have produced visually stunning but utterly vapid films that left me close to clawing my eyes out from boredom, and for the first act of this film, I wasn't entirely won over. But by the time the end credits rolled, I found myself paled, shocked out of my mind, with a strange smile on my face and gripping my seat from pure exhaustion. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't think of anything else. This is the kind of film that is perfectly suited to the talents of these two filmmakers. [Rec] isn't so much a story as it is a ride, and what it lacks in substance, it more than makes up for in pure dripping style.

Balagueró and Plaza take their time to build the atmosphere around their location, then completely explode into a frenzied roller-coaster. Simply put, this experience feels like being trapped in a haunted maze, and there are images here that are the stuff of nightmares - and I mean Lynch-Buñuel-Argento-Miike kind of nightmares. It's simple-minded, but just when you're ready to dismiss this one as another unoriginal zombie entry, the directors open the gates and unleash a whirlwind of chaos, claustrophobia, and jump-from-your-chair "Holy fuck!" moments. Natural performances and a lack of soundtrack only add to the realism that comes across even with lavish production values.

The filmmakers exploit the technical issues of recording on hand-held camera to enhance the scares - shots taken while running are sometimes very disorientating, the sound occasionally becomes warped and distorted, and the green light of the night-vision - recalling The Descent - is always unnerving. While the subtitles may distance non-Spanish speaking viewers from the reality, the realistic style is almost entirely maintained throughout [Rec] and technical feat of some of the long takes is impressive. It wouldn't be too far from the truth to call [Rec] one of the most inventive and creepiest horror films ever made.

[Rec], like most hand-held films, should come with a warning for those with motion sickness; neither is it for the faint of heart - there are enough good, awesome scares here to fully satisfy a hardened horror fan and traumatise the inexperienced. Most of you won't be able to see [Rec] until Sony has their remake out on the market, and that's such a gigantic shame. No horror - hell, Film - fan should have to wait that long for a film this good. My advice - for those who won't have the chance to witness this Spanish pearl in the theatre - is to go the "region-free" route, spend a few bucks on an import DVD, and then keep your fingers crossed that the predictably titled Quarantine is even half as good as [Rec]. This is not me complaining about the quick-fix American-ized remake, but I beg of you: do not let the original go unnoticed. This film deserves to be seen by every living being on this fucking planet.

Ken: "Ray, you are about the worst tourist in the whole world.
Ray: Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't."



Stop me if you've heard this. A hooker, a hit man and a midget walk into a bar. They exchange rapid fire, wit-filled dialogue that is as hilarious as
it is off-the-wall. That's only about two minutes of In Bruges, a bravura, genre-twisting gem. Shading all of the characters with colours far exceeding black and white and trusting the strength of his filmmaking to carry out his deliberately paced, instantly immersive narrative, writer-director Martin McDonagh (an Irish playwright already extremely respected in England and Ireland) more than establishes himself as a gifted new talent to watch. Amazing, too, how McDonagh so effortlessly is able to shift between pitch-black comedy, soul-searching drama, and riveting suspense without missing a beat or losing sight of his grander scheme. This isn't just a fun comedy, a thrilling action film or a poignant drama - it's all three. It's a truly great film.

Apparently McDonagh created the story after visiting the picturesque city of Bruges, Belgium for a weekend getaway. Though intrigued by the history and architecture, he was also about to lose his mind from boredom. These two mindsets immerged on paper as separate characters. Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are two hired assassins who, following a hit on a priest in London, are sent to Bruges under the impression that the trip is a way for them to lay low for a while. As Ken attempts to make the best of it and to take in the sights, Ray keeps bitching like a little boy from the moment he gets off the train, insults American tourists and sets up a date with a local bewitching film production assistant named Chloë (Clémence Poésy). All the while, he is unable to shake the guilt of having accidentally killed a child during his very first job. As Ray struggles to come to terms with what he believes is an unforgivable sin, Ken receives a phone call and a demand from their daunting boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes): as means of punishment for murdering the young boy, Ray must be taken out.

Ray: [beating a tourist that he believes to be American] "That's for John Lennon, you Yankee fuckin' cunt!"

This may be getting old but the vast majority of today's motion pictures - particularly those made within the big-budget Hollywood system - are derivative, pre-packaged attempts to please mainstream audiences who are expected to only want to see the same things they've seen a hundred times before. The greatest joy of a film like In Bruges is that it goes against the expected grain and actually tries something different. As the story slowly yet mesmerizingly unfolds, it is impossible to predict what will happen next, and how McDonagh plans to get there.

The first act is deceptive for a reason, setting up a sense of laid-back calm and camaraderie as Ray and Ken explore the foreign city they have landed in. Sort of a travelogue of Bruges, the opening thirty minutes are visually stunning - the cinematography throughout by Eigil Bryld (Becoming Jane) takes full advantage of locations that one character accurately describes as "a fairy tale come to life", as well as ruminative and poetic in its collision of the Old World with the New. When the full details are finally revealed about the circumstances that have brought Ray and Ken to Bruges, that lulling feeling of safety begins to tear apart. And, by the time Ray starts to question how he can go on with his own life while knowing what he has done and Ken is sent on a deadly new mission that he is unsure whether or not he can carry out, all bets are off.

The film's second half, which should be left for each individual viewer to discover, goes to grim places that are at once shatteringly violent and breathlessly, poignantly humane. As tough, uncompromising themes concerning morality and faith wash over the characters' embattled consciences, McDonagh continues to surprise and fascinate with each new taut development. The irony-rich climax, of which a bell tower, a foot-chase among the cobblestone streets of Bruges, and the surrealistic, snow-swept film set play respective parts, is both thrilling, frightening, and oddly beautiful, calling to mind a Shakespearean tragedy that also happens to have a darkly biting sense of humour.

Ray: Purgatory's kind of like the in-between one. You weren't really shit, but you weren't all that great either. Like Tottenham."

Performances are top-notch across the board, the actors having a grand time sinking their teeth into roles that are more complex and original than the norm. As the physically and emotionally in-crisis Ray, Colin Farrell is remarkable as he explores his in-over-his-head character's unbearable shame and regret. He's as good as he's been in a long time, probably because, for the first time in a long time, he can stop worrying about faking accents and just be Irish. As the more experienced Ken, Brendan Gleeson is empathetic, essaying a man who suddenly finds a chance at nobility in a life that has thus far been anything but. French actress Clémence Poésy adds striking support as Chloë, a love interest for Ray who is treated with enough detail to exceed the part, while Ralph Fiennes is menacing and downright brilliant as the unforgettable Harry, a cold and calculating villain who nonetheless is refreshingly not without a moral compass of his own, however skewed it might be.

When so many films of this sub-sub-genre (hit man flicks) portray their characters as cartoonish, one-dimensional pawns, In Bruges affords its characters the space to breathe, react and connect like real human beings. Likewise, the plot is unforced and refreshing, evolving naturally out of the extreme but plausible situations McDonagh has cooked up. It also cannot be stated enough how valuable the atmospheric on-location surroundings in Belgium are; despite Ray's misgivings for ever coming to Bruges, the film could inspire viewers to reserve plane tickets to this stunning, magical destination. Veritably thoughtful as well as inspirational, In Bruges is one of 2008's first great cinematic releases, a rewarding experience with the style, texture and substance to linger long after the end as arrived. A truly awesome film.

Ray: Maybe that's what hell is, an entire eternity spent in fucking Bruges."

"I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening."

Everyone who writes about films (for a living, or just for fun) has described Rachel Getting Married - or at least thought about it - as "Altmanesque." There are dozens of adjectives that can describe this quiet, fine film, but that one is the most appropriate of them all. This is the best Altman film in 15 years.

Of course, it's not by Robert Altman, but by Jonathan Demme, one of America's great filmmakers, a cineaste that came up behind the Altmans and others of the early 70s, who made his first high profile film, Melvin and Howard, one decade after Altman's M*A*S*H. Twenty-eight years later, Demme pays tribute to Altman with the best that he gave cinema: the style of real-life over-talking, silence, and open ends that he has never really emulated before combined with his personal aesthetic of music, wild but loving characters, and unexpected performances that change careers.



The story is simple... kinda. The title character, Rachel, is getting married. But the center of the film is her sister, Kym, who is coming out of rehab (not crisis, rehab!) to be a part of the celebration. Over the course of one weekend, we will meet the family, discover secrets, and see the foibles of ourselves and people we know, even if the storyline doesn't fit like a glove. It is part of Demme's genius that he makes his people - all of his people - relentlessly real and empathetic.

There's a lot of Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, probably the best of all the Dogma films, in Rachel. But Demme pulls back the layer one level deeper, choosing not to throw quite as severe a curve into the story. His film never reaches that level of a family deteriorating under the weight of a long held lie. This family's pain is no secret. It's much more like most families that suffer tragedy along the path of life. Everyone knows, everyone hopes it won't surface, everyone gets caught up in the petty (and not so petty) roles that they play in either ripping off scabs or trying to heal their... family.

So much of what is great in all of Demme's work is the casting (though I don't remember a Demme film without Chuck Napier before). Here, it is Anne Hathaway's film and she doesn't miss a note. Her Oscar nomination may have been one of the most deserved in years, but her work here is not the stuff that gives actors statuettes, but something much more important: people's respect. She doesn't show off for the camera. And when you hear criticism of this film, that will be the center of the complaint. Not the performance, but the lack of "gotcha" film moments. Every story is different, but this is one of those human stories that feels more real than written (thanks to Jenny Lumet, the screenwriter, and yes, Sidney Lumet's kid.)

And on the few occasions Hathaway isn't on-screen, you have the emergence of an actress who may be one of our next big stars and the reappearance of an actress who was one of our biggest stars... and then walked away. But wait until you get a load of Debra Winger. She just eats the screen every second the camera lands on her. She's not hamming it up, she's just plain magnetic. There's so much going on behind her eyes that as an audience member, you just have to keep an eye on her to see what's going on. She, too, has one "big scene," but it isn't as big, in the script, as you might expect. You don't get the 5-minute speech where she tears down the house. What you get is what the character demanded, and that includes a boatload of subtext. This is an actress who's clearly mad at Hollywood the industry, but you get the feeling that some director with a great script for an adult woman will turn up at her door and talk her into doing the work she's meant to. All these years since she has been a fixture in films and she still has that unmistakable star power.



And Rosemary DeWitt, best known for her work on "Mad Men," shows up big here as the opposite number to Hathaway's reservoir of pain and fear. She's the one who holds the family together, even when it's her day. And she hits just the right notes of selflessness and selfishness... again, from life. There's a scene in the film's final act when Kym returns home after a car ride that goes badly. She goes to her sister's room, knocks on her door, and doesn't say a word. Rachel lets her in, takes care of her, helps her bathing before her own wedding. Hathaway and DeWitt are so good, so in-synch that you literally believe they're sisters. It's heartbreaking stuff. Especially for anyone who has siblings. That unnerving feeling of unconditional love travels from the screen right to you. It was only at that point that I was sure I was in love with Rachel Getting Married.

Of course, Demme has his regular parade of irregulars (the regular ones and others). One of the most fascinating casting choices is Tunde Adebimpe (the lead singer of TV on the Radio who you might remember from Jump Tomorrow). The role of the husband-to-be could be cast in all kinds of ways, but Adebimpe plays it close to the vest, with the clear presence of big ego potential, but very low key, a man who draws people into his world, but also puts out for those close to him when the chips are down. (Many would say the same of Demme.)

Anna Deavere Smith as The Second Wife, Bill Irwin as a father twisted in emotional knots that he fights not to allow to unravel, a new actress named Anisa George as the bitchy best friend, Carol Jean Lewis leading the way as the leading face of Sidney's impeccably cast family, and comedy-guy Mather Zickel, turning in a smooth performance as The Best Man who turns out to be the person who gets Kym the best.

And then there's the music. There's a score (by jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. and Palestinian musician Zafer Tawil), but the film is floating throughout on a cloud of "live" music around the house, classic music, light music, ethnic music, noodling, infectious music... all kinds of music, life in an iPod of the coolest stuff you'll hear.

By the end of the film, your expectations have been overwhelmed by the world that Demme and all of his collaborators (including Declan Quinn as DP and Ang Lee's regular cutter, Tim Squyres on the Avid) have created. At the same time, what many people expect to get from a film these days is not offered. Sorry. But any detractor - and there will surely be some - should take a breath and think about what they were offered here by Lumet, Demme, et al. When was the last time we saw this kind of intimacy in a film released by a major or a division of a major? It's what Altman was always reaching for, for better and sometimes worse. It's what Soderbergh brings to his more earnest efforts. It's what I yearn for film after film: an intimate human truth.

A wedding is where the family is forced/chooses to come together, as adults, with histories, in an attempt to share a loving event. It's a classic dramatic construct. Rachel Getting Married is a classic deconstruction of cinema at its most natural state - close to whatever it was that those crazy Danish purists were thinking when they came up with Dogme 14 years ago. It's without a doubt one of the ten best films of 2008, and even in a weak film year, that's always saying something.

"I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone, I just don't want you to hate me."

Certain films about losers have a special, desperately moving appeal. By showing us men whose lives have fallen dramatically short of their dreams, they speak to - and for - all of us. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke as a broken-down professional wrestling star still clinging to his glory days from the 1980s, could touch a chord in audiences the way On the Waterfront and Rocky did. It has that kind of lyrical humanity.



Aronofsky doesn't speak a sentimental cinematic language. Shooting in a grainy, bare-bones naturalistic style, full of jump cuts, raw light and a handheld camera whooshing about, the director - the most talented of his generation - of Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain now strips away all frills, tapping a classic Hollywood myth - a has-been looking for redemption - and, at the same time, transcending that myth. The Wrestler is like Rocky made by the Scorsese of Mean Streets. It's the rare film fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

Back in the pumped-up, heavy metal '80s, Randy ''The Ram'' Robinson (Rourke) was a big deal, a golden-god gladiator with his own action figure and videogame. His Madison Square Garden bout with a wrestler known as the Ayatollah was seen by a million and a half people on pay per view. But that was then. Now, 20 years later, Randy is a wreck on painkillers, with pulverized bones, a hearing aid, and a face that's been mashed so many times, it's hard to believe it once seduced women. But he still wrestles before small crowds in VFW halls, eating up the bluster of the adoration, which is mostly nostalgia for the bluster of two decades before.

That's something Mickey Rourke must know a lot about. As a young star, he was a bow-lipped bad boy who wooed women on screen with his soft voice and twinkly, knowing smile. Now, it's not just his look that has changed; he seems stunted - all muscle and scar tissue, a figure of damaged loss. Miraculously, though, the softness remains. In The Wrestler, Rourke is at once an authentic former wrestling superstar, a Here's How They Look Now! tabloid curiosity, and - more than ever - a great actor. With platinum hair down to his back, he's like some bloated, freakazoid Sammy Hagar, and he makes you feel every crunched bone and pained breath, the way that Randy subjects his body to punishment to remind himself he's alive.

Aronofsky plays off Rourke's fallen-icon status by feasting on that spectacular, pulped wreck of a face. Yet from within that mountain of wounded flesh, Rourke gives Randy a deep, slow voice of disarming gentleness. Randy is the soul of decency encased in a monster's physique, with a buried sadness that, pushed far enough, explodes into rage.

The film burns through the fakery of wrestling in a touching way, by letting us see how the trumped-up ''enemies'' in the ring actually love and support each other. And they're not just sham warriors. Randy slices his forehead open with a fragment of razor to make sure he's putting on a bloody good show. In one gruesome bout, he gets lacerated by barbed wire and a staple gun. Is such a scene needed? Let's just say it expresses the cutting edge of Randy's pain-freak authenticity.

When he's not in the ring, Randy is basically a polite, saddened middle-aged man who lives in a New Jersey trailer park and works part-time in a supermarket. Aronofsky, working from a script by Robert Siegel, brings us piercingly close to the life of a relic: the visits to the tanning salon, the courteous way that Randy treats even the people who make fun of him, the two-decade-old fan paraphernalia he brings to a pathetically underattended ''legend signing.'' We see how scared he is - an insecure dude who never got over his given name, Robin.

He's a loner, almost completely isolated, yet he tries to reconnect to life through two women: Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a stripper who has taken a liking to him (but still makes him pay for his lap dances), and Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), his furious estranged daughter, who now wants nothing to do with him. The film lets us see how Randy was a bad father whose selfishness has broken his own heart. He's a man who has lost nearly everything. Yet he can still reach for grace: Standing up on the ropes, preparing to do his theatrical pounce, he looks triumphant, tearful, and ready to enter heaven.

"My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!"

A gentle, almost tender biopic of a man who spearheaded a revolution, Gus Van Sant's Milk is appropriately itself a dichotomy. It's an almost aggressively conventional film about a premise that could not be more foreign to mainstream cinema: the fight for gay civil rights.



With clean, economic storytelling, an efficient script and wonderfully grounded performances from its impressive cast, the film on the surface might not feel like anything special. Like dozens of awards-season projects before it, Milk is a competently-made bio of an extraordinary individual that pulls all the right heartstrings and hits all the right notes. It's not until you take a step back from the film that it hits you: This is the gayest major motion picture ever made.

From its sobering opening montage (news footage of gay bars being raided in the 1960s) to the humbling final moments when thousands march in the deceased Harvey's honour through San Francisco, Milk is an unapologetic, beautiful and affecting testament to the strength, warmth and complexity of gay men and women at a landmark time in not only gay, but human rights history.

The screen is rarely without a gay character. We see gay men cooking, lounging in bed, working, dancing, loving, squabbling, joking, driving one another nuts and supporting each other in the wake of tragedy. Though the conversations are overwhelmingly about discrimination against gays, there are numerous tender moments when we see these men not marching in the streets or shouting through bullhorns, but simply living their lives.

The anticipation leading up to the highly-buzzed film has mostly been about the fact that the story of Harvey Milk, a gay rights leader who was assassinated along with Mayor Geroge Moscone by a fellow city supervisor, was actually - impossibly - making it to the screen after nearly 40 years. But its real accomplishment is something different, and to me, unexpected: it gently but without hesitation takes the audience into the world of gay men in a way that no film ever has before.

Equal parts sweetness, melancholy and rage, it's a wonderfully immersive, warts-and-all journey. Harvey and his friends aren't perfect, but they're not out to hurt anyone. They just want what's fair. And it would be near impossible to walk out of this film without understanding that. The approach works thanks mostly to the once-in-a-lifetime performance of Sean Penn as Milk, a brassy New York Jew with an infectious grin and a rascally but harmless sense of humour. Penn's Milk is aggressively flirtatious, obnoxious, stubborn and shameless... which, by many accounts, is probably historically accurate.

He's also gentle, caring, intelligent and braver than you could imagine. He says "Here I am, and what of it?" There's never a moment of hesitation, not a second that you don't believe that he is doing what he truly believes to be right, and not a moment when Penn feels counterfeit or uncommitted to the role. This isn't about a gay man struggling to come to terms with himself, it's about a gay man struggling to get the world to come to terms with him. And for that fact alone, this film is like no other that has come before it.

Surrounding and aiding Harvey in his fight are dozens of other men, nearly all of them gay. As Milk's longtime lover Scott Smith, James Franco offers an openness and emotional honestly that we've never seen from the actor before, which is essential as Smith is the real heart of the film. He's the man who ignites the spark of hope in Harvey, and he's clearly his lifetime love, even though they were separated when Harvey was killed. And ff Scott Smith is the heart, Emile Hirsch's Cleve Jones is the film's hot blood, and we see his evolution from a sassy part-time rentboy to one of the most vigilant gay rights warriors in history. A bold contrast to Smith's gentility, Hirsch's Jones is a flame that just needs fanning, and soon after he and Harvey meet he's a full-on activist wildfire.

As Milk's colleague and eventual murderer Dan White, Josh Brolin is also excellent, deftly walking the line between curiosity and abject disgust in his dealings with Milk, who is the only other supervisor who will give him the time of day despite the fact that White openly dislikes gay men. Although Milk mentions at one point that he thinks that White might himself be gay and deeply closeted, the film thankfully doesn't run with the idea, leaving White's actions somewhat of a mystery, which is indeed what they remain to this day.



The focus of the film is instead on Harvey's political career, and the issues that formed the basis of his campaign. In recapturing the era, Van Sant makes clever use of ample historical footage of both the Castro neighborhood that Milk called home (which is at times blended in so seamlessly with the modern-day recreations that it's impossible to tell the difference) and news footage of many of Milk's political foes, most notably Anita Bryant, whose conservative Christian movement pushed to get Proposition 6 (a ballot measure that sought to remove all openly gay teachers - and their supporters - from California public schools) passed in California after first finding success in Florida.

Milk packs a lot of stuff into its 2-hour running time, covering Harvey's move to California from New York and his romances with both Smith and Jack Lira (Diego Luna), his numerous runs for office, his political battles, his cautious friendship with White, his eventual murder and, finally, his legacy. But thanks to the warm performances from the central cast, the film doesn't suffer from its brisk pace, although some viewers might leave the theatre wanting to know more about Milk himself (we learn virtually nothing about the man pre-California). That, for me, is what's more important about biopics: it's not just what we see about the man/woman in the film, it's what it makes us wish to learn.

It's also worth noting that there are virtually no women present in this story. Aside from Anne Kronenberg, a lesbian largely responsible for Harvey's eventual campaign success, the Castro is curiously devoid of women. While there may have been segregation in causes at the time and while Milk's close circle may well indeed have been mostly male, it does seem strange that there is so little visibility for women (particularly lesbian women) in the film. Van Sant clearly wants to immerse the audience in a community of not just gay citizens in general, but of gay men in particular, with all their particular shortcomings and virtues.

As a straight man, but a human being to whom tolerance, humanity and respect are untouchably important, not recommending Milk isn't really even up for discussion. The fact that a renowned filmmaker and cast have managed to bring the story of a gay civil rights hero to screen is staggering to begin with, but the fact that the film that they have created is so solidly rendered, so heartfelt and so accessible is more than a relief, it's a godsend. There's a gay film about gay causes that shows the strength and resilience of the gay community without apologies, and a film like that has to be recommended without reservation.

Will the film change minds? Maybe not. Anyone rabidly anti-gay won't be seeing it to begin with. But what Milk might do is reenforce in the minds of those who are merely "tolerant" of gays or who don't fully appreciate the scope of the gay civil rights struggle that these are human issues, based around real people. Gay physical affection is presented as a matter of fact (there are love scenes and kisses abound), as is the hatred and bigotry directed at Harvey and his community. Some will be moved to tears by Harvey's story, others will be educated, and still others will leave the theatre furious at what is still happening in the world today. I entered the film prepared to be disappointed; thankfully, I wasn't. But I was also prepared to be detached from a time and a struggle that I'm relatively unfamiliar with.

However, within seconds of the film's opening there was one particular image that grabbed me by the throat and will probably stay with me for the rest of my life: During the title montage made up of news footage of gay bar raids, a group of men sit quietly with drinks at cafe tables surrounded by the harsh lights of camera crews, each with his face buried in his arms trying to hide from the cameras. Two hours later the film closes on the image of Harvey's community marching with candles through the streets of San Francisco, thousands strong. If Harvey's short legacy can teach us anything, it's that we - gay, non-gay, whatever - cannot live in fear and that we have nothing to hide our faces from. And if that is Harvey Milk's lasting message, it's one that is excellently realized, and long overdue.

"All men are created equal. No matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words."

Walter: "Tarek is teaching me the drum.
Mouna: How is that going?
Walter: I sound better when he's playing with me."



I'm afraid that describing the bare bones of The Visitor only makes it sound like the kind of film you drag yourself to see out of a sense of duty, one of those nice little pictures that's so timid it's incapable of either offending or exhilarating. But The Visitor, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, who made his debut with the understated and beautifully shaped The Station Agent in 2003, is pleasurable on so many levels that what it's about becomes far less important than what it is. In the multiplex universe - a place where, increasingly, marketing campaigns and marquee names are more important than film craftsmanship - it's sometimes easy to forget that acting and filmmaking are two of the things we go to the cinema for in the first place. The Visitor was made by a group of people who apparently grasp that simple but elusive truth. Eloquent and unassuming, it's a picture that hits home precisely because it doesn't overreach its grasp.

Richard Jenkins, that character actor we've all seen somewhere before, perhaps best known for his recurring role of Nathaniel Fisher in "Six Feet Under," is a subtle, responsive actor, but he isn't exactly leading-man material: the basic fact that so many different and great filmmakers (Mike Nichols, the Coens, David O. Russell, etc) have often made a space for his unflashy but considerable gifts seems like a minor miracle. Jenkins gets here, at 61 years-old, his first leading role in a feature film. He plays Walter Vale, an apathetic, slightly hunched economics professor who's been teaching the same course for years and who leads a life that's uneventful and solitary.

He lives alone in a spacious, silent Connecticut house that seems underfurnished and under-lived-in. In an early scene, we learn that he's trying to learn how to play piano, even though his teacher (played by a marvellously tart Marian Seldes) tells him he has zero aptitude. In later scenes, we learn, offhandedly, that his wife was a concert pianist and music teacher. Without spelling things out too baldly, Jenkins and McCarthy make it clear that Walter is trying to keep his late wife's memory alive in himself, but his desperation goes even deeper than that: He seems to have lost his own pulse, and he can't find it in the notes represented by the piano keys.

Walter is called to New York to deliver a paper he co-wrote (which held so little interest for him that he barely had a hand in its writing), and he has a place to stay: He's kept an apartment there for years, an East Village walkup that could be a remnant from a hipper, groovier life. Then again, it might just be plain old real estate - looking at this greyish, solemn man, it's hard to believe he ever partook of the '60s in the ways so many of his peers did. When he unlocks the door, he's startled to find that two people - both of them illegal immigrants - have taken up residence there: a Syrian musician named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira). Both parties are unnerved and a little embarrassed by the situation. Tarek and Zainab have been scammed into thinking they were living in the apartment legally; they offer to leave immediately. Walter agrees that that's exactly what they should do, but realizing they have nowhere else to go, he changes his mind for reasons he clearly doesn't even understand. They should stay with him, at least for the night, until they can figure out what to do.

The story that grows out of this almost too-simple set-up is a real New York story, made by someone who understands how the city works - or, in some cases, doesn't work. The film is partly a brief on the plight of illegal immigrants in that great, but deeply flawed country and, at times, McCarthy may hammer a little too persistently at that theme. But more significantly, it's a story about friendship and connection, and about how we sometimes locate the best parts of ourselves by reaching out to others. The film's title is intentionally ambiguous: who, exactly, is the visitor? Who belongs here and who doesn't? The Visitor is about the miraculousness of finding a sense of place, even when a person feels doomed to dislocation.

That's a heavy concept to fold into a small film, but The Visitor works marvellously because the writing, the performances and the direction are all so perfectly in sync. Tarek is by nature open and genuinely friendly (Zainab is more guarded, although she eventually warms to Walter as well), and when Walter expresses an interest in African drumming, Tarek sits down and gives him an impromptu lesson. Not long after, he brings Walter to a drum circle in Central Park, where the two take their places - Tarek eagerly, Walter reluctantly - among a group of musicians playing an array of percussion instruments. It's a mark of the film's generosity and thoughtfulness that no one makes a big deal out of the nerdy white guy in the grey suit, sitting among a bunch of far hipper looking (and largely non-white) percussionists. McCarthy doesn't have to draw attention to the fact that Walter doesn't fit in. He's more interested in showing how readily he's drawn into this larger circle, how even his deep isolation can begin to fall away in an afternoon.

The Visitor may be a gentle film, but it's not a toothless one. Tarek is arrested, and not as the result of any wrongdoing. His mother, Mouna (played by the extraordinary Israeli actress Hiam Abbass, star of The Syrian Bride and Satin Rouge), treks from Detroit to New York to try to help him, and Walter reaches out to her as well. McCarthy, as the actor that he is, gives everyone something to do: Gurira and Sleiman are extremely charismatic actors, but they're warm, believable ones too - the friendship they forge with Walter feels natural, not manufactured. And Abbass is, as always, wonderful: at first she matches Jenkins' low-key style; their scenes together intensify gradually, but even then, the shifting of gears is so gentle that by the film's end, we're as surprised as they are to see how far they've come.

As for Jenkins, he is extraordinary here. Not because he does anything big, but because everything he does is so economical and intuitive. At one point Walter visits Tarek in the dismal Queens detention centre where he's being held. He's carrying a letter from Zainab, who can't visit Tarek without risking deportation herself. Tarek stops Walter from slipping the letter under the glass divider between them, which is forbidden. But he tells Walter it's OK for him to hold the letter up to the partition, so he can read it.

Walter holds the letter to the glass and instinctively turns his head, a way of allowing Tarek privacy. This is the sort of subtle actor's moment that a dumb director could ruin, by letting the camera linger just a fraction of a second too long, or by adding melodramatic music to intensify the effect. But McCarthy underplays everything here. There are places where a character will ask Walter a question, and instead of countering with a line of dialogue, Jenkins responds with just a look: this is that rare script, written by someone who understands that writing doesn't just mean dialogue.

McCarthy brings an affecting and effective genuineness to his film, which, like The Station Agent, is a story about the ties that sometimes bind lost souls and marginalized others. The political undertone, the protest against the way immigrants are often treated (and not just in the U.S.) is an integral part of the film, but it shouldn't be taken as essential. This is, at heart, a story about friendship. A beautiful one. In his own modest way, McCarthy has emerged as a vital humanist voice in an independent cinema that is often a little too worried about colourful, "quirky" characters and that frankly, needs a few more filmmakers as bold and unafraid of a little sentimentality.

"You know, the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get; Richard Nixon's face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist."



Based on a half-forgotten series of pay-for-play interviews conducted by a British playboy and a disgraced ex-president, Frost/Nixon does for Richard Nixon what The Queen did for Elizabeth II, and that is to make a distant and controversial political celebrity into something simultaneously more manageable and more profound. Both works share a writer in Peter Morgan, though only Frost/Nixon started life as a play. Where other Nixon films have focused on high drama and constitutional crisis, this one finds the most compelling truths in anecdotal detail - an approach Morgan has raised to the level of high art. It's a film worthy (for a change) of the multiple Oscar nominations it received, and one that probably deserves a few more in categories that don't exist.

Considering how thoroughly he haunts our cinema, it's amazing that no one ever truly captured the ghost of Richard Nixon on film until now. Before the rise and fall of Nixon's regime, film presidents were mostly statesmanlike figures that used Roosevelt's clipped Hyde Park intonations to shower wisdom, grace and second tier Lincoln-isms on a grateful nation. The US government was largely a benevolent society run by aging and white-haired boy scouts who took off their hats in the presence of a lady and almost never appeared in public without placing one hand over their heart. American armies didn't so much prosecute wars as initiate secular crusades, vanquishing evil and then returning to escort the long-suffering women who waited for them down the tree-lined streets of Mid-western towns where any ex-soldier could live out his days unscathed, tranquil and whole.

By the time the Nixon Presidency terminated, the cinematic shorthand for America and its politics had soured to the point of becoming unrecognisable. Long black limousines of official power prowled the night, firing on enemies and dragging unwilling bystanders onto stained back-seats that swirled and clutched like whirlpools made of automotive leather. New filmic axioms had come into being: All politicians lie. Military officers are butchers and sadists. Veterans are frequently traumatized madmen. The CIA lurks in every shadow. And you are being watched. And overheard. And lied to. I can't be easy being American.

It would be too facile to say Nixon broke America's faith in itself, although it would be hard to overstate the public trauma of Watergate and of the Vietnam War Nixon promised to end and then extended into Cambodia instead. Nixon's real achievement, however, wasn't that he turned a nation of rubes into cynics. It was that he brought something dank and subterranean in the American character aboveground, where it became impossible to ignore. And so films absorbed the syntax of his paranoia, his resentments and the unscrupulousness mapped out by the inverted parabola of his trajectory - and fed that Nixonian shade back to audiences in the form of increasingly cheap and knee-jerk plot devices that are with us to this day.

The man himself was too intricate a monster to be depicted in such shorthand generalities, though several great directors gave it a try. Hal Ashby and Alan Pakula took the stock footage route, depicting Nixon as a tele-visual phantom - a distant spokes-model for malevolence and moral decay. To Oliver Stone, Nixon was Willy Loman, a backslapping low comedian in a film incongruously framed as stentorian high tragedy. The greatest of them all, Robert Altman, drew the most blood from the least resources: his forgotten 1984 film Secret Honor used Philip Baker Hall to deliver a harrowing one-man monologue during a fanciful dark night of the presidential psyche.

For all his success and prestige, Ron Howard is a journeyman compared to any of the four filmmakers named above. And yet he has succeeded where they failed, in part because his general tendency as a director is to be a self-effacing facilitator of the material (which is great) and performers. With Frost/Nixon Howard has had the good fortune (and indeed the moral obligation) of hiring Frank Langella to reprise his Tony-winning performance as Nixon - or more accurately, to revisit his resuscitation of Nixon's soul.

Most any actor of a certain age can probably "do" Nixon, for he was one of those unfortunate public men - like James Cagney, Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson - whose mannerisms inspired even amateur impersonators. The revelatory genius of Langella's performance is that his Nixon is doing an impersonation too - wearing a self-generated construct at least as artificial as anything impressionists might have performed in 1977, the year when the TV interviews that frames the action took place. To witness Langella's Nixon enacting the American politician's reflexive rituals of learned amiability is to watch a man torment himself into a shape he is unable to assume. It took a remarkable effort of will for someone as uncomfortable with himself as Nixon to climb so high in a system based on the popular vote, and Langella can communicate both the tenacity behind the rise and the inevitability of the fall in something as simple as Nixon's inability to convincingly pet a dog.

Langella is matched - or nearly so - by Michael Sheen, the Tony Blair of Morgan's The Queen, and an actor who will wrongfully be accused of reprising that earlier triumph with his portrayal of David Frost here. There are some major similarities, as there must be, for both Frost and Blair are self-made products in the British class-based society - men who have risen through an all but closed system to impossible heights based on luck and personal charm. But Sheen manages to do something almost as complicated and soulful with Frost as Langella achieves with Nixon, and he has to act through a swoop of hair and a toothy, premeditated smile to do it. Initially playing Frost as a callow playboy, Sheen comes into his own after the compulsively combative Nixon virtually wills Frost into a worthy adversary by offering him a glimpse of something that is beyond telegenic charisma to resolve. In that Faustian moment, Frost sees himself in the image, with Nixon as a kind of overlooked shadow he failed to notice he was casting under the public glare of flashbulbs and klieg lights.

Like Morgan The Queen, Frost/Nixon's sublime skill is that it humanizes history books and the leaders in them with tarnished names. More so than with any other President-film, Morgan and Howard are dealing not with a monkey fool or a stone monarch, but the 20th century's most human president, save perhaps Bill Clinton. Nixon sweated and fretted and plotted with the same urgency he would have had if he had never been more than a grocery store manager. Here, when he finally stops outrunning his past, we want nothing more than to offer him a hug and a handkerchief to wipe his brow.

Bobby Sands: "It's done. It won't be stopped.
Father Moran: "Then fuck it! Life must mean nothing to you.
Bobby Sands: God's gonna punish me.
Father Moran: Well, if not just for the suicide, then he'd have to punish you for your stupidity.
Bobby Sands: Aye.
Father Moran: And you for your arrogance.
Bobby Sands: Because my life is a real life, not some theological exercise, some religious trick that's got to fuck all to do with living. Jesus Christ had a backbone, but see them disciples, any disciple since? You're just jumping in and out of the rhetoric and dead-end semantics. You need the revolutionaries. You need the cultural and political soldier to give life a pulse... to give life a direction.
Father Moran: This is stupid talk. You're deluded.
Bobby Sands: Aye. So you say."



British artist Steve McQueen's feature film debut, Hunger, co-written by Irish writer Enda Walsh, is a graphically violent, deeply brooding film about IRA volunteer Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who led a hunger strike in 1981 aimed at improving conditions for IRA prisoners and regaining their status as political prisoners. Sands had been convicted of handgun possession and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. At the time, IRA prisoners were held together in one of several "H-Blocks," and began their protest with a "Blanket and No-Wash Protest" beginning in 1976.

The demands of the Irish prisoners during the hunger strikes seem, in retrospect, to be relatively minor: they sought to be recognized as political prisoners (prisoners of war), and as such to not be forced to wear prison uniforms, to not be forced to have work duty, to freely associate with other prisoners, and to be entitled to a weekly visit, parcel and letter.

The film opens with a man washing blood from his battered knuckles with echoes of Macbeth's "out damn'd spot, out I say!"; he has an air of grim determination about him as if he's resigned to whatever circumstances led to his state. The man, Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), is a prison guard, and we'll learn soon enough how his hands came to be in that state. Lohan stands in the snow, moodily smoking a cigarette; he gets ready for work at home, his wife watching worriedly as he checks under his car for a car bomb before leaving; he dresses in his uniform in the locker room and eats lunch alone, staunchly silent amidst the jovial camaraderie of his colleagues.

In the prison, we meet Davey (Brian Milligan), a new prisoner being brought in, refusing to wear the prison uniform, and being labelled "non-cooperative." He's tossed into a cell with another IRA member - a darkly claustrophobic hole his roommate has fingerpainted from floor to ceiling with smears of feces. And it's pretty much all downhill from there. We witness the brutality which Davey, his roommate Gerry (Liam McMahon), and the other residents of the IRA cellblock endure, but more than that, we witness their resiliency in the face of circumstances under which many of us would, no doubt, come to question both our sanity and our willingness to hold onto the values which put us there in the first place.

The core of the film, though, focuses on Sands, who led the hunger strike. Sands believes deeply and unquestioningly in the cause for which he's in prison and is willing to fight literally body and soul for the rights of the men being held for acts committed in the name of what he views as a war worth dying for. One of the film's strongest scenes is a lengthy dialogue between Sands and a visiting priest (Liam Cunningham).

The priest, father Moran, a fast-talking, charming fellow Irishman, is trying to convince Sands that his hunger strike is nothing but suicide; Sands passionately defends both his beliefs and his reasons for organizing the strike. He knows he is martyring himself with the strike; that, to him, is the point. He's not striking for himself, but for the cause in which he believes so strongly; for the inherent human dignity of his fellow IRA prisoners and the ultimate furthering of his cause, he is willing to die an ugly and painful, self-inflicted death.

In another powerful scene, prison guards line the hall of the IRA block decked out in full riot gear. They beat on their plastic shields with batons, creating a deafening roar; the prisoners are hauled out, one after another, and hurled into the row of guards, who beat the living shit out of them as they're forced down the hallway for a body cavity check performed with all the violence of a gang rape. It's an absolutely agonizing and wrenching scene, reminiscent of Alan Clark's Scum, a bit like watching an attack by a pack of vicious dogs going after helpless victims, one after another. Alone among the shouting guards gleefully beating their prisoners, one guard stands aside, sobbing amid the din of a breakdown of humanity; it's an evocative scene, a reminder that even within the horror of this grotesque warping of morality and human values, there is hope that not all will succumb to its sway.

There's not a bad performance or hokey line of dialogue in the entire film, but Fassbender's performance in particular is nothing short of mesmerizing. He's an absolute revelation in this film, in both the scene with the priest and the latter third of the film, as he starves himself to death. Milligan and McMahon deliver strong performances as well, and Graham, who is tasked with conveying the weight of the moral self-judgement of the prison guard almost entirely in silence, is remarkable as well, in particular when we see him suddenly shift from the melancholy introspection of the earlier scenes to acts of shocking violence.

McQueen doesn't hold back in showing us the ugliness of the conditions in which the prisoners are living, and the animalistic way in which they are treated. This, he shows us, is a place where the only human dignity left is that which you can hold onto inside. Beatings, forced bathings and body cavity checks are the tip of the iceberg here; these are conditions that would have PETA beating down the doors if animals were being treated this way, and the knowledge that these are human beings abusing other human beings in this way makes it almost unbearably difficult to watch at times. His direction is solid and unflinching from start to finish.

The film is graphically, brutally violent, but under the circumstances the violence isn't gratuitous, however difficult it may be to stomach. It's a cinema verité approach to viewing human dignity in the face of unimaginable indignities, a grim statement about what happens when differences of opinion in social and political matters lead men to treat other men with horrific cruelty.

Close camera shots within the prison cells evoke sweltering claustrophobia, and the unflinching lens of McQueen's camera brings us no relief from the brutality to which we are witnesses. This is a violent film, but there is masterful artistry at work as well. To be perfectly fair, McQueen and Walsh don't address the circumstances that led to these men being incarcerated, and the years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland were permeated with violence on both sides; Hunger, though, focuses on these particular men at this particular time, and it's a brilliant, inevitably harrowing portrayal of a tragic moment in human history.

"Many people have a soul that loves to swim. They are commonly known as lazy."

Another Parisian delight by Christopher Honoré, Love Songs confirms that the polarizing Ma Mère was but a bump in an artistic path ardently committed to exploring the winding avenues of contemporary romance. Divided into three parts that chart the effects a woman's love and death has on friends, family, and flames, the film has invited obvious comparisons to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but really it's continuing where the splendiferous A Woman Is a Woman left off, detailing the complexities of the ménage à trois Jean-Luc Godard's film was preluding to and seemed impossible more than 40 years ago.



The tremendously talented and handsome Louis Garrel plays Ismaël Bénoliel. Prowling the chilly, rain-swept streets of Paris like a disconsolate cat, pursued by at least four actual or potential lovers of various genders (one of them a ghost), Ismaël is a classic lonely hero of French cinema. To be specific, he belongs to the socially disconnected, emotionally damaged tradition of the French New Wave protagonists. Love Songs, in-competition at the '07 Cannes Film Festival, is part of an on-going effort to reanimate the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague in the context of a new century and a vastly different French society.

You could describe Love Songs, in fact, as a blend of Godard's and Truffaut's wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar's acrid polysexual comedy, which were never far apart to begin with (given the difference in climate and native temperament between France and Spain). But Honoré is also tapping into another French tradition, one he hinted at in his lovable and miscellaneous Dans Paris, also starring Garrel. Love Songs, after all, is a musical - one that blends young love, bedroom farce and tragedy. The result is a romantic, bittersweet experience one can conceivably fall in love with, and Honoré's best film so far.

Built around 14 doleful, funny, dark, dance-floor-accented songs by French pop composer Alex Beaupain - the film was written to fit the songs, rather than the other way around - Love Songs follows Ismaël's progress through a bumpy ménage à trois with his long-time, 28-year-old girlfriend Julie (Ludivine Sagnier, Swimming Pool) and vivacious brunette Alice (Clotilde Hesme, who co-starred Garrel in Regular Lovers). As Alice sings to her two bedmates in one of Beaupain's best numbers, "Je suis le pont entre toi et toi", or "I am the bridge between you." It's clear that Ismaël and Julie are passionately in love but wrestling with the usual big questions about commitment and the future. Alice is an intriguing detour for both of them, and a mode of communication on the way to stay together or break up.

Neither of those things happens, and while I can't totally avoid a spoiler, it's better if you don't know too much about the sudden and devastating tragedy that descends on this awkward threesome. Let's just say that Ismaël is sent wandering sleepless from place to place, unable to find much solace with Alice, Julie's charming parents (Brigitte Roüan and Jean-Marie Winling) and younger sister Jasmine (Alice Butaud, one of Garrel's girlfriends in Dans Paris), and avidly fleeing the attentions of both Julie's older sister Jeanne (the marvelous Chiara Mastroianni) and an idealistic, gay Breton college student (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) who's developed a massive crush on him.

If Ismaël's ultimate destination (in one of the loveliest, most improbable balcony renditions of Romeo and Juliet imaginable that will move even the most idiotic homophobe alive) surprised me, and if I felt that Love Songs ended a little too abruptly, the fact is that I didn't want it to end at all. At first it's startling when Garrel and Sagnier move from naturalistic dialogue into a pop song - performed in their own pleasant, natural, non-professional singing voices - but Honoré soon wraps you in his distinctive universe of realism and artifice, erotic comedy and heartbreak. It's a seductive, absorbing, treacherous realm, photographed with un-showy grace by Rémy Chevrin, who makes an unadorned Paris look truly divine.

Unlike John Carney's fabulous Once, Honore's musical isn't a latter-day backstage musical, but an honest-to-God, burst-out-into-song-when-speech-is-no-longer-sufficient event that few filmmakers, other than iconoclasts like Lars von Trier, Francois Ozon or Alain Resnais, have the guts to attempt. And unlike its reference point - Demy's Umbrellas - it's strikingly realistic. Honoré has taken a dozen of mostly pre-existing Franco-pop songs and seamlessly woven them into his plot (although a few of Beaupain's lyrics sound a lot better sung in French than they read subtitled), effortlessly capturing the footloose youthfulness and fancy-free sexuality of the early New Wave without compromising his own vision, and always making clear this story is happening today.

Honoré works fast and cheap on the margins of the French cinema mainstream; his four features so far haven't tackled heavy social issues like race or immigration, and with the exception of Ma Mère they aren't sexually explicit. (Love Songs is remarkably chaste, given the subject matter: there's very little on-screen nudity, let alone sex.) So he really hasn't been recognized at home as anything beyond a niche art-house director with a '60s obsession, and he has zero profile outside of Europe. This inexpressibly tender and lovely picture confirms what I've known for a few years: he's developing into a major talent, one who can accomplish a great thing: to make the spirit of classic French films come alive in a new world.

"Balloon, are you coming or not?"

Paris (and France in general) tends to be a habitat seen in big sweeps and large outside shots, attesting to the ongoing American romanticizing of the City of Lights. The Eiffel Tower looming large in the background, the stoic Arc de Triomphe, the rolling lawns in front of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur: However intimate the city's candour might be, Film has always taken Paris in with its monuments, landmarks, and open spaces as pieces of a collective familiarity.



With the exception of a lone, beautiful coda within the Musée d'Orsay, the very body responsible for the film's funding, Hou Hsiao-hsien's gorgeous Flight of the Red Balloon drifts away from these environs, making a film about Paris life that seems uninterested in Paris as a city. Based on, or perhaps just familiarized with, Albert Lamorisse's French children's classic, Hsiao-hsien moves the focus from a child and his balloon to a child, his frazzled mum, and his new Chinese nanny, a young filmmaker on a student visa.

In an odd act of attentiveness, the nanny, Song (a great Song Fang), begins to make a student film about the red balloon floating around her arondissement, co-starring her ward, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Explaining how she got the balloon to move exactly how she wanted, Song briefly talks about green screens and the pratfalls of modern, low-budget filmmaking, giving Hsiao-hsien a behind-the-scenes fantasia of sorts within his own film. Simon's father, a writer in self-imposed exile in Montreal, has only one interaction by phone, but his presence is aptly felt through Simon's mother's (Juliette Binoche) barbed interactions with her husband's friend and current tenant, Marc (Hippolyte Girardot).

Binoche is a dream. Like the city in which the film is based, Hsiao-hsien has stripped Binoche of her token abilities: her dark hair mussed and badly dyed into a blonde mess, her usual role as centre of gravity thrown into a state of utter upheaval, her coy beauty mutated into a palette of raw nerves. Yet, through this act of deviation, Binoche gives one of her best performances to date, at once completely spontaneous and thoughtfully patient.

In a year brimming with great French films, it's ironic that the most successful of them would come from a Chinese-born, Taiwan-educated filmmaker. Like Wong Kar-wai's first immersion into foreign language cinema, the English-tongued My Blueberry Nights, Hsiao-hsien continues to study the same tropes of his outstanding Chinese output: loneliness, isolation, stilted love. It also touches on the polarizing effect of city life and travel, a strong force in the master's 2003 tribute to Ozu, Café Lumière. But whereas Wong's exercise coaxes out the director's inevitable faults when not working in his language, Flight of the Red Balloon highlights Hsiao-hsien' staggering strengths, both aesthetically and technically speaking: Like the rest of Hsiao-hsien's oeuvre, his latest feels like the culmination of all his works beforehand.

Working with the masterful cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, Hsiao-hsien, who gave his actors full character histories but no written dialogue, delivers all the film's action in confined settings. A cramped, cluttered apartment, a darkened puppet theatre, the narrow streets of Paris: Somehow these areas breed imagination for Hsiao-hsien's actors. Shot in his patently-resplendent long takes, the aesthetic is seemingly unencumbered, but, coupled with Chu Shih Yi's gentle sound design, the images breathlessly unspool into suites of effortless intricacy.

As Suzanne argues heatedly with Marc downstairs, Hsiao-hsien's camera wanders around the apartment as Song and Simon prepare for a mid-day snack and a blind tuner repairs Suzanne's piano. All the sounds and movements of the characters co-mingle, interact, climax, and then gently descend: You won't see anything as rapturous as this in any film made or released in 2008.

"It's funny how you can tell the fake smiles in pictures. You notice people don't bring out cameras on sad days?"



Based on the richly textured novel by Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels is a searing portrait of three interconnected families living in a small Pennsylvania town, their lives affected and, in some cases, irretrievably altered through a series of tragic events. As faithfully adapted for the screen and directed by David Gordon Green, the film's escalating power and cumulative emotional impact can only be attributed to the care that this incredibly perceptive and poetic filmmaker brings to the project. Both in his depiction of a wintry landscape of lost souls and in his painfully accurate portrayal of characters struggling to make their way in a world that oft-times seems cruelly unfair and confusing, Snow Angels rings resoundingly true.

Representative of four relationships in varying states of growth or disrepair, the film's centre of gravity is teenager Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano), who watches as his parents, Louise (Jeanetta Arnette) and Don (Griffin Dunne), mutually separate and his college professor father moves out of the house. At school, the cutely bespectacled Lila (Olivia Thirlby) has her eyes on him, but her obvious attempts at starting something romantic are lost upon Arthur, who can't imagine someone would be interested in him.

At his job as a busboy at a local Chinese restaurant, he works alongside his former babysitter Annie (Kate Beckinsale), at the time a teen herself and now a somewhat hardened and overworked mother going through a difficult divorce with perpetual screw-up of a husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell). Against her better judgement, Annie has begun a seedy affair with Nate Petite (Nicky Katt) behind the back of his wife and her best friend and co-worker Barb (Amy Sedaris). When the unthinkable strikes after Annie's and Glenn's 4-year-old daughter Tara (Gracie Hudson) goes missing, it is the catalyst for everyone to finally face what they mean to each other and where they stand in the choices they've made.

Snow Angels begins with what could only be looked at as a harbinger of doom to come. Arthur's marching band practice on the high school football field is suddenly disrupted when two nearby gunshots ring out in the frosty air. Rewinding the clock by several weeks, the film aims to explore what leads to this fateful moment in time, and for 106 minutes, Green holds us in rapt attention even as we occasionally find ourselves shrinking down in our seats, aware (even if subconsciously) of the inevitable conclusion being built toward. While there are light-hearted moments to be had, and the adorably burgeoning relationship between Arthur and Lila offers glimmers of revelatory hope, Snow Angels is extremely bleak and uncompromising in its tone and narrative turns. At the same time, save for a somewhat forced opening monologue by the overbearing band leader, the film is never less than glaringly authentic.

The ensemble of characters are true originals, feeling, looking and sounding like real people rather than vaguely developed screenplay pawns. In the very specific milieu Green is working within, his characters are flawed, sometimes troubled, but sympathetic even in spite of some of the less savoury choices they make. All of them are simply trying to navigate the circumstances they've found themselves in and, unfortunately, a map has not been made to guide them.

In a film of emotionally rattling moments, it is in the smaller, quieter interludes of human connection and reflection that are often most poignant. The way, for example, that Arthur gives Lila a pencil from his locker as a spur-of-the-moment present, is naive in the extreme, and yet exactly why Lila is charmed by him. A conversation they later have in Arthur's bedroom where he tells her about his remembrances of having Annie as a babysitter are heartbreaking in their subtle comments on the way innocuous childhood memories have a way of holding greater nostalgic value years later. Another moment in which Arthur and his mum reminisce over a photo album is unpredictably insightful.

As with all the other four films Green has directed, the actors in Snow Angels are all doing some of the best work they've ever had in their careers, clearly delighted to be able to sink their teeth into unusually complex, three-dimensional roles. As Arthur, Angarano is just about as good as it gets for male actors of his late-teen/early-twenties age group. He has an everyman quality about him that makes him instantly identifiable, but also the kind of face that you just want to hug. He is perfect as Arthur, an otherwise ordinary teenager whose sensitivity and heart run a little deeper than most. Because of this notion, he and Lila, an embracer of the offbeat who refuses to conform to stereotypes, make for an undeniably sweet couple. Olivia Thirlby is an utter delight as Lila, worldly and intelligent yet mischievous and vulnerable.

As the morally torn Annie, Beckinsale is a revelation. When you put aside the vampire-killing roles, she has been superb in the past (in Emma, Haunted, The Aviator) but, sort of like Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl, she's never been given the chance to essay a role with quite so many layers and interior demands. She's obviously a gorgeous woman, but Green shoots her like the saddest one in the world, and it helps her to completely dig into the darker corners of a person's psyche. Her final on-screen look and utterance of "Oh my..." is especially haunting. It's usually the kind of performance that wins Oscars, if we were talking about a "bigger" film, of course.

In perhaps the most difficult part to pull off, Sam Rockwell is mesmerizing as Glenn, a man who can't seem to ever do right - his forgetting to bring a stuffed bunny he has bought for Tara on one of the their days spent together is particularly symbolic of this - and whose mounting religious faith is at direct odds with the actions he takes in the third act. In lesser hands, Glenn could have become over-the-top and too broadly played, but Rockwell makes him as credible as the rest of the characters. As an actor who's been in more than thirty films in less than two decades, it never ceases to amaze me how Rockwell can make you laugh hysterically one moment and break your heart the next.

Emanating a sense that what happens to these characters not only could happen in real life, but has, Snow Angels is mesmerizing in its sharp, fully-realized gaze at lives approaching a crossroads from which only some of them will reach the other side. Beautifully photographed by Tim Orr, taking advantage of his chilly, ice-drenched setting, it's ultimately such a provocative and effective film because of how David Gordon Green handles the tough material, lending equal weight to both the extraordinary and deceptively mundane moments of life in motion that make all of us startlingly, stingingly and intensely human.

"I forgive you. I don't even know you, but I forgive you."

"Yeah, they know. Everyone knows now. I'm on me own now. I can't go back... being that other person, because that other person is dead."

Like Control, the recent Anton Corbijn treatment of Ian Curtis' short life, John Crowley's powerful British drama Boy A announces its gravitas with a look - organically achieved, with cinematography, production design and direction working together - you are meant to notice. In scene after scene the excellent actors are placed in stark isolation against vast gray or beige backdrops, or against concrete slabs or brick walls. Oxygen and joy, like simple human connection, are hard to come by for everyone in this universe, most of all for the young man at the story's center.



He's a 24-year-old graduate of juvenile prison, having been convicted, along with another boy, for the murder of a pre-teen girl. For the last fourteen years, he has been known in the outside world as "Boy A." Crowley's fine, gritty film (which feels reminiscent of Shane Meadows and an early Alan Clarke) follows the young man as he re-enters society, relocates under a pseudonym to Manchester, takes a factory job, meets regularly with a caseworker, falls in love - and then feels the hot breath of the world-famous English media on his neck as his secret identity resurfaces.

The film is directed by the veteran stage practitioner John Crowley, who brought Martin McDonagh's similarly oxygen-depriving story "The Pillowman" to London and New York. Boy A comes from Jonathan Trigell's 2004 novel, which was based loosely on various real-life cases, including the 1993 killing of two-year old James Bulger in Liverpool, one of the most notorious crimes in modern British history. Although the screenplay tips our sympathies wholly in the young man's direction, it's cleverly structured to reveal the particulars of the long-ago crime, and what led up to it, in flashback.

"They said I could choose me own name," says the man who becomes "Jack Burridge" upon his prison release. Andrew Garfield - skinny, beetle-browed, his eyes and smile full of puzzled wonder at all he sees - is first-rate throughout. Jack's an adult, but his emotional receptors are off and his childlike responses carry a hint of danger. He never knows when someone's kidding him, whether it's a co-worker (Shaun Evans), his lover (Katie Lyons) or his caseworker (Peter Mullan).

The mood, colour schemes and isolating placements of the actors are all so consciously controlled, Boy A sometimes feels less like an exploratory portrait than an exercise in aesthetic clamminess. Yet Garfield, who was one of the few positive things in Robert Redford's terrible Lions for Lambs, playing the young American student, makes a whole, aching character of Jack. And in the scenes with Lyons, who doesn't really know who is in her bed, Garfield experiences the joys, terrors and undiscovered country of first love like someone from another planet.

"I saw a whole other future. I can't stop seeing it."

Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes' return to the domestically dysfunctional stomping grounds that made his name nine years ago with American Beauty, has given me all sorts of grief. I thought I was pretty much done for the year, ready to call it a day on 2008 and then along comes this film. Now I've gotta go back and put Revolutionary Road on all my best of lists, not only for the year, but possibly for all time.



If I was the swearing type (I can be, but never mind), I'd have exactly the expletive to describe my reaction to this film; it's one much more closely associated with professional wrestling matches or special effects blockbusters. Revolutionary Road is that much of a shock of power and gravity. Like a kick in the gut, the performances are raw and brutal. Mendes' great achievement is levelling his actors' emotional nakedness against the veneer of the self-possession and plastic reserve of the film's 1950s setting.

"Revolutionary Road," the first and most lasting novel by the late Richard Yates, was published in 1961. It was a shake and a slap to the post-war suburban Middle Class, arguing that success in American society need not breed conformity in its trappings and a forfeiting of personal or professional ambition. Many have subsequently tried to turn the book into a film and it can be argued that 2008 is one of the least appropriate times to make the attempt. Nowadays, Yates' plea for cultural acknowledgement of the dangers of suburban malaise is no longer surprising or controversial. But even if its relevance has shrunk to a less societal (more personal) level as a portrait of a married couple trapped in the Great American Lifestyle, it still packs a hell of a punch.

As written by Yates, Frank and April Wheeler are just a couple of crazy, dreamy-eyed kids in love. At least they were before marriage, kids and the perfect house in the suburbs came along. Somewhere Frank's romantic talk of travel and April's unconventional life as an aspiring actress fell by the wayside of their quaint Connecticut surroundings. April's discomfiture at settling into the mode of the typical '50s family seeps into every aspect of her being. In the role of the breadwinner and man of the house, Frank has slipped into upwardly mobile docility far easier than his restless wife and cannot relate to April's rages against happy mediocrity. To April, the encroaching languid domesticity threatens to overtake their pledge to always hold on to the young, progressive couple they were. Desperate to seize the last gasps of their heady ideals, April pleads with Frank to come away from the stale, bourgeois existence that is consuming them and run off to live the life of true bohemians in France. One person's freedom is another's bondage and Frank and April struggle to find the common ground that will allow them to be happy again.

Revolutionary Road is a study in the moral claustrophobia of an era. The film shines a light on marital disappointment and fading dreams that aren't, after all, so far removed from this age as then. April's wrath against the dawning of comfortable mediocrity and "settling down" is relevant to anyone who's watched a lover become less than the superhero you were sure was there. That frustration, bouncing against the rubber walls of a beautiful home in 1950s Connecticut, is made all the more stifling when the entire neighbourhood is watching and judging. April's passion for life and one last grab at it is smothered by all around her, including her partner, and is ridiculed for being a childish or unrealistic decision. The utter betrayal April feels realising that she and Frank have grown into utterly different people than the two young dreamers they began as is sealed when Frank questions her very sanity at her inability to happily live in what he has decided is a perfect life.

When it comes down to it, this is very close to be the best thing that either Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet have ever done. Considering that Winslet is chronically excellent in everything she does, that states much. The very antithesis of their previous hearts and flowers coupling in Titanic; one could easily muse that this might have been how Jack and Rose's life turned out had he been able to stay on that damn floating table.

DiCaprio lends an oozy charm to Frank's smug, entitled alpha-male working drone. Frank is comfortable with his place in the world because despite his initial reluctance at following in his father's footsteps at the same company, he's simply got the best a working stiff can ask for. The three-martini lunches and access to disposable, dewy-eyed secretaries are simply a matter of course. As his star rises within his company, the more frightened Frank becomes of losing the stability that April despises. DiCaprio does a lovely bit of balancing between the smarmy philanderer and the mystified young man who no longer understands the woman he is still besotted with.

Winslet's April is arch and passionate, nurturing, confident and needy. As her own dream of becoming an actress dies in a Connecticut school auditorium, ill-placed words by a well-meaning, clumsy Frank add bricks to the wall of her reserve to be more than just another suburban mum. Without histrionics, Winslet's ability to convey how trapped April is by every aspect of her life is breathtaking. Under April's constant public scrutiny, she gives more away with less - a flick of a cigarette and a downward gaze - than scores of other actors of her generation could manage with reams of dialogue. In the forcibly subdued veneer of acceptable 1950s behaviour, April fairly chokes on her distaste for everything she and Frank have become; frightened, boring and finally ordinary. When neither hysterics nor silence avail her nothing, you can genuinely feel the walls closing in on her. I think this will be it for Kate; the Oscar will finally be hers.

And then the fantastic supporting cast is the Maraschino cherry on top. From Dylan Baker as Frank's slimy, unctuous cubicle mate, to Kathy Bates as Mrs. Givings, the Wheeler's adoring, nosy friend and realtor, to David Harbour as the next door neighbour whose adoration for the Wheelers goes a bit deeper. The standout is Michael Shannon as the Givings' mentally "ill" son, John. The Givings reckon being around a model young couple like the Wheelers might help John to acclimate himself back into society. His unclouded insight and lack of verbal inhibition cuts a swathe through the fluffy veil of pretence of the Wheelers' public front, forcing even the couple to face hard truths. Shannon's nervous, imposing presence jolts a film that was already moving along quite greatly. His shattering of the Wheelers' carefully posed perfection is a band-aid torn off a raw wound. It's not lost on April that the institutionalised John is the only one who sees her life in the same way she does.

Comparisons will obviously be made to Mendes' American Beauty but, beyond taking that same suburban nightmare territory, Revolutionary Road is a totally different animal. The 1950s is much more fertile ground for the mannered, simmering desperation abundant in the piece. Sam Mendes masterfully conducts his impeccable cast, alternately reining in and allowing controlled fireworks of verbal savagery to suit the age of apropos and good reputations. It's been a long time since I was haunted by a film, but Revolutionary Road will stay in my eye for a very long time.

Brilliant, this.

"What is honour? I think we're speaking about something else. We say "that sucks" or "this blows." We don't say honour."



One (and the best) of several global dramas that clearly culled direct inspiration from the infamous Columbine High School Massacre (and evidence, given its geographic origins, of that tragedy's global impact), Ilmar Raag's harrowing Klass (The Class) unfolds in an Estonian high school where, as with any other school in the world, kids bully other kids. Amid this morass, 16-year-old Joosep (Part Usuberg) suffers from constant, sadistic belittlement and humiliation. One of his torturers, newcomer Kaspar (Vallo Kirs), soon changes sides and offers to protect the victim, as a kind of bodyguard, but in time, per human nature, the bullies also turn him into a pariah. One act of systematic humiliation too many soon pushes the two boys over the edge and sets the stage for an unremitting bloodbath of vengeance.

The film is divided into seven chapters and takes place in an anonymous Estonian secondary school. This isn't a sociological probe into the theme of adolescent bullying which might turn violently against the perpetrators, but more a universal reflection on the darker sides of the human soul, often hidden beneath an attractive exterior, ready to provoke an unexpected reaction under excess pressure. The acting performances (all first-timers, regular kids) of the leads, in particular, give the story - a linear progression where silly pranks develop into a tragic outcome - a highly credible dimension. For the first time you'll see the subject treated realistically. You'll see kids actually fighting back.

While for a long time high school shootings seemed confined to North America, with the killing sprees in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, Erfurt, Germany in 2002 and in Jokela, Finland just last November, they have started to leave their mark on the European continent and psyche. Estonian director Ilmar Raag, though nominally inspired by Columbine, tackles the subject in a very European way in this highly uncomfortable work, a film that asks a lot of ugly questions about peer pressure, bullying and one's rights to revenge or at least defend oneself (if Van Sant's Elephant purposefully seemed to offer no questions or insight, then this film makes up for it twice, though there are no clear-cut answers).

Klass won the Europa Cinemas label at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and a Special Mention in that festival's East of the West Competition. It also signals Estonia as an important new hotbed of quality European cinema. Besides Raag's feature, other noteworthy titles include Kadri Kõusaar's Magnus (which, like Klass, relied mainly on non-professional actors) and Veiko Õunpuu's Venice winner Autumn Ball, and this accomplished trifecta of films makes it clear that there is a new generation of Estonian directors in their twenties and thirties that have a lot of interesting stories to tell and are not afraid to ask ugly questions or present ambiguous answers. In a country this small (population: 1,3 million), you have no idea how hard that is.

"Beautiful women are invisible; we're so dazzled by the outside that we never make it inside."



There's much irony in the fact that it took a female director to finally successfully bring the sometimes misogynistic Philip Roth to the big screen. Based on a short story by the masterful writer called "The Dying Animal," Isabel Coixet's Elegy is one of the more interesting dramas of the year, and it has not been easy to heap praise on previous Roth adaptations like The Human Stain or Portnoy's Complaint. With other modern masters of the written word like Ian McEwan (Atonement) and Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men) finally getting cinematic treatments worthy of their source material, Roth could become the next go-to-guy for the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Elegy is not quite as good as the films that broke McEwan and McCarthy into the Oscars last year, but it is hopefully the beginning of a pattern for this excellent writer and one of the better dramas of a year that hasn't seen too many worth mentioning.

The reason why Elegy not succeeds on its own terms, but actually ends a more rounded, humane and involving experience than its source material, can be located in its choice of director: Isabel Coixet. The Catalan is the kind of filmmaker who specialises in rare cinematic birds: her 2003 film My Life Without Me is one of very few terminal-illness dramas I can watch over and over again, and its preoccupations with mortality make it very much of a piece with this latest.

Coixet seems instinctively to understand that, where matters of life and death are concerned, the tone will always sit better when understated. What's more, the casting of Sir Ben Kingsley is inspired. His character, David Kepesh, a sixty-something professor, is different from the novel in being neither American nor, apparently, Jewish; he's a Brit who escaped to New York in the 1960s, lured by the promise of sexual freedom. But in other respects Kingsley has him to the life - distant, calculating, self-satisfied, a man who gets laid a lot ("unimpeded in the world of eros," in Roth's grandiose phrase) but avoids any commitment. The perfectly bald head and neat beard only enhance his bearing as a satyr. When we first see him on a late-night culture show, Kepesh, a confessed hedonist, berates the American puritans for their attempts to outlaw "sexual happiness." But what then happens to him argues that such happiness is a chimera.

He begins dating one of his former students, Consuela, a Spanish beauty with Cuban heritage who reminds him of Goya's portrait of The Clothed Maja (this is a high-toned comparison, and hugely unfair to Penélope Cruz who, even with her girlish fringe, is about a hundred times more alluring than Goya's muse).

At first Kepesh rhapsodises about her breasts and calls her body "a work of art"; then he falls helplessly in love with her. And, to his embarrassment, he finds himself a nervous wreck, as prey to jealousy and insecurity as any lovelorn swain. In one excruciating scene, he goes to spy on her at a nightclub, convinced that she's gone there to meet another man, and his cover is blown. The look she gives him - more in sorrow than in anger - would make a less self-regarding man leave not just the club, but the country. Worse, his 30-year seniority is now a source of oppression: she's young and lovely, he's old and on the way out. But this, too, is revealed to be another aspect of the man's towering selfishness, since Consuela sees a future for them and wants Kepesh to meet her family.

What comes across in Roth's novel as crybaby indulgence - a young woman's love and he still can't be happy - is rendered in Coixet's film as a tragicomic getting of wisdom. Self-pity is softened until it looks like pity for the human condition. Some of the liveliest moments happen on the margins, where Kepesh dodges around the people who have known him best. Patricia Clarkson is terrific, again, as a no-strings lover who has kept him company for the last 20 years and now suspects she's being run in for a younger model.

Even better are the scenes with Peter Sarsgaard as his 42-year-old son, Kenny, still tight-jawed with rage at Kepesh's desertion of his family all those years ago and the "serial tomcatting" that followed it. Now Kenny's own marriage is in trouble - he has met another woman - but his father, who ought to sympathise, can think of nothing to say that might help (though he does get a very good line about an oboe). Dennis Hopper, as the professor's best friend, is the single instance of miscasting, simply because Hopper cannot be anyone's best friend, but he's interesting to watch nonetheless, and his deathbed scene has a curiosity all its own.

Fans of Roth may wonder where the nervy, disputatious energy of the writer has gone; it looks rather too discreet and tasteful for anything associated with his name. What Coixet misses out, however, she makes good in terms of humanity. Like a lawyer with a problem client, Kingsley gives a generous account of a distinctly unamiable protagonist. His ramrod-straight posture and watchful eyes betoken a man on guard against the world, and his one brief burst of laughter makes even Hopper sound vaguely human. Yet this is a portrait of great complexity that passes from pathetic insecurity to shocking regret, and it finds a complement in Cruz's doe-eyed charm. Beautifully photographed by Jean-Claude Larrieu, Cruz gives the best English-speaking performance of her career. Again, it's the restraint of the playing that touches; there are no operatic displays of anger or self-pity, just a wry philosophical acceptance of the hand that fate has played her.

Elegy ends as quietly as it begins, and its crepuscular mood will not be to everyone's liking. It's a drab title, though in truth "The Dying Animal," while more evocative, would probably draw even fewer people to the box office. It's not an obvious choice from the Roth oeuvre to put on screen - I'd love to see what Coixet might do with "Sabbath's Theater" or "The Plot Against America" - yet she has done more than honour it; she has found a tenderness and vulnerability that were so deeply buried as to be almost undetectable. She's truly a fascinating filmmaker.

"When you make love to a beautiful woman you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life."

"My name is Benjamin Button, and I was born under unusual circumstances. While everyone else was agin', I was gettin' younger... all alone."



There's no way to watch David Fincher's odd sentimental ode, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, without thinking of its cinematic cousin and spiritual ancestor, Forrest Gump. Like that Tom Hanks blockbuster, Benjamin Button deals with a good-hearted simpleton who journeys far and wide to discover overstated truisms about living and dying. Like Gump, Button's got a sweet-but-stern Southern mama (Taraji P. Henson), and an enduring love interest (Cate Blanchett) that accompanies him through the chapters of his life. The two films share a strange magic realism, stretching the bonds of credulity without caution. Most importantly, both films are shamelessly designed to tug the heartstrings of mainstream audiences, while simultaneously appearing highbrow enough to garner some year-end awards. And hell if it worked, it got 13 fucking Oscar nominations. Thirteen!

Benjamin Button, however, is much more fascinating than Gump or other treacly films in this sub-genre. (Atmospheric echoes of Big Fish, The Notebook and Titanic also find their way into Eric Roth's lugubrious screenplay.) Its magnetic power, in my opinion, is chiefly due to two artists whose biographies make them an unlikely, uncomfortable match for this material. They're the ones who deserve their respective nominations the most.

First is Fincher. Widely accepted as a modern-era visionary, his major films to date - Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac - are dark studies in humanity, rife with heavy metaphor and duplicitous characters who, in their instincts and world-views, betray the fragile underbelly of civilization. Fincher is, on the surface, a terrible match for the soporific platitudes and feel-good moralizing of Benjamin Button. But that incongruity fuels a palpable friction between the story and the storyteller... a friction that gains intensity and resonance as the film meanders towards its conclusion. Imagine it: me, plopped precariously into starry-eyed American sentimentality. Nothing could be stranger... unless Scorsese makes a film about Hobbits.



By contrast to Fincher, his leading man, Brad Pitt, is most comfortable when exploring the peculiarities of idiosyncratic characters. After twenty years of creating iconic performances, you would think a provocative turn like that in Benjamin Button - a man who lives through the 20th century by mysteriously aging in reverse - would be a less surprising shock. But pleasantly shocking it is; Pitt brings a gentle sadness to Button, a man whose difficult circumstances inform his perspective rather than cloud it. Yes, he struggles with the character's Cajun accent (a serious problem almost as distracting as the film's Hurricane Katrina flash-forwards). But in the main, Pitt takes material that in the hands of a lesser "superstar" - say, Tom Hanks - would merely be maudlin and trite.

I confess that I've grown less tolerable of Hollywood "whimsy" in the last decade... a personal aversion that I first noticed, coincidentally, while re-watching Forrest Gump a few years ago. But if I've got to suffer through films awash in easy moralizing and pat answers to life's complexities, I'd much rather do so in the company of Fincher and Pitt, who seem to share my distaste enough to try to reconstitute and recontextualize it. Good or bad, that's an incredibly admirable achievement.

Is that achievement enough, however, to recommend the film? I'm not sure... or, rather, a blanket recommendation seems to miss the point. Your enjoyment of Benjamin Button, more than any other film I've seen this year, depends upon who YOU are, and how you like your Film menu to be filled. But know, as you make your decision, that the most important word in the title of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is "curious." It's exactly the right descriptive needed for this erratic, surprising, flawed, delightful, inconsistent, fascinating hybrid.

"Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss."

Will: "OK!
[swings from a rope and drops into the water]
Lee Carter: [filming] Yeah! Keep swimming to the other side!
Will: [floundering in the water] I can't swim!
Lee Carter: ... What d'you mean you can't swim?
[watches Will sink beneath the water] ... Oh, shit!"



Oh man, what a a joyous film this is. Son of Rambow is about making friends, making films and having a great time. A film for anybody and everybody, especially those with a love of the '80s. Enjoyable by any audience, it's both touching and hilarious, but without a hint of cheese or a drop of cynicism. You'll be swept up in its characters and their adventures, their humour and their hardships, and as the credits roll you'll feel great. This is not an easy thing for a film to do. But when it happens, you realize that what you've just witnessed is that most elusive of clichés, the centre of the bulls-eye and the heart of the whirlwind: it's magic in the form of film.

We enter on the Britain of the early '80s where 11-year-old Will (Bill Milner) isn't allowed to watch TV. The mind boggles at what a creature such deprivation will birth, but Will manages to get by OK. He lives with his quiet, extremely conservative, Amish-like family and spends most of his time doodling imaginative characters in his school books. Forced to sit in the hallway while the rest of his class watches an instructional video (not allowed to watch the tellie, remember), he gets a tennis ball in the face. The sender is none other than the school troublemaker, Lee Carter (Will Poulter). Lee bosses Will around, steals from him, and roughs him up. Naturally, the two become good friends.

Lee takes his new chum home and leaves him alone in his garage - with a TV. And a VCR. And a recently-pirated copy of First Blood. Eyes wide with wonder and fear, young Will witnesses an angry, dirt-caked Stallone hold a knife to Colonel Trautman's neck and mutter, "In town, you are the law. Out here it's me. Don't push it or I'll give you a war you wouldn't believe. Let it go." Will does the opposite. You come to understand that this is a moment he will hold onto for the rest of his life.

As soon as Will discovers that Lee, also enamoured by the Stallone classic, is set on filming his own version of the film for a local young filmmakers contest, he wants to take part. Christening himself the "Son of Rambo(w)," Will stars in a series of outrageous stunts in the pursuit of action cinema greatness. But when a hip, red leather clad French exchange student comes to school capturing the hearts and minds of his peers with his accent and coiffed hair, Will and Lee's action opus gets into trouble. You see, the French kid wants to star in it. Will is delighted that this smoking, girl-kissing Prince-like idol wants to be in their film, but Lee sees it as an end of their fun times and a hijacking of his project.

It's not just the characters, or the story, or the humour that makes Son of Rambow a great film, it's the way each element plays off the next. The way these kids speak sounds genuine. The way they act feels real. Thing is, it's not - there are hints of manipulation here, but you welcome all of it. Witness Will's hilarious attempts at performing his own stunts: For one shot, he stands on a teeter-totter as a heavy barrel is pushed onto the opposite end, sending him flying. For yet another set piece, he gets up on a ladder in the middle of a crop field and places himself directly in the path of a heavy-powered water hose - again, the skinny kid goes flying. Realistic? Probably not. But fun, funny, and welcome within the world of the story? Absolutely.

Most of the film's gags are perpetrated at the lacquer-nailed hand of the French exchange student, played with wicked hilarity by Jules Sitruk. Not only is it funny that he manages to rustle up a league of followers with just a shrug and a puff of a cigarette, but their painful attempts at winning his favour will make you laugh out loud. I've never seen a more subtle and smart stab at the British-French rivalry in my life. They follow him around, queue up girls for him to make-out with - all of whom couldn't be more excited - and, in a particularly memorable gag, hold hands, cool-guy on the end, and tap a live power circuit, just so the calm hipster can light his smoke. Again, it's a tad cartoony, but you're having such a great time you won't care. You're happy to sacrifice a bit of reality for such fun moments.

But the real strength of this film lies in the friendship between the two kids and the imagination and heart with which their dynamic is presented. Will and Lee complement each other perfectly and we're lucky to be allowed in on their adventures. What's more, the story, penned by writer/director Garth Jennings (for whom this is a follow-up to Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy), is a gem of a screenplay. Each element contributes to the story, each beat fleshes out the theme and the characters. And each laugh is earned. If this is what Jennings can accomplish with his second film then watch out: what we've got here is one hell of a storyteller.

Son of Ranbow is the type of film that will have you sitting and watching the end credits because you're still processing. The emotions that the film has evoked still linger in your mind and in your heart. As you watch white text float up a black canvas, you'll want to go out and hug someone. You'll want to call your childhood best friend with whom you used to play everyday. You'll want to go out and make a film. But most of all, you'll want to make the time to see Son of Rambow again. It'll really make you feel - and that's a rare, precious thing indeed.

"You keep on rowin', and I'll keep on smilin'."

Film-goers, novel-readers, TV-watchers and culture-consumers spread through our little planet generally are now on a continuous yellow alert for irony; narrators of every kind are regarded as about as trustworthy as the patio-building stepfather at the televised press conference, pleading for his partner's 15-year-old daughter to return home. So when irony appears to be withheld or abolished, the natural reaction is suspicion.



You could be forgiven for assuming that the title of Mike Leigh's latest film must surely be ironic. Happy-Go-Lucky? It's difficult to say the phrase out loud in anything other than a sarcastic voice. Leigh's last film, Vera Drake, was, after all, a harrowing dark masterpiece about the darkest corners of the human co-existence, and the titles of many of his films (Life Is Sweet, High Hopes) appear to signal that despite elements of sweetness, richness and happiness - always under-acknowledged in Leigh's films - there is irony at some level.

But not here. And with this title, Leigh boldly challenges our easy assumptions about realism, pessimism and irony itself. It describes the heroine, Poppy, who is vividly played by Leigh regular Sally Hawkins, here stepping up to her first lead role, and carrying it off with terrific confidence and gusto. She is a north London infant school teacher who is, well, happy-go-lucky. That galumphing, slack-jawed phrase is the only one that does justice to her relentless chirpiness. She has just turned 30, and lives with her best mate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) in a rented flat. She is happy to be single, goes clubbing with her mates and her younger sister who love her, and the kids at her school love her, too. She speaks in an unending sort of U-certificate larky-sarky backtalk, which is never funny in the way it might be if it was scripted as such, yet neither is it exactly unfunny, because Poppy's ingenuous childlike enthusiasm makes it impossible to take offence.

You can spend the first 20 minutes of Happy-Go-Lucky, or maybe the entire film, in a state of unbearable, nerve-wrecking tension. When is Poppy's secret tragedy or horror going to be disclosed? When will that smiley face turn into a scowl? When will we discover what past, hidden trauma she's been through? When is she going to be revealed to be a self-harmer, a kleptomaniac, a Nazi, or a prat? When, for fuck's sake?

The answer is never. But dark things do happen to Poppy. She has an uneasy encounter with her second sister, married and pregnant, who reproaches her for not caring about her future, though this situation calms itself presently. She spots a boy being bullied in the playground, and calls in a social worker, though this itself is to open up a glorious opportunity in her personal life. Most seriously, she finds that her driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan) is an angry paranoid racist who is developing a sinister obsession with her. Yet even this situation - which in another sort of film would provide the violent and despair-inducing finale - is something that she handles with courage, intelligence and tact. The film, like Poppy's life, just free-wheels along, swerving amiably this way and that. There is a very funny and good-natured scene where she has a flamenco lesson, which Leigh puts in for the same reason Poppy takes the class: for a laugh.

The part played by Mike Leigh in shaping the British TV comedy idiom has been exhaustively discussed: and it becomes relevant again here. Poppy is sometimes as maladroit, in her way, as David Brent, yet not contemptible, because she is without vanity. (She's closer to Caroline Aherne in "The Royle Family".) Interestingly, a tiny non-speaking role for the actress Rebekah Staton, who is in the current BBC comedy series "Pulling," reminded me of that show's horrific character Karen, played by Tanya Franks. Like Poppy she's an infant schoolteacher who is surrounded by mates; unlike Poppy she is nasty, unhappy, scriptedly witty and addicted to booze, drugs and casual sex. Karen is the polar opposite of Poppy, who lives in a world without irony. Unlike Karen, or Brent, she is genuinely nice. The happy-go-luckiness of the film therefore asks us questions: why are we so comfortable with irony? Is it a dishonest cop-out? Do we affect to disbelieve in happiness because we're afraid of being humiliated by life's reversals? Have we spinelessly given up on happiness, in art as in life?

Maybe. Happy-Go-Lucky has been extravagantly admired since it premiered at Berlin earlier this year, and I find myself liking it more and more. Leigh's trademarked cartoony dialogue, as ever lending a neo-Dickensian compression and intensity to the proceedings, is an acquired taste and I have gladly acquired it, though some haven't. I'm not quite sure what I think about the big, final confrontation between Poppy and Scott. It is well-acted and composed, and Marsan is ferociously convincing, yet the episode is closed off a little too neatly, and Poppy seems eerily unaffected by this or anything else. The effect is a kind of odd and steely invulnerability: not unattractive exactly, but disconcerting.

Hawkins plays it superbly though: exactly right for the part and utterly at ease with a role that is uniquely demanding. It truly is one of the first great female performances of the year, and the proof that Mike Leigh is the man to work with, if you're an actor and you're ready for excellence. In the factory-farmed blandness of Film these days, Happy-Go-Lucky has a strong, real taste. Not always sweet ... but real.

Hellboy: [drunk] "Why is she mad at me? And it's not about the mess, either, it's about something else.
Abe Sapien: [also drunk] Well, ask her then!
Hellboy: No! Look, Abe, when a woman's mad at you, but she's really mad about something else, and you have to ask, she gets mad because you had to ask in the first place! You know?
Abe Sapien: Uh...
Hellboy: Never mind, don't answer that."



I stumbled out of Hellboy II: The Golden Army feeling as if my imagination had eaten too much. In terms of sheer spectacle and visual invention, Hellboy II is an absolute knock-out, frames stuffed with bizarre creatures and mystic runes and arcane weaponry and wondrous design. And yet, Hellboy II has more than a little heart to it; it's scrappy and self-aware, and never out of touch with what it is.

Adapting Mike Mignola's post-superhero retro-styled comic series for the second time, Guillermo del Toro corrects some of the mistakes of the first Hellboy, makes a few mistakes of its own, picks itself up, keeps going. And, on the way, knocks the back of your eyeballs for a loop. Hellboy II: The Golden Army does what it says on the tin: It is a sequel about a character named Hellboy, and yes, an army of golden warrior-robots is involved, the mystical weapon of mass destruction that the elf-prince Nuada (Luke Goss) hopes to seize control of so as to wage war against humanity ... I know I'm getting ahead of myself. Then again, so does Hellboy II, right from the jump, and it doesn't slow down.

And it's exactly that giddy, goofy momentum that keeps the film moving. You get the epic war at the dawn of time between man and the mystic world shown with stop-motion as your prologue; later, you get a drunken sing-a-long to the strains of Barry Manilow. You get a big-finish fight scene that feels like a big-finish fight scene, but you also get a Three Stooges sequence played out with paranormal powers. Did you see the first film? Yeah, well, this is like that one, but slightly better.

If you want to see Hellboy II - and again, I'd wager that if you haven't seen Hellboy, you're not reading this - you'll enjoy it, and you should see it on the big screen. There are moments here that stun and amaze, like when Hellboy (played with the right combination of manly presence, tough-guy machismo and self-deprecating humour by Ron Perlman) leads his team of paranormal trouble-shooters to a secret under-place called the troll market, hidden beneath the shadows of many worlds and located under the Brooklyn Bridge. The troll market may be the most dizzying overdose of fantastic place-setting since Luke and Obi-Wan cruised into Mos Eisley and walked into the cantina.

But, to Del Toro's credit, you also get a sense of the people in that place, too. The tour of the troll market sequence not only follows evil Prince Nuada's trail as he seeks the crown that will control the golden army, but also as Hellboy and Liz (Selma Blair) talk about how they have to talk. At the same time, fish-man-walking Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) is tailing a mysterious blonde - who happens to be the sister of Prince Nuada, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton, who looks just like a younger Emily Watson), who's fleeing with the final part of the shattered crown her brother will need to make whole before he can raise the golden army against man's plague.

Nonsense? Yes, and well-played. Hellboy II's got flesh-eating fairies, gods and monsters, crypto-fascist kung-fu elves and clockwork killing machines lit with eldritch fire; it knocks off cop shows and Victorian adventure tales and John Woo's Hard Boiled and gets in jokes like the news anchor who asks, inspired by Liz and Hellboy's relationship, "Inter-species marriage - is it a threat to traditional marriage?" It has a cool new supporting character, the disembodied busy-body bureaucrat Johann Kraus (voiced by Seth McFarlane in mock-Teutonic tones out of Danny Kaye or Mel Brooks), who is as much a supporting character as he is cool and new.

The plotline and transitions are still a little lumpy, but less so than last time; the bad guys and their plan are far better defined, and drive the film far more firmly than Hellboy's faceless bland baddies. And Del Toro and his effects team bring the freaky in every possible way; it has demon-on-robot fist-fight action and ravenous little scurrying terrors that go for your bones, first; it's got winged messengers of death and a verdant, violent earth elemental rising above the streets of Brooklyn. But even with that sensory overload and tumbling avalanche of ideas, you can't say that Del Toro doesn't try, sincerely, to give you plot and character links to string into a lifeline to get through the storm, or provide a little blinking moment of bizarre fun or style to light the way.

Is Hellboy II all sound and fury, signifying nothing, or, worse, nerdiness? Quite possibly, but, 2008 blockbusters considered, it's got the heart and enthusiasm that the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull lacked, the brute you can root for that The Incredible Hulk didn't quite give us, more geeky slapdash fun than the shiny-fast Iron Man and a better mix of effective story and special effects than Speed Racer - and if Hellboy II signifies nothing, well, at least there's a hell of a lot of it.

Like all sequels, it's a bit overstuffed, but I can't also say what you would lose; the fat provides a lot of the flavour. And I never felt transported to another world or invested in the characters past their four-color surfaces, even as Del Toro's sights and wonders put me in a look@that! state of nerd-vana. And the finale sets up places to go for the series, even if it doesn't conclusively make us crave that; as much as Del Toro's the only man for that hypothetical job, I'd rather see him making his own films, which is part of why I'm so unenthused by the prospect of his version of The Hobbit. I don't know if I need a Hellboy III, but The Golden Army feels like a summertime comic-book flick that doesn't want, or need, to be a blockbuster and instead simply and sincerely succeeds as a great matinee.

Abe Sapien: "Now, see, I love this song. And I can't smile, or cry. I think I have no tear ducts."

"We are meant for each other and not meant for each other. It's a contradiction."

The fourth (and apparently final, since I hear he's back in the States) film in what will be know in the future as Woody Allen's European period, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the closest to what fans of his classic relationship comedies keep hoping the 73-year-old filmmaker will produce again. It's a light, entertaining and romantic film without the strained zaniness of Scoop or the predictability of Cassandra's Dream, filled with mild humour, gorgeous actors, some wonderfully drawn characters and a lovely, lovely Spanish setting.



In keeping with Allen's late-career embrace of sensuality over awkwardness, Barcelona is a visual treat from start to finish, revelling in the beauty of both its locations (Barcelona, of course, but also Oviedo) and its stars. Rebecca Hall and recent Allen muse Scarlett Johansson are the title characters, two of those typical Americans spending a summer abroad. Vicky (Hall) is working on a master's thesis on Catalan identity (an interest that apparently began with architect Antoni Gaudí), while Cristina (Johansson) is just hoping the change of scenery will help her "find herself."

Their circumstances and states of mind are described by an omniscient male narrator in a technique that is jarring at first but soon gives the film the tone of a particularly sharp and observant short story. The narrator, for example, encapsulates Cristina's flightiness perfectly in his introduction of her, in which he explains that she has just spent a year writing, directing and acting in a 12-minute film that she absolutely hates. Snide remarks like these pop up occasionally, always with measured delivery but showing a level of skepticism (though never condescension) toward some of the characters' choices.

Staying with Vicky's distant relatives (played by Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn), the two women soon meet up with charming, easy.going Spanish painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who bluntly proposes bedding both of them during their first conversation. Engaged Vicky finds him off-putting initially, but Cristina immediately swoons, and soon ends up his devoted lover. Things continue at a frothy but sometimes sluggish pace, and just when the film threatens to lose its spark, something great happens: Penélope Cruz arrives to liven things up as Juan Antonio's ex-wife Maria Elena.



Cruz is fantastic as the passionate, mentally unstable woman who always says (often in Spanish only, in a delightful, but subtle reference that few people will get, to the Spanish way of being) exactly what's on her mind, and her presence gives both Cristina and the film itself a reason to perk up. Maria Elena insinuates herself into Juan Antonio and Cristina's relationship, leading to the understandably over-hyped (and really rather tame) threesome that made horny bloggers go crazy. Allen may be more open to exploring the sexiness of romance these days, but he still isn't interested in anything lascivious, and his depiction of the trio's relationship is more about their individual intimacy issues than it is about hot girl-on-girl action.

Meanwhile, Vicky nurses a slow-burning flame for Juan Antonio while spending time with her dull, wet-blanket fiancé, Doug (Chris Messina), such a generic corporate tool that he works for a company called Global Enterprises and seemingly talks about nothing but golf. As a character, he's a cipher, but that's part of the point - Vicky is marrying an empty suit rather than pursuing the vibrant, unpredictable Juan Antonio. Hall, a rather surprising casting choice (a British actress who appeared in her first film only two years ago) plays the closest thing the film has to the traditional Allen surrogate, and she makes Vicky's dilemma real and more problematic than it would appear on the surface. Johansson, somewhat out of her depth in previous Allen outings, imbues Cristina with the right mix of infuriating and endearing. As for Bardem, he's appropriately sensual, but also likable, which is important in plausibly setting up why Vicky and Cristina are so drawn to him.

It's Cruz who runs away with the film, though, and holds it together when it starts to feel insubstantial. Allen envelops his audience in sensuality, makes it salivate, and then uses it to offer some bitter life lessons. Still, for a romance in which nobody seems to end up getting what they want, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is deceptively satisfying, and leaves you with a sense of hope, however false. Think of that feeling you get when Annie Halls ends. Only there's no rainy New York, only sunny Barcelona.

King of Ward 3: "Hey Lady, I will not forget your voice.
Doctor's Wife: And I won't forget your face!"

Blindness opened Cannes last year, and it didn't do well there. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. The print included a supposedly disastrous voice-over by Danny Glover (since stripped from the final cut), and it was perhaps undone by expectations that it might be a different kind of film - a Big Idea kind of film. I think Blindness is the kind of film that wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been a book first.



It's an adaptation of the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago (a personal hero of mine), and at first blush it seems to fall into the same mold as Children of Men: a "serious" film that uses the sci-fi premise of a near-future dystopia to comment on the modern-day dystopia already upon us. But the trouble with expectations is that they tend to numb one to what's really at hand. Saramago's "Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira" (which would translate as "Essay on Blindness") was an allegory about spiritual blindness and about humanity's lack of compassion for strangers. Blindness, the film, pushes the Big Ideas aside for a brutalizing exploration into the hard fact that humans, in the right circumstances, will turn desperate and even barbarous.

The catalyst is an outbreak of blindness in a city that is intentionally vague, its citizens casually multinational (as is its terrific cast, which does a lot within the restrictions of limited screen time). Ruffalo plays an ophthalmologist who unknowingly spreads the infectious disease from its first case to a waiting room full of patients and on to concentric circles of panicky outbreak.

None of the characters are named, which is one of the many signature marks of Saramago that Meirelles stayed loyal; they're listed in the credits, and referred to by descriptive appellations as the "Doctor" and the "Doctor's Wife." The latter (played by the marvellous Julianne Moore) is introduced whipping into submission a tiramisu for her distracted husband. When he wakes in the morning with the "white sickness" (the blindness is unique in that the infected see white, rather than black), she makes a rash decision to feign blindness, too, in order to join him in the government-issued quarantine. One senses the decision was borne as much from helplessness as self-sacrifice.



The sick are shipped off to an abandoned insane asylum and more or less left to fend for themselves, and there the secretly sighted Doctor's Wife becomes witness to unending awfulness as conditions deteriorate and a turf war ensues. We become witness, too, and it's a long, hard slough: Meireilles - no stranger to harsh climes, having previously touched down in the favelas of Rio and a Kenya ravaged by disease and - unflinchingly charts every slipped rung down to the bottomest depths of human degradation. Frequent cuts to white screen aside, there is very little lightness here. Meireilles plays on that whiteness, in one instance using it to soft-shoe a morally complicated sex scene, then abruptly cutting to full-colour to expose it for what it really is, which is the desperate rutting of the doomed.

There are no pulled punches here, and within that same morally complicated universe, Meireilles and screenwriter Don McKellar (who co-stars) demonstrate a scope and a sensibility expansive enough to meet every devil with some sympathy and every joy with commensurate sorrow. All this, I think, would be unbearable without Moore, who masterfully characterizes the devoted wife's metamorphosis into a heroicism both unwanted and unheralded. It's a rattling, heart-rending performance in, yes, a long, excruciatingly hard slough of a film - one that always remains one step behind brilliance and that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

"Oh my fuck... I just killed a fucking spook!"

One thing about the Coen brothers - you never know what to expect when you sit down to watch one of their films. This is especially true of their comedies, which can range from lowbrow slapstick (Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to chilly, intellectual aloofness (The Man Who Wasn't There). As for their latest, Burn After Reading, I just watched it twice and I still don't know what to make of it. It's an intense political thriller filled with intrigue, except that there aren't any politics and the intrigue all stems from a complex web of misunderstanding, paranoia, and just plain stupidity. It's like a Bourne film in which Matt Damon has been replaced with the Three Stooges.



John Malkovich plays Osbourne Cox, a low-level CIA analyst who quits in a huff after being demoted due to a drinking problem, and then sets about writing his memoirs, which somehow end up in the hands of Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt), a pair in which unextraordinarity abounds and who work at a health club. Certain that they've stumbled onto some vital classified information, Linda and Chad attempt to blackmail Cox so that Linda can finally afford a series of cosmetic surgeries that will improve her social life. When Cox refuses to pay, they take the floppy disc to the Russian embassy, where a bemused official named Krapotkin doesn't know what to make of it or them.

Meanwhile, Cox's ice-cold wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with their health-nut friend Harry (George Clooney), a sex addict who has also hooked up with Linda through a computer dating service. Katie's planning to divorce Osbourne and marry Harry, while Harry still loves his wife (who's planning to divorce him and is having him shadowed by a detective) and also is falling for Linda. When Linda sends Chad to Osbourne's house to try and dig up more secret information, he runs into Harry, who thinks he's a spy. The increasingly paranoid Harry then discovers that Linda's involved in the whole thing and thinks she's a spy, too. An important element in all this is that Harry's job requires him to carry a gun, which isn't a good idea under the circumstances.

It's a hard story to put into a nutshell, and it's even harder to convey just how goofy and off-the-wall this film is. All the trappings of the political potboiler are here - car chases, shootings, break-ins, deceptions, people being followed by shadowy figures, the whole bunch - but while one half of the cast is made up of serious people living their lives in the really real world, the other half is composed of colossal idiots blundering their way into this serious milieu and gumming up the works with catastrophic results.

The Coens direct it like a straight-faced thriller with the chameleon-like Carter Burwell supplying a pulse-pounding musical score, and their deadpan approach to this material makes it delightfully fun to watch. It's also wonderfully unpredictable - I dare anyone to try and figure out what's going to happen next at any point in the story - with one or two developments that are wild enough to give the viewer whiplash. Like Janet Leigh's fatal shower in Psicho or the jaw-dropping ending of To Live and Die in L.A., this story often manages to whip the rug right out from under us with prankish glee.

Frances McDormand gives us another quirky, memorable Coen character here, but unlike Fargo's Marge Gundersen, her Linda Litzke is a ditzy wacko. Brad Pitt has a great time playing the equally idiotic Chad, and together they make quite a pair. George Clooney is hilarious as the increasingly frazzled Harry, whose life is flying to pieces around him for reasons he can't even begin to understand. Malkovich, of course, is fascinating to watch as the equally paranoid Osbourne Cox, as he tries to figure out who the hell Linda and Chad are and what insidious government conspiracy is closing in around him.

As his wife Katie, Tilda Swinton is about as cold and ruthless a bitch as you could imagine. Another Coen regular, Richard Jenkins, expertly underplays his part as usual and is probably the film's most sympathetic character. In lesser roles, David Rasche and J.K. Simmons are pitch-perfect as a couple of bland, weary CIA officials struggling to make sense of the whole twisted affair - their final scene together is a subtle, deftly-played wrap-up that had me howling in giddy disbelief as the closing credits appeared, aghast that the Coen brothers had pulled off something so audaciously messed up.

In the end, Burn After Reading won't appeal to everyone, which is something Joel and Ethan Coen have never seemed overly concerned about. They appear content to make whatever kind of film strikes their fancy at the time and let it find whatever audience happens to latch onto it. I've always liked filmmakers who work like that, and I'm glad I latched onto this one, because not only did I have a grand time watching it, but the characters have been running around inside my head all day re-enacting scenes from the film, and I kinda like it.

"Sure you don't wanna fly? It's not too late."

It's a rare thing to watch a filmmaker shift gears from project to project, varying tone from one film to the next and still being able to master the different conventions. And yet, that's exactly the position Brad Anderson finds himself in after completing Transsiberian. I first discovered him after renting his underrated 2001 horror film Session 9. Then, 2004 saw his psychological drama The Machinist and now this year delivers Transsiberian, which sees Anderson skilfully blend crime-thriller with human drama. By doing so, he has created an inescapable atmosphere of tension that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the end, proving that he belongs in the upper echelon of today's filmmakers.



In the years since 9/11, there's been an obvious influx of films exploiting American fears of travelling overseas, but nothing quite like Transsiberian. It's a film that owes as much to the internal dynamics of a marriage as it does to the problems of strangers in a hostile land. Anderson takes a twist-filled story that could be material for thrillers of many stripes and connects it to a stark, isolating, beautiful backdrop that makes it seem particular and fresh. Inspired by the writer-director's own post-college trip on the famed Trans-Siberian railway, which stretches from Beijing to Moscow, the film feels like a story idly devised on a long stretch of track; it's easy to imagine Anderson mixing personal stories with the strange faces and sights he encountered along the way.

Fresh from doing church-sponsored humanitarian work in China, Jessie and Roy (Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson) board the Transsiberian Express for the first leg of their trip home. Sure, it would be faster to fly, but Roy is a train buff, Jessie likes a little adventure and they're trying to work through a little marital discord, so a six-day jaunt through some icily spectacularly scenery suits them both. They've barely settled in when they meet their cabin mates, dangerously handsome Spaniard Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and his much-younger girlfriend, Abby (Kate Mara), who's spent the last two years putting as much physical and psychological distance as possible between herself and her unhappy childhood in the US.

Roy is a small town optimist to the core, quick to assume the good in people and slow to see the bad, but former wild-child Jessie immediately picks up disturbing vibes: maybe she just recognizes comrades in the bad habits she struggles daily to keep behind her, or maybe it's something worse. Given that the film opens with a Russian narcotics agent (Ben Kingsley) calmingly examining a frozen corpse with a knife buried at the base of its neck, it comes as no great surprise that Carlos and Abby are mixed up in some very bad things or that Roy and Jessie get drawn into them as well. The surprises are in the whats, hows, whys and with whoms, and Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy keep them coming until the end.

Anyone watching this film without knowing much about it might expect it to turn into Hostel or Wolf Creek at any second, because as we know from watching far too many films, Americans travelling abroad almost always get into trouble with the locals. Transsiberian doesn't go there. It's more like L'Aventurra meets Dial M for Murder as Anderson continues to proudly wear his Hitchcock influences on his sleeve, though it isn't his smartest script by a long shot, as the premise of tourists encountering drug smugglers and corrupt Russian police on a cross-country trip seems somewhat obvious and derivative. It's difficult to talk more about the plot without ruining things, because whenever you may think you know where things are going, Anderson throws a number of clever and unexpected twists that keeps you on your toes.

Be it horror, drama, or thriller, Anderson's films always excel at cramming together psychologically complex characters together into a claustrophobic space and watching them explode. Eduardo Noriega stated that what drew him to the script was the idea of multi-layered people, "characters who have characters," and the depth and dimensions of the characters on screen is one of many reasons to watch and enjoy this film. With such greatly flushed out characters, it's a guarantee that the drama that unfolds between them will suffice to keep you on the edge of your seat. Of course, as far as modern thrillers go, there's always the fear of a let-down or a predictable twist, yet Anderson continues to take us into new directions with his writing, safeguarding himself from boring and stale storytelling.

Though Woody Harrelson's name is first in the cast list, Transsiberian belongs to Noriega and especially Emily Mortimer, who digs into a complicated character who seems a decent and trustworthy Christian from Middle America, but often acts out of ruthless self-interest when the pressure's on. She's a delicate but ferocious construction, and Mortimer thrives on her, turning in a fine performance. Harrelson, to be honest, can't wrestle a believable human out of his character, but manages to keep things light when necessary as the always-cheerful Roy, the typical care-free American abroad. Sir Ben Kingsley's cold demeanour serves as a subtle political message of Russia's crumbling humanity as well as another ethnic entry in his long filmography, while young Kate Mara also impresses in her smaller role.

Even with an American filmmaker and recognizable stars, Transsiberian is more reminiscent of European cinema - which is understandable, since this is a Spanish-British-German-Lithuanian co-production - so it never feels like another entry in the catalogue of Hollywood films with exotic locales. Anderson, who studied Russian in college, demonstrates an affinity for the snowy landscape and chilly atmosphere and his film doesn't come off as a travelogue. He attacks the icily exotic location like a man who's actually been there, not like a tourist. Xavi Giménez's beautiful vérité cinematography and visual motifs further construct the saturating environment, making great use of the blindly white Eastern-European scenery. Transsiberian was actually shot in Lithuania, not Russia, but it can fool anyone into thinking it's really Siberia.

While it piles on the hair-raising twists, the film is ultimately a morality tale about the devastating consequences of people not taking responsibility for their actions. And though Anderson's storytelling gets hazy at times and his plot often ventures into "Americans stuck in a foreign country having bad stuff happen to them" territory, he always manages to keep things fresh (since most of the bad stuff is one of the Americans' fault) and twisting along nicely to keep the viewer interested. It's a fine showcase for his versatility, adding to an impressive, under-the-radar résumé. As far as recent Hitchcockian thrillers go, Transsiberian is a more than decent effort. It's also another one that doesn't come from Hollywood.

"Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with? That's me."



Everyone has at least one friend with a racist grandparent. They'll scream and shout about how the Mexicans/Abrabs/Africans/Indians/etc (depending where you're from) are moving into the neighbourhood or bitch about the white devils down the street. They're not out there actively wearing clan hoods or marching in hate demonstrations, but they're not above dropping the occasional racial slur. Many people tend to excuse racism among the elderly as a product of the way they were raised. "My granny's from a different time," your friend will tell you. "She's not a hate-monger, she just doesn't know any better," your friend will say. That's an excuse I've never really bought into. I still don't, but the biggest compliment I can give Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino is that it almost changed that. It made me care about a character I would absolutely despise in real life.

That character is Eastwood's Korean war vet Walt Kowalski. He's everybody's angry, racist grandpa crossed-bred with gun-toting Mr. Strickland from Back to the Future. His wife has recently died and he's the last white person left in an old neighbourhood which has long since been repopulated with immigrants. We never see Walt's life with his wife, but he speaks of her with reverence. Presumably she was a stabilizing influence. Without her he's anger, bitterness and loneliness personified; a sour-faced ogre who seems to hate everyone and everything around him.

He sits day after day on his porch guzzling beer, scowling at his neighbours and calling them the most vicious ethnic slurs imaginable. His relationship with his greedy, selfish family is little better. After a long life Walt has no tolerance left for laziness or fools. "Pussy!," he snarls whenever someone fails to live up to his expectations. He wouldn't be out of place running into the street, firing off a shotgun and screaming "slackers!" at passing children, and at first it seems that a bitter, fed-up, racist husk is all that's left of craggy-faced old Walt.

Walt may have a low opinion of the world, but he's a man of principle and character. When gangbangers rough up the quiet Hmong (people from the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia) family next door, he drives them off with a rifle in a classic, Eastwood, badass stand-off. His grateful neighbours don't buy it when he growls that he simply didn't want them on his lawn, and Walt wakes up the next morning to discover his porch littered with gifts. Walt isn't interested in their friendship at first, but eventually he starts to see some value in Thao and Sue, the Lor family's well-behaved kids, a marked contrast to his own self-absorbed grandchildren. Soon even he gets sick of all the constant loneliness and Walt accepts an invite to dinner where he develops an affinity for Hmong food.

In another film, this is the spot where hard-bitten racist Walt would be magically transformed into old softie. The film would end with him weeping and perhaps reconnecting with his son. Forget it. That never happens in Gran Torino and maybe that's why it's so damn good. There's obvious affection between Walt and his neighbours but he stays the same unforgiving, bitter, aged badass he is at the beginning of the film. Rather than them changing him, he sets out to change them by taking Thao under his wing and working with him to build character, to turn him into a proper man. Soon it's clear that Walt loves Thao and his family, his loneliness is satiated, but he goes right on calling them "chinks" and "spoonheads." It's not out of malice, for Walt that's just the way it's always been. Thao and Sue look past it, recognizing they're only words. They've seen the good in him and it outweighs whatever it is that makes him such a curmudgeon.

If there's any change in Walt it's that his tolerance for the thugs and gangbangers who accost his friends has become even lower. He sets out to protect Thao and Sue. His way of protecting them is by packing a pistol and refusing to put up with crap. Imagine every butt-kicking, unflinching character Clint Eastwood has ever played. Now imagine seeing them in their twilight years, wrinkled, haggard, on death's door, and spitting in the face of death one last time to help a friend. As Walt lets Thao and Sue in, he starts to care. The more he starts to care the less he can stand to let the scum continue to rule his neighbourhood. He loads his weapon and stands up.

Clint Eastwood's performance as Walt is his best work as an actor in years, a return to all of the things that made him great as a younger man. He's brilliant and imposing, shocking and so over-the-top he's often funny. Unfortunately the rest of the film's cast isn't quite up to the task of going toe to toe with them. They range in acting ability from bearable to plumb awful. Christopher Carley is the film's worst offender as a concerned neighbourhood priest and the thugs Walt takes on never manage anything better than stereotypes. Bee Vang and especially Ahney Her, both in their acting debuts, fair better as Thao and Sue, but it's Eastwood that makes Gran Torino so compelling.

This is, simply put, a film everyone should watch. Lots of people will almost certainly lambaste it, attempt to dismiss it as clumsy and cry out in shock at Eastwood's willingness to portray a man so filled with hate and intolerance. Spike Lee, after publicly calling out Clint for leaving black men out of Flags of our Fathers, may have an actual coronary. Hey Spike, this time he's surrounded himself with brown people and decided to scream ethnic slurs. Ignore the naysayers, they won't be able to see past their own prejudices to what lies beneath. Gran Torino is smarter than it seems and it's broader, funnier, and more straightforward than you'd expect. This is the Clint Eastwood we all remember in a perfect final performance. He's riding off into the sunset scowling, snarling, and spitting blood.

"There's no border here. This is free trade between nations."

Courtney Hunt's Frozen River takes place in rural upstate New York on the Canadian border, in the dead of winter. At crucial junctures in the plot, the heroine, Ray Eddy, drives her battered old Dodge Spirit across the ice-bound St. Lawrence river with illegal immigrants hidden in the trunk. The Spirit is willing, if the engine is weak, but Ray's spirit is indomitable. This is a debut feature, though you'd never know it from the filmmaker's commandingly confident style, or from the heartbreaking beauty - heartbreaking, then heartmending - of Melissa Leo's performance as a poor single mother who's living her whole life on thin ice.



Ray looks like a descendant of the gaunt, weary woman in Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph from the Great Depression. Her husband has vanished after gambling away the money they'd saved for the balloon payment on a new mobile home, leaving her to care for their two sons in a mouldering trailer. As Christmas approaches, she works at a Yankee One Dollar store, but money is so tight that the boys must dine on popcorn and Tang. Yet Ray is a gambler, too, determined to do whatever she must for her family, and her odyssey is anything but depressing. In a setting full of strangeness and danger, the strangest thing is how surprisingly non-depressing and thrilling Frozen River manages to be.

Much of that is due to Hunt's fondness for striking details, and her gift for dramatizing them in a tale of two equally, if differently, devoted mothers. Ray lives near a Mohawk Indian reservation, where a laconic young Mohawk smuggler, Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), becomes her tutor, and her partner, in crime. Ray is no angel, either. She's willing to use the pistol she packs, and is quick to suspect a couple of terrified Pakistani immigrants of being terrorists. Her older son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott), may be considered trailer trash by his peers, but he's so bright and well-spoken that he's able to work a credit-card scam over the phone so he buy his little brother a Christmas present. Nothing fits neatly in the lives of these characters. That's a governing principle of Hunt's script, and a source of its singular energy.

The main source, though, is the critical mass of tenderness and ferocity in Melissa Leo's portrayal. Her character could be more knowledgeable about towing one car with another - Ray uses a bungee cord, which pops apart at the first yank - but the actress pulls everything and everyone along with her, even when grimness or spiritual darkness slow the pace. Reed Morano's digital photography goes murky in low light, but on the whole it's strikingly elegant. You may remember Leo as Kay Howard, the smart, tough cop in "Homicide: Life on the Street"; as the devoted wife of Benicio del Toro's tortured ex-con in 21 Grams, or from any number of supporting roles on TV and in independent films. What she does here, though, is a revelation, and a quiet joy. There's nothing trashy about Ray, as Leo plays her, not even at her lowest ebb. Longing for a better life, she makes the most of the one she has.

"Heil Headmaster!"

Based on a real event from a California high school in 1967 and transposed to Germany today, The Wave is a cautionary tale about the roots of fascism. Seductive and horrifying at the same time, it suggests that anything is possible in today's unstable environment. And it's pretty damn scary to think it might be right.



An assured piece of filmmaking by Dennis Gansel, The Wave captures the intoxicating power of conformity. Gansel opens the film with a rush of energy and doesn't let go. Charismatic teacher Rainier Wenger (Jurgen Vogel) is driving to school with the Ramones' "Rock 'n' Roll High School" blasting in his car as the camera gazes at the calm life of the city passing outside. It's not going to last long.

It's Project Week at school, and though Wenger, an aging post-punk radical with unconventional teaching methods, is disappointed he doesn't get to teach the class on anarchy, he dives headfirst into the preparing for his class on autocracy. It's a hard sell to the indifferent students and as one puts it, "What is there left to be against? All we want is to have fun." What follows is a textbook study of how fascism starts and takes hold. When Wenger asks if a dictatorship like Hitler's would be possible in Germany today, the students either say no or don't care. But Wenger gets an idea for an experiment.

So the class elects him as leader and in contrast to his usual easygoing style he demands that students call him Mr. Wenger and stand when they have something to say. The motto for the day is "strength through discipline." Once he's got the students' attention, things escalate within a week. Fascism has traditionally taken hold among an underprivileged, alienated population, and who is more alienated than high school students? They like the idea of dressing the same to reduce social pressures and they start wearing jeans and white shirts. They name the group "The Wave," create a cool logo and a come up with a salute scarily reminiscent of Hitler's.

Much to their surprise, and Wegner's, they find that they like the power of unity, of being able to rely on others, and soon this new-found discipline spills over to other school activities, and newcomers join the group. One student, Karo (Jennifer Ulrich), who has a fairly stable familial structure, resists the rising conformity, but even her boyfriend, Marco (Max Riemelt), who comes from a broken home, is smitten.

The Wave gives these kids something to believe in for a change and some of the initial ideas about social equality and the will of the people are appealing, until they go too far. As in the rise of the Nazis, unstable and disturbed individuals latch on and feel powerful for the first time, and the most damaged become the lieutenants. That's what happens to Tim (Fredrick Lau), a disturbed, skittish student who no longer feels like an outsider.

But when the insiders start bullying other students and violence erupts outside school, Wegner realizes things might have gone too far. The genius of the screenplay by Gansel and Peter Thorwarth is that they recognize Wegner's good intentions, his psychology and mixed feelings. His wife, Anke (Christiane Paul), who also teaches at the school, holds him accountable, and he admits he loves being idolized.

Vogel (a very underrated German actor) is brilliant in the film's climactic scene as his agreeable face hardens and contorts into a scowl as he becomes the dictator he feared. The cast of kids, especially Ulrich as the dissenter and Lau as the most vulnerable, are convincing enough to command the belief that they really are high school students. Gansel is obviously dealing with complex stuff here and he does so with first class filmmaking. A pounding score of rock songs and music by Heiko Maile adds to the combustible mix and cinematography by Torsten Breuer captures the action, including some aggressive water polo matches, with a combination of outstanding hand-held and slow-motion camera work.

Although the original experimental demonstration, named "The Third Wave," in a Palo Alto high school did not end this way in 1967, Gansel has updated the climax to what could and has happened in schools today. There is something additionally chilling about seeing it take place in Germany. But as the film makes abundantly clear, the roots of fascism grow everywhere. It's just particularly brave of a German filmmaker to decide to make this film, to acknowledge his county's history for once, and not look the other way.

"Every time my dad is on a TV Show, my friends make fun of me."

Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD (arguably the greatest surprise of 2008) opens with a high-powered action sequence. We see Jean Claude Van Damme dodging endless barrages of bullets, knocking out hordes of nameless villains, and getting past impossible explosions before ending up being ignored by his 20-something, disinterested director (imported from Hong Kong, in obvious reference to John Woo, who Van Damme introduced to the American market but never paid back the favour by giving him a role in any of his non-crappy Hollywood projects after Hard Target).



As the opening sequence, where we witness in one spectacular shot the action star quickly metamorphosing from indestructible hero to just another man in the film set, depicts, El Mechri's goal is to remove Van Damme out of the myths of superhuman strength his roles in films like Blood Sport, Universal Soldier and Double Team have supplied him, and turn him into something more convincingly human: a victim of circumstance, aggravated by his fame and notoriety.

The portrait of Van Damme we see in JCVD is vastly different from the characters, all of whom are exquisite representations of brash masculinity (indestructible cage fighters, no-nonsense hitmen, and virile ladies' men), he played in several of his B-films and actioners. Here, he's aging (his face riddled with lines and wrinkles), with a physique that could not have belonged to the same person who fought to the death in Blood Sport. Here, he struggles at diplomacy, turning his Brussels cab driver from adoring fan to nagging annoyance in a matter of minutes. Here, in the midst of a crisis that should logically be easy for the Muscle from Brussels, he can only imagine, but cannot actually do, the spectacular stunt moves that would get him out of trouble.

The Van Damme we see in JCVD is closer to the Van Damme that magazines and tabloids cover and more often than not, make fun of. Here, Van Damme is struggling with the impending loss of his daughter because of his uphill battle for her custody, while playing mind games with his agent whose incompetence lost him a direct-to-video project to Steven Segal (who agreed to cut his ponytail for the starring role). JCVD succeeds as entertainment because of its tabloid sensibilities, dwelling on the mostly negative predisposition of a pathetic has-been. However, it does more than expose the incapacities and failures of a fading superstar for sheer entertainment's sake. El Mechri succeeds in turning Van Damme from infamous icon to encumbered human being, worthy of our sympathies. Van Damme succeeds in exposing himself, not as a devious fraud and agent of moronic cinema, but as a victim of circumstance and his own ambitions.

JCVD may not turn prepubescent boys who never saw the '90s into Van Damme idolizers. It does, however, add a deeper dimension to a nearly forgotten pop icon, allowing him the opportunity to address the several issues that have been thrown to him (his womanizing, drug addiction, his worsening notoriety and declining fame) and in turn, transforming himself into a figure that is not dissimilar to the rest of us. His previous films may have given him the legacy of brute ability. JCVD cracks that legacy, and allows us an intimate peek to Van Damme's persona.

In the middle of the agonizing hostage drama which El Mechri composed as the narrative device to put his fictional version of Van Damme in, everything suddenly stops except for Van Damme. His chair ascends, and we see the film set's klieglights and other mechanisms behind him. The internal film logic of JCVD takes a pause to allow its hero respite from the conventional untruths of cinema and media he has been accustomed to. Van Damme breaks the fourth wall to deliver his confessional, unscripted and intimate (the still camera centering on his face, no cues, no direction except for his own). He talks about his problems, his past as a scrawny teenager who dreams of making it big in Hollywood, his frustrations and disappointments. Finally, Van Damme, the Muscle of Brussels, the sonic-booming soldier in Street Fighter and time-traveling Sci-Fi hero of Timecop, cries. This undoubtedly is Van Damme's greatest on-screen performance ever, and the fact that he isn't acting makes the sequence - and the film - more astounding.

"Turn to the side. Everything has a force. You embrace it or deflect it. Why oppose it?"

It's always fun to watch David Mamet Mametize another film genre: the heist picture (Heist), the red-meat war film (Spartan), and now, in Redbelt, the go-for-it sports drama. So how's the Mamet Rocky, you ask? Fast. Lively. In your face. Extremely watchable. And, like its predecessors, so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level. But the underpinnings are consistent. As Mamet has evolved into a confident and resourceful film director, his world-view has hardly budged. What's changed is that his film heroes manage to protect themselves from life's inevitable betrayals.



Understatement is not part of the mix. The rhythm of the rain mixes with the rhythm of the drill as honourable Mixed Martial Arts instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an exponent of Brazilian jujitsu, teaches his prize pupil, a cop named Joe (Max Martini), how to fight with one hand bound: "There is no situation from which you cannot escape." This assertive credo makes Mike a promising Mamet-fim protagonist; that the instructor's pedagogical style is a non-stop torrent of hectoring advice mixed with colour commentary suggests the filmmaker's own faith in the power of language. One of the most truculent literary figures to strut the American stage, Mamet may lack Norman Mailer's intellectual brawn, but he suffers no deficiency of bluster.

Still, as played by Ejiofor, Mike is open, straightforward, and quietly sweet - a natural victim. His business is going broke, but he's the calmest guy in the room, if not the most honest person on the entire planet. His modest storefront academy, which also houses a fabric business belonging to wife Sondra (Alice Braga), is an outpost of Zen clarity illuminating a bleak stretch of asphalt somewhere in West Los Angeles. Reality intrudes when an apparent junkie, Laura Black (Emily Mortimer) - driving through a monsoon menace looking for a drugstore to fill her dubious prescription - dents Mike's parked car. Hysterically bursting into his dojo to apologize, she further freaks upon seeing the cop and, through some arcane form of film magic, manages to fire his gun through the academy's plate-glass window.

As illogically as this incident plays, it encapsulates the bizarre laws of cause and effect or action and reaction that govern the film's universe - everyone is at seeming cross-purposes until the final score-settling. Another bait-and-switch caper occurs when Mike visits his brother-in-law's bar to get a bouncer pal some owed back pay and finds himself intervening in a fight to protect a big-time film star (Tim Allen) out for a night of carousing... perhaps.

Mike and Sondra are subsequently invited to dine at the star's mansion. One needs only a rudimentary familiarity with Mametian paranoia to sense that these suspiciously grateful swells are fitting Mike and the missus for some sort of noose. The Hollywood conspiracy is clinched the next day when Mike visits the set of the star's new film, nothing less than a re-creation of Operation Desert Storm produced by the sinister Jerry Weiss (Mamet axiom Joe Mantegna). Somehow, they're thinking of bringing on Mike as an executive producer. But is it all a plot to force the honest samurai - who has hitherto been too pure to fight competitively - into the ring?

Cinema is a technology of deceit: No good deed goes unpunished; no bright idea remains unripped off; no one can be trusted. The film, however, wears its honesty on its sleeve. As a director, Mamet favours unambiguous close-ups and uncluttered interiors; baddies' frequent sleek offices, and chaos comes from dark rainy nights. Neither oppressive nor subtle in its symmetries, Redbelt is a cleanly constructed piece of work. The climactic fight scenes are notable less for their competent orchestration and stolidly ritualized weirdness than for their principled opposition to the HK fare (of which I'm so deeply fond of) of the past two decades.

In press notes so long, detailed, and repetitive they could only have been supervised by Mamet himself, the filmmaker is identified as a long-time student of, and purple belt in, jujitsu. Thus, Redbelt is a personal statement, as well as a sort of naturalized kung fu western, ode to all Martial Arts enthusiasts, and revisionist Popular Front boxing drama. There's a hint of Egawa Tatsuya's Japanese manga "Golden Boy" (the fighter's innate sensitivity), a few allusions to Robert Wise's The Set-Up (the fighter's desperation, the tawdriness of his final bout), and a line ("Everybody dies") ostentatiously swiped from the quintessential John Garfield flick, Body and Soul - if here contemptuously given to the evil producer.

Like the left-wing, largely Jewish writers of the '30s and '40s, Mamet identifies with the situation of a solitary fighter trapped by a corrupt system. In his case, however, the system isn't capitalism so much as show business. Therein lies a paradox - Mamet attacks showbiz while surrendering to it. The tenets of Brazilian jujitsu (a sport that, like all MMA, is all about intelligence and speed, about using your opponent's weight and strength against him, as opposed to Boxing, which is essentially punching the other guy in the face) may argue there's no trap that cannot be escaped, but the rules of American entertainment insist on it.

"There's always an escape."

Coach: "You've got a lot of nerve, kid! Throw this ID away or you'll end up in jail.
Dario: You saw me play. Give me a chance, coach.
Coach: You play well, but there's lots like you and they're only 15. Time is tough on an athlete."



Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas' Linha de Passe, the second collaboration between both filmmakers, follows four young fatherless brothers being raised in Brazil by their mother, who's pregnant with a fifth child she will raise on her own. The film is a follow-up of sorts to Foreign Land, which Salles and Thomas made 12 years ago, in 1996, and like that film, Linha de Passe focuses on youth, movement and change.

Salles and Thomas use the lives of these brothers - Dênis (João Baldasserini), the oldest, who is one of some 300,000 bike couriers transversing the crowded streets of Brazil; Dario (Vínicius de Oliveria), a talented football player who, like millions of Brazilian kids, hopes to use his skill at the game as a path to a better life; Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues), who seeks escape by joining an evangelical church; and youngest brother Reginaldo (Kaique de Jesus Santos), who spends his days riding buses around the city, searching for his father.

Salles and Thomas focus on the lives of these brothers to reflect on Brazilian society and the changes that have taken place there in the 12 years since they made Foreign Land. During that time, the dictatorship was overthrown, a president was elected who immediately eliminated funding for the arts, effectively shutting down filmmaking in Brazil for four years, and Brazil's cities, particularly São Paulo, where the film is set, grew exponentially with little civic planning or control. São Paulo's population has doubled in ten years, creating a culture where jobs are scarce, especially for young people, and for young men like these brothers, growing up in the poor working class, there are few paths out for those who choose not to pursue a life of crime, with football and evangelism offering a light at the end of the tunnel for some.

The directors show through their story the lack of choices facing Brazil's young people and its consequent results, but the tone of the film is also hopeful. The brothers are resilient, they are strong, they keep fighting. The title of the film, Linha de Passe, comes from an expression used in football, but also a children's game played by four kids, where the object is to kick the ball back and forth without passing it. The four brothers are, figuratively, struggling to keep the ball from dropping, to stay in the game, and to be seen as valued members of society.

Salles weaves the theme of fatherlessness throughout all his films; with some 28% of children in Brazil being raised by single mothers, he and Thomas clearly feel this issue is emblematic of many of the problems facing Brazilian society. Cleuza (Sandra Corveloni), the mother, struggles to raise her sons without paternal guidance. She's often supportive and loving, sometimes exasperated, but always seeking to help her sons find their path through life.

On another level, the film addresses issues of race within Brazilian culture; the youngest brother, Reginaldo, is black, while his brothers are fair-skinned, and his search for his father is very much a search for his own self-identity and a sense of belonging. The character of Reginaldo was based on a true story from Brazil about a 14-year-old boy who rode the buses around Brazil in search of his father, finally stealing a bus one day and leading police on a chase in an effort to gain attention from the father who'd abandoned him.

The characters in the film are always moving, moving ... Denis trekking through the dangerous traffic as a courier, Dario on the football field, Dinho in his search for acceptance and salvation within the community of his church, and Reginaldo, endlessly riding the buses. Salles and Thomas evoke motion visually with "guerilla filmmaking" - they had to shoot much of the film with cameras mounted on motorbikes, weaving in and out of traffic jams to film the bike scenes, and following the motion on the football pitch with handheld cameras.

This gives the film a sense of restlessness, of a constant struggle to swim upstream. Dario, having reached the age of 18, has missed the window of opportunity to move ahead in Brazil's highly competitive junior football leagues, and seeks to find a way onto a professional team so that he can keep playing, while Dinho's faith is challenged by a series of events that cause him to question his own path.

Salles and Thomas masterfully portray the issues underlying Brazilian society without being too heavy-handed with the social politics; here are four brothers, they say, and these are their stories. They weave all the pieces together into a coherent fabric that brings the story life and keeps the audience engaged in the lives of these boys and their mothers. We care about them and what happens to them and thus, by extension, come to a better understanding of the issues as a whole.

Vinícius de Oliveria, who plays Dario, is the only actual professional actor in the film. You might remember him as the kid from Salles' Central Station. A football player himself, he trained for four years in a São Paulo football league in order to play his role. The rest of the cast are making their feature film debuts, which is quite remarkable when you consider the performances Salles and Thomas elicit from their inexperienced cast. Sandra Corveloni went on to win the Best Actress award at Cannes last year.

The directors also chose to staff the film with a young crew; Salles has said in an interview that they "wanted the film to reflect the idea of youth and opportunity from the bottom up." In spite of the young crew, or perhaps because Salles and Thomas mentored them so adeptly, the cinematography by Mauro Pinheiro Jr. and editing by Gustavo Giani are first-rate as well. The only other element of experience comes in the form of Gustavo Santaolalla's beautifully moody score. Linha de Passe is a moving, engaging film by two filmmakers who know what they have to say and how they want to say it.

The film is part of a larger project; Salles and Thomas plan to follow the changes in Brazilian youth and society at 12 year intervals, making four more films together exploring similar themes. If the next four are as good as Linha de Passe, we have much to look forward to.

Héctor: "Who is the man in my house?
The Scientist; He's you.
Héctor: He's me?
The Scientist; Technically you're the same person. He's like your reflection. You're looking in the mirror. Only this mirror shows what you were doing
roughly about an hour ago.
Héctor: But that man is in my home!
The Scientist; And he'll leave, in the same way you did."



Fans of Shane Carruth's mind-bending Sundance-winner Primer, as well as time-travel enthusiasts/freaks in general, should be first in line to see Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes. This genre-jumping, expertly designed thriller, at first set up as a horror tale before moving into different unforeseeable directions, is less cryptic and pretentious than the aforementioned American indie, while still demanding attention be paid in order to wrap one's mind around its intricacies. In return is a craftily satisfying and wholly absorbing experience.

Héctor (played by the great and underrated Spanish actor Karra Elejalde) and Clara (Candela Fernández) are a happily married couple still fixing up the country home they have recently moved into. When Clara heads into town to run errands, Héctor's lawn chair relaxation in the back yard is cut short when, through his binoculars, he spots a naked woman in the woods staring back at him. Going to investigate, Héctor is accosted and stabbed by a psychopath with a head wrapped in stained bandages. He narrowly escapes to a nearby gated laboratory where a scientist (Vigalondo) closes him in a dome-like contraption. When Héctor reemerges, he discovers that he has gone back in time by about an hour and a half. Spotting a copy of himself - "Héctor 2," as the scientist labels him - still sitting in his yard in the lawn chair, Héctor is suddenly thrust into an unthinkable situation where he must evade his other self while making sure that the same events occur so that, once again, there will only be one of him in the world.

Films dealing with the time and space continuum - i.e. The Time Machine, the Back to the Future trilogy, Donnie Darko - are usually fascinating, but not always easy to pull off. As with any film involving time-travel, there are small details that don't quite hold up to scrutiny, but Timecrimes does a superb job in its attempt to fill in most of the holes. Shot on a low-budget and with only four characters, Vigalondo's impressive work is a study in minimalism even as the narrative is labyrinthine in the circuitous loop it finds itself within. While difficult to go into too many details - this is one film that the less a first-time viewer knows about it, the better - it should be said that there comes to be a third (and possibly fourth) version of Héctor all existing in the same 90-minute time frame. Running into each other, or making one false step, could spell a disastrous paradox.

Before the time-travel material enters the equation, Timecrimes has a thirty-minute first act that works deliciously as a trippy, scare-filled horror film. Héctor's run-in with the bandaged mystery man in the forest is nightmarish enough, but a sequence where he must make his way up a lighted path amidst the darkness, his only knowledge of where the killer is reliant on the information he receives from the scientist via a walkie-talkie, is utterly chilling in a grasp-the-armrest sort of way. The second and third acts are more technical than emotional, with the stakes raised and time wrapping back around on itself again and again, but no less gripping. The use of the Blondie song, "Picture This," during a few key moments exquisitely adds to the atmosphere.

The ending resolves Héctor's plight to a point while leaving a couple unanswered questions - like the matter of a dead body - hanging in the balance. Nevertheless, Timecrimes manages to be intellectual as well as never less than entertaining. The story is ingeniously mounted, too, and the tricky cinematography by Flavio Martínez Labiano is both dynamic and menacing. For all the geeks out there who believe in time-travel, Timecrimes is a great, thrilling little flick to be watched more than once.

Oh, and if you have the slightest interest in the film, please, do try to watch it before the Yank remake washes in your shore. And by the way, if you like it, get a glimpse of Vigalondo's great Oscar-nom short 7:35 in the Morning. It's great stuff, and I'm sure it's on YouTube, everything is.

"It's going to be up to you now."

One of my very few, utterly pointless quibbles about Kelly Reichardt's last film, Old Joy, was the dog: Two dudes hang out in the woods around Portland for a couple of days - hiking and talking about stuff and, you know, hanging out - and they bring a dog with them. But they hardly talk to it, suggesting that they're either hopelessly callous men or secretly "cat people" (or both). In such an intimate and intense situation - a "two-men-and-a-doggie tent" - a closely knit trio like Kurt, Mark, and Lucy would necessarily find each of its members on equal footing. This is true especially while camping, when a dog's instincts, fidelity, and perspicacity are at an apex. It seemed to me, while watching Old Joy, that Lucy would not likely be merely tagging along for the ride with the more interesting central characters, she would in fact be the more interesting central character. She would at least be more affectionate, sociable, watchful, courageous, and sensitive than Kurt and Mark.



But, admittedly, Reichardt's film is about these two characters precisely because of their general lack of these qualities. And to be fair, part of my reaction to Old Joy - which is in any case a beautifully rendered, delicately paced, and acutely pitched film that should be seen by everyone - is due to the uneasiness I feel at recognizing parts of myself in the two human (and male) characters: Perhaps I feel as though, faced with the awkwardness of hanging out with an old, estranged friend, I'd rather spend quality time with the dog. Miraculously, though, Reichardt has somehow received my subliminal quibbling and made a new film, Wendy and Lucy, that casts a dog in a title role, opposite Michelle Williams.

Lucy is, in fact, the same dog, Reichardt's own gorgeous tan mutt, whose charisma is enough to match that of her formidable co-star. Extraordinarily understated, Williams gives a tangible, if taciturn performance as Wendy, a twentysomething woman traversing the country en route to Alaska, where she hopes to find work at a cannery. With just five hundred dollars, a (very) used car, and a faithful dog to her name, Wendy is living close to the bone, and Williams' portrayal balances toughness with vulnerability, expressing her dreams and disappointments with the lightest of touches.

From the outset, Reichardt places her protagonist in a uniquely American context, beginning (and thereafter occasionally punctuating) her film with shots of freightcars and railyards. These are points of departure and intersection, but also a means of transportation for the impoverished. (One thinks of Reichardt's producer, Todd Haynes, here, and his film about Bob Dylan, one of the few American artists to consistently take poverty as a theme of his work, however romantically.) Setting out in its own train-like manner, the camera tracks along at length with Wendy as she tosses a stick to Lucy, who gleefully runs away and returns, runs away and returns. As the autumnal light begins to fade, Wendy briefly loses track of Lucy, only to find her again in a sort of makeshift bacchanal for young transients, who give her a little advice about the best places to find work in Alaska. The tone here and throughout the film is equivocal - a little welcoming, a little threatening - but it is clear that Wendy, alone as she is, is not the only marginalized soul wandering about the country in search of a better life.



Of course, these dreams of the Alaskan good life are derailed in Portland when Wendy's car breaks down, she's nabbed for shoplifting, and Lucy goes astray. Destitute and adrift, Wendy is forced, in part, to rely on others - a kindly parking lot security guard, a local mechanic, the attendant at the dog pound - but even the help of others is of limited use and not much comfort. Tight-lipped and defensive throughout, Wendy rarely allows the audience (and much less the few characters she comes across) any awareness of her emotions, but for a few outbursts of frustrations, curt attacks, or urgent pleas. Another nocturnal encounter with a railway tramp - this one much more menacing - leaves her in a possum-like crouch; the small kindnesses of the parking lot attendant are responded with cautious, even slightly begrudging gratitude. Above all, it seems, Wendy feels the shame of accepting charity and the help of others, faced as she is with a sense of her own failure, her inability to care for the one thing that mattered to her, her only responsibility.

As if to illustrate this, the camera tracks again - now in the opposite direction - past the diminutive prison cells of the local pound, where lost dogs of every variety lie in wait to be claimed or else forgotten. In this persistent way, Sam Levy's cinematography follows Wendy too - keeping a steady watch, waiting for moments of expressivity, and inviting the spectator to read into her silence - a much more assured and thoughtful approach than Peter Sillen's faux-documentary shooting in Old Joy. The camera-work thus conveys a slightly more commanding, authorial presence than in the prior film, as do Reichardt's subtle invocations of politics and current events.

The filmmaker has said that, in writing the film, she and co-writer Jon Raymond (who also co-wrote Old Joy and upon whose short stories both films are based) drew some inspiration from the fall-out of Hurricane Katrina and what it revealed about poverty in America. This suggestion of politics is not quite so up-front, nor so oblique, as Mark's NPR listening in Old Joy; rather it's more a faint air of a particularly American milieu: chain-stores, bottle depositories, gas-station bathrooms. We meet Wendy in transit and are given very little back-story - she has a sister and brother-in-law back at home, also undergoing hard times financially, but they're only disconnected voices on the other end of a payphone.

But from all of these minute hints, it is clear that, like the most immediate victims of Katrina, Wendy is a kind of refugee, subsisting perilously close to the edge of disaster, hunger, and permanent transience. A car breaking down, a lost dog, a town with no jobs - these are mundane points in a mundane America, but they are Wendy's world in its entirety, a floating world that we glimpse briefly before it moves on.

Martine: "I know you, Terry. And I know your mates. You've always been looking for the big score. The one that makes sense of everything. I have it for you.
Terry: What?
Martine: A bank.
Terry: A bank, as in rob? How would you know about a bank?
Martine: I've been seeing this guy, runs his own business - security systems. Next month they're installing new alarms in a bank in Marylebone. Seems like the trains have been setting off the tremble alarms in the vault, and so they've had to turn them off. So for a week or so, they won't have any.
Terry: Now why would he tell you all this?
Martine: We were having a laugh about it. Imagine if half the villains in London knew about this, he said. And I thought, I know half the villains in London. I grew up with some of them."



In 1971, London was the venue for an audacious bank robbery at a Baker Street bank, by a gang of criminals called the 'walkie talkie' gang. They got away with over £500,000 (£5 million pounds in today's currency) and after an initial media frenzy focusing on the walkie-talkie conversations the gang had, that were intercepted by a nearby radio ham, the whole thing was quickly dropped by the press, under rumours that the incident was given a D Notice by the government, which is an instruction for the media to stop a news story for reasons of national security. Rumours soon started to surface of illicit photographs of a prominent member of the British royal family in sexually compromising positions - that would be the late Princess Margaret then, a royal with a list of scandals attached to her name as long as the Great Wall of China, with Mick Jagger, Peter Sellers and even Dusty Springfield rumoured to be her lovers.

Directed by Roger Donaldson, an Australian director who's made a horrible film (Dante's Peak) and a great one (The World's Fastest Indian), The Bank Job is based on that famous heist. There are a few worrying echoes of a TV film in watching this film - that isn't helped when you know that the script was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, a veteran writing team who used to write great British TV comedies such as "Porridge" and who recently wrote Across the Universe - but The Bank Job is, in the end, one of the most purely entertaining and fun films I've ever seen.

Clement and La Frenais claim to have spoken to at least six people directly involved in some way with the robbery at the heart of this yarn and what we see on screen is all true. The writers have declined to name their sources, but they do state that several of their sources separately claimed the bank raid was aimed at getting hold of the scandalous Royal photographs and the whole heist was arranged by the MI5. In the film, the explosive photographs are placed in a London bank vault for safe-keeping by Michael X, a well-known, true-life criminal and black rights campaigner, originally from the Caribbean. Michael X was championed by none other than John Lennon and Yoko Ono and in this film, his entourage is seen to be infiltrated by an undercover daughter of a Tory MP working for MI5 - trust me, I'm not making any of this up.

After a racy opening set in 1970, that shows an obscurely shot raunchy threesome on a tropical island being secretly photographed, the film moves forward a year and introduces us to Terry, (It is an unwritten law that all East End gangsters have to be called Terry) and his motley gang of loveable rogues. Terry is played by Jason "hard man" Statham, an actor with all of the subtleties of a slap in the face. This is all fertile ground for true Londoner Statham though, who some might remember, had his film début ten years ago in Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Statham can do East End hard-man in his sleep, but this time his character is supposed to be 'loveable'. He has a few money problems at his second hand car garage and he is portrayed as a family man who loves his two daughters and wife, played by the ever-lovely Keeley Hawes (who'll always be known by video-gamers as the voice of Lara Croft).

Terry's gang is comprised of not-that-known-outside-of-the-UK British actors, with Daniel Mays (Atonement) and Stephen Campbell Moore (The History Boys) all doing their best 'diamond geezer' impressions. So far, so believable, just, until Saffron Burrows, an actress born to play posh, turns up. Saffron plays Martine, an East End old flame of Terry's with a highly variable cockney accent. Martine got caught smuggling drugs into the country and subsequently gets blackmailed by the MI5 to enlist Terry's gang into pulling off the bank job, to get the photos back for the establishment without Terry knowing the true purpose of the heist. Terry and his gang plus Martine, rent out a shop near the bank and start digging their way in. Once the bank vault floor is breached and the boxes are fully raided, the gang soon learns that it is not just dirty royal photographs that they have in their possession, but also pictures of high ranking government officials starring in freaky snaps (now that I can really believe) as well as a ledger book listing every crooked policeman in London, belonging to a porn baron played with a nice evil relish by David "Poirot" Suchet.

If you believe Clement and Le Franais' claim that this story is true, then this is one incredible sequence of events that no Hollywood scriptwriter could ever have cooked up. This film is no classic, no film starring Jason Statham ever could be - in his big emotional scene with Keeley Hawes screaming at him as a wounded wife, Statham shows all of the emotional range of a brick - but this film moves along at a very quick rate and engrosses and thrills the hell out of its audience throughout, with a sure fire recipe of murder, sex and corruption. The actual bank job itself (the title's unoriginality being the film's only actual weakness), is probably the dullest part of the film, it is only when the gang take flight with their potentially explosive cargo, mixed up with the diamonds and loads of cash, that the film really starts to fly, all be it with a few loose ends and a large debt owed to Mike Hodges' Get Carter.

On the end credits the postscript informs us that the names of the gang have been changed to protect their identities and that most of the corrupt police officers were arrested. They also tell us that Michael X, the real-life person who allegedly stored the royal sex photos in a London vault, was hanged in 1975 for murder in Trinidad. At the very end though comes the real bombshell, Michael X's secret government files cannot actually be opened until 2054 at the earliest - what on earth could they be possibly trying to hide?

While the script is not flawless, it's fairly easy to follow. The film's several sub-plots introduce a horde of interesting characters, but they are all directly tied to the main story line. The many twists clearly lack plausibility, but the end result is quite simply fun to watch. Donaldson's edgy and clearly retro direction, a clean editing, a great soundtrack and a committed cast make the film work on many levels. The Bank Job provokes enough laughs, builds up enough suspense, and features enough simple, yet gripping action sequences that should keep every interested cinema-goer happy. So far, one of the finest films of 2008 and the best heist flick since Spike Lee's Inside Man.

"There should always be a first death. Otherwise, nothing happens. Otherwise it's never a problem. Otherwise, everything is always on. No. There must always be someone dying first."



At school, the bullies are out for blood and the good guys can do nothing about it. Back home, mum is helpless, while the absent father is guilt-ridden. In the community, social services are compassionately indifferent and the medical establishment takes too stoic a view to be of practical help. I ask you, then: What chance does an autistic teenager have for survival?

Belgian director Nic Balthazar asks the same from all of us in his directorial deut, the relevant and psychologically rich Ben X, inspired by a true story of a teenager who committed suicide after years of harassment in school. The question has haunted Balthazar over a number of years and across multiple storytelling platforms. Ben X started life in 2002 as "Nothing Was All He Said," Balthazar's debut novel for "youngsters who do not read." He then adapted it for the stage as a solo performance piece, before drawing on both his works for a feature film.

While the fictional and dramatic roots are instantly recognizable - the language is gloriously literary and delivered in one long monologue - Ben X also stakes its own claim on the big screen. Balthazar is a visual documentarian, tracing, preserving and playing back footage of an autistic teen's life.

Ben is one of two children raised by a divorced mother in a bleak, industrial European town. His daily dose of bullying starts well before he makes it to school, usually at the bus stop or at some point during the ride. Ben retreats into the on-line gaming world of ArchLord, where he has reinvented himself as a monster-slaying warrior. It's there that he meets Scarlite, a soulful love interest whose identity, if not actual existence, is in doubt. Ben reaches the breaking point after a particularly devastating incident of bullying in which he is stripped from the waist down by his classmates.

What follows is a revenge tale with some unexpected and some predictable twists. Yes, the narrative becomes more emotionally manipulative as the film reaches its final reel, teasing us with intolerable cruelty and unbearable tenderness. And there's a whiff of an after-school special, with teenage suicide and cyber-bullying among the film's "issues." The overall effect, however, is to capture a life of humiliations with dignity. And with an accusatory flair, I must add: Balthazar loves pointing fingers at those who have failed Ben, though (save for the more vicious bullies) he stops short of condemning them outright.

Withholding moral judgement is not the only tall order in the film. Ben X has an extremely ambitious emotional scope, almost all of which has to be filtered through the actor playing the title role. This is the kind of film that lives and dies on one casting decision, and Balthazar has struck gold with Greg Timmermans. His gripping performance not only captures Ben, but offers a panoramic view of the world in which he lives. We are, after all, meant to see this story from Ben's own idiosyncratic perspective.

It's not the overarching naturalism of the performance that stands out but the conceptual breakdown of the portrayal into smaller, loosely connected segments. Just as Ben enters the on-line world to discover who he can be, an audience journeys slowly through the corridors of Ben's tightly guarded mind - a mind that one doctor describes as a computer that has been configured differently. Timmermans is capably supported by Marijke Pinoy as a mother who decides not to suffer in silence and by the lovely Laura Verlinden as the apparitional Scarlite.

Ben X generated some buzz throughout 2008 on the festival circuits for integrating scenes from the virtual world of on-line gaming into the main story. As much as these flights of fantasy reveal essential clues about Ben's psyche, Timmermans and Balthazar do better whenever they place him in his immediate familial or romantic surroundings. In purely dramatic terms, Ben at home and Ben in love trump Ben as the virtual warlord. Perhaps it's that old-fashioned human touch that no computer game and no second, third or fourth life can replace.

"Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone."

While film and theater bear similarities to the point that theater directors often cross-over to film and vice versa, there's a distinction that separates the two art forms apart. One that always will. Film is a recorded medium, where a single performance is eternalized. Theater, on the other hand, is organic, where each individual performance has certain nuances that differentiate itself from previous or future ones. That said, adapting a stage play into a film involves something more than recording a performance.



For the film to truly stand on its own, the director must infuse the material a personality that will make it distinct and memorable, enough for it to be immortalized not only in form but in spirit. Take for example Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the prolific director's take on Stephen Sondheim's musical of the same title, about the legendary vengeful barber who murders his clients and stuffs them in into meat pies. Burton remains faithful to the material but infuses it with a visual style, a sense of comedic darkness that is distinctly his own. In turn, he creates one of the most memorable stage-to-film adaptations in recent years.

John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable is an electrifying examination on how we live in a grey world that morality and the institutions that espouse it insist on classifying as either black or white. The play centers on Sister Aloysius, the strict and stern principal of a Bronx school, who headstrongly launches an investigation against Father Flynn, the amiable parish priest, when Sister James, an impressionable young nun, finds Donald Miller, the school's first black student, distraught after a private session with the priest. The play does away with revelations, keeping the narrative within a certain level of very uncomfortable uncertainty. It is this uncertainty that fuels the play's questions, and these questions are just left unanswered, ultimately giving birth to further queries on the repercussions of the fallibility of supposedly ironclad principles such as religion and justice.

Shanley's film adaptation, barely differs from the stage version. Doubt is embellished by Roger Deakins' reliable cinematography and Howard Shore's cleverly spare musical score. However, underneath the cinematic trappings that Shanley has diligently put together, Doubt runs like a theater piece, stubbornly mechanical as to how the story unfolds, with conversations that have a tendency to overflow with literary self-importance. Symbolisms, some obvious and some archaic, abound.

However, Doubt feels as potent in its insistence on denting humanity's reliance on the questionable certainty of morality with a tool that seems as natural as the world itself: doubt. The only problem with Doubt is that it is overly reliant on its source material, down to the overly theatrical elements (which is undoubtedly the result of having the same person adapt and direct his own play; we never really get to see a valid re-imagining of the material), to the point that it feels absolutely inert: an overbearing and at times, rambling piece.

Thus, the burden of making Doubt an effective theater-to-film adaptation belongs largely to the ensemble. Amy Adams, who plays Sister James, personifies naiveté very well (as we've seen before). It's the way that she commands this facile innocence into the realm of distrust and suspicion that is quietly riveting. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Father Flynn, crafts a character that is the center of the film's persisting ambiguity, most of the time, convincingly sociable and intelligent, delivering rousing sermons in the pulpit that navigates the Catholic Church's eventual liberation from its dogmatism, and sometimes, palpably predatory.

Then there's Viola Davis, who plays Donald's working-class mother in the famous extended scene with Sister Aloysius, and who has the duty of further deepening the dilemma, infusing Shanley's discussions on the blurry spectrum between good and evil with the expansive reach of real world poverty. Her surprising reaction to Sister Aloysius' affronts introduces the malady of social inequity to the picture: if Father Flynn is indeed guilty as Sister Aloysius claims, is his actions, considering that it is Donald's only hope in a world that has decidedly existed against his race and gender, evil?

Of course, the film really belongs to Meryl Streep, who graduates Sister Aloysius as a caricature of authoritarian pompousness into a more understandable monster of a woman: a wasted figure that retreats to religion in the midst of tragedy (which also explains why it is so easy for her to give it up). Her motivations for destroying Father Flynn are unclear: is it really in the interest of justice? to protect Donald Miller from the abusive priest? To quietly assert the strength that the Catholic Church, through its dogmatic insistence that only males can be priests and nuns are answerable to priests, has deprived her?

Despite this ambiguity in her character, Streep plays Sister Aloysius with methodical coldness, but with an allowance to show cracks so that little bits of her shrouded humanity can be observed. Doubt, as what I think is only a recorded version of the play, a product of modern convenience, belongs largely to the ensemble, which, through the individual cast members' inspired performances, has elevated the film from a mere and typical adaptation to something more.

[he examines the joint]
Saul: "It's almost a shame to smoke it. It's like killing a unicorn... with, like, a bomb."



I was never a fan of stoner comedies. I mean, I like to smoke pot as much as the next guy, but I've always had a hard time getting into the humour those films usually offer. The only real pothead comedies that I truly enjoy are The Big Lebowski, Up in Smoke, and a large portion of the Harold & Kumar misadventures. Frankly I'm of the opinion that most pot comedies feel like they were written by someone very stoned, and let's just say that writers don't always do their best work when they're extra-baked. (They might THINK their stuff is hilarious, but usually it's not. That's just the weed talking.) You'll definitely find a few cannabis-caked giggles in trash like Half-Baked, Grandma's Boy, and Smiley Face - just not enough to sustain a whole film, if it's me you're asking.

So it is with much pleasure, enthusiasm, and recently-applied Visine that I find myself completely in love with Pineapple Express, which just may be the Casablanca of stoner films. Or perhaps it's more like "When Ultra-High Harry Met Super-Stoned Sally," but either way Pineapple Express isn't just hilarious, it's pretty damn sharp and clever too. It has some of the funniest "weed culture" insights since Richard Linklater's fantastic Dazed & Confused - which I wouldn't call a full-bore pot comedy, but it sure isn't shy about passing those joints around. Best of all, while Pineapple Express will absolutely appeal to both the casual and committed pot-smokers, it's also just a very funny buddy comedy/action flick parody that comes bearing the very unique stamp of that unique director that is David Gordon Green.

How ironic (and downright miraculous) is it that a filmmaker who has been making art (not just "movies") for almost a decade eventually ended up directing a guns & weed comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco? And if you think the guy's dry, low-key, and slyly sober style has been squashed by the Hollywood Movie Machine, then you're in for a big treat with this flick. Pineapple Express is certainly "accessible" in true multiplex fashion, but it also has several memorable touches of strange wit, unexpected character, and just plain old random weirdness - you can tell you're in the hands of a filmmaker who actually wants to deliver a big, odd concoction of a film.

The plot is enjoyably simple: Two potheads find themselves on the run from a crooked cop and a violent drug lord after one of the stoners accidentally witnesses a murder. (The title refers to the world's most powerful marijuana, so intoxicating that apparently it smells like "god's vagina.") So while early word on Pineapple Express has called it a partial homage to the buddy action comedies of the 1980s, what I saw in this film comes from a decidedly late-'70s format. Imagine if Richard Rush or Don Siegel had directed the first Cheech & Chong film, and that's what Pineapple Express feels like to me. And that feels good.

"A dude, a lady, and a cop? That's like a massacre, man!"

We all know Seth Rogen's a very funny guy by this point and he does a very fine job of creating a central nebbish who simply wants to enjoy his weed and get through life without bothering anyone. As his partner in perpetual paranoia, the normally stoic James Franco is allowed to let his hair down here and have an absolute ball with his role. (If you've never seen "Freaks & Geeks," then you'll probably be shocked to learn that Franco has such comedy chops. I, however, was very entertained but not at all surprised.) Best of all, Rogen and Franco strike a fantastic chemistry together (which isn't surprising either, since they've known each other since they were teenagers), with the former a neurotic and self-centered (but ultimately sweet) nobody and the latter a soft-spoken and frequently clueless (but occasionally insightful) weed-sponge.

As is always the case when Rogen and Judd Apatow are on the job, the bong is over-packed with colourful supporting characters. Once again we have a film that all but screams "This Danny McBride dude is FUNNY!" (This guy redefines the phrase "scene-stealer," particularly as part of one of the funniest film brawls I've ever witnessed.) As the snarling bad guys, Gary Cole and Rosie Perez are clearly having a lot of fun riffing off each other. Even more arcane antics come from the likes of Kevin Corrigan, Craig Robinson, Bill Hader, Ken Jeong, Amber Heard ... plus we get some of the funniest stuff from Nora Dunn and Ed Begley Jr. ("Angie, you're a fucking idiot. I say that with love.") in quite some time. I chuckle just thinking about it. Enthusiastic film geeks who buy a ticket for Pineapple Express hoping for some choice "quotables" will NOT go away disappointed.

"You just got killed by a Daewoo Lanos, motherfucker!"

Pineapple Express is, of course, an unapologetically raunchy, appreciably scrappy, and exceedingly violent little comedy, and it's a "matinee for relative grown-ups" that will almost certainly entertain its intended audience. Green and company keep the material moving at a very brisk clip, some of the more conventional comedy stops are interrupted by unexpected sequences of admirable... weirdness, and the whole thing looks like it was as much fun to shoot as it was to watch. And even if you wouldn't know weed from green wool, Pineapple Express works as a fast-paced buddy comedy with lots of laughs and a few hilariously unpleasant surprises. It's not exactly a "dark" comedy, but it sure isn't scared of making mirth out of morbidity. Let's say that once the bullets start flying, Franco becomes Bugs Bunny and Rogen becomes Daffy Duck. And you know what those guys do to their enemies.

"War is upon you! Prepare to suck the cock of karma!"

In other words, I liked this flick a lot, not just because it gave me some "funny pot schtick" from a bunch of entertaining actors and it's directed by a man I admire immensely - but because it's a comedy that takes chances, hearkens back to a weirder generation, and doles out as many surprises as it does big laughs. I'd call it a near-perfect mix between art-house cleverness and mainstream amusement. Plus, man, it's worth seeing just for Franco's frequently fried facial expressions. This guy should never do "drama" again.

Saul: "BFFF?
Dale: Best Fuckin' Friends Forever, man!"

"Man, I don't drop character 'till I done the DVD commentary."

More a farce (in the classic, theatrical sense) than the satire it was predicted to be, Tropic Thunder is a far from perfect summer comedy, and it may have a small problem living all the way up to the very high box-office expectations its hilarious trailer had generated as a result. But in the end, the film's intermittent audacity and overall shagginess may be its most appealing attributes. Every time it settles down into anything resembling the standard geometry of the genres it draws on - the Vietnam war film, the caustic showbiz satire, the big-budget action film and, of course, the Ben Stiller comedy, which has become a brand all its own - some inspired bit of nonsense materializes and takes things into an unexpected and hilarious new direction.



"Tropic Thunder" is the name of the film within the film - a cliché-driven Vietnam picture with echoes of everything from Apocalypse Now and Platoon to the Rambo series embedded like arrows in its derivative hide. Choppers swoop, Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield tracks wail, and yet another thoroughly needless Hollywood wallow in American military trauma unspools before our eyes. But the egomaniacal actors aren't cooperating, and when a big stunt goes wrong and the film turns out to be "a month behind schedule after only five days of shooting," director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan, in a sort of condensed-milk version of the more realized (and hilarious) work he's done back home in England) is in trouble.

He's called on the carpet by a vicious studio boss (a brazen tour de force from a fat-suited, bald-capped Tom Cruise, portraying an ink-blot test of contemporary mogul, with at least two current production chiefs the very obvious models). Damien's solution: He will save his film by stranding his prima donna players in an actual jungle, and then shoot them guerilla-style with handheld and hidden cameras for realism - a plan that goes awry instantly, stranding five actors armed with blanks and wearing period military gear in the middle of a jungle ruled by Burmese druglords. Hilarious complications ensue.

Star/auteur Ben Stiller has only directed a handful of films (the most memorable for audiences was probably Reality Bites), but his directing aspirations go all the way back to 1990 and "The Ben Stiller Show," the 13-week flop that failed so badly Fox didn't even broadcast its final episode, but which somehow launched not only Stiller's career but that of Judd Apatow, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross and Andy Dick.

The Stiller show was a great leap forward for American TV sketch comedy, in that its mockery of the usual pop-culture targets almost always bypassed the direct celebrity impersonations that are Saturday Night Live's stock in trade and aimed at subtler parodies of the substance, syntax and generalized cynicism underlying so much visual media. From its brilliant opening sequence - three bogus "pre-title" trailers establishing the characters and careers of action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller, channelling Stallone), comedian Jeff "Fats" Portnoy (Jack Black, mocking multi-character Eddie Murphy fart-fests) and multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr., taking down Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson), Tropic Thunder marks a clear and welcome return to the sketch-comedy priorities of Stiller's influential television work.

The loose format, which allows Stiller to mock everything from the horrific visual clichés of the post-Saving Private Ryan war film to the Oscar-baiting pieties of films like Forrest Gump and Rain Man, seems to have liberated Stiller both as filmmaker and performer. The generosity Stiller has always shown to other actors (no star working today is more committed to the notion of an ensemble) blossoms here, with Jack Black at last reminding audiences of why School of Rock was so funny, and Jay Baruchel and the veritable unknown Brandon T. Jackson holding their own against a brace of more seasoned pros, including the great Nick Nolte.

But it's Downey Jr.'s brilliant performance as a white method actor trapped inside the cliché-driven black character he's created for a film that elevates Tropic Thunder to a whole new level. I mean, a white guy who undergoes a skin pigmentation operation to play a black dude? It was destined to be the most talked about thing here, and it deserves to be, not only because he's characteristically great but because the audacity of the concept epitomizes what's best about this film. But race is far from the only hot button topic that gets poked in the eye with a sharp stick here. A partial list of the sacred cows that Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux reduce to gored oxen would include: panda slaughter and the Endangered Species Act; child warriors in the Third World; mental retardation and other handicaps; celebrity adoption of children from developing nations; and drug addiction - each of which would be either a no-go zone for a different type of comedy or a "serious topic" in another kind of Hollywood film.

There are slack passages and unfortunate stretches where Tropic Thunder coasts along on the very action clichés it's supposedly sending up. But Stiller has broken out as a director with this one. And any comedy that mounts such a full-frontal assault on so many fetish objects of contemporary showbiz sanctimony has earned the very wide audience and cult status Tropic Thunder will undoubtedly reach in years to come.

"I don't read the script. The script reads me."

"It's not a piece of equipment. It's a suit. It's me!"

He's not Batman or Superman. He's not in the public consciousness the way the Dark Knight or the Caped Crusader Man of Steel are. He's beloved by legions of comic fans, but they're a far more select crowd. Our pop-culture lobes aren't cluttered with the faces of half a dozen different actors who've played him over the last half century, or with the memories of the earnest 50s black-and-white TV dramas or the campy candy-coloured 60s sitcoms in which he fought evil and embodied the spirit of the era.



No, there's just this film, now, and what a doozy of a popcorn-a-licious introduction to Iron Man it is. It spells certain ruin for future incarnations unless they are very, very good indeed, for when someone makes "Iron Man: The Web Series" in 2026 and someone else reboots Iron Man for 3D sensesurround films in 2043, everyone will be all, "Oh, but Robert Downey Jr. will always be Iron Man for me," and, "Oh, but no one can do it like Jon Favreau did."

This might well be the perfect comic book film, actually. It's just pertinent enough to feel like it's set in something like the real world and just tongue-in-cheek enough not to get too heavy about it, but it's got enough self-respect to be sincere. It manages to be funny in more places than you might imagine without winking at itself, like it doesn't know it's a comic book flick, and that all sorts of smirking and jabs in the ribs are supposed to go along with film adaptations from that medium. Oh, sure, there's no question that this is Iron Man - the spirit of the character is absolutely intact, and though there's been some shuffling around, the faces and names and situations will be completely familiar to fans of the comic series, and will pay off in ways they'll be able to predict. But the key thing is: Tony Stark doesn't think he's a "superhero."

And he isn't. He has no superpowers, unless genius and a preternatural ability to charm the ladies count. Nope: Stark is just your run-of-the-mill billionaire playboy geek - he's Bill Gates with Austin Powers' mojo. He heads up Stark Industries, a weapons contractor with sidelines in a few more philanthropical arenas for the PR value, but he's not just a businessman: he actually designs and builds his deadly toys. He's a brilliant engineer and inventor... as well as an inveterate party animal who just so happens to be as gorgeous and charismatic (if in a slightly smarmy way) as Robert Downey Jr.

The funny stuff? It's all Downey and the easygoing, reflexive snark that is his trademark. Which isn't to say that he's not a vital part of the whole self-respecting sincerity of Iron Man: his snark is, as it always is, his way of armouring a character with deep and intriguing flaws against having to acknowledge those flaws. (One recurring joke about how Stark treats the robotics in his private lab, the kind of robots you might see in an automobile factory, like pet dogs or even sentient creatures, is layered with poignancy because he probably does count these machines as among his very few close relationships.)

And when Stark is angry? Downey is nuclear with it - like a slow meltdown, not like a mushroom cloud. But whether Downey is gearing Stark toward funny or mad or somewhere in between - his relationship with his human assistant, Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) is fraught with all sorts of interpersonal land-mines that make for some of the film's best moments - Downey exudes a sense of effortlessness, as if he were just making it all up as he goes. Some of Stark's offhandedness was clearly given by Downey, but surely the four credited screenwriters - Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (both of whom worked on Children of Men and First Snow), and newcomers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway - contributed their fair share. Downey can't have done it all on his own: it just feels that way.

Jon Favreau, being an actor himself, knows to just stay the hell out of Downey's way and let him run with a story so deceptively simple that it really does seem as if it's Faveau's star doing all the embellishing. On a trip to Afghanistan to push a new weapons system on the U.S. army, Stark is injured and kidnapped by cave-dwelling terrorists, and it's a full hour into the film - not that it drags or anything - before Stark has whipped up his first flying suit of armour as a way to escape. Refinements to the suit come later, but there's relatively little of the crime-fighting you'd expect from this kind of superhero origin story. Stark goes, well, ballistic when he discovers what uses his company's weapons are being put to, and engages in a bit of do-goodery to right that, but still: Stark emphatically isn't a superhero - a few snide Downey asides about what his life would be like if he were a superhero are well played, and only underline the non-comic-booky vibe here, which plays much more in the Sci-Fi sandbox. Think Robocop meets Transformers, not "Batman with metal armour."

But this is, of course, deep down, a superhero origin, and the very funny final line of the film leaves no doubt that there will be a sequel. I say let it come. It's a nice feeling for a film to leave you, for a change, with the sense that that's a promise, not a threat.

Kemo: "Sarah Marshall.
Peter: Yes. How did you know I was dating Sarah Marshall?
Kemo: Dwayne told me. Chuck told me. Even Rachel told me. I heard about it from everybody. You gotta stop talking about it. It's like "The Sopranos." It's *over*. Find a new show."



Jason Segel follows Seth Rogen as the next Judd Apatow-produced regular to be an unlikely leading man and show off solid writing chops - this time, in the same film. Following the forgettable Drillbit Taylor, this raunchy and sweet romantic comedy shows that as long as Apatow keeps mining the cast and crews of his old cult TV shows "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared," he'll more often than not be able to deliver the startlingly frank brand of humour he has become known for lately.

Directed by Nicholas Stoller (a writer for "Undeclared"), Forgetting Sarah Marshall follows a heartbroken puppy-dog named Peter Bretter (Segel) after being dumped by his famous TV-actress girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kirsten Bell). It turns out Peter is a non-motivated musician who's coasting because he can, since he landed the plum job of creating cheesy, brooding "mood music" for Sarah's "CSI"-like prime-time detective show.

Like Knocked Up, it does stretch believability to have a dumpy guy going out with a gorgeous TV star, but average-looking guys should thank Apatow and his stable of wish-fulfillment writers and actors for making it seem a little more likely that this kind of thing happens. It is too convenient to have sad-sack Peter go on a vacation by himself in Hawaii at the urging of his happily-married cousin (Bill Hader) and then unknowingly end up at the same hotel as his ex and her new British rock star boyfriend, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). But this is easy to forgive, because in the confines of this typical set-up, Segel and company score over and over again with terrifically witty interplay and very funny situations.

Like Apatow and Seth Rogen before him, Segel nails the comedy so perfectly because he sticks to what he knows. Not only is the raunchiness a full-force part of the script, integrated seamlessly with that inherent sweetness that makes it all go down a little easier, but Segel also lampoons the hell out of Hollywood types - people with that unique mix of egotism and lack of self-confidence that comes with having jobs in the entertainment industry. (Segel's most recent gig is on the fabulous show "How I Met Your Mother," while Bell has been on hit TV shows since "Veronica Mars.")

I've always enjoyed films (and their writing) in which neither character is what you'd call a "villain." One of the reasons why I enjoy Apatow's stuff so much (and I mean even before he became world-famous) is because it usually does that. And Forgetting Sarah Marshall plays a delicate balancing act the entire time as well. As in most break-ups (depending on whose side you take), one person looks evil and the other completely sympathetic. That is, until the details about the relationship known only to the two start to come out. During the course of this film, there's a subtle switch happening that allows both characters to showcase their weak sides.

It all culminates with an indefensible act that is uncomfortably (and ingeniously) played for laughs. Like the infamous pregnant bedroom scene in Knocked Up, Segel breaks down another sacred behind-closed-doors sex situation that no one likes to talk about, and ends up with a classic memorable moment.

A super-solid supporting cast including Hader, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, and Mila Kunis - who is a real eye-opener in a tricky role - navigate the audience through some unlikely twists and turns, making sure that the characters never delve into parody. British comedian Brand, in a role that will surely open many doors for him, could have turned one-note faster than you can say "Bittersweet Symphony," almost steals the entire show as laid-back rock star Aldous. Besides being the only truly confident character in the film, he is so casual about his celebrity status that it makes his unexpectedly blunt remarks even more hilarious.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall may not contain all of the hardcore truths about modern male/female relationships that made Knocked Up so brilliant, but it has more than its fair share of uncomfortable and familiar situations. Segel's characters talk like real people and Stoller's direction keeps a close watch on their emotional trials, and a knowing eye on the punchline at all times.

Apatow is creating a solid body of work (with the occasional, forgiveable misstep) that is approaching household-name familiarity. Like Christopher Guest's stable of cult-favourite improv actors, the Apatow players make us smile by just entering the frame. My friends and I laughed heartily each time Rudd, Hill, or any other recognizable face showed up on the screen. The time of Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Sandra Bullock has (thank God) passed and the nerds and their too-hot dates have taken over. When people look back at this time in Film history, Apatow's potent, frank, and sweet comedies will absolutely define this era of mainstream filmmaking.

"How you served five years under her, I don't know. You deserve a medal, or a holiday or at least a cuddle from somebody."

"People ask the question... what's a RocknRolla? And I tell 'em - it's not about drugs, drums, and hospital drips, oh no. There's more there than that, my friend. We all like a bit of the good life - some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour, or the fame. But a RocknRolla, oh, he's different. Why? Because a real RocknRolla wants the fucking lot."



If there's a director working today more fascinated by the kinetic and unapologetic joys of lawlessness than Guy Ritchie, I'd love to hear his or her name. It's hard to imagine anyone else so keen on reducing the perils and proceeds of the criminal lifestyle to pure consequence-free, hyper-stylized pop. In Ritchie's breakneck world, psychological motivation and emotional ambiguity are as scarce as the cops, and yet somehow he manages to inject enough wit, aesthetic imagination, and unbridled enthusiasm into his films to keep them from sliding into mindless commercialism. That, my friends, is why I'm a fan.

Ritchie's latest is an in-spirit sequel to his earlier London-gangster comedies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, which might just be a nice way of saying that he's now made the same film three times. Anyway, you'd be forgiven for thinking so, as all the classic Ritchie tropes are present: the herky-jerky editing, the sequences of extended cartoon violence set to the sounds of Eighties ska music, the improbable mutual acquaintanceship that permeates his imaginary criminal underworld, and the witty narration that plays like a voice-over to a nature documentary, presenting in colourful detail the ecosystem of modern-day British film-gangsterism, as if London were a watering hole and all its thugs, snitches, bosses, torturers, thieves, and junkies were merely animals fighting for their spot in nature's hierarchy: "Behold the Russian mob boss, most dangerous of all God's creatures!"

And thank God for that narration because the plot of RocknRolla is so convoluted it would take more words than I have here to encapsulate it. Suffice it to say that it involves brutish mobsters, political corruption, a couple of high-profile robberies, lots of guns, lots of swearing, a femme fatale accountant, an ultraviolent rock star, an infinite number of fancy outfits and shiny cars, a criminal savant with a taste for the films of Merchant Ivory, and a stolen painting that everyone is looking for (just like the rifles in Lock, Stock and the diamond in Snatch).

To say more would be to open a can and let the worms inside spill out onto the floor and slither off in a dozen different directions, never to be corralled again. Better instead just to sit back and enjoy RocknRolla for what it is: a fast-paced amoral joyride that's more interested in the absurdities of violent criminality (torture by crayfish, anyone?) than the complications of real life. Ritchie can keep this type of flick coming for the next twenty years, that I'll keep enjoying the shit out of them.

Hogsqueal: "Do birds live in these little houses?
Jared: Yeah.
Hogsqueal: Oh my gosh, that's genius! Who thought of that? You can stick your tongue right in it!"
[begins slobbering over a birdhouse]



Hollywood has many tendencies. Sequels, remakes, TV shows turned into films... etc, etc. One of its most recent ones is their (often successful) attempts to cash in on the enormous popularity of many fantasy children's novels. Harry Potter is, of course, the epitome of the tendency, but besides J. K. Rowling many other authors have seen (from home or their grave) their work turned into money-making enterprises. Names like C. S. Lewis or William Joyce come to mind.

As someone who loathes most of said tendencies, I was more than ready to see The Spiderwick Chronicles become another series of kid-oriented fantasy novels brought to the big screen in the hopes of jump-starting another ready-made film franchise. And as someone who has probably seen more films of this type than anyone who doesn't have offspring of his own, I can't say that I pushed play on my DVD remote with anything resembling glee. That said, while the film doesn't exactly reinvent the genre or offer viewers much of anything new, it does offer a certain number of pleasures for those who think that they have seen it all before, including some nice bits of humour here and there, a surprisingly serious undertone and a gleefully over-the-top finale that will no doubt delight kids and make cynical adults chuckle. I did. And I loved it.

The not-as-cute-as-in-a-couple-of years-ago Freddie Highmore, in a dual role, plays twin brothers Jared and Simon Grace and as the film opens, they, along with older sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and harried mum Helen (Mary-Louise Parker) are arriving at a ramshackle house in the woods, the former home of a distant relative, where they're going to make a new start following their parents' separation. While his siblings and mother try to make the best of the situation, the angsty Jared is petulant about the entire situation - he hates having to leave New York for the backwoods, he blames his mother for the separation and he is eagerly waiting the sure-to-be-soon moment when his dad (Andrew McCarthy) will come along to rescue him.

While knocking around the house, Jared discovers a hidden room that contains a bunch of weird-looking specimens and a book bearing a note begging those who look upon to not even open the book if they know what is good for them. Of course, Jared ignores this warning and discovers that the tome is a sort of field guide that was written 80 years earlier by the distant and long-vanished relative Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) chronicling the various mystical creatures - gnomes, faeries and the like - that surround us even though they're invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen by humans when it's their wish.

This is all neat stuff - that is, it is neat until a rhyming elf by the name of Thimbletack (voiced by Martin Short) reveals himself to Jared to explain the dangers that he has unknowingly unleashed by freeing the book from its hiding place. It seems that there's an army of monsters, led by the fearsome Mulgrath (Nick Nolte), lurking in the woods and if the book ever fell into their hands, they could use its secrets to destroy everything. Before long, Mulgrath and his minions discover that Jared has found the book and surround the house - they're unable to enter due to a protective spell put on it by Arthur decades earlier - and threaten to kill his entire family if he doesn't turn it over.

After convincing his siblings about what is going on, Jared, Simon and Mallory must try to figure out a way to reverse what has been done and get rid of the monsters before they can hurt anyone. This involves a visit to Arthur's daughter (Joan Plowright), whose stories of her father battling monsters has landed her in a rest, some semi-helpful advice from a hilarious, hungry, bird-eating troll named Hogsqueal (Seth Rogen), a griffin-driven trip to a faraway land where the hasn't-aged-a-day Arthur remains in a state of permanent enchantment and an exceptionally messy and fun final act battle between the Graces and the monsters for possession of the book.

I realize that the above may sound like standard kiddie-fantasy fodder and while it does start out along those familiar lines, it soon shifts gears and turns into something a little more quirky, smart and offbeat. For one thing, the adventure and intrigue is on a refreshing and blessedly smaller scale than the overblown likes of Harry Potter or that talking dragon nightmare. Instead of watching these kids defending entire kingdoms or worlds, it essentially boils down to three children trying to protect their home and family. The story also moves along at a snappy pace without ever getting bogged down with endless explanations of the various creatures and the rules governing them, which is especially impressive when you consider that the screenwriters have taken all five of the best-selling "Spiderwick" books co-written by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black and streamlined them into one 107-minute narrative without creating the impression that important material has been left on the sidelines.

The performances are also of a higher calibre than you usually find in films of this type. Highmore, fresh from a really annoying role in August Rush, takes what could have been a failed bit of stunt casting and creates two highly distinctive characterizations for his work as Jared and Simon. In smaller human roles, Sarah Bolger (an endlessly talented young actress who, mark my words, will win Oscars one day) is fun and feisty as the sister, Mary-Louise Parker is appropriately harried in the otherwise thankless part of the disbelieving mother and whomever came up with the idea of enlisting David Strathairn to play Arthur Spiderwick deserves some kind of medal for spot-on casting. As the various creatures, Martin Short is slightly irritating as Thimbletack (then again, the character itself is meant to be kind of annoying as well), Seth Rogen gets big laughs as Hogsqueal (by just shouting "Bird!") and Nick Nolte is appropriately fearsome as Mulgrath - unlike a lot of the bad guys in kid films, this is a villain who actually sounds like he means business when making his various threats against our heroes.

Speaking of that, I was also surprised and delighted by the unusual intensity of the action on display here. You see, as someone whose childhood was peppered with such PG-rated moments as the Nazis with the melting faces from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mola Ram yanking out the still-beating hearts of his victims in Temple of Doom and the kids in E.T. being chased by men with guns, it has been my opinion that kid-oriented films these days (not the epics designed for all audiences) have become too safe and sterilized for their own good. Removing all traces of actual danger or tension may keep overly sensitive American parents from complaining but it doesn't necessarily make for good storytelling. Thankfully, The Spiderwick Chronicles cheerfully goes for an approach similar to those old Amblin epics from a couple of decades ago and it really does make all the difference.

When Mulgrath's minions first attack the house and nail Simon, he winds up with some nasty marks that show without shadow of a doubt that they're serious and it adds an extra layer of tension to the proceedings early on. As for the finale, in which the monsters begin to lay siege to the house while the Graces fight them off with everything in their power, the combination of high humour, genuine excitement and splattery special effects results in a sequence that plays like a blissfully bizarre blend of two of the more infamous home invasions of screen history - the final reel of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and the part in Gremlins when the titular creatures discover that they've picked the wrong kitchen to attack. God, I miss Gremlins!

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a modest and reasonably charming example of a genre (and a tendency) that isn't exactly renowned for modesty or charm. Instead of trying to pound audiences into submission with overly detailed backstories or elaborate visual effects, it lures them in with a nicely told story that gets the job done with a minimum of mess or fuss and actually comes to a conclusion instead of leaving us with a cliffhanger ending that may or may not ever be completed at some point down the line à la Spider-Man. Which is ironic because, unlike a lot of these would-be franchise films, this is one saga that, based on its initial entry, I actually wouldn't mind seen a continuation of in a couple of years. Meanwhile, Harry Potter is on its sixth round.

''Welcome to L.A, embrace the pain.''

Alex Holdridge's In Search of a Midnight Kiss, from his own screenplay, regards démodé downtown Los Angeles with the same fiercely lyrical affection Woody Allen has lavished on Manhattan over the decades. This alone would make the film strikingly original, but in addition, its tempestuous love story, with its heartbreaking complications, is well served by a cast of comparative unknowns. This talented assemblage is headed by Scoot McNairy as Wilson, the director's alter ego, and Sara Simmonds as Vivian, the Diane Keaton-type: the salty-tongued blind date who leads Wilson on a wild frolic across the well-worn streets of a part of Los Angeles that has known better days and years and decades.



If Holdridge belongs to any school of filmmaking, it is the Austin, Texas, school of Richard Linklater, the Linklater of Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Suburbia, and Before Sunset. Linklater's and Holdridge's are the types of romantic comedies that can spend an entire film on a single date, as if a chance encounter can change one's whole existence, which often, if not always, happens in real life as well.

Where Holdridge differs most decisively from Linklater is in the comparative foulness of today's youthspeak, though our male protagonist, Wilson, is 29, and Vivian, his stormy blind date, is 27. Whether all the profanity represents an increasingly widespread lewdness of speech in the young, or, simply, a more permissive atmosphere for a filmmaker, particularly an independent filmmaker, I cannot say.

Fortunately, all the bad words are not merely camouflage for unintelligent dialogue. Quite the contrary. The talk in Midnight Kiss is uncommonly bright and realistic, a fact that gives me renewed hope for the future of so-called independent cinema.

The film is set on New Year's Eve, already an absurdity in sunny Los Angeles. It has been a miserable occasion for Wilson over the past six years. He has become so desperate for a meaningful midnight kiss that he has been reduced to masturbating in front of a nude photoshopped photo of his best friend's girlfriend, Min (Katie Luong). What's worse: He's caught doing it by his roommate and friend, Jake (Brian Matthew McGuire), who proceeds to ask Min out of mild curiosity if that is indeed a picture of her. After looking at the photo with mock thoughtfulness for a few moments, she answers in the negative, though it is obviously her face. The important thing is that everyone remains cool about the situation, though Wilson, as is his wont, remains flustered in general.

When I was in high school, someone told me that only 5 percent of the students masturbated, and the other 95 lied about it, and I have accepted these figures as gospel ever since. Yet films have seldom approached this practice except in the fringe exploitation genres. Even when we confront 40-year-old virgins of either gender, films refuse to show them compensating for the lack of a sexual partner. There is lasting shame involved in this spectacle. So, in a sense, Holdridge has started his protagonist off on an embarrassing note, and yet manages to save the character, and actually develop him into a quasi-heroic stoic navigating the treacherous shoals of deception and infidelity.

Robert Murphy expertly photographed the somber ruins of a once vital downtown Los Angeles with many dazzlingly varied perspectives. Murphy also joins the cast as Vivian's insanely jealous ex-boyfriend, Jack, whom Vivian caught cheating on her with another woman, and was thus receptive to Wilson's personal ad on Craigslist. Wilson had been virtually bulldozed into placing the ad by a helpful Jake in the aftermath of the masturbation fiasco.

At their first meeting, Vivian starts things off unpromisingly by asking Wilson to sit at another table while she interviews a speed-dating applicant waiting patiently. The logistics here don't make much sense, but the sheer outrageousness of Vivian and the situation is funny enough to make us forgive any lapses of logic and probability. In any event, the temporary delay in the meeting of Vivian and Wilson ends quickly in Vivian's somewhat cruel dismissal of a well-meaning lug who gains our sympathy by his abject need for encouragement in the game of love.

Before Wilson receives his long awaited midnight kiss, the narrative unleashes two wild twists, which, for a change, I'm not going to give away. These make the film both sadder and wiser. In Search of a Midnight Kiss overcomes patches of overwriting to end up as a film well worth watching, and Alex Holdridge as a writer-director to be remembered for future reference.



Holdridge's gift as a director resides in his conflation of the mundane and the somewhat profound. He's obviously been on some first dates and knows the way a good - no, miraculous - one can wend its way into adventure. In the real world, that transformation takes a few nights and days. In romantic comedy, 24 hours will do. But even as romantic comedy, Midnight Kiss moves sideways. It's a work of old-school, black and white American independent filmmaking that falls somewhere between Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Kevin Smith's Clerks - not just because of the lack of both colour and money, but because its maker, on the one hand, exults in the atmospherically rich oddness of romantic possibility, and on the other, finds certain types of crudeness really funny. What I think makes this kind of films (John Carney's Once would fit here too) essential is the fact that it inspires and encourages hundreds of aspiring filmmakers like myself. And I like to think at least 5 percent of us will have stopped being aspiring in a few years.

The quick symphony of locked lips that opens the film while Wilson introduces himself is, as everyone's figured out, a hat-tip to Manhattan. But Holdridge appears to have already figured out how to pay deeper, subtler tribute to Allen. A dual sequence in which Wilson and Vivian take the subway or another in which they stop for lunch are far more fun to watch. The film and its smart observations occasionally threaten to get away, never more so than when the phone rings - it's Vivian's brand-new ex-boyfriend, who seems as unstable as she sometimes does. He threatens to burn some of her stuff, and you're scared he'll take the rest of the film with it.

But he doesn't. Holdridge gets a lot of mileage out of charm. His two stars are incredibly likable and that, in a film like this, is essential. McNairy seems incurably lonely and resembles other forlorn-looking guys, like screenwriter and actor Mike White and Andy Warhol actor Taylor Mead. He doesn't have much of a screen presence, but as the film spins into full-blown craziness, McNairy's sadness suddenly has a point: That long face becomes an anchor of sanity. Simmonds, meanwhile, is a captivating species of actor. She's Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudson merged in one, a whiff of craziness, and some real struggle in her face. You're not sure you like her, in the same way that Wilson isn't sure he does. For a while, it looks as if she'll shove the film into other Manhattan territory: Martin Scorsese's comedy of bad-date surrealism, After Hours. But Midnight Kiss is a less ambitiously cruel film, and its fantastic ending (with Scorpions' "Wind of Change" popping in the soundtrack) leaves you with a strange feeling of hope.

The film is, in the end, a far cry from the comedies of inarticulation and inaction that have won a backhanded video-story shelf. In Search of a Midnight Kiss is actually not about the chronically depressed and self-loathing, it's about active souls. The films gives us two transplants to Los Angeles who discover the city's underpopulated splendours while discovering each other. That they do most of this on foot constitutes a major leap of imagination. This is the rare film about the start of something interesting that happens to look a lot like the end of the world. And it feels so good.