My Favorite Movies

The movie that made me "fall in love" with David Lynch and cinema...

One of the most sensual and romantic films ever made, without one single kiss. This film is 100% pure beauty. From the colors, to the music, to Maggie Cheung... Stunning in every possible aspect, In The Mood For Love is one of the first masterpieces of the twenty first century, perfection reached in the art of film making. No matter what Kar-Wai does in the future, this will always be the film that made me 'fall in love' with him...

David Lynch's most complete and perfect film!

Allen fans will forever discuss this but... Annie Hall is his masterpiece. Manhattan can only approach perfection, Annie Hall reaches it.

It just doesn't get any better than this! The perfect union between drama and comedy and a lesson of film-making and acting from Benigni! Has clearly his touch in it. Simple and pure comedy! Not any kind of "intelligent" humour, just goofy and innocent... Very much Chaplin's style, brilliantly mixed with a very emotional and intense story that makes you undecided between laughing or crying... The film is clearly divided in two parts. A more "enjoyable" first one, and than a little more difficult and sad second one. As for the "so called" critics (not even a masterpiece escapes!) who said this film was irrealistic, among other barbarities, yes it can be a little irrealistic. But that's not a bad thing! I don't think Benigni's ideia was to diminish or offend the Holocaust survivors in any way. On the contrary! This is simply a story of love and above all hope, that happens to take place during the war and in a concentration camp. It has also one of the most perfect, uplifting and brilliant endings I've seen... You know those films that make you stare at the credits for a couple of minutes when it ends? (Unlike the millions whose imediate effect on you is to get up instantly, get your jacket and leave...) This is one of them! Obviously a very restricted list...

The greatest film ever made...

The kind of film that makes me believe in perfection. Hitchcock's masterpiece.

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence."



Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange will always go down in history as one of the most polemical, violent, disturbing films ever made. A tale most vile, full of the old in-out and other such nastiness. A tale in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell), our faithful narrator and leader, is imprisoned for the accidental killing of a person and later conditioned by his government to abhor sex and violence, but also the glorious music of Ludwig Van. Sometimes karma can be a cruel, cruel mistress. Sometimes it can be poetic. But, the thing to remember, is that it's always in play.

So learns Alex after his release from prison. Cured of his predilection toward sex and violence, he encounters the victims of his earlier transgressions only to find that people's forgiveness cares little for his cure or the fact that he's paid his debt to society. The wounds Alex has inflicted are deep, so it's little surprise when his victims exact their revenge because, deep down, they are no better than Alex. Freed from restraint by a feeling of righteous indignation, they are able to expose their true selves, as dirty and nasty and vile as Alex in his prime, only now Alex has been so conditioned that he cannot even fight back. He is defenceless, begging for mercy. It's doubtful that this was a desired effect of the conditioning, so you have to wonder: if the government takes away Alex's ability to defend himself and sends him out in a society that hates his very existence and distrusts this so-called cure, does perhaps the punishment exceed the crime? Taking nothing else into consideration, possibly. But when you factor in the conditioning against the perfectly natural sexual appetite and the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven, then it's clear the government has gone too far.

There's little question that's part of the film's message, but to what end? The Prison Chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), as close to a voice of morality as A Clockwork Orange gets, argues before the review board that due to the conditioning "He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice." He's right, of course, as the Pavlovian approach to morality takes away the subject's humanity, reducing him to nothing more than a castrated animal. He's pitiful, really, which is a stunning turn of events considering his actions in the first half of the film. A great deal of that change relies on the acting abilities of McDowell, who's amazing in the role. His performance is often noted as one of the best to never be nominated for an Academy Award. He was also snubbed by the British Academy. The film received four Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing. It won zero.

Part of what made A Clockwork Orange so controversial upon its initial release - Kubrick received death threats against both himself and his family and took measures to ensure the film wouldn't be shown in Britain until after his death, which happened in 2000 - is that switch wherein Alex goes from hated to pitied. Kubrick presents us with a protagonist and narrator who is essentially an uber-villain - a gang leader who picks fights with rival gangs, beats up a homeless man, orchestrates a gang rape, and has a three-way with two teenage girls. There is no code of ethics by which he could be considered a good person. But, he is a clever and charming young man who serenades his rape victims with "Singin' in the Rain" and has a strange, unexplained fascination with Beethoven.

It's difficult to reconcile that this likeable young man could be capable of such atrocities, which is partly what Kubrick's going for here. Take Alex out of his odd white outfit and into some normal clothes and he looks no different than anyone else his age. Only at night he lets his inner demons run wild, where the rest of society has decided to suppress them. But the solution of just taking the demons away isn't a solution at all, because the demons are vital to who we are. Think of it as a ying and yang approach to the soul of man. Without that battle between good and evil we have nothing but an empty, boring wasteland. And that's not a life worth living.

A Clockwork Orange, like so many of Stanley Kubrick's films, is an acquired taste. It is a bold, daring piece of cinema that aims to provoke a reaction in the belief that it is better to be found spectacularly bad than dull. Thankfully, it is neither. Kubrick paints in broad, provocative strokes, muting nothing in the frame. He employs a broad range of colours and flourishes that give the film a vibrant and raw feel, as if you're watching the characters and images explode off the screen. Alex mentions during one of his sessions that "the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen", so Kubrick does his best to make them seem really real, from Mum's hair to the red outfit of the woman being raped to the flashing lights of the record store. Couple that with the wide-angle lenses Kubrick is fond of, the slang bordering on gibberish, the numerous phallic symbols, and the occasional intention continuity error and the entire film is a bit disorienting and unnerving. It's designed to put you slightly on edge.

Of course, A Clockwork Orange isn't for everyone. It's an X-rated film that contains rape scenes and torture and pretty much anything that could make someone uncomfortable, but it's also a brilliant film with grand ambitions. Sure the film's message gets a little muddled near the end, and it isn't always clear what the intention is, and it tends to occasionally lose its way, but that isn't a reason to discount it. Thanks in large part to Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange feels like jazz, and because of that it feels alive, and a flawed film that feels alive is always preferable to a by-the-numbers one that's dull, especially when it's directed by a genius.

Everything that was made after 1967 regarding the mix of comedy and romance - the so called 'romantic comedies' - has in The Graduate its main source of inspiration. Owner of one of the most ridiculously perfect endings ever!

"He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."



Widely hailed as the greatest black comedy ever filmed, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is Stanley Kubrick's subversive take on a common Cold War theme. Deranged General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has sent his squadron of planes an order to attack the Soviet Union as they held at the fail safe point, and subsequently made it impossible for anyone other than him to call the planes back. When news of this reaches Washington, President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) calls his advisors to the war room, where General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) suggests the best plan of action may be to back the planes up with a coordinated all-out offensive that's sure to cripple the Soviet forces and limit American casualties to twenty million, tops. But the Russians, to everyone's surprise, have just completed a "Doomsday Machine" designed to destroy all plant and animal life on the planet, and even they cannot prevent it from retaliating.

Combine the plot details with Kubrick's direction, and it's probably safe to assume that few people in 1964 automatically assumed Dr. Strangelove would be a biting political satire. But on second thought, maybe they did. In retrospect, Dr. Strangelove feels like a departure from Kubrick's normal fare, like 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, but Dr. Strangelove pre-dates them all. So a comedy doesn't seem like a Kubrick project to us, but it makes sense when you view it in context. This is a man who had done several self-produced projects, which he had parlayed into the Kirk Douglas war film Paths of Glory. When Douglas couldn't get along with Anthony Mann, he replaced Mann with Kubrick for Spartacus, primarily to serve as a figurehead through whom Douglas could operate. Naturally, this didn't work. Kubrick took over, then made Lolita, a 'light-hearted' version of the Vladimir Nabokov novel that featured a supporting turn by Peter Sellers. All this is to say that when you view Kubrick's career in that sequence, a Peter Sellers dark comedy isn't all that unexpected. In fact, it's a rather natural progression.

But enough history, let's look at the film itself. The primary settings for Dr. Strangelove are deceptively simple: the interior of a plane, the War Room, and General Ripper's office. Apart from a few others, that's pretty much it. A knowledgeable audience member realizes that much of the film is shot on sound stages, but a couple of choices in staging and camera work gives the impression of so much more.

The plane interiors are filmed as if the camera is being operated by one of the crew. There are no long tracking shots or wide establishing shots. They are instead framed in a way that at no time are we given the feeling that the production has taken out a chunk of the plane so that the camera can get the perfect angle. This gives the scenes a cramped, uneasy feeling further heightened by the borderline mental instability of the pilot, Maj. T.J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens). Our level of closeness to him and the rest of the crew is uncomfortable, especially when you consider the nuclear bombs stored below. Contrast that with the scenes in the War Room, where Kubrick goes to great lengths to show us just how big it is.

He seats all the advisors around the type of enormous round table you only see in a film, with a circular florescent light hovering overhead. Behind them is the "big board", a large map of the Soviet Union with lights indicating the position of the planes. The room itself is so big that even the widest wide-angle shot cannot show it all. Clearly rooms of this size do not exist, but Kubrick uses it to remind us of the great power the men in this room hold, but at the same time, he often puts them in the lower part of the frame, an indication that despite all their power, there is little they can do in this situation.

And the one man in the room who should be able to prevent a nuclear holocaust, comes across as the most ineffectual of them all - President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). Originally conceived by Terry Southern as a character with a bad head cold, the President is shocked to learn that not only has someone authorized an attack, but that there's no way to bring them back. And to top it off, the bill that enabled such a bizarre scenario is one that he approved. It is a politician's worst nightmare.

Of the three characters Sellers plays in the film (Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove), this is the most memorable, or at the very least my favourite. His telephone conversation with the Soviet Premier ranks as one of the best comedic exchanges in all of cinema, and it's all that more impressive that we can only hear one half of the call. The Premier is drunk, so Muffley must explain things to him multiple times and deviate from a very important issue to reassure this man that "Of course I like to speak to you! Of course I like to say hello!" The three-pronged performance by Sellers is clearly one the best from this comedic genius. Much of Muffley's scenes are played against Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson (George C. Scott), a military advisor a little too enamoured with the business of war and highly distrustful of the Russians.

Scott, a criminally underrated actor, is perhaps the best thing in the film. Chomping violently on multiple sticks of gum, he's all big movements and facial contortions, ready to fly off into a rage at a moment's notice. Secretly he's thrilled with the turn of events and a little perturbed that he must waste valuable time convincing this damned politician to launch a coordinated attack. Acting-wise, Scott is off in his own little world, but it's important to note that even as he launches nearer and nearer to madness, he stays firmly grounded in the reality of the film. Few actors can chew the scenery with such vigour without detracting from the film. It's a fine line, and Scott walks it perfectly.

There's little doubt that Dr. Strangelove serves as the high-water mark for anti-war films, but it also ranks alongside not only the best comedies ever made, but also the best films. For such a timely film, it feels as fresh today as it did in the Cold War. But what's most remarkable is that it was even made at all. Imagine the modern equivalent: a dark satire about terrorism featuring the melody "We'll meet again" playing over footage of the explosion. It's the sort of bad taste no one would permit, but when you have people as bold and talented as Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers, they find a way to make it work. In their able hands, the gruesome becomes absurd and the horrific becomes somewhat campy and sweet. It is, hands down, one of the greatest and most brilliant things ever put on film.

"I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!"

I remember a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a friend of mine who goes to art school in which she told me something very interesting about how she perceived Picasso's work. She said that she thought he was just alright until she saw his early works, that it wasn't until she saw that he could paint very well while following the rules of art at the time that she could truly appreciate how he was able to break the rules.



In a similar way, I think The Elephant Man is an absolutely essential piece in David Lynch's - who, as I'm sure you know, is also a painter - oeuvre. It shows how he was able to craft a film that played by the rules of Hollywood and keep his vision and integrity intact. Lynch's career path has taken so many twists and reached so many peaks and valleys, that you really can't call it a path anymore. Not with a straight face, anyway. He abandoned any pretence of a traditional Hollywood career a long time ago and a familiarity with his subsequent work makes watching The Elephant Man all the more fascinating. Back in 1980, Lynch was just beginning to make his way as a filmmaker, but had already found a style distinctly his own through his experimental short films and the 1977 cult hit Eraserhead. This cinematic voice reverberates through every frame of this film. Even today, The Elephant Man remains one of Lynch's very best films and certainly one of his most accessible.

The film is based on the true story of John Merrick (John Hurt), discovered by Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) on display as a circus freak and billed as the Elephant Man. Treves teaches anatomy at London Hospital and is immediately overwhelmed by the wide array of physical deformities suffered by Merrick. He is intrigued by him as a specimen, but - understandably - assumes him to be an imbecile. Even so, when Treves discovers that Merrick is savagely beaten and misused by his "owner" Mr. Bytes, the proprietor of the attraction, he arranges for him to be given shelter at the hospital.

Once there, Treves is astounded to learn that Merrick is in fact quite literate and his misshapen body houses the soul of a true English gentleman. Word of London Hospital's new patient spreads and Merrick again finds himself the centre of attention, greeting visitors from the highest echelons of society. Treves now begins to wonder: is he any better than any of the others who've exploited Merrick for their own benefit? Merrick seems happier than he's ever been, but why did Treves bring him to the hospital in the first place?

The first act of the film, before we see Merrick's face, is wonderfully directed. Lynch makes us hate the people who gawk at Merrick, not because we believe in the dignity of all creatures as we would like to think, but because we are jealous of the people who see what he looks like. We paid our money, and we want to see what these people are seeing. It is only after we see Merrick's face and learn of his intellect that we are able to raise ourselves above the level of the gawkers, of only by a little bit.

Of important note are the two shots that set Merrick's first visit to the hospital. Each shot is taken from an elevated position, distancing ourselves from Merrick. This distance works on multiple levels. First, it gives the impression of a peeper looking at Merrick. This is emphasized in the first of the two shots, since we are able to see a staircase leading up to our level. Second, it shows how we look down on him, both literally and figuratively. Third, and most importantly, it is the same distance and angle shot. This shows how nothing has changed. Treves doesn't understand him as a human being, and neither do we. We do later, but at this point he is just another freak to us.

The film's fascination with the two-faced nature of Victorian London society is born out in how Lynch employs veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis' gorgeous black and white photography. Over and over again, Lynch's camera is fixated on the elements of industrialization and modernity - smoke chimneys, enormous machinery, an operation on the mangled body of the victim on an industrial accident. While much of the story takes place in the world of the upper class - the hospital, Treves' home, the opera - many scenes are set in the squalid back alleys of London, which immediately establishes a consistent visual juxtaposition that illustrates Victorian society's deep split. This is complicated, however, by Merrick's outcast status, as his deformed body precludes his being fully a part of either the upper or the lower class - he is completely outside.

The cast of The Elephant Man includes some of the most distinguished actors of all time, including Sir John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft, Wendy Hiller and Freddie Jones as Bytes. But the brunt of the film rests on Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt. Their work in this film ranks among the best of both their careers. Hopkins expertly conveys the warring feelings of ambition and compassion that Treves struggles with. As for Hurt, he's extraordinary, completely buried beneath prosthetic make-up that renders him totally unrecognisable. John Hurt is the heart and soul of this film and it is virtually impossible to remain unmoved by his performance.

David Lynch, who - I've told this story 300 times, I know - is the filmmaker who made me fall in love with cinema, is too often dismissed as an intellectual weirdo. He may well be an intellectual weirdo, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying his films. Whenever I meet someone who can't quite embrace Lynch's more esoteric films, like Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet and especially Eraserhead, I usually point them toward The Straight Story and especially The Elephant Man. This is a beautifully produced, deeply humanistic film that promotes a message of tolerance, which makes it mandatory for any cinephile. Nominated for eight Oscars - it won none.

David Lynch in its more raw and natural state. A film that has haunted me profoundly (in the most positive way possible) since the first time I saw it. A work of rare genius and real bravery. A stream of subconsciousness work of art in surrealism and abstractness. Eraserhead, ironically, for being Lynch's first and most honest, even 'naive' film, ends up being the one that can get you the closest you'll ever be to understand his world, to see through his mind. It's a film that seems to require interpretation. Answers, however - and this really is what stops any human being from enjoying Lynch's work - are so distant that you'll wonder if they are even intended. May very well be the greatest debut by an American director after Welles' Citizen Kane.

First of all, what people need to understand and have in mind (I saw some comments here that blowed my mind), is that this was made in 1968... 1968! You have to understand that number. That's almost 40 years! What we need to ask ourselfs, and try to answer truly, is that if we could possibly have the vision to do something like this in that time. And the answer is obviously NO! I don't have the slightest doubt when I say that this film is one of the greatest achievements in Cinema history! The way Kubrick imagined the 'future', 2001, our present (or past), is brilliant and fascinating. Technicly the film is flawless, considering it's time, and there are moments, scenes that I actually didn't believe that that was made in 1968! Of course I understand people who say it's boring. As a classic has to be recomended to anyone who loves Cinema, but it's not for those who expects action and dumb entertaining. What I would say is that this is one of the most 'difficult' films to wacth and analyse. It just can't be watched if you're sleepy, as simple as that... Anyway, I said it and I say it again: this is one of the most important achievements in the history of Cinema! That's why it's one of the few that deserves 5 stars...

NOTE: This review will discuss the film's ending. If you haven't yet seen it, beware.

"Hate the smell of dampness, don't you? It's such a, I don't know, creepy smell."

The film that made a generation wary of the shower, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is a landmark of cinema, one of the high-water marks for the man many consider to be one of the greatest directors in history. Janet Leigh stars at Marion Crane, a rather ordinary secretary who one day decides to steal $40,000 from her boss and run off with her unsuspecting boyfriend. After napping on the side of the road, she arouses the suspicion of the local authorities, but nothing comes of it. Nearly in the clear, she stops on a rainy night at the secluded Bates Motel. She rents a room, shares a pleasant enough discussion with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the son of the hotel's owner. Then, she is brutally murdered. Meanwhile, back in Phoenix, Crane's boss starts to worry, both about his secretary and his cash, so he sends a Private Eye (Martin Balsam) looking for her.



While a great number of people would rather forget it ever happened, we all know Psycho was remade in 1998 by Gus Van Sant. Employing a shot-by-shot approach and starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, the remake is generally considered to be a preposterous travesty - which, for me, is being nice - but it actually has some value for the purpose of explaining how genius the original is. One would assume that a shot-by-shot remake would approximate the quality of the original, at least to some extent. It doesn't. So what does this tell us about film? Well, for one, one could argue that the contributions of actors holds more value than originally assumed. After all, that's the major variable at play. Beyond that, though, it suggests that perhaps Film is an art form where genius lies between the shots. That is, if the shots are identical and the script is identical, then what does it do to the auteur theory? Van Sant is no slouch of a director, so you have to wonder if his remake indicates that perhaps we're spending too much time analysing the specifics of a shot, if perhaps there isn't something larger at play that conventional criticism can't put a finger on. It is, at very least, something to ponder.

As for the masterpiece, to fully understand the impact Psycho had when it was originally in theatres, you have to know a little of the backstory. Hitchcock purchased the option to Robert Bloch's little-known novel without telling anyone, then proceeded to buy every available copy he could find. During the production, which was filmed under the fake title "Wimpy", he planted casting rumours in the press that he was considering Helen Hays for the non-existent role of Mother, had a chair on set reserved for the character, and went to the trouble of billing Janet Leigh as the film's lead, despite the fact that she dies in the early going. Effectively this created two stunning plot twists with the dual benefit of being completely unexpected both in the context of the film and in the reality of anyone familiar with the various Hollywood machinations of casting. Few expect the lead to die in the first half of the film and fewer still expect the casting rumours to involve a character that is a figment of another character's madness.

Part of what makes Leigh's death scene so powerful is that the film never gives us any indication that it isn't going to be about her theft of the money. It invests a great deal of energy in developing her story, from the opening scene of her in a hotel room with her lover, to the nerve-racking encounters with the police, we are completely behind her as a protagonist. So when Hitchcock "kills" her, revealing the theft as the ultimate MacGuffin, it has the ability to take your breath away, but the way Hitchcock films it - with quick cuts and lots of screaming - creates one of the most harrowing scenes ever put on film. It is such a vivid scene that many audience members swore they saw red blood washing down the drain, when in fact the film is done entirely in black and white.

With the protagonist gone, the audience is left scrambling, open to suggestion and manipulation and all sorts of trickery. So we focus on the relationship between Norman Bates and his mother, or what we believe to be his mother. Hitchcock wisely gives us only as much information as is absolutely necessary for us to be convinced of her existence - a shrill voice, a silhouette in a window, a shadowy figure in a dress - but none that might suggest otherwise. Yet the ending survives our suspension of disbelief, partly due to the psychiatrist's explanation but largely thanks to the performance of Anthony Perkins, who is nearly flawless as the boy with the Oedipal complex. He's a friendly enough person, perfectly comfortable with small talk, but note the slight shift in his eyes when someone mentions his mother. He reflects both devotion and a quiet desperation, but more importantly goes from helpful to protective. It should be clear that he's got something to hide, but the devotion to one's mother can be a fierce one, so a son protecting his mother's health isn't all that insane. Only, in this case it is.

To me, one of the most powerful aspects of Psycho is the way the film presents two false realities without undercutting the impact or validity of what's truly going on. So often a twist ending is either telegraphed well in advance by excess foreshadowing or so far-fetched that no reasonable person would ever believe it. But Psycho manages to avoid both pitfalls, striking a perfect balance where it is both shocking and realistic. Factor in Hitchcock's unique ability to ratchet up tension shot by shot and what you've got is one of the greatest thrillers ever filmed, the likes of which most films can only dream of duplicating, even if they duplicate everything else.

The most magical and honest celebration of cinema ever created in the form of film. A film with such a heart and soul that you feel literally happy for being alive. Genuinely emotional and authentic. A beautiful, sublime cinematic piece. Virtually impossible to not be loved, because, in the end, if you don't like Cinema Paradiso, you don't like films.

Sublime. The kind of film Sir. Alfred Hitchcock himself would have been proud to make. One of the most imaginatively scripted films ever made. A 2-hour comedy-mystery-thriller and a tour de force for two enormous, genius actors. Expertly directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (his farewell film) and based on the play by Anthony Schaffer, the film opens with delightfully circus-tinged music that lends itself throughout the entire film to mix up the tone as each of the characters transition from serious to comical. Sleuth is a grand example of how you can take the barest of essentials - two great actors, one great script, one great set - and make magic happen. A game of murder, mystery, intrigue, deception and good old-fashioned sleuthing. Outstanding acting from its two main - and only - actors. Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier in one of his most eccentric and wickedly clever roles ever. One of the greatest British films ever made.

I've had the "why is Woody Allen a genius?" discussion many times. There are virtually hundreds of explanations. One of them is the fact that he did something few - if any at all - filmmakers in history have: he took essentially the same thematic material and made two great, huge films out of it, and they feel entirely unalike. They are obviously Annie Hall and Manhattan. They both star Allen and Diane Keaton, both are about imperfect and somewhat forced relationships, and both have the traditional Allen-isms of him playing essentially himself as a neurotic character who inhabits New York. However, the two are completely different in tone. While Annie Hall is the blunt, sad realist of the pair, Manhattan is the hopeless romantic. Annie Hall's honesty reminded us that two people in love don't always end up together in the end - which is true everyday - Manhattan's naiveness made the point that the idealizing and glossing of life can't be considered a bad thing either. Call one the realistic adult that we eventually become after eperiencing life and the other the dreamy child we're often asked not to leave behind. They need each other to make their points. In the end, it's one's personality and view of the world and life that dictates which one we love the most. Personally, my heart belongs to Annie Hall (the character and the film), but Manhattan will always be one of the few films which remotely approaches its sublimity.

Elliot: "Oh, God!
E.T.: Elliot.
Elliot: What?
E.T.: Elliot! Elliot!
Gertie: I taught him how to talk. He can talk now.
Elliot: Wait. Can you say 'E.T.'? E.T.?
E.T.: E.T.
Elliot: Aha!
E.T.: E.T.! E.T.! E.T.!"



There are certain cultural experiences that tend to define a generation, sometimes a song or a novel or a current event, but quite often it tends to be a film that transcends demographics and is able to reach people on an intimate level. For a variety of reasons, few films can accomplish such a feat, but the ones that do are permanently burned into our collective memories. Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is one such film.

The story, for the uninformed (is there any?), centres around Elliott (Henry Thomas), a little boy trying to adjust to his parent's divorce and the myriad of things boys his age must adjust to. Then one night he encounters E.T., an alien accidentally left behind by his spaceship. They form a fast friendship, even to the point where Elliott begins to feel what E.T. feels and react to what he does and sees. But as E.T. stays separate from his own kind, it begins to have negative consequences on his health and, by extension, Elliott's. He attempts to "phone home", but it may be too little too late.

It had been roughly five years since I last saw E.T., a long time to be sure, but an eternity when you consider that my primary focus back then was less on cinema and more on sports and creating havoc. As a result, the E.T. I remember only somewhat resembles reality. Certain things are lodged in the back of my head - the Reese's Pieces, the NASA men, and the rest of the iconic images - so it was surprising to watch it again and realize just how different the actual film is from the film in my memory. The childhood version of me found the film, while certainly endearing and moving, slightly creepy. But what do kids know anyway?

In actuality, very little, but they do have the unique ability to respond to stimuli without the burden of knowledge and cynicism. So when E.T. propels the bicycles across the face of the moon, a child is much more likely to believe they're flying, rather than assuming the film is using some form of rear projection or other such effects. It's that innate sense of wonder that E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial employs more effectively than the vast majority of films dare dream. It has the ability to move people to tears with a simple tale of a friendship that transcends all barriers.

One thing Spielberg does in the early going is model the visual style of the film after all the alien invasion B-films of the 1950s. At every opportunity he fills his night exteriors with fog and lights cutting through the haze. He puts more light then is even remotely plausible in the shed where E.T. is hiding, so when contrasted against the fog, it tends to glow with an otherworldly eeriness. And this is before either the characters or the audience has met the alien, so there's an amount of unease about the scenes where Elliott is sitting in the lawn chair armed with nothing more than a flash-light. For all we know, the alien could pounce on him at any moment. There's always that risk in an alien film: they're either friendly or hell-bent on world domination. Rarely is it something in-between. And sure, you could assume that, since this is the man who idealized Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens are likely to be peaceful, but young directors love to try new things, so you never know.

So when we discover that E.T. is indeed friendly, a lonely soul accidentally left behind, we breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Elliott and his family will indeed be safe, that no one is going to get shot with a laser. Elliott, for his part, does what virtually every boy his age would do in such a situation: he treats E.T. like a cross between a little brother and a pet that's followed him home and he won't be allowed to keep. That is, he hides him in the closet, confiding only in his older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and little sister, Gertie (7-year-old Drew Barrymore), who, despite some conflict earlier in the film, are more than willing to help. The task of keeping E.T. a secret serves to unite these siblings in a common cause. Gone is the constant bickering and yelling of the film's early scenes. When Elliott is teased in school, Michael actually sticks up for his brother against his friends. They learn, in some small way, what it means to be part of a family, growing closer in pursuit of a goal.

Of course, they don't become nearly as close as Elliott and E.T., who actually form a bond so tight that their heart rhythms begin to operate in sync. They begin to share experiences, such as E.T. drinking beer while Elliott gets drunk during school and mimics the actions of the film E.T. is watching on TV. This is by no means an original way to show how two characters are linked, but by tying their fates together in a supernatural way, Spielberg is able to present it in a new way and it's so effective that when they lay side by side on the verge of death, you can scarcely stand the thought of what might happen. As an audience member, you're torn between wanting E.T. to be able to phone home and re-join his family and wishing he could stay on Earth with Elliott and his family. But if they're to both live healthy and productive lives, they cannot stay together. E.T. cannot stay on Earth and Elliott cannot leave his family behind, and so ends one of the great friendships in all of cinema. The film, however, will live on forever.

[Mary hits E.T. with the refrigerator door]
Gertie: "Here he is.
Mary: [absently] Who?
Gertie: The man from the moon. But I think you've killed him already."

The kind of film that is above any kind of personal opinion or 'taste'. Is and will ALWAYS be a masterpiece! Gibson's first proof that he's a natural-born filmmaker.

One of my personal favourites... Amazing script, wonderfull acting, brilliantly shot! A modern masterpiece!

The kind of film American cinema should make at least once a year, but only does once a decade. Total perfection in almost every level. A future classic.

One of my personal favourite films. A captivating, sensitive and perfect capture of life's essence. A picture whose charm, meaningfulness and perceptive intelligence is big enough to fill every one of Earth's oceans with. A film I personally connected beyond words with, and one that is likely to be appreciated by anyone who is still 'searching' for themselves. Whatever that means or how much of a cliché it might sound. The kind of film I dream of making one day.

"Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"



Two young men are hurtling down a street as Iggy Pop's incantatory ode to survival, "Lust for Life," blasts through an old '90s-TV speakers. A little 11-year-old boy (yours truly) watches, sitting in his couch alone, speechless. Concurrently, a voice-over, with a thick Scottish accent, sardonically disembowels society's empty exhortation to "choose life." The little boy discovers, for the first time in his life, that he doesn't want to choose life either. And that he should stay the hell away from heroin.

Trainspotting is and will always be the film that kind of took my innocence away. Once I first saw it I wasn't a little boy anymore. It's a modern-day little story about the experiences of some unrepentant Scottish junkies, yet in its opening moments, it spiritually resembles nothing so much as the Beatles' careening burst of adrenaline-charged "devil-may-care" in their introductory films, A Hard Day's Night and Help!. Hardly cute and cuddly moptops, these Trainspotting rogues are, nevertheless, driven by similarly simplistic formulas. In those films, the Beatles race along trying to stay one step ahead of crazed fans and other pursuers; action for the Trainspotting crew is solely motivated by the need to fix and score.

Instead of the social-realism approach taken by most films dealing with drug sub-cultures, Trainspotting observes its subjects with a mordant eye - an inclusive perspective that permits humour ("It's SHITE being Scottish!"), exhilaration, wit, and hyperbole to mingle with stark realism and dingy morality. Some have (falsely) interpreted this stance as a dangerous glorification of heroin, but Trainspotting really remains neutral on the subject. Heroin, with its pitfalls and pleasures, is merely a fact of life, and so are the sub-cultures and lifestyles it generates. The film does not ignore the drug's harrows, but neither does it deny heroin's intractable lure and efficacy. In fact, the film's most pathologically violent and twisted character is an alcoholic who never touches heroin.

Trainspotting plainly includes various heroin-related tragedies such as AIDS, crib death, and personal betrayal, but it also resorts frequently to humour and exaggeration in order to drive home other points. The most obvious example of this is the by-now talked about to death scene in which Renton swims into the most disgusting toilet/cesspool of feces in order to retrieve a couple of heroin suppositories he unwittingly excreted, thereby showing in an astonishingly vivid, surreal, and unforgettable manner the literal depths to which one can sink in the quest to score.



The same Scottish team (Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge, and Ewan McGregor) responsible for 1994's surprise low-budget hit Shallow Grave reunited here for Trainspotting despite serious wooing and many lucrative proposals from Hollywood financiers. Besides pretty much making the careers of McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kevin McKidd and Jonny Lee Miller, Trainspotting was also Kelly Macdonald's first role. It's arguably the most important film in which all these actors were in.

At times, the Scottish accents seem difficult for everyone to penetrate (I know for a fact that even English people have a hard time understanding them), and the characters' dexterous use of slang and sub-culture references do not make things any easier. Yet the ear, if permitted, adapts quickly to the Glasgow oratory, and though some of the specifics and nuances may pass unclarified, isn't that the way of all sub-culture lingo? The on-target performances, along with the unceasing barrage of popular music and daring narrative gambles, combine to make Trainspotting one of the grand film rushes of the '90s.

"We took morphine, diamorphine, cyclizine, codeine, temazepam, nitrazepam, phenobarbitone, sodium amytal, dextropropo xyphene, methadone, nalbuphine, pethidine, pentazocine, buprenorphine, dextromoramide, chlormethiazole. The streets are awash with drugs you can have."

Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuarón, Isabel Coixet, Walter Salles, Ethan & Joel Coen, Christopher Doyle, Tom Tykwer, Wes Craven, Gerard Depardieu, etc... All directing their 'little' love story (wrote by them) through the random neighborhoods of Paris.

I was obviously curious about Paris Je T'aime, but I had absolutely NO IDEA the result would be this brilliant! Mainly because it's hard to make this kind of film work. It has been done before, and not very successfully. Putting together eighteen random stories that apparently have nothing to do with each other and linking them in a way that it means something. As far as I'm concerned it was perfectly achieved.



The film flows very naturally, you almost don't realize you're watching eithteen distinct episodes. Each one has its own topic and style, given by each filmmaker, and when put together result in this amazingly beautiful and harmonic mix of short films, all with the same subject: love. And not necessarily the typical 'Man loves Woman' kind of love. All with at least one thing in common: Paris as a scenario. Really, is there a better scenario in this world than Paris? Anyone who has been to that magical city will immediately fall in love with Paris Je T'aime. Some of the shorts will seem realistic, others pretty sureal. The truth is that each one has the ability to show so many different feelings and characters, a pure look at Human nature. I'm not going to describe each segment, not a spoiler... But obviously I have my favourite ones, like Nobuhiro Suwa's ''Place des Victoires'', Tom Tykwer's ''Faubourg Saint-Denis'' or Vincenzo Natali's ''Quartier de la Madeleine''. Who already watched it know what I mean, who didn't will find out soon, I hope. The cast is also interesting. A mix of big american names like Steve Buscemi, Gena Rowlands, Natalie Portman, Elijah Wood, Willem Dafoe, Nick Nolte, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Miranda Richardson and some european 'stars' like Gerard Depardieu, Juliette Binoche, Rufus Sewell, Gaspard Ulliel and Emily Mortimer. Either way, all of them are equally great and a big part of why I personally consider Paris Je T'aime a rare masterpiece. Unmissable!

I'll the risk gladly, but I'll say this: Dolls is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever! Takeshi Kitano is one of the most talented and brilliant filmmakers alive! I've seen every one of his films and the truth is that there isn't a single one that isn't at least 'good'. I won't say Dolls is his best film, even though in my intimate it is my favourite one, side by side with Hana-bi, but it certainly is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen.



It might take some time and mind openness to fully get its greatness. Probably why some didn't get it at all... But there's no way you won't get blown away by this modern masterpiece. It's painfully beautiful, sad, melodic, depressing, realistic and visually astonishing! The rose garden scene is something close to sureal... Any aspiring filmmaker has to see Dolls. There's no going back there. It's pretty much a lesson of filmmaking... I can't help finding extremely transcendental that one single man (sensei Kitano) has imagined, wrote and directed this piece of pure, genuine ART...

Like Kitano or not (or even know him at all), if you truly love Cinema than you can't, just can't, miss this wonderful film!

A film that will always have its name written in history as one of the best and greatest animated pictures ever made. Miyazaki's most accomplished work, technically speaking. Will always be considered his masterpiece, but most of all, it's the result of a unique and brilliant career, full of magical and beautiful films. Breathtakingly beautiful, exquisitely formed, a flawlessly executed masterwork. A sheerly imaginative and groundbreakingly wondrous cinematic piece, wether the anime genre or filmmaking in general is concerned. A dream and poem in the form of film.

One of the strongest and most affecting films ever made. Horrifyingly honest, mesmerizing, scary, raw, romantic, sad and devastatingly effective. Conveys, visually, sonically and dramatically, the siren call of addiction like no other film has to date. A phantasmagoria of self-destructive obsession that is so visually astounding it becomes literally painful to watch. And yet, you can't look away. A spiritual nightmare. One very worth having. Has everything a cult film is supposed to have: innovative visuals, a haunting score, undeniably courageous performances from all of its leads and a consistently gripping narrative. A masterpiece.

"If you want to end your life, end it. You don't have to kill yourself to do that."



Powerful, heavy, crude, turbulent, realistic, brutally honest... All those adjectives combined are not still not enough to describe Head-On. This is probably the most sincere film I've ever seen, occasionally too sincere for everyone to endure. Throughout it, with no warning whatsoever, there are these (at first) incomprehensible, random shots of a red dressed singer accompanied by a typical Turkish orchestra in front of the Bosphorus valley, with the stunning view of Istanbul in its background. It is, as well, with one of these shots that the film itself starts. With this simple Brechtian technique, Fatih Akin (as a tribute to his origins) provides us some occasional clarity and calm during the two long hours of chaos and melodrama that are hard (impossible I'd say) to run from. Without those short, occasional breaks the darkness and the suffocatingly dramatic mood of this film would probably be too much to handle.

Two Turkish immigrants (Cahit and Sibel) living in Germany - he, born in Turkey, but officially a German, she, a Turkish immigrants descendent - two of the so called "German Turks" living in Hamburg meet by chance and fall in love. Even though they have a German ID, they don't feel German, nor Turkish. Foreigners in their own country. They meet in a psychiatric hospital, after both of them tried to commit suicide. Cahit (Birol Ünel), by driving his car into a wall (Gegen die Wand = "Against the Wall") and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), by classically slitting her wrists. At first sight they don't seem to have that much in common. He's a lonely, numb, Rock 'n Roll legend-alike 40-year-old who has no reason to live since his wife's death. Drown in alcohol, drugs and self-commiseration. Self-absorbed on his nihilism and mad at everyone and at the World. She, on the other hand, is a beautiful 20-year-old with her whole life ahead of her, who desperately wants to live, to experiment everything, but finds herself trapped by her family's traditions and restrictions.

Sibel sees in the apparently only similarity between the two of them (the Turkish background) her ticket out of the 19th century recreation she has lived in her entire life, by asking Cahit to marry her. What's interesting and ironic is the way that they both complete each other. She, tied in her suffocating culture, needs to get loose from it in order to be free. He, already 'too free', and distant from his origins (doesn't even talk Turkish correctly), needs something new, something to make him feel alive again, which he eventually finds in Sibel. The two main actors are absolutely phenomenal. Birol Ünel is one of the most charismatic actors you'll ever get the chance to see. Cool as hell. An amazing performance (won a German film prize) and a big part of the film's triumph. Sibel Kekilli is also brilliant. Not being dazzling, she has this natural beauty that fits her character like a glove. Very intense and provoking.

While being a very personal look at the lives of Turks in Germany (told through one of them), Head-On is much more than that. It's a tale of alienation, loneliness and about that feeling of not belonging (If you want a comparison think of Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things). Whether it's in Germany or any other country in the world, that's something that millions of people can relate to. Which is probably why this film has such a deeply honest and contagious strength, because it all feels natural. The people involved, Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli in front of the camera and Fatih Akin behind it, are telling a very personal story, far from being fiction. I can't recommend this film enough. It was here I first discovered the enormous talent that is Fatih Akin and it's the ideal film for anyone willing to open themselves to one of the most promising and gifted filmmakers working today in Europe. This film speaks, shouts directly into one's soul. A unique, unabashedly raw masterpiece!

"Punk is not dead!"

One of the most complex and utterly brilliant original screenplays ever written, by the ingeniously idiosyncratic Charlie Kaufman - who is by far the most exciting screenwriter working today. A concept so unique, strange and yet human that the film is somehow simple in all of its complexity. Both a brilliant piece of visionary filmmaking and a deeply romantic love story. The fact that Jim Carrey gives the best performance of his career also helps a little. A masterpiece!

"The worst part of being old is rememberin' when you was young."

Inspirational. The personification of what films are supposed to be. David Lynch's most 'normal' and humane film since The Elephant Man. The living proof that a man and artist's genius can show itself in more than one way.



Based on a true story, The Straight Story follows 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, in the best acting performance of 1999, next to Kevin Spacey) as he travels cross-country on his '66 John Deere lawnmower. Alvin lives with his daughter Rosie (the magnificent Sissy Spacek) who has a speech problem, he doesn't have a driver's license, can't see very well, and can't stand without the help of two canes. All that, however, won't (and didn't) stand in his way of travelling 240 miles between Laurens, Iowa and Mount Zion, Wisconsin, when he hears that his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton), whom he hasn't spoken to in 10 years, has suffered a stroke.

During the six week period his journey took, Alvin meets all sorts of different people, like a pregnant teenager, a group of cyclists and a nice couple who lets him camp in their front lawn when his lawnmower breaks down. Alvin helps them with their problems, even if simply by sharing his old-fashioned country wisdom, and they all feel the need to help him too. In one occasion one of the friendly neighbours offers to drive him to his destination. Alvin's reply is, "you're a kind mind talking to a stubborn man."

While watching The Straight Story, I asked myself a simple question: If I hadn't known the director's identity beforehand and hadn't seen the opening credits, would I have recognized this as a Lynch effort? The answer, no matter how big of a Lynch fan I am, is probably no. This is a G-rated film, distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. I mean, the words Lynch and Disney don't go together... right? Apparently they do.

Although astute viewers may be able to find traces of Lynch's usual bizarro small-town characters from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, the truth is that The Straight Story, even with its share of weirdness, doesn't belong to the steroetyped 'Lynchian Universe'. While Blue Velvet opened with a shot that burrows beneath the ground to reveal maggots, The Straight Story starts with a placid view of a starfield. Lynch takes a break from the nightmarishness and darkness which he obviously prefers to emphasize in the human nature and, for once, focusses on its humanity and simplicity. He doesn't attempt to dissect middle America - he celebrates it. And more importantly, he brings back a time where American cinema was unique and the good old road movies and westerns were a joy to watch.

Lynch paces the film beautifully, allowing Alvin's character to be developed in such a way that the climactic scene has a genuine emotional impact. The Straight Story moves slowly, very slowly, which almost works as a sort of metaphor in a film that concerns travel by a lawnmower. The cinematography (by Freddie Francis) is evocative, and features numerous shots of autumn leaves and corn fields ready to be razed. Angelo Badalamenti (the composer of the "Twin Peaks" theme) turns in a wonderful score that enhances the atmosphere without ever becoming intrusive.

A beautiful, beautiful film.

Vanilla Sky is a little children's film compared to the original spanish masterpiece...

Wong Kar-Wai was born in China and moved to Hong Kong when he was five. This obviously means he grew up watching traditional Chinese martial arts films. Everyone who was born there did. So, considering that those are always a filmmaker's first influences, it would be normal, expected even, if he would to aspire to make films such as those.

...Except we're talking about a man who emantes art and beauty from anything he does. His first film, As Tears Go By, came in 1988 (one year after I was born) and it was the start of a career full of visually unique, highly stylized art films. Ashes of Time is his... I wouldn't say 'attempt', more like his tribute to the Wuxia genre. His only film that doesn't take place in the 20th or 21st century.

It isn't, however, an action film. There are two, maybe three fight scenes in the entire film. The action is shot in a largely inscrutable manner; most of the motion is blurred, and the chaotic swordplay rendered more so by the quick cutting. Wong isn't interested in action or violence so much as the idea of them. Basicly what he does is to turn something as physical and 'real' as swordplay into a dreamlike abstraction. I can't even begin to eplain how brilliant that is to me. Ashes of Time has everything any other of his films do. The only difference is that its characters live in the martial arts' world, instead of an urban, easier to relate one. Other than that they still feel love, loss and regret.



Not suprisingly, the film doesn't follow a traditional narrative but, rather, carefully unspools a number of interconnected plot threads. The common link between all of these stories is Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) a once-active swordsman who now acts as an agent for other hired killers. As a multitude of characters pass through and by his Inn in the desert, the focus of the film moves across a number of episodes involving characters such as Yao-shi Huang (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a swordsman friend of Ouyang's, who one day gives him a gift of 'magic' wine; a swordswoman (Brigitte Lin) with a severe multiple personality identity crisis; and a blind swordsman (Tony Leung) who wants one last glimpse of his home before the final blackout.

Ouyang had abandoned his home and his true love (Maggie Cheung) in search of fame as a swordsman, and as the film unfolds we come to understand how he came to his current place in life. Cheung's character is the heart of the film, the one with more screen time, but the film would mean nothing without all of its characters, who all interact in strange, unchronological manners. The doubts and the confusion that will emerge (cause it will) from all these characters put together - at a certain point you'll find yourself completely lost, wondering who's who - won't be nice, some will find it infuriating and won't be able to fully understand its greatness after several viewings. However, the many fragments of Ashes of Time DO assemble into a clear picture. The patient and attentive viewer will be rewarded when the film ultimately reveals itself as the meticulously constructed puzzle that it is.

Ashes of Time is a gorgeous film. Even those who can't follow the story should be greatful for the fact alone that they got to see something this beautiful. Wong's poetic prose, along with hauntingly melodic music and Christopher Doyle's heavenly cinematography makes it a feast to the senses. A film of a rare and unique beauty. Even the fight scenes (shot, keep in mind, 13 years ago), beautifully choreographed, are a joy to watch and make a masterpiece like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon feel ashamed of itsef. Words are not enough not describe how sorry I am for all those who can't see the brilliance of this film.

For any Kar-Wai fan, or, in a larger picture, any Asian Cinema fan, Ashes of Time's cast is like a dream come true. I mean, can you picture Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin together, all giving some of the best performances of their careers? Cheung is fabulous as the lead, playing the cynical and bitter Ouyeng, Leung gives what might be his most emotional performance ever as the mysterious Blind Swordsman, Lin is probably the one who shines the most, playing two characters in one and Maggie's ten minutes torward the end is the most jaw-droppingly beautiful, yet haunting and sad scene you'll ever see. If this wasn't a masterpiece, the film would be worth it for that scene alone.

May be hard to believe, but Ashes of Time recalls Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Besides the love-it-or-hate-it reputation, both have insanely stellar casts; both use a violent genre as the launchpad for existential meditation; both concern themselves with the psychology beneath the bloodshed. And, of course, both have been called pretentious. I call them both art. A-R-T!

"As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices."

The future never looked this bleak. In a matter of 20 years time, the world overcome by its own excesses and greed. In Alfonso Cuarón's chilling dystopia Children of Men, we witness a world not different with the world we live in today, a world of violence, inhumanity, plague, environmental destruction magnified through a looking glass. With one pinning factor of hope deducted... children. How can one think, knowing that they are the last generation left on earth, with no one to look after? Death to the human race as we know it.



The film opens as a crowd gathers in a small cafe mourning the loss of the youngest person on earth, born on 2009, died 2027. This will be the catalyst for events to come, as Theo (Clive Owen) meets up with his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), still mourning their own loss several years ago, they must both come together as they embark on a new journey that will spark hope to humankind's deadlock fate.

Cuarón, together with his go-to cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, have created a place as accurate one may think of in the near future. A world filled with violence, as people are more concerned with their own survival, one may even see similarities to events that have passed, as we witness our so called future. The forced deportation of illegal immigrants from the U.K. portrayed on screen recalls the Nazi Germany's crackdown on European Jews and other minorities during the early to late 1930s, well into the 1940s as Adolf Hitler enforced the Gleichschaltung, a doctrine that forbid individualism and free thinking and adhering to one ideology, and that period called for antisemitism.

Today, we have the Patriot Act in the US and Anti-Terrorism Law in dozens of countries throughout the world, in which ever fence of political ideology you may belong to, one cannot deny the countless objectionable provisions that are included, such as detaining and deportation of "suspected" immigrants of terrorist activities. More often than not, innocent people are detained. The so called "sneak and peek," where in any law enforcement agency can search a person's home or business without any warrant. All comes full circle on Cuarón's adaptation of the novel by P.D. James. We may be closer to the world portrayed here than we anticipated.

Amazing characters dot this film from Michael Caine's hope trotting hippie, to Pam Ferris, a hopeless reveler, even Charlie Hunnam seems to be out of whack, as Patric, a zealous member of the Fishes. Notice how the camera evokes realism through seamless tracking shots, as seen through the immigrant's ghetto, we follow Theo run and dodge bullets both left and right. Or perhaps, the claustrophobic aura in the car, as Theo, Julian and their group are attacked by a crazed mob, the camera swivels around them as the mob tries to get in the car. No music used on both climactic scenes, just a realization of dread.

It's highly plausible that an infectious agent will one day cause infertility to human reproduction, as seen in other animal species. Add in the myriad of other threats to our survival, indifference, social inequality, global warming, habitat destruction, natural calamities, widening gap between the haves and have-nots. All of these things come together in such a symbolic film. Children of Men has probably opened up more questions than it has answers. As viewers of the celluloid, we're given a choice: continue on towards our path to destruction or instill change while perpetual hope blooms. The choice is ours to make.

Tony Wilson: "June 4th, 1976. The Sex Pistols play Manchester for the very first time. There are only 42 people in the audience... but every single one is feeding on a power, an energy and a magic. lnspired, they will go out and perform wondrous deeds. For instance, Howard Devoto, at the front, Pete Shelley, at the back. They organised this gig. They're way ahead of everyone in Manchester. They're already the Buzzcocks. Howard later sleeps with my wife. Behind me are Stiff Kittens. Soon to become Warsaw,
later to become Joy Division... finally to become New Order. That's John the Postman. He's... a postman. And that guy dancing at the front, that's Martin Hannett... the only bona fide genius
in this story. Well, one of the only two bona fide geniuses in this story. He will later try to kill me."



It feels as if we've waited an eternity for 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom's glorious 'mocku-feature' about Manchester and its "mad music" sound of the 1980s. Released in the UK in April 2002, 24 Hour Party People is Winterbottom's Almost Famous, his love letter to Manchester and the post-punk revolution that made that city the place anyone wanted to be, that he and producer Andrew Eaton brainstormed while avoiding the cold climes of Canada during the shoot of their last film, The Claim (2000). 24 Hour People wasn't just worth the wait, it was a dream come true.

24 Hour Party People, named after an early Happy Mondays song, is an irreverent piece to say the least. A biopic of sorts, the film's creators (including scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce) do all they can to tear down the inflated genre. Almost functioning as two films in one, 24 Hour Party People is based around the life and times of the still very alive Granada TV reporter Tony Wilson, one of the chaotic architects behind the famed Hacienda Night Club and influential music label Factory Records.

The parallel film is of course about the music itself. The bands and individuals featured in 24 Hour Party People (whether they were there or not sometimes) range from major, world-changing bands like Joy Division and their later incarnation New Order, to the Happy Mondays, the Duritti Column, The Fall, The Buzzcocks, manager Rob Gretton, Howard Devoto, Bernard Sumner and producer Martin Hannett, made eccentric and troll-like by an actor who seems to specialise in trolls these days, Andy Serkis ("Gollum" in Lord of the Rings).

After Wilson kicks off the proceedings with a madly funny recreation of a hang-gliding story for local Manchester TV, we veer straight into the Sex Pistols' first Manchester gig in 1976, where straight-to-camera again, Coogan's Wilson informs us that this is "where it all began" for the Manchester sound. Forty-seven people attended the gig (including "Tony the Postman"), though its inspiration proved infinite for the area. The film all but implodes around 1992, the year that Wilson and his associates ran out of money and closed the Hacienda, one of the acknowledged foundations of England's rave culture.

Winterbottom, Boyce, and Coogan all grew up in the "Madchester" scene, so the story is as much theirs, as fans, as it is the bands' or the film's mouthpiece, Wilson. Boyce could have waxed elegiac, mourning the loss of an era, or nostalgic in recalling the music so integral to his youth - which he still does, particularly in the tribute to Ian Curtis and the recreation of his suicide. But he eschews both, choosing, instead, to celebrate the Factory with absurd, ironic humour and a screenplay that breaks through the fourth wall for Wilson's constant asides to the audience (with dialogues such as "this scene didn't actually make it to the final cut. I'm sure it'll be on the DVD"). Winterbottom and cinematographer Robby Muller complement Boyce's script in grungy, hand-held, digital-video style that both lends the story a sense of immediacy and echoes Manchester's industrial milieu. You literally feel as if you're actually there.

Anybody who has ever experienced comedian/actor Steve Coogan's character Alan Partridge is sure to find a lot of that creation in his portrayal here of Tony Wilson, the irony being that said character was in part actually inspired by the guy in the first place. His performance is that kind of glue which keeps things vaguely adherent to some semblance of plot here is quite sublime, helped out no end by a not particularly big name, but no less talented because of it, supporting cast all faced with a rather lofty challenge - portraying an array of people all well-known, many of whom are still alive and still around. Some are spookily accurate, while some are merely representative without invoking any real sense of those they're playing. However, as with the screenplay, the direction, hell - even the whole Factory saga to a degree - it all works. Somehow. 24 Hour Party People is responsible for some of the most fun - memorable, meaningful fun - I have ever had while watching a film. An immediate, life-lasting favourite of mine.

Tony Wilson: "And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They're applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester."

Euthanasia. Mar Adentro isn't about it. Nor if it's 'ethic' or not, even though obviously everyone has their own thoughts and opinions on the subject. It's about one man, Ramón Sampedro. About his life, his struggle for dignity and about his beloved ones who stood by him untill the end.

Ramón was a young, charming, intelligent, life lover man who, in an instant, because of an accident that could happen to ANYONE, became quadraplegic. The next 28 years of his life were spent on a bed, without any use of his body, with only one life goal: to die. Like I said, the intention wasn't to discuss Euthanasia itself (even though that was unevitable), it was to tell the life story of this man who always kept that strange smile on his face, his love for music, his unusual humor and who, above all, kept loving his family and friends...



Biographic or not, this is an intense drama with a sublime message of hope and love. Alejandro Amenábar is an extremely talented and sensitive filmmaker that everyone should keep in mind. He may very well be the future of spanish Cinema. As for the acting, couldn't possibly be better! Javier Bardem's performance is simply haunting and mind blowing! Just brilliant!

With clear remindings of The Barbarian Invasions, even though with different approaches, Mar Adentro's runtime exceeds by far the theatre, it goes on and on inside each and everyone of its viewers. That should be the intention and wish of every film maker... Right?

A film that should be used in Film schools in the "How to create the perfect Soundtrack" class.

At this point of the year (ten days away from 2008) and although I haven't seen the Coens' No Country for Old Men - which, apparently, will be #1 in most 'Best of the Year' lists than any other - I, personally, have found my own #1 for this fabulous year that was 2007. Now, regardless of my huge fondness and respect for the Coens, unfortunely I won't be able to see their film 'till next year, so I suppose it's oficial: Atonement is the best film I've seen in 2007.



Joe Wright's second feature film - after the fabulous Pride & Prejudice - is one of those extremely rare examples of when everything works out perfectly in a film. And I mean everything. Atonement is perfect in every single aspect that makes filmmaking an art: writting, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, music, etc... I feel nothing but sorry for anyone who sees a flaw in this film.

Wright's second film is also his second adaptation of a prestiged literary work (I have read both, I'm proud to say). After Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" two years ago, this time it was Ian McEwan's "Atonement". Anyone who has read the book knows how powerful it is. How huge its emotional impact is (particularly the end) and how exhausting and brutal it can get as an experience. I remember being completely drained and numb after finishing it, feeling like my heart was ripped out of my chest. Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton's biggest achievement was the way they managed to be faithful to the source material (even with the obvious, occasional changes), dividing the narrative structure in two principal parts and a short epilogue, and also keeping the power and essence of the ending. Watching the film felt just like reading the book again... except in two hours. I tell you, that is a magical feeling.



In both cases - book and film - the first part of the story covers the pre-WWII era in the life of the Tallises, an upper class english family who knows nothing but wealth and privilege. On an ordinary summer day at their luxurious countryside estate, impressionable 13-year old Briony (Saoirse Ronan) witnesses, and misunderstands two encounters between her older sister, Cecilia (Kiera Knightley) and the housekeeper's charming and educated son, Robbie (James McAvoy). Feeling a combination of jealousy and overprotectiveness, she falsely accusates Robbie of a horrible crime and forever changes those three lives.

The film jumps four years - again, like in the book - to find the three characters' lives altered by the break of WWII. Devastated and lost Robbie is now a soldier fleeing with the rest of the British army toward the English Channel. Cecilia, still in love with Robbie and eternally waiting for him, works as a nurse treating wounded soldiers back from the war. And Briony (now played by Romola Garai), also a nurse, now completely aware of the consequences of her actions as a foolish 13-year old girl, who, tending to the brutally wounded and holding the hands of dying men, seeks some kind of atonement.

It doesn't reach half of the book's emotional impact, but Atonement is not an easy film to endure. It's much more likely to be appreciated for its artistry than for its entertainment value. When you look at the film's poster or trailer you see two young people in love, but in reality that love story isn't as important as Briony's serch for atonement. Atonement isn't about two people falling in love and then spending the rest of the film trying to end up together, it's about how our actions (even when we're just 13) can affect others, how we - human beings - are all an expected event away from watching our lives being destroyed.



Joe Wright does an absolutely fantastic job directing. Earlier in the film, in order to capture two scenes in particular from the book in which Briony's perceptions don't match the reality, he shows us events twice - once through Briony's eyes looking through a widow and once from a neutral, correct perspective. This reminded me of Kurosawa's Rashômon, distances kept. With the help of cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designer Jacqueline Durran, editor Paul Tothill and Dario Marianelli's Score, he also makes it a completely gorgeous film to watch. In more than one occasion in the film's second half, it felt like watching a painting in motion. This obviously includes the very talked about, almost famous scene of the Dunkirk retreat. A vast 5-minute re-creation of one of England's shining moments, except through a perspective of horror and descruction that makes war what it is. Breathtaking. One of the most beautiful and brilliant scenes I've seen in my life.

Acting-wise, both Keira Knightley and James McAvoy show chemistry enough on screen and both give good performances individually. Knightley proves (again!) that she's much more than a pretty face and that her true potential can only be extracted playing sensitive, literary characters, not playing pirate on american blockbusters. McAvoy adds another great performance to his career and is already in the group of best male performances I've seen this year. Still, as exceptional as they are, the standout here is 13-year old Saoirse Ronan, who owns the screen from the moment she's introduced. Ronan's Briony is a spoiled child one moment, and a spurned young woman pining after a man she can't have the next. She's both innocent and diabolical, bright yet foolish... one moment you like her for her cleverness and next you want to slap her for her arrogance. My guess is that girl is going places. I think I'll even watch I Could Never Be Your Woman just so I can see her again.

It will be very hard the Coens' No Country for Old Men to steal Atonement its first place in my 'Best of 2007' list. I'll give it the chance, of course, but I'm afraid Atonement got to me first...

The personification of what a perfect animated picture is. So good that it shames virtually and literally almost every animated film made since Spirited Away. An organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and inventive film experience. A masterpiece!

The reason why Battle Royale is so loved and hated at the same time is simply because it explores an idea that the human mind is almost pre-programed to fear and reject. We are thought, when we're kids, that there are two sides: 'Good' and 'Evil'. Stealing is wrong, killing is even wronger. But the pure and unquestionable truth is that any human being has the ability to take someone else's life, or themselve's for that matter. As simple as that. That's why Battle Royale has the unique and fascinating ability to shock, inlight, entertain and divide people. It's just brilliantly honest exploring that idea. How more honest could it be than putting 42 teenagers on a deserted island and making them kill each other for their own survival? If you think about it, it's not that different than a bunch of kids with guns killing everything and everyone on their way on some random american school... Is it? Of course, the probability of something like that (the 'BR' program, I mean) happening is almost unexistent. That's why the script can be a little surreal and at times silly. But guess what? I LOVED IT!



The violence, the killing, the blood... All of that loses relevance when we realize just how original and visionary (in a kind of twisted and bizarre way) Battle Royale really is. I mean, let's face it, it wasn't for the violence or the blood (seen on thousands of other, sometimes awarded, beloved films) that the film was banned from the US and almost in Japan. It was the social/polytical message. Youth has the need to be heard. As simple as that. 20, 50 years ago and now as well. When a kid is not taken seriously he makes himself heard, he asks for attention. Rebels. This may be a little 'Oprah,' but it's true. So, maybe kids boycotting their schools, writting on the board 'Today there's no class, because we don't want too!' is not that utopic... That's probably the reason why the japanese goverment didn't find it that funny.

Either way, and finalizing, I just can't help finding hilariously ironic that the same country that banned this modern masterpiece from their theatres is the same one who will remake it in 2008...

Polanski's most relevant and humane masterpiece. One of WWII's most amazing stories of survival ever put on screen. Adrien Brody had in Wladyslaw Szpilman the role and performance of his career.

I saw it when I was a little kid and I never forgot it... It touched and shocked me in a way that not many do...

People love to say how sad and heartbreaking this or that film is... But until you see this film, don't! If there is a perfect way of capturing inocence and hope on screen, with some humor, it was done here! Very intense and detailed film, that can make any human being on this planet cry... It also has one of the most brilliant endings I've ever seen!

First of all this is a Christopher Nolan film. Which means that you already expect it to be a dark, thoughfull masterpiece. I mean, this is the mind who created Memento, one of the most fascinating pieces of Cinema of the last 50 years... Being said this, there would always be a risk that The Prestige would not live up to the expectations. But it does! It's all there: brilliant script (wasn't aware of the book), stunning cinematography and the best cast that Nolan could possibly wish. If Christian Bale's performance is not Oscar worthy than nothing is. As simple as that! An actor can't get any better than that... Hugh Jackman is also amazing and Sir Michael Caine's character just couldn't be played by anyone else. The plot's complexity, though not in a confusing way, keeps you wondering till the last scene and the truth is that, being the film about Illusionism, the film itself has something of tricky (Nolan's touch), with that brilliant, shocking finale... But I won't say more. Just don't take your eyes of the screen of else you'll be lost... :)

So, I guess it's pretty clear that this is one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the year. I'm starting to think that I've said this a lot of times... Probably because 2006 may well be one of the recently richest years, as for quality is concerned...

Beats any american classic war movie! The story is not the war itself, it's the effects, the human connections!

The kind of excelence German cinema can and should provide us with more often. A fascinating history lesson disguised as a clever, heartwarming tragicomedy. Its social satire is tinged with affable humor and subtle sadnesses. Daniel Brühl gives the first great performance of his career.

ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC!

Based on a true story, on the life of Oscar Orlando Torres, who wrote the screenplay and co-produced, Innocent Voices is one of the most moving and powerful films I've ever seen.



It portrays the harsh childhood of the eleven year old Chava (the sensational debuter Carlos Padilla) in the early 1980's in El Salvador, a country emerged on a long and senseless civil war. Chava lives with his mother (the stunning and talented Leonor Varela) and his sister and two little brothers. They live in a poor, remote village in one of its many cardboard houses. Everyday is a struggle for survival.

Now, this isn't just another war film. Nor a simple biopic. It's an amazing tale of survival and courage. A story of a child whose biggest struggle was to remain a child, to fight for his innocence (like so many around the world). And also a story of a mother, who'd do anything for her son. This is a film of an extreme importance. The fact that it had the UN support says it all. A film that deals with 'sensitive' subjects, subjects that most people prefer to ignore. Because wether we want to face it or not, people die everyday in stupid, easily avoided wars around the world. Twelve year old kids are recruited to the army, when their only concern at that time should be a math test or falling in love.

The most impressive thing is to think that everything we see in the film (or at least 90%) actually happened. This isn't just another film remotely 'based on a true story'. It was written by someone who actually experienced all of it. Unlike Oliver Stone's Salvador, that looked at the El Salvador conflict through the typically American point of view and whose plot and characters were obviously made up based on facts read on newspapers and magazines, Innocent Voices is about real people, real life situations and tragedies, real human emotions.

This is a mexican production from Altavista Films (the same company that gave us Amores Perros). Technically the film is close to perfection, from the stunning cinematography to the editing and the magnificent score, this is a world class film, can't put it more simply. Another huge triumph of Mexican Cinema!

Can't, just can't be missed!

And so it came, almost out of nothing, an unexpected masterpiece. Unexpected because a few months ago I haven't even heard of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, even though I'm a particularly enthusiastic follower of European Cinema. I guess I wasn't the only one caught by surprise with this stunning directorial debut.



Being european, I grew up studying this film's subject in class rooms, so I was curious as to it's political and historical relevance. Even thought I'm not exacly a History expert, I'd say that this is an extremely relevant film, an essential look at a particularly important time of our recent past. A tribute to those (impersonated in Georg Dreyman) who fought for their ideals, for freedom of speech, for their secret dream of a united nation. And also an interesting look at the 'other side', at those who'd do anything they were told in the name of their loyalty. Ulrich Muhe's performance is absolutely phenomenal! Incredibly dubious, dark, sad and believable...

The 'Best Foreign Language Film' award is my favourite one at the Oscars. It has been for several years and I'm sure it'll always be. Probably because it's the only one that can still surprise me and make me forget, for a while, the triviality and previsibility of the cerimony iself. And of course, when we look at the nominees, there are always 5 top class films that are as good (or better) as the candidates to 'Best Film'. I mean, let's face it, when we have The Lives of Others and Pan's Labyrinth, both competing for the same award, we have to ask ourselves if the language is really that important. My opinion? NO!

For any filmmaker born in Europe, to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival is like... well, like a dream come true. It's basically the greatest achievement that filmmaker can aspire in his or her career and lifetime. Writer/director Cristian Mungiu wrote his name in History last May with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a stunning, simply stunning film. Another one from one of the most promising cinematographies of today.

Much like Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, who started this Romanian New Wave, Mungiu's film has a vaguely political nature, in the way it criticizes and analyzes the effects of Communism in Eastern Europe, but it doesn't have the clever, dark humor and graciousness in which those two filmmakers told their stories. Quite the contrary. 4 Months... is as dark, dramatic, gripping and devastating as a film can get.



Set in 1987, during the final years of Nicolae Ceausescu's regime, the film takes place over the course of one long and menacing day in the lives of two college students. The film's first brilliant shot shows us roomates Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) making preparations for what appears to be a trip. Packing their bags, cleaning their dorm room, debating over taking notes for exams they will miss and feeding the goldfish. We soon discover that Gabita is pregnant and has decided to abort - ilegally, obviously.

Gabita is the pregnant one, but she's maddeningly helpless. It's Otilia who takes care of the situation, who is forced to make all the arrangements: securing the hotel room where the procedure will be performed, meeting the demanding abortionist - ironically named Mr. Bebe (the convincingly creepy Vlad Ivanov) - and even helping to pay the high cost of the abortion. When they get to the hotel, things go horribly wrong. The fact that they got a room in a different hotel then the one he had requested, that Gabita didn't meet him in person and especially that she lied about the lenght of her pregnancy makes the sinister abortionist charge more for his services than he was supposed to, and the two girls, to pay a price they never thought they would...

The fact that 4 Months 'stole' the Golden Palm from films like No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Zodiac may help to understand its real brilliance. In the last few years I've had the "Is Cinema Art?" discussion hundreds of times. Many say it isn't, others stick to the original belief that it is. And the discussion is useless, really. Each one believes in whatever he wants. However, this is one of those films that I would use as an example if I had to defend my point of view. It will get inside your thoughts and guts and won't leave them. It will shake the very core of your existence. It will make you hate and love humankind at the same time. It will tear you apart.



Mungui creates a grim landscape of dilapidated buildings, dark hallways and green gray rooms that just get under your skin. One particular scene, at the birthday party of Otilia's boyfriend's mother, becomes a kind of tour de force, with the joy and loudness of the celebrants making Otilia's misery all the more palpable before our very eyes. In another, a tense, gripping and heartbreaking sequence towards the end of the film, she must dispose of the aborted fetus in the darkness and squalor of an unlamented urban hell. Virtually every scene, no matter how long, is shot without cutting. In long, hand-held takes, the camera bears witness to the events in what feels like real time. The story is told through Otilia's emotional responses. Anamaria Marinca's performance is powerful beyond words.

If I said that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wasn't about abortion it would obviously seem false. It's impossible to run from the issue. It was obvious, and Mungiu knew it, that the film would raise (again) discussions and debates on the subject. Some will make the point "If abortion was legal at the time, those women didn't have to go through what they did. They would just go to a clinic, and that was it". Ceaucescu outlawed abortion and contraception in Romania in 1966. By 1989 - the end of communism - 500.000 estimated women died from illegal abortions and 200.000 children grew up in orphanages. Still, no one needs those statistics. Everyone makes their own mind on the matter. 4 Months... is less about abortion than it is about the power of friendship. Its power knows no limits or boundaries, and this film will teach or remind you that in the most painful and cruel way possible. A masterpiece.

Bill: "Do you find me sadistic? You know, I bet I could fry an egg on your head right now, if I wanted to. You know, Kiddo, I'd like to believe that you're aware enough even now to know that there's nothing sadistic in my actions. Well, maybe towards those other... jokers, but not you. No Kiddo, at this moment, this is me at my most... [cocks pistol] masochistic."



Quentin Tarantino has never hid his love for 1970s exploitation and asian/kung fu genre films. His occasional film festivals have often featured forgotten and nearly-forgotten grindhouse fare and his "Rolling Thunder" distribution company (named after the 1977 revenge flick) has brought back into circulation b-films such as 1975's Switchblade Sisters (from blaxploitation director Jack Hill) and Takeshi Kitano's 1993 gangster film Sonatine, which was the first Kitano feature to be shown internationally and one of Taratino's inspirations for Reservoir Dogs (this
photo, Tarantino himself admited, being an actual tribute to that film and to Takeshi "Beat" Kitano). But with Kill Bill, Volume 1 (and later Vol. 2) Tarantino has taken all of his grindhouse and kung fu inspirations, filtered them through his own particular vision and created a masterpiece that is more than the sum of his influences.

Uma Thurman is The Bride, a member of the elite Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. When she decides to quit the professional assassination business to settle down and marry, leaving without a word after discovering she's pregnant, the other members of the team show up at her wedding - at the wedding rehearsal, actually - killing everyone present and putting her in a 4-year coma. Understandably enraged at having had four years of her life, her planned future and her unborn baby all taken from her, The Bride sets out to extract her revenge on her former team mates (Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Darryl Hannah and Michael Madsen) and their leader, the enigmatic Bill (David Carradine). Volume 1 sees the Bride start out on her quest and her encounters with a now turned suburban housewife Fox and Tokyo organized crime head Liu before ending on an emotional cliffhanger leading to what would be the concluding installment, one year later.

Even with Tarantino's trademark non-linear storytelling, the plot is strictly fairly linear, in much of the style of the many of the kung fu auctioneers released by the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers Studio from the '60s to the early '80s. Tarantino is plundering much of the same source material that Ang Lee did for 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But where Lee concentrated on themes of love, honor and duty, Tarantino is more concerned with vengeance, a much rawer and bloodier business.

When I first saw Vol. 1, I believed Tarantino was - besides making a film he always dreamed of - baiting us to cheer for vigilante justice and excessive bloodshed. But having seen the whole thing now, I see that this takes place in a fantasy world, a police-free universe, in which the Bride represents the struggle of a sinful woman to break free of her chains, rid the world of her devilish master, and make the world safe for herself and whoever might come after her.

Make no mistake, Kill Bill is a violent picture, which obviously put some audience members off (members who shouldn't even be watching it in the first place, for it simply wasn't made for them) and even had the audacity to call it overrated. But the violence almost transcends itself at points. Tarantino (along with fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping) stage the most violent and lengthy segment ("The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves") almost as if it was a dance number, with long flowing shots that showcase the fighting skill of all involved. At one point Thurman and several opponents square off in silhouette backlit by blue light recalling An American In Paris.

Kill Bill wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It opens with the title card "Filmed in Shaw-Scope" that graced the opening seconds of many Shaw Brothers pictures. The flashback describing fellow assassin O-Ren's background is done in Japanese animation style. Living legend Sonny Chiba, star of the Streetfighter series of films in the '70s, appears as Hattori Hanzo, a master forger of samurai swords, former Shaw Brothers star Gordon Liu (1978's 36th Chamber of Shaolin) is Johnny Mo, the head of Lucy Liu's army of black-suited yakuzas, "The Crazy 88", and the - at the time - 19-year-old Chiaki Kuriyama is the insanely psychotic and sexy Gogo Yubari (aka coolest body guard ever created) who, from the moment she appeared in cult films as Battle Royale and Ju-on, obviously got Tarantino's attention.

While many may pick up on the Bride's yellow track suit as a tip of the hat towards Bruce Lee's Game of Death (1978), many may not get the finale to the House of Blue Leaves fight as being visually inspired by the Shaw Brothers production Lady Snowblood (1973). Still, one doesn't need to know that Darryl Hannah's character is inspired in the main character of the Swedish film Thriller (aka They Call Me One-Eye, 1974) to enjoy Kill Bill any more than any other filmgoer. It's certainly fun to discover those little details, but they're just an extra. Kill Bill owes its masterpiece title to itself and, although Tarantino takes many inspiration from all those films, his outdoes most of them, which would be expected.

This same philosophy seems to have directed Tarantino's choice of music for the film's soundtrack. Here he's utilized tracks like Al Hirt's "Green Hornet", Isaac Hayes' "Run Fay Run", Argentinian master Luis Bacalov's "The Grand Duel" (from 1972's Italian Spaghetti Western of the same name) and Nancy Sinatra's cover of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" (originally recorded by Cher in 1966). This is not the first time that he's cannibalized another film's soundtrack. Jackie Brown opened with the theme from Across 110th Street from the 1972 crime-drama of the same name. Tarantino makes the most of these selections, cutting images to the music's rhythm for maximum impact.

But Kill Bill - contrary to many's belief - isn't just a triumph of style, there's plenty of substance also. These characters know they're part of a cycle of violence that they may not be able to break free from. Early in the film the Bride regrets that Fox's 4-year-old daughter discovers the end result of their confrontation and tells her "If when you grow up, if you're still raw about it, I'll be waiting". When The Bride defeats Lucy Liu's O-Ren, there's not a sense of accomplishment, but one of remorse, knowing that O-Ren's life was forged from a similar experience of violent loss that has set the Bride on her own path of retribution. Whether or not the Bride can break free of this cycle of violence, especially in light of the film's final line of dialogue, would remain a doubt until April 2004, when the much expected Volume 2 came out.

Bill: "[about B.B.'s pet fish] She told me later, that the second she lifted up her foot and saw him not flapping, she knew he was dead. Is that not the perfect visual image of life and death? A fish flapping on the carpet, and a fish not flapping on the carpet. So powerful even a 4-year-old child with no concept of life and death knew what it meant. Not only did she know Emilio was dead, she knew she had killed him. So she comes running into my room, holding Emilio in both of her little hands - it was so cute - and she wanted me to make Emilio better. And I asked her, why did she step on Emilio? And she said, she didn't know. But I knew why. You didn't mean to hurt Emilio, you just wanted to see what would happen if you stepped on him, right?"



Quentin Tarantino's homage to 1970s exploitation, grindhouse and martial arts cinema concludes with the second installment of his Kill Bill saga.

Having dispatched with two of her would be killers in the first volume, The Bride (Uma Thurman) continues on her "roaring rampage of revenge". But before she confronts Bill (David Carradine), the man who ordered her death, she must first defeat two more of her former teammates. However, when she finally faces Bill, she learns what we the audience did at the end of the previous film - the daughter she thought was dead is still alive.

Where the first film packed a wallop from its visceral and often brutal fight sequences, Volume 2 delivers a more emotionally charged punch. Kill Bill, Volume 1 was a story of revenge that relied heavily on the inheritance of blaxploitation and kung fu films. Volume 2 owes more to Japanese samurai films and spaghetti westerns with its stronger emphasis on the psychological aspects of revenge and retribution.

The assassins that the Bride goes against in this installment are stronger, more complex characters. Bill's brother Bud (Michael Madsen) is tired of the death that defined his life and has seemingly exiled himself to a beaten-up trailer home in the desert. He realizes that there is a price to be paid for the life he has lead. "I don't dodge guilt", Bud explains to his brother when informed that the Bride was on her way. "She deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die", being one of the film's most famous lines. Darryl Hannah - playing what is perhaps my favourite character of the saga - deliciously shades the hatred Elle Driver holds for the Bride with just the right air of respect for her skill and power as a fighter - something that is very much a part of Asian culture, but not so much of Western one. When the two finally square off, it was the film's most intense and personal battle: brutal and desperate.

David Carradine has the role of a lifetime in Bill. A man who exudes a hypnotic, deadly charm, like the poisonous snakes he uses as codenames for his assassins. It's easy to see from the writing why Tarantino's first choice for the role of Bill was actually Warren Beatty. However, the casting of Carradine was perfect The film's opening sequence between Bill and the Bride conveys volumes of their history not through expository dialogue, but through subtle shadings of their line delivery. It's great work (storytelling work, not style or choreography) and serves to set up the film's climactic confrontation between the two. Even when we see Bill playing with the Bride's daughter B. B. an undercurrent of quietly restrained menace lies behind his loving father exterior. Not many actors can do that.

Quentin again utilizes many old genre stars in small roles, this time Swedish actor Bo Svenson (Walking Tall Part II, 1975), stuntwoman Jeanne Epper and Sid Haig (Coffey, 1973; The Devil's Rejects, 2005) in small roles. Hong Kong martial arts star Gordon Liu returns (after playing Johnny Mo in Vol. 1), this time playing one of the saga's most beloved characters, kung fu master Pai Mei. Liu literally grew up in the Hong Kong cinema (his first film work was at age seven) so he knows intimately the type of character Pai Mei is. The character feels transplanted directly from a Shaw Brothers film. Also returning from the first film in a new role is Michael Parks, playing a Mexican pimp who can direct the Bride to Bill.

While the conversations may not be as witty or as wise as those in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, they do help flesh out these characters, their worldviews, and their motivations. But what makes Vol. 2 even more worth listening to is its music. This film is every bit Pulp Fiction's equal as a fusion of film and song-oriented soundtrack and surpasses the first film's music, which was pretty darn good. From the spooky retro-pop-jazz of Shivaree's "Goodnight Moon" to Robert Rodriguez's Spanish guitar stylings and Ennio Morricone's evocations of Sergio Leone films, it's a dazzling tour of music and light. In one of the film's most emotional - and, yes, human - scenes, there's an irresistible remix by Malcolm McLaren of the Zombie's brilliant '60s hit "She's Not There" that is as memorable as Mia Wallace's famous solo dance to "Son of a Preacher Man" in Pulp Fiction. One of my personal favourite soundtracks, that I proudly own and that I've listened to countless times these past few years.

But the film's chief virtue is one of performances. For the first time, Tarantino has drawn out a lead performance that overshadows his aggressive stylistic flourishes. Uma Thurman deserved an Oscar for the versatility of her work here. It is a rare wonder to see an actor commit themselves so whole-heartedly - and so whole-bodily - to such a demanding role. Robert DeNiro (Raging Bull) and Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) come to mind. Thurman makes the Bride soft, hard, funny, bitter, brave, sad, and terrified. Her tough vigor, for me, surpasses even legendary action hero performances like Bruce Willis' or Harrison Ford's in the Die Hard and Indiana Jones films. We believe that she can do anything, which is a greater achievement because... well, she's a woman.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, Tarantino doesn't tie up all his loose ends. He's made no secret of the fact that he plans to make a third volume some time in the future - I've read somewhere that he once had the idea of making it with the two little girls (B. B., the Bride's daughter, and Nikki Bell, Vernita Green's daughter, who watched her mother with a knife on her chest as a result of the Bride's revenge, as the two main leads) which means he'd have to wait ten years - and he has plenty of material to work with although, I suppose, the title would be irrelevant at that point. The Tarantino style has been copied a thousand times over since Pulp Fiction, what Kill Bill, Volume 2 proves is that he's still the man.

Giuseppe Tornatore is one of those names that every true Film lover should recognize and bow to, when heard. An unusual filmmaker that always cared more about making good films rather than lots. The Unknown is only his 8th film, six years after Malèna and nineteen after his masterpiece, Cinema Paradiso. After directing Monica Bellucci in 2000, Tornatore dedicated himself completely to the big project on the Leningrad siege left behind by Sergio Leone after his death. The Unknown marks a break from the overwhelming research work for the still-active project and it is surprisingly stunning.



While Malèna had on Lajos Koltai's heavenly Cinematography, on Morricone's Score and Monica Bellucci's physical and acting qualities its strongest points and Cinema Paradiso had... well, nothing but qualities, The Unknown is also nearly flawless. In fact, I think I'll risk it and say that it is flawless. Cinema Paradiso is and will always be Tornatore's masterpiece, but the fact is that the man made another one.

Set in a north-eastern contemporary Italian city, The Unknown follows the trials and tribulations of Irena (russian actress Ksenia Rappoport, in a fantastic performance), a young, 'unknown' Ukrainian woman looking for a job. We immediately understand that she's trying to run away from a troubled past, as a slaved prostitute in southern Italy. She settles in an old and pricey flat, and soon starts working as a cleaning woman in a rich and distinct building situated in front of hers.

The distant people around Irena start to embrace and accept her, and while we watch her cleaning a big, dirty spiral staircase, she gets more and more in touch with a nanny (Piera Degli Esposti) who is working for a family of rich goldsmiths, the Adacher (Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino), taking care of their young daughter (the adorable Clara Dossena), who has a rare neurological disease that deprives her of any defensive reaction. We soon realize that her slowly building closeness with the family isn't just a coincidence...



The film is structured around a duality. The timeline which separates the present life of Irena from the old one is physically correlated to the division between the two houses: her house, and the house she works in. All the dramatic development of the plot, and the violent reemergence of Irena's troubled past, lies in the interchange and interrelation between these two dimensions.

Throughout the film constant flashbacks of her past appear randomy. It's like we're seeing two different stories: one in the past and one in the present. Irena may very well be one of the most complex characters I've ever seen. One minute she seems 'normal' enough and the next her actions are completely vicious to say the least (like throwing the nanny down the stairs so she can have her job). Still, we can't help to feel nothing but empathy for her.

Labeled by many as an Italian noir, the film is a complex and bizarre fusion of genres. A distinct noirish out-of-the-past scheme is obvious, but The Unknown is less noir than thriller, only, with an added melodramatic touch. The hitchcockain feel to it is undeniable and Tornatore does what any filmmaker on this planet should aspire: he brings back the essence of Cinema's golden age - the 40's/50's - mixing the typically italian full blown melodrama of directors like Raffaello Matarazzo and Vittorio De Sica with the less usual exploitation and perversions in the form of thriller of Pasolini and Dario Argento. Still, his touch is recognizable in every single shot. The ending, for instance, is of a brilliance and beauty that I find hard to describe by mere words.

What makes The Unknown such a clever and utterly gripping thriller is the fact that we never know where the film is going. Irena's intentions are never clear to us. We know something is going on, we slowly try to figure it out, but the plot's complexity and density is such that we're not 'allowed' to know more than we're supposed to before it's time. Again, Sir Alfred Hitchcock's legacy at its best.

The Unknown is as a joy to listen as it is to watch. Mr. Ennio Morricone's Score is fabulous. One of the best he ever composed. Goes from a sweet, sad and mellow melody to a delirious, mad and powerful sound of shrieking violins that will immediately remind you of the shower scene from Psycho. I wonder if 2008 will be the year in which the Academy will finally open their eyes and give the man a bloody Oscar...

One of the rare examples of a Hollywood film about an international/historical event that actually resulted in a good film. Even though it isn't the first time this issue is subject of a film, it's always aplaudable and important that what happened in Rwanda reaches out to as many people in the world as humanly possible - and we all know Hollywood is the only one who can do that. An enormous, enormous performance by Don Cheadle!

"Before the holocaust, Adolf Hitler called all of his collaborators together and in order to convince them that he could get away with his plan he asked them "who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" That's what he said. Thirty years later nobody remembered the million Armenians exterminated in the cruelest possible way."



In acting, as in life, the ability to listen is perennially underrated. A talented actor's gifts are sometimes deemed mysterious, but often it's less look-at-me line readings than an authentic relationship with the world - more critically the sounds, the words - surrounding him or her that reveal character, forge connection. Perhaps we all wish to be listened to so well, with such passion; in acting, as in life, a good listener evokes an almost primal response. Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins are challenged, in Isabel Coixet's second English-language film, The Secret Life of Words, to develop a connection during long dialogues in which Polley, playing a nearly deaf nurse more comfortable with her hearing aid turned off, listens with her eyes and her fingertips, while Robbins, a burn patient temporarily blind from his injuries, is keenly attuned to her silences - more frequent than her words - listening with the set of his mouth, twist of his neck, and the quick lines fanning at his cheeks.

As Hanna, Polley uses her million mile eyes to suggest the stillness and the silence of her character's existence, which can be mapped out in the footsteps between her home and her factory job, precisely controlled portions of her meals, and stacks of almond-scented soap - one for every wash - lining her bathroom. The tight cask of silence is a comfort to the girl, it seems, and she defends it with the tenacity of the gravely wounded; though she speaks with an Eastern-European accent, Hanna lives in Ireland, and when her boss, unnerved by her 10 straight years of uninterrupted service, demands she take a month's vacation, she is at a loss as to how to exist outside the confines of routine.

Through a rather convoluted series of events - moreso when we learn her history - Hanna finds herself on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, the only woman among a crew of men recovering from an on-site fire which killed one worker and badly injured Josef, played by Robbins. Hanna, a former nurse, volunteers to tend to Josef until he can be moved to the shore, and finds him to be a willing, if voluble, patient; there is clearly more life in Josef, blinded and burned raw, than there has been in Hanna for quite some time. The rig, a bleak palette of inky greys and fresh rust, is also populated by an ambitious Chilean cook, a shy oceanographer, a reclusive foreman and a pair of workers who may or may not be lovers.

The Secret Life of Words could have been two different films, using the same actors and characters, thatched together into a contrasting mellifluous whole. During the first half the mood is as hazy as the mist and clouds that permeate the screen; as mysterious as its quietly solemn subject. Coixet gives virtually no background information about her protagonist, begrudgingly letting small titbits go as the dialogue requires it. Enjoying the mystery, and knowing Coixet's early Spanish films (which were essentially dramas about broken-hearted people), I thought the film might centre around the exploration of Hanna's interior existence as she'd tenuously moved through the concrete world of the oil rig. However this was not to be.

The Secret Life of Words' back end funnels the plot through a sharply focused narrative which highlights Hanna's previously ambiguous behaviour and motivations. Yet this is no Shyamalanesque serpentine thriller, designed to impress us with its cleverness. Rather the interplay of relationships is what counts here; specific plot details serve only to give these interactions context and weight without overtaking them. The film centres on the hope of rediscovery when life has buried, beyond sight, your very person.

Robbins, hitting unlikely, deeply romantic grace notes with another pint-sized blonde (see Michael Winterbottom's brilliant and underappreciated Code 46, with Samantha Morton), has a sweetly hulking quality (even when bedridden) and a stubborn bloom of a face; combined, in Josef, with an all-American bawdiness, his desperation to draw Hanna out is magnetic. Polley is the soul of conflicted restraint as Hanna, sizing up her compulsively chatty opponent: it's not that she doesn't have the words he seeks, if facetiously; indeed, they have been living the secret life of the title inside of her. Somehow Josef, harbouring a secret of his own, provides both the perfect storm and safe harbour for Hanna and the unspeakable words she has to share.

Victor: "He doesn't like to be with the others. He's a loner, too.
Hanna: There are many of us."

"Say what you will about Gibson, he's a filmmaker right down to his nerve endings!"

Couldn't agree more with Peter Traver's review! Apocalypto may well be one of the most amazing, breathtaking films of the last couple of decades! Of all times maybe... It's highly entertaining, lots and lots of adrenaline will run through your veins untill the very last minute, that's for sure! But than again, it's so much more than an action film. The real, ultra fast paced action only begins in the second part of the film, after the pyramid scene, with the chase. - The greatest chase sequence since The Fugitive? - before that there is a deep, realistic, brilliant and even funny at times, look at a civilization that lived 500 years ago. No matter what, you just can't ignore and not admire what Gibson did! He reinvoked and portrayed the Mayan culture in a way that probably was never done so far. I pretty much travelled in time, of how involved I was... But more importantly, what he did was a reflection on 'civilization' itself. The fact that eras come and go. That life on Earth is always on constant change. As for 'evolution', don't really know... The violence, that the 'professional critics' called excessive or ridiculous, for me was one of the best parts of the film, and one of the reasons why it is so stunningly realistic. There are some scenes (like the pyramid one) that you just can't believe your eyes, of how bizarre and primitive what you're watching really is... And still, I couldn't help finding it strangely fascinating and brilliant.

It's pretty clear Gibson's fascination (or obssession) with Human nature and suffering. He just loves to shake people up, to make them jump off their seats! The way he shoots impersonates that. My doubts were taken: digital cinema IS definitely the future! The cinematography here is nothing less than perfect! And so is the acting! I still can't believe that this was Rudy Youngblood's first acting job and Carlos Emilio Baez ('Turtles Run') is just adorabe! :)



When I got home from the theater, I came straight to Flixster and immediately added Apocalypto to my 'Best of 2006' list! Something tells me I'll watch this film many times in my lifetime...

POST SECOND-VIEW THOUGHTS:

It only made me love it even more! F#%$&'n BRILLIANT!

Sublimely funny, surprisingly warm-hearted little story that will always be relevant, no matter its time or location. Wether it's 40 years ago, today or 40 years from now and regardless of what country and society is concerned, the war between idealistic young people and rich, capitalist, conservative and fat fucks will always be one worth fighting!

"Every heart is a revolutionary cell..."

One of the most insanely amazing physical transformations ever endured by an actor. One of the few films to scale the barrier between chilly fantasy and authentic cinematic nightmare. Not for everyone - difficult to watch, sad to contemplate and just creepy - but also inventive and, in the end, sublime. Bale's performance is simply magnetic and mesmerizing. A fantastiic Spanish film!

Sonny: "You're making me very nervous, Richard.
Richard: Well you should be. If I were you, I'd get in that fuckin' car and I'd get out of here man. I'd gather them goonies and get whatever you've got comin' mate... 'cause I'm gonna fucking hit you all.
Sonny: I don't like being threatened, Rich'.
Richard: I'm not threatening you mate. It's beyond fucking words. I watched over you when you were asleep and I looked at your fucking neck and I was that far away from slicing it.
[opens up his right hand and points towards his palm] You're fucking there mate!
[clenches his hand]
So get in that car... and FUCK OFF!"



Mike Hodges' Get Carter set the bar 37 years ago as the ultimate in brother revenge sagas, where honourable intentions are carried out with extreme measures of violence. Shane Meadows has, with his fourth film Dead Man's Shoe, muscled into the heavyweight division of that sub-sub-genre with a highly unnerving and unsettling tale of justice and revenge.

In a story that is simple but told in a gut-wrenchingly effective way, Paddy Considine (a personal, old friend of Meadows' who shares the screenplay credit) stars as Richard, a disaffected soldier who returns to his Midlands hometown of Derbyshire intent on avenging a terrible deed committed upon his mentally-challenged brother Anthony (an excellent Toby Kebbell). Those responsible for the crime are a bunch of petty drug dealers, grown men who have never left town and are big fish in a small pond. Starting off quietly, Richard taunts, stares and occasionally explodes in short verbal assaults. He haunts them, appearing in their houses with uncanny ease, and gradually gets his retribution in several shocking ways.

There is a creepy, but oh-so-cool hint of Michael Myers about Richard in his suit. Not only frightening to look at, his eyes genuinely scare the shit out of you. With all the skill and calculation of a chess grand master, he orchestrates every move before eliminating obstacles in his way. To say too much would be to spoil the occasion, but there are twists, turns and horrific bloody scenes of carnage. Told through a series of flashbacks, Anthony's ordeal is eventually made clear and the motivations for Richard's spiteful acts of revenge become more understandable. This is the film's strength, the slow unravelling of past events crossing the path of the present.

Much of Meadows' trademark style is in evidence, notably the almost-improvised dialogue that peppers his script. It's an excellent cast, made up largely of local actors, but it's Considine who shines and makes the film. One of - if not - the most talented young actor in British film today, the fact that, in other roles, he so often conjures up empathetic, humorous (24 Hour Party People) and even endearing (In America) characters works all the better here, once the viewer's got used to the bleakness. His Richard is devastatingly menacing and utterly insane, but entirely credible, sudden acts of pitiless violence and all. When Meadows refers to Considine as the Robert DeNiro to his Scorsese, he's only half-joking. They're most definitely a partnership to watch.

What makes this so special are the elements you're not expecting at all, being a violent revenge flick: the nimble switching from terror to laughter; the deeply surreal flourishes; and the quite spectacular cinematography. Meadows has a knack for making his comedic moments blacker than black and revels in life's little absurdities, such as the sight of the hard men of town travelling around in a battered Citroën 2CV. There are several jarring visuals, notably the sight of Considine in a gas mask and, while the film does have its edgy moments of blood and guts, the skill is in the way it is portrayed, where anticipation builds up the tension several levels. The use of a hand-picked melancholic and atmospheric soundtrack and 'period' flashback footage is immensely effective, and the emotional after-effects on the viewer of the whole film are uncommonly powerful.

It's a film that stays with you. Meadows is slowly becoming an expert at taking well-worn film scenarios, eradicating them from Hollywood, and transposing them into his own backyard. In many ways, his debut TwentyFourSeven was a distant cousin of Rocky or The Karate Kid, whereas Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, as the title suggests, played out classic Western situations in modern day Britain. Dead Man's Shoes obviously has one eye on bygone revenge films of the likes of the mentioned Get Carter and Straw Dogs, but again, goes about it in the uniquely Shane Meadows setting. If one day I had the opportunity to talk to Meadows I would immediately ask when is he planning on making a film about hooliganism. I always had the feeling that he would do wonders with it. I'm sure the thought has crossed his mind.

Perhaps in some ways, despite all this, it remains a low-fi assemblage of terrific elements rather than an entirely satisfying, original whole, but that's almost shallow nip-picking, which isn't something I do. It's a fascinating work by a potentially tremendous filmmaker. Meadows' best, it seems certain, is still yet to come. For now, Dead Man's Shoes remains a must-watch for anyone who wishes - and I strongly encourage you - to discover this new exciting and endlessly talented British filmmaker. Terrific stuff.

I saw this film years ago but I had to watch again! I don't even know what to say! First of all it's unlike anything I've ever seen! The plot is simply surreal and to call it original is an euphemism... It's basicly everything you (well, me at least) could possibly wish in a film! A brilliant black comedy, a provoking drama, an unsual horror movie, a twisted thriller and a futuristic fantasy film (1991!). It's all of this and more... Definatly one of the 90's greatest!

After lots of enthusiastic recomendations from some 'aussie mates' of mine and months trying to get it, I finally saw In My Father's Den. And let me tell you that it was so worth the wait! Turns out all of the reviews I read (and the 8.0 rating on IMDb) was right. This is a great piece of Cinema!

With an extremely clever scipt, well adapted (even though I haven't read Maurice Gee's novel), the film is this half drama, half thriller, very well paced and delivered, never becoming too long, even though it crosses the 2 hour barrier. Visually stunning, as New Zealand itself, with those breathtaking landscapes, that Peter Jackson (as a 'local') knew were the only ones capable of turning The Lord of the Rings trilogy into one of the greatest achievements in Cinema history. In My Father's Den manages aswell to capture the essence of New Zealand, the quietude that almost allows you to hear your own thoughts, the loneliness that only who was born on an island can understand.

The story isn't original. This is not exacly the first melodrama filled with long hidden family secrets, nor the first 'small town guy returns home' flick. But I can garantee it's one of the best you'll ever see! Brad McGann gets us hooked from the very first scene, and keeps it that way 'till the very last one. A thriller at some of the time, that gradually develops and unveils, through some unexpected twists, the secrets and tragedies that were hidden, from the main character Paul and of course, us. The acting is utterly superb, specially Matthew Macfadyen and Emily Barclay. Both so amazing and incredibly heart-wrenching. The link between the two couldn't possibly be more genuine, like they're not acting at all.



I started mentioning those who recomended me this film. To them, a big Thank You! :) And I can only do the same, please do yourself a favor and watch this amazing film!

In 1984 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, Hayao Miyazaki's second film, was released, and led to the creation of a landmark called Studio Ghibli. Initially, Nausicaä could not find financial backing, so Miyazaki created a manga series instead, which proved successful and thus paved the way for this feature-length animation. After that, he would eventually become the greatest animation director of modern cinema, and make it into the list of the greatest of all time.



A Sci-Fi epic warning against the dangers of damage to the environment, a theme Miyazaki would later continue in Princess Mononoke. It shows a world devastated by mankind 1000 years before in a war which burnt the world. Survivors now live in isolated communities seperated by the Sea of Decay, a poisonous forest inhabited by giant insects, chief of which are the Ohmu. Nausicaä is a Princess who lives in The Valley of the Winds, a peaceful place until it's shattered by a aircraft from the warlike people of Tolmekia, which crashes into their valley. Closely followed by a resuce party from Tolmekia it is discovered that the crash ship carries a weapon left over from the old world, with which the Tolmekians plan to destroy the Sea of Decay and reclaim the Earth for man.

Miyazaki sets the model here for his imaginative vitality, with probably his most fantastical tale - machines, creatures and setting all impressively realised. There is also the spiritualism that can be felt elsewhere in his work; though taken further here by a prayer to God (by Nausicaä), a rarity in a Studio Ghibli production. Having the Ohmu harry humanity is noteworthy. 'Ohmu' is pronounced in the film just as 'Aum', a sacred word in Hinduism. Indian strings in the musical score play in relation to the insect. In Hinduism there is the belief in karma - where in the cycle of life, rebirth to a better or worse life is a result of our actions.

Few are the filmmakers of our time who can claim they made their first masterpiece at their second attempt. Hayao Miyazaki is one of them.

As cute and sweet as a film can possibly and humanly get. The kind of film I would, one day, watch with my kids. In the original Japanese version, of course.

I've been a fan of Sarah Polley since the first time I saw her in Go, no sure how many years ago. She had two collaborations with spanish director Isabel Coixet, which resulted in two of my favourite films (My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words). Hell, I even watched Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead pretty much just because of her. That might help to explain the reason why I waited more than three months, with the DVD of Away from Her on my shelf, just so I could watch it in the theatre.



It has been said that Alzheimer's is the only "major" terminal condition to exact a greater toll on the family than the victim. Compared to cancer (for example), Alzheimer's offers a relatively gentle journey into oblivion for the patient, a gradual dissolution of memory and personality. For the family and such, however, the experience is different. They must watch as a loved one disappears, stolen away piece by piece, before their eyes. The process of mourning begins before the patient has died. Having dealt with it personally (my grandfather, who was a second, if not a first father for me) I knew better than I wished that Alzheimer's is not exacly a popular, nor easy subject for a film.

If Away from Her had turned out to be unrealistic and manipulative, I would have been tremendously disappointed. Luckily, it didn't. It represents one of the few clear-headed, uncompromising looks at Alzheimer's and its impacts. In large part due to Polley's approach, this is not a relentless downer. Calling it 'life affirming' might be a stretch but it at least offer moments of hope and an understanding of what it means to move on while at the same time remaining true to the past. Unlike films like The Notebook and Iris, Away from Her does not embrace the tear-jerker label. It is sad and touching, yes, but not a tragedy, and it does not seek to reduce its audience to hopeless weeping.

Like any actor-turned-director, Polley tells her story through her actors. She doesn't try too hard. There's nothing flashy in her approach. She respects her characters and the story they have to tell. Casting Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent (but especially Christie) as her leads, was, with all due respect for her undeniable filmmaker qualities, more than half of the work. Christie is still an incredibly radiant presence at 66 and she rivets us to the screen. Her Fiona is a woman of grace, charm and beauty, qualities that she obviously shares. Her performance is truly fantastic and now seats at #2 on my favourite female performances of 2007. Then, Pinsent's performance holds the film together. His steadfast love and growing realization of what his future holds is heartbreakingly sad. His performance is never cloyingly sentimental. It is always direct and deeply felt. Away from Her is an actors' film.

it wouldn't be too far from reality to compare Sarah Polley's debut to the work of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, who specialized in family dramas with a deep, cleansing, almost spiritual touch. There, Polley is less interested in how many hankies her film rates than she is in touching the human soul and finding it damaged, yet still beautiful. The world has in Polley another filmmaker full of potential. Give her a camera and some chances and she will make beautiful, haunting films in the future. Away from Her is, I hope, just the beggining.

What to say? What to say about something that reached perfection? Are words enough? The 5 stars surely aren't. I guess the thing that most upsets me is the fact that only 38 people, out of thousands, have seen this... So then I make this little experiment... I click on City of God below and... Ta-dah! 4814! I mean, I understand the diference of recognition, I do. But The Man Who Copied, without any type of comparisions, is as brilliant, as perfect as the same year's 'World Hit'! It has the same social relevance, shown through André's salary references, the fact that he has to steal to buy a 17$ jacket... Obviously the crime aspect is there, but without any kind of exagerated violence. Than it's also a comedy, a smart and touching one, that never makes you cry... On the contrary, it puts one big fat smile on your face. It can be hilarious at times, like the chicken scene (the other 37 will know what I mean...). Of course all this demands a talented cast. 'Talented' will probably not be enough in this case. Lázaro Ramos' performance is nothing less than stunning, showing the versatile actor that he is, with the perfect way he plays André, the shy 19 year old kid who works as a photocopier on a crapy store for his monthly 100$ wage, and that by night goes to his own world, with his drawing escapes or spying on his neighours (especially Silvia). The spying scenes are an obvious reference and trivute to Hitchcock's Rear Window by director Jorge Furtado. The rest of the cast doesn't desapoint either. Leandra Leal as the beautifully awkward Silvia, Luana Piovani as the jaw-dropping (like herself) Marinês or Pedro Cardoso as the funny Cardoso.



Jorge Furtado made what any filmmaker aspires, or at least should! Something unique. Actually sent something new to the world. A smart, touching film, always unpretensious, with some interesting and unpredictable twists and one of those perfect endings that, like I said, brings a smile to even the most heartless' face...

Studio Ghibli's last production of the 80's and another Miyazaki film set in Europe. Although it's a fictional Europe, in which WWII never happened, the way Miyazaki's animation - besides gorgeous to look at - is so accurate portraying the cities' architecture is simply amazing. Other than that, it's more of the same: fantasy, pure and harmless entertainment, adorable characters (including the cutest cat in history) and a fun and inspirational story full of timeless messages.

Part of the 80s classics, regardless of personal opinions and tastes. Broderick's "Twist and Shout" parade scene is among the most fun and entertaining things I remember seeing.

One of Miyazaki's very first masterpieces. Another tale of endless fantasy and adventure. Funny, sweet and romantic as always. Incredibly advanced technically for something made more than 20 years ago.

This isn't a semi-long, detailed review. For one I don't have the time and besides, pretty much everything there is to say has been said. Pixar's greatest achievement to date. A lesson of animation and filmmaking.

Best film of 2007 so far, side by side with Hot Fuzz.

"The most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another ever encountered on film."

Stephen Holden



It is EXTREMELY hard (impossible, actually) to review La Môme focussing on, and only on the film itself. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't... Once you decide to to see the film, you're irremediably about to witness one of the greatest performances in the history of Cinema.

Marion Cotillard's portrayal and encarnation of Edith Piaf isn't just another 'great' performance, with the expression 'Oscar-worthy' written all over it (something that happens every week these days, whenever an actor/actress does a decent job). It's a performance that belongs to a different category, that assumes an almost historical importance and that shouldn't even be disscussable as to any acting award that might exist.

She doesn't merely embody Piaf, she is literally possessed with all of the monstrous talent - and behavior - that burst out of the parisian chanteuse. From her struggling youth to her middle and dying adulthood; all the moves and gestures, in and out of the stage, all the facial and verbal expressions, the personality - with her occasaionally big ego and her deliciously dark humor. Even the voice... It's all there. An immaculate and ultimately perfect performance.



It has been said that the greatest obstacle in mounting a successful biopic - a genre that hasn't succeeded many times, with the most renowned exceptions of Lawrence of Arabia, Amadeus or Schindler's List - is for the lead performer to overcome ventriloquism. Which, obviously, Cotillard does. After a series of recent disastrous docudramas, such as last year's Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus and Factory Girl, Olivier Dahan's film is all the more impressive for its energy and completely earned grandiosity.

Although Dahan claims his intention "wasn't to make a strict factual biopic, but a fanciful portrait", La Môme, in the end, manages to put together the most important moments of Piaf's troubled and fascinating life. From her childhood, through her abandonment first by her mother and then twice by her father, her brief childhood blindness, her upbringing in a brothel, the start of her career singing on Parisian streets for centimes or her fall, consumed by ilness and drug addiction. Dahan's narrative makes us travel from a period of La Môme's life to another. A scene from childhood seamlessly melts into an adult tragedy. One minute we see a young girl singing on the streets and the next a broken, disabled Piaf in her late 40's...

As we float through those times for two hours, Dahan makes us wait for the cathartic release until the very end, with Piaf's last performance at the Olympia. Never a final scene has meant so much. Never a song has meant so much as "Non, je ne regrette rien" ('No, I regret nothing'). An absolutely shivery and tear-dropping scene of dramatic proportions. A perfect finale for a pushing-perfect film.

It is difficult for me to explain the emotional impact this film had on me. I grew up watching my mother listening to Edith Piaf's records while I did my homework... As far as I'm concerned she was one of the few godesses that ever stepped foot on a stage, one of the most brilliant artists that ever lived. If you add to that the amount of pain and suffering she had to bare her entire existence (lost pretty much everyone she ever loved) you can easily understand why she is an icon and one of the most beloved artists in her country and around the world, and therefore worthy of every single tribute we can think of.

Yet the appeal and beauty of La Môme - or La Vie en Rose, if you like - transcends nationality or people's taste in music. Simply put: this is a film that EVERY human being should see. Period.

"If I had a penny for everything I love about you, I would have many pennies."

These days true originality is something of a rarity. That's why, to me, it's a pure joy to come across with such a fresh, smart and witty film like Waitress. Actress-turned-writer/director Adrienne Shelly (lead in Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth and Trust) has made a 'little' film that just emanates beauty and unpretentiousness. Another gem this wonderful year has brought us.



Keri Russell - the talented and underrated Keri Russell from "Felicity" - stars as Jenna, a young woman who works as a waitress/pie maker in a small town's pie restaurant. Jenna is unhappily married with the controlling, Neanderthal Earl - one of the most ridiculous and pathetic characters I've ever seen in my lifetime - (well played by Jeremy Sisto) and her only two friends are her co-workers Becky (Cheryl "Larry David's wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm" Hines) and Dawn (Adrienne Shelly herself, in an adorable role). The only thing in her life that brings her 'some' happiness is making pies. Designing and creating new, unique pies for the restaurant's daily specials. That's probably enough to show how wonderful her life is... *Sarcasm*

She has just discovered that she's pregnant - a fantastic opening scene, where she says something like: "I don't need no baby. I don't want no trouble. I just wanna make pies. That's all I wanna do, make pies!" - and, although the baby isn't exacly welcome (she calls it "an alien and a parasite"), it will change her life. That's how she meets the newly arrived in town Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion, in another fun and charismatic role), a nervous, kind of foolish doctor with whom she'll have an affair and who'll remind her what it feels like to be happy.

Even if its premise might not seem exacly original - woman trapped in unhappy life who tries to escape abusive husband - Waitress is as original and unique as a film can get. Garanteed. Shelly beautifully balances clever humor, light drama and heartbreakingly lovely moments of happy truth. The film's sweet and utterly honest tone makes it one of those films that was made to be loved and enjoyed. Not judged or criticized, even if it might have its flaws.

Some scenes and moments go way over merely 'enjoyable', dangerously approaching sheer genius. This includes Jenna's letters to her unborn baby, all starting with "Dear baby...", as a form of narration or her pie invention - and naming - process ('I-Hate-My-Husband Pie'; 'Pregnant-Miserable-Self-Pitying Loser Pie') shot in fantastic, colorful and vibrant overhead close-ups that will make you salivate throughout the entire film. Little warning: do NOT watch with an empty stomach. Fair warning.

The film's female strenght and sensitivity is obvious. Every single male character in the film is either a jerk or an idiot. And don't get me wrong... I didn't find that insulting. Not at all, I actually think it's pretty faithful to the real world. Men really are either jerks or idiots. Myself included. Shelly's unquestionable filmmaker's gift, when combined with the cleverness and brilliance of her dialogues and characters and Keri Russell's career-defining performance make Waitress what it is: a captivating, graceful and meaningful film that should be seen by as many eyes and hearts as humanly possible.

RIP Adrienne Shelly... :(

One of the most brilliant, yet overlooked films I've ever seen. A collection of five stories involving cab drivers in five different cities - Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki - throughout one night. The film is disguised as a comedy, when in reality it's an authentic study of human nature via the taxi drivers and their passengers. Roberto Benigni's segment is hilarious beyond words and the Helsinki one has Jarmusch's genius stamped all over it. The whole film has.

A mark in portuguese Cinema!

Szofi: "[at subway vending machines] Nice place. Come here often?
Bulcsú: Only when I really want to impress a girl."



An enormous crowd pleaser at several 2004 film festivals throughout the world - picking up the "Prix de la Jeunesse" (Award of the Youth) at Cannes - and young Hungarian-American Nimród Antal's film début, Kontroll is one of the most creative and original films I've ever seen. Part black comedy, part action/thriller and part allegorical tale of redemption, it mixes elements from standard American urban thrillers with the feverish, dreamlike distortions of classic Eastern European art cinema, played out in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Budapest subway system, the world's second oldest.

There's something very appealing and appropriate about subway systems as an outsider film location, underworlds in which those who do not fit in or have rejected the values of society above can feel at home, subsections of society in which small pockets of precariously maintained civilisation are connected by a large network of dark tunnels that could house just about anything, areas into which no sane person would venture without the protection of a big metal underground train. Antal takes full advantage of that evocative locale by setting all of Kontroll down there - shooting the entire film at night in the stations and tunnels of the Budapest Metro - with the world outside and above never glimpsed, except as a distant hazy light just above the topmost stairways. The result: a highly exciting, visually alive thriller that stands as one of the most promising débuts in recent film history.

Kontroll opens with a message from the director of the BM, stating that the film we are about to watch is a work of fiction - which, therefore, has to be seen symbolically and not literally - and that the employees of the Metro don't behave as shown. We then understand why. According to Antal's vision, the Budapest subway system is the kind of place where people threaten each other with Gypsy curses and dirty syringes, amateur welders work on the rails, and even the white-collar business travellers don't bother buying a ticket. Administered by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the system employs five-member crews of ticket collectors - controllers - to ensure law, order, and proper payment of fares.

This is the story of one group, an unkempt unit already on probation for breaking the rules. There's the leader - our protagonist - the mysterious and damaged Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) who never goes above ground, the elegant and middle-aged Professor (Zoltán Mucsi), the belligerent, slightly insane Muki (Csaba Pindroch), Lescó the narcoleptic (Sándor Badár) and the new boy, Tibi (Zsolt Nagy). They're the kind of group fused together by foul working conditions, general anarchy, and the hate of the general public. They're also the kind of guys who routinely wake up smeared with blood, ketchup, or something worse, and it's somewhat normal for them to walk through a door into a fight with pipe-wielding, face-painted hooligans. (The existence of these gangs is never explained; they're just there.)

Bulcsú's motley crew are constantly faced with public contempt, erupting hostility, wild chases and violence on their daily rounds - complicated by the insolent cheats (including their nemesis, a fast punk called "Bootsie" who wears a CD headset and often sprays paint in the controllers' faces); the callous indifference of their subway system bosses; the contempt of a rival, slicker group of inspectors; and the assaults of a mysterious, hooded serial killer who has been terrorizing the system, randomly pushing passengers off the platforms into the paths of oncoming trains.

One of the problems I have with leading characters in many Hollywood films is that, even those in the most grubby and punishing jobs, don't look like the people who actually carry out these tasks, but good-looking actors pretending to be them. In Eastern European cinema the opposite occurs. There's not a face in Kontroll that doesn't look like it has wandered in from the back streets of Budapest, and the film is all the better for it. Hollywood relies on the recognition factor for character engagement - oh look, it's Tom Cruise, I know him, therefore I know the character - but in Kontroll you engage with the characters in part because the faces so perfectly fit. You feel you know them precisely because, in a way, you do - you've met them, worked with them, are related to them. Perhaps you even are them.

It helps, of course, that they are genuinely funny people, or at least funny to us - they have a somewhat negative world view arising from working in a largely thankless job that offers the thin illusion of power to those who would otherwise never command it. Their authority is tenuous at best - the controllers are identified only by a simple armband pulled over their regular clothes, their slovenly attitude and scruffy appearance making it all too easy for those they confront to ignore, argue with or even attack them. It is these very confrontations that provide some of the funniest moments, and if a couple of these groan under the weight of painful stereotyping - the smiling, camera wielding Japanese family, the outrageously camp predatory gay - many of the others are inventive and wittily handled, and in one case involving a syringe and a saw, borderline surreal.

The great unspoken question of the film is this: why is Bulcsú down there? He doesn't just work in the subway - as we find out in the opening scene, he lives there 24 hours a day, sleeping on benches and empty platforms after the last train stops running. In one scene, we find that Bulscú has left a job - not named, though his former colleague's words and possessions make either architect or mathematician seem the most likely possibilities - at which he was quite good, and which surely was more profitable than his current job.

Antal's messages are so subtle you don't even notice they're under your skin until they're already there. Bulscú relishes the loner mentality he can cultivate in the subway, and Antal's crafty direction heightens that feeling of isolation to the point where it becomes incredibly ominous. The contradiction between the closed-in world of the underground and the wide-open way in which Antal frame it is a brilliant representation of Bulscú's mindset - the underground may be a finite network, but to him it represents more freedom than the surface world ever did.

He has a different take on the underground. For him, it's not just a workday hell, as it is for his co-worker-mates; it's a source of magic, adventure, athletic triumph (he's a crack tunnel-racer) and romance. Bulscú's world-view starts to shift with the introduction of Szofi (Eszter Balla), a pretty, weird girl who rides the subway dressed in a teddy-bear costume. Representing the good side of human nature, she is a stark contrast to the faceless killer's random attacks. In the end, Bulscú must come face to face with both.

Many people have described Nimród Antal as the Hungarian Danny Boyle. With the film's slick, jazzy aesthetic and high beats per minute, it's relatively easy to notice how Kontroll resembles Trainspotting - the weird little guy (Badár) even looks a little like Robert Carlyle's Begbie - although it also reminds Doug Liman's work. Point is: Antal has talent. And he obviously knew where to draw inspiration from. As for the acting, Sándor Csányi is a marvellously magnetic actor, and he inhabits the whole Brando-Dean-De Niro-Pacino persona with impudent skill and deep inner emotionality. The ensemble is a fine one too, salty character actors with pungent faces and lines. But the truest star of Kontroll, of course, is the Budapest underground itself, which I very much hope to visit one day.

Vilmos Zsigmond's apprentice DP Gyula Pados' fulsome cinematography makes of the underground sets the kind of textured iconographic landscape of Wim Wenders' late American films. A dream (paced by electronica group Neo's rowdy, fantastic score), in which Bulcsú finds himself crawling through something like an endless vaginal tunnel, is the moment when Kontroll comes fully alive: it's the juncture between metaphor, craft, and narrative - and for almost all of its final hour, the film maintains an unbelievably high level of invention and insight. It's a great Sci-Fi piece, a razor-sharp satire, a horrific thriller, a lyrical fantasy and an impressive calling card for an emerging Hungarian cinema. Fantastic!

Girl in Cafeteria: "What are you writing?
Alex: Uh, this? It's my plan.
Girl in Cafeteria: For what?
Alex: Oh, you'll see."



Gus Van Sant's Elephant, at first blush, seems on an inexorable path to controversy. The film that put a stop to the nine-year absence of American cinema from the list of Palme d'Or winners, it is a quietly horrifying, fictional exploration of a Columbine-like school shooting... but one with little - or absolutely no - moralizing about its subjects. The film projects a cavernous, labyrinthine American educational system that has little understanding of the deeper social forces affecting its students. Perhaps most provocative, the two male killers share a pre-annihilation kiss. Add political fire-storm, mix well, and serve.

These details, however, misrepresent the undeniably compelling nature of Van Sant's mesmeric film. Told in sparse, improvised dialogue that erupts between longer, langorous passages of time, Elephant strips the tragic sentimentality from this particular social catastrophe, allowing viewers to look reflectively at a larger context. It is moving, yes, and sad too. But it's also fine, magnificent work that makes one re-consider preconceived notions about Columbine?s massacre and its causes. It is important, timely, and visionary cinema.

Considering that Van Sant revelled in unchecked sentimentalism when he directed another story about two mixed-up boys (Good Will Hunting), the cool, even tone of Elephant is refreshing and unexpected; it is, perhaps not surprisingly, the best film of his career. His cast, comprised of over a dozen untrained teenagers in Portland, Oregon, reach astonishing heights under his direction, inhabiting their high-school trajectories with disarming honesty and adolescent ritual. Improvised dialogue can often be indulgent and grating, but here the cast?s personal experiences imbue it with a clarity no screenwriter could have attained. Particularly outstanding are John Robinson as a social butterfly who must care for his alcoholic father, and Alex Frost as the social outcast who takes solace in classical piano and internet gun websites.

Unhurried and unconstricted, Van Sant follows a very particular and personal vision, reflected most exquisitely in the cinematography of Harris Savides. The camera floats ethereally around the campus, a seemingly endless connection of nondescript hallways, vacant gymnasiums, and personality-beige classrooms. Savides fills each frame with a classical grandeur, a rolling beauty that underscores both the banal commonality of high school life and the missed opportunities in every moment. It is as if the camera is telling us that life is precious... and no one is there to listen. Savides' images are complemented by an outstanding score - a collection of songs chosen by Van Sant himself - that enhances the elegiac quality of the filmmaking. The music of Beethoven, in particular, resonates superbly in the film's atmospheric aura.

Much was made of the details of the story, where controversy would always find plenty to rear its ugly head about. The final strength of Elephant, however, is not in these particular plot points, but in its steady, sharp focus on the larger picture. The murders, we all know, are horrific. But the blissful, unaware hours that precede them - which make up the majority of the film - are even more so. The minutiae of high school life becomes electrically charged by the misery we know is imminent, but Elephant never tips its emotional hand to exploit this. The tension stays firmly in us, and not the students - they are dramatically unprepared for cataclysm when it occurs. When tragedy finally does arrive, even we who knew what was coming are unprepared for its impact. What in the hands of a lesser director might have become overwrought or maudlin is instead a cool, dispassionate sadness at the inevitably of a culture gone awry.

Elephant's greatest achievement is to remove the veil of history from these events, making the unreal real again. Great art undoes its viewer, in order to remake us. On that score, Van Sant has scored an unreserved triumph. And I'm sure that Béla Tarr was proud to have influenced such fine cinema.

"So foul and fair a day I have not seen."

Pete Dunham: "Fuck it, I will take you with me. You might learn something...
Matt Buckner: About soccer?
Pete Dunham: No mate. Not about soccer, AND FOR FUCK SAKE, STOP SAYING SOCCER!"



Football hooliganism is a sociological phenom studied in Universities in Europe for decades. German-born writer and director Lexi Alexander's - Oscar nominee for her 2002 short Johnny Flynton - Hooligans (in its original title) widens the issue considerably, probably for the first time, by giving it a more 'Americanized' view. Juiced by her eagerness to depict what she apparently learned while living among British football gangs, somehow the film, an entertaining yet still realistic look at a a firm's functioning and what it means to be educated, transcends its faults.

Elijah Wood plays Matt, who is expelled from Harvard's journalism school when his stoner roommate sets him up. Matt's father, a well-connected journalist on assignment in Afghanistan, is unavailable to offer guidance, so Matt transports himself to London, where his sister (Claire Forlani) lives with her British husband (Marc Warren) and a newborn he has never met. Through implausible circumstances that are the film's sore point, Matt is drawn into the underworld of Brit football teams and their roaming gangs, a band of thugs who spend their down time - each has a respectable job - beating rivals to a pulp. They're called the Green Street Elite and they support West Ham United.

Charlie Hunnam takes the film to a higher level. Looking like Heath Ledger with a buzz cut, he plays Green Street's fast-talking top dog Pete, and, before Matt can unpack, Pete lures the unwanted American into London's mean streets. Tattooed Pete swaggers around causing trouble and cheering for West Ham, trying to raise the firm's stature. He is aided by an assortment of surly types, including a swarthy fellow who has Judas written all over him. The gang has rules, of course, and among these is the commandment that thou shalt not associate with the dreaded journalist - a commandment that any well-respected, tabloid-hater British hooligan follows religiously. Without knowing much about Matt, Pete, who's game for turning pint-sized Matt into a mini-me, takes a liking to the young American, whom he inducts into the gang.

Matt guzzles beer, slurs his speech and finally feels like he belongs. He learns how to fight, too, in a rivalry that elicits a good war strategy - taking the fight to the enemy's turf with a show of unyielding force. Only a gang is a gang. Not glorified so much as examined, and not too closely at that, Alexander re-inserts the college tale exactly where it belongs, transforming a pansy into a man who learns what it means to fight back.

This is not a pity party and the fights, language and action are gritty, rough and tumble, though fistfights are impossible to follow. Game battles and intra-brethren jealousies culminate in a showdown, an impressive scene with slow-motion thrown in, whose violence and realism are surprisingly top-notch, for something shot by a feminine eye, where everyone - including a vengeful old rival - shows what they can do in a pinch.

Elijah Wood tries to make us forget Frodo, and whether he succeeds, in the end depends on one's fealty to that gigantic trilogy. His Matt is aggressive and, if he fights like a ferocious kitten, he throws a few punches, too. As Pete, Hunnam gets the showier role, and he milks it like he's playing Brian's Song, protecting the pack, initiating the American and locking horns with anyone who gets in his way. Forlani as Matt's sister cries a lot, and she is more interested in tickets to the theater than in the fact that her younger brother has gone from Harvard to hooliganism on her watch.

It's probably soft in spots and like I said, obviously Americanized, but it had to be 'cause that was the whole purpose, and besides, nobody wants to sit and watch blood clots form. For a spirited B-film, Hooligans - Green Street Hooligans, for the yanks - is a fine film.

One of Woody's best. Allen's character (Cliff Stern) is, of all of his, the one I relate to the most, Alvy Singer included.

"I am out here for you. You don't know what it's like to be ME out here for YOU. It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, OK?"



There's a scene in a recent episode of "How I Met Your Mother" in which Ted explains the reason why Marshall didn't enjoy Jerry Maguire by saying he doesn't have a heart. Now, I apologize to those who aren't familiar with the show - which is awesome, btw - but that's also the best thing I can think of to say to anyone who can't seem to enjoy this film. Those people should, by law, be forbidden to use the expressions "show me the money!" and "you had me at hello." whenever they're trying to make a '90s cultural reference.

At the time of its release, which was twelve years ago, Jerry Maguire received mostly positive reviews. It's easy to understand why: it's funny, cute, harmless, and has an iconic, much beloved actor in the lead role. The first time I watched it I found it to be all those things, nothing more. But, growing up and getting to know the work of Cameron Crowe, it started to grow on me, eventually becoming a sort of "guilty favourite", a film I'm always ready to defend against anyone. This is after all perhaps the best example of why the world loves Tom Cruise in spite of all the craziness. The Scientology bullshit, his relationships, jumping on the couch on Oprah, all that has absolutely nothing to do with his work as an actor. This film did its best to exploit the Tom Cruise we still pay money to see in theatres. No one can really think of Tom Cruise, the actor and not remember Jerry Maguire.

He's a fast-talking, hard-working young sports agent who works side-by-side with a group of young people at SMI (Sports Management International) in Los Angeles. During a tumultuous exposition-laded, terrifically edited opening credit sequence - note to "serious" filmmakers: see, they're good for something, as opposed to just starting the film with no sense of focus or pace - Jerry has a dark night of the soul, sits in front of his computer and writes a "mission statement" ("not a memo") pleading to shift the focus of the business from the bottom line to hands-on managing of fewer clients per agent.

The memo brings public cheers from his colleagues, most of whom remain privately cynical. Is there room for the truth? Apparently not; Maguire is fired by his boss, whose unremorseful callousness will make him the vague focus of Jerry's professional redemption. Stalking out of the office with only a goldfish and humble accountant Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger), Jerry pours his not-immodest energy into two clients, clean-cut college quarterback Frank Cushman (Jerry O'Connell) and eccentric Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.). When his shepherding of Cushman hits an unexpected obstacle, it costs Jerry his relationship with hard-as-nails NFL publicist Avery Bishop (Kelly Preston) and opens the door to the awkward but inevitable courtship of Dorothy, whose young son Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki) has taken an immediate liking to the agent - who is surprised and touched by his own seemingly endless tolerance for the kid.

The climaxes of the film, such as they are, involve redemption: Rod learns the importance of singing for his supper in a hysterical send-up of celebrations that was reportedly choreographed by Paula Abdul; Dorothy's sceptical, wise-cracking sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt) makes her peace with their relationship ("If you fuck this up, I'll kill you," she tells Jerry); But most significantly, Jerry Maguire has the courage of not making its convictions about a revenge against SMI, opting instead for a graceful story arc of discovery and growth followed by an unabashedly sweet fade-out that makes extraordinarily effective use of Bob Dylan's classic "Shelter from the Storm" (the awesome soundtrack includes other giants such as The Who, Elvis Presley, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, AC/DC or Gloria Estefan).

Remarkably, at 19 minutes over two hours, Jerry Maguire never plays long, due entirely to the informed immediacy and precise balance of the script. It took Crowe three years to write, and the care shows in the depth of the characterizations and the logic of the plot. Originally conceived as a vehicle for Tom Hanks, the film cries out for an actor going through what one character fleetingly refers to as a "pre-mid-life crisis". Crowe has trusted his instincts to go with - at the time - relative unknowns in the large supporting cast, and the gamble has paid off handsomely. The acting is uniformly first rate, without a sour note in the entire ensemble. Gooding Jr. is outstanding (as would be his Oscar-win celebration), Zellweger is a revelation of precise comic acting, while little Lipnicki is constantly adorable, and his finely-timed scenes with Cruise - sentimental without once becoming cloying - are indeed the heart of the picture.

After Mission: Impossible, Cruise, an actor known for balancing "important" films with more mainstream stories, has cleverly switched the order by starring in his summer smash and following up with a film that looked like another populist parable like Days of Thunder but played with as much sincerity and substance as Rain Man. Perhaps sensing that his brash-young-guy-on-the-come routine was getting a bit old, Cruise must've rejoiced at the complexities of Maguire, a guy who wants to change but hasn't a clue how to go about it with guaranteed success. And it is that very confusion and vulnerability that separates Jerry from Cruise's other forgettable creations. A very smart actor, he saw the need for modification and jumped at it with calculated relish. Could Tom Hanks, or John Cusack, or Matt Dillon have played Maguire? Sure, but not with the volatile mix of supermarket tabloid fame and honest talent Cruise brings to the role. Would that have had an impact on the fragile chemistry of the film? Without a doubt. Jerry Maguire, the actor's 19th feature, showcases the best performance of Tom Cruise's career.

By 1996, Crowe was now three-for-three as a hyphenate filmmaker. His Say Anything... (1989) is a sublime tribute to youthful eighties exuberance, while Singles (1992), with its stoned-again career-best performance by Dillon but uneven secondary cast, was unfortunately overlooked but will play far better with age and the adoration of pop archaeologists seeking the truth about the Seattle grunge movement. Jerry Maguire was the confirmation, the "that guy has talent." statement.

He's a filmmaker of power on the word processor as well as the set, writing snappy, sharp dialogue that plays only in the context of his seemingly meandering, episodic plots. Look closely, though, and you'll see how carefully he unites actor and situation: scenes like the awkward elevator ride after Jerry and Dorothy have left SMI succeed through an intertwined foundation of timing, angles and performance. Yet an actor in a Cameron Crowe film must be prepared to do things that fly in the face of conventional narrative: his characters are forever addressing the camera and declaiming their innermost thoughts in voice-over, the cumulative effect of which is an anything-can-happen atmosphere and characters of enormous substance. That he coaxes such a disciplined performances out of 27-year-old Zellweger is proof enough that his sets must nurture an atmosphere of confidence and control.

Smart without being smart-mouthed, astute without being calculated, and quite obviously the work of a filmmaker with something important to say and a clear and wicked way of saying it, Jerry Maguire is a triumph of nuanced social satire masquerading as a commercial romantic comedy, a film that can both make fun of and wallow in its celebration of the crass spectacle professional sport has become. It's everything you'd expect from a Cameron Crowe film: funny, poignant, and insightful. There's a hero who dares to be optimistic in a cynical world, a charming, lonely man who yearns for recognition and, of course, the Girl, the one who inspires the hero to be more than he thought he could be.

Bailey: "Tonight I'll be the super me.
Steve: What if the super you meets the super her and the super her rejects the super you?
Bailey: Then it's no problem.
Steve: Uh-huh. Why?
Bailey: Because it was never you, it was just an act. I live my life like a French movie, Steve."



A disarmingly clever and sweet-spirited comedy, Singles - Cameron Crowe's second film, three years after Say Anything... - was the first film to put a new spin on the boy-meets-girl formula. When the young romantic couples in this film break up, they don't get mad at each other or indulge in a series of insults and attempts to make their lives miserable. They simply go from being lovers to being friends - and it's often hard to tell the difference. That's what Singles is about: a generation so self-protective it has come to see love as just another style of friendship - as interaction plus cuddling.

While Say Anything... was arguably the loveliest youth comedy of its decade, full of true, delicate, layered emotionalism, in Singles Crowe expanded his focus to include six characters in their early to mid-'20s, most of whom live in the same horseshoe-shaped apartment complex in Seattle, the new capital of middle-class bohemian chic. The surprise is that Singles is even slighter than Say Anything... was. Crowe may be a director in danger of having too much affection for his characters. He likes them so much, he minimizes their conflicts; he doesn't want to see them hurt. Still, he has such a perceptive eye for detail and a genuine, singular wit. Singles often comes close to being a TV show (Twentysomethings, perhaps), but it's a clever and infectious comedy of manners.

Honest performances, great writing and a kick-ass soundtrack make this film more than just a romantic comedy about finding true love. Crowe has a unique ability as a writer/director to mix the right song with the right dialogue to create lovely, funny and heartbreaking cinema moments. Kyra Sedgwick, Scott Campbell, Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon are perfectly cast, bringing their own unique touches to characters that could have been clichéd, yet come across as distinctly original. The film is separated into acts, breaking up the two main relationships into the various actions and conversations that either bring the lovers together or tear them apart.

The Sedgwick/Scott pairing is the more serious, taking their instant attraction onto a bumpy life road neither of them is prepared to deal with. They give the film heart and hope, showing that there really is someone out there for everyone and that sometimes you have to fight for happiness. On the other hand, Fonda and Dillon are the poster children for the old adage opposites attract. He's a wild, womanizing, wannabe rock star; she's a simple, sweet girl who just wants to be loved. When she stops being a doormat and begins to realize her own dreams, she gives him a reason to not only miss her, but respect her as well. Her conversion from desperate to confident is a wonderful example to women everywhere that you don't need a man to be happy with yourself or your life. That her lack of interest eventually turns Dillon into a worthwhile boyfriend stretches belief, but it does make for a happier ending.

Singles received a fair amount of publicity because of its links to the indigenous Seattle grunge-rock scene. Yet it's far from being any sort of cutting-edge slice of Rock & Roll life. Given its nightclub settings, the film and the characters could have used some more raunch but then again, except for Cliff, they're not meant to be spiky, into-the-night types - they're basically polite, stylish young people. What marks them as '90s bohemians is their casual communalism. They're like overgrown teenagers, blithely exchanging partners as if love were a high school square dance and at the same time, they've grown up in a world where romance is shot through with cynicism and fear. And so they're too wary to let themselves be overwhelmed. Crowe has caught their spirit - the cooled-out passion of those who can long for love without being ruled by it. An intelligent look at relationships that never gets old.

Besides, you can't go wrong with a film that has Eddie Vedder (in a cameo as one of the members of Cliff's band, "Citizen Dick", along with Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam) and Tim Burton (as a next big Avant-garde director who makes a living shooting dating videos) in it.

"Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature."

D.C.: "Lloyd, why do you have to be like this?
Lloyd: 'Cause I'm a guy. I have pride.
Corey: You're not a guy.
Lloyd: I am.
Corey: No. The world is full of guys. Be a man. Don't be a guy."



When you think of '80s "teen romantic comedies" you think of John Hughes. You think of Molly Ringwald, you think of The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Cameron Crowe's Say Anything..., his first foray behind the camera, is not only the best film of that lot and an incredibly impressive début, but it's also stood the test of time and become one of the best films about young love EVER made.

The film is set during that pivotal summer between high school graduation and (what usually seems like) the emergence of the "real world". It opens with Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) wrestling with the idea of asking Diane Court (Ione Skye) out. But Lloyd doesn't really know Diane all that well; in fact, nobody really does. Diane, known as a "brain", has kept to herself during her high school years - eschewing social activities in favour of long hours of homework and studying. Lloyd decides to give it a shot anyway, though, and is pleasantly surprised when Diane accepts. He asks her to a blow-out graduation party given by the same 20-something guy every year, and while most of the attendees recognize her, she finds that she knows very few people there. Lloyd, on the other hand, appears to be a big-man-on-campus type, with virtually every guest saying hello to him. Although Lloyd and Diane seem an unlikely couple, the two begin a summer relationship everyone assumes is doomed to fail - most notably her father (John Mahoney).

Say Anything... was made nineteen years ago, and it holds up incredibly well - all the more surprising given that it could have wound up resembling a Michael Jackson video. A lot of films from that time period (the late '80s, early '90s) have aged quite poorly, due mostly to overindulgence in everything that was showy and loud about that era. But Say Anything..., like Roman Holiday and all those great romances that came before it, has a certain timeless quality about it. The time and place of the film takes a back-seat to the characters and their motivations - the key difference between a good romantic film and a bad one. By the time the end credits begin to roll, Lloyd and Diane have become real characters to us; and as such, we want desperately for their love affair to succeed.

This is due in no small part to the lead performances by Cusack and Skye. Unlike contemporary counterparts like Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook, these two young actors actually had a huge amount of talent and charisma. Their chemistry together is undeniable, which only encourages us to root for them. As Lloyd, Cusack gets the chance to be as charming as ever - the sort of guy most people have known at some point in their lives. And Skye takes what could have been a standoffish sort of person and makes her human (and genuinely likable). The supporting cast is comprised of an eclectic bunch, including Joan Cusack, Lili Taylor, Eric Stoltz, and frequent Cusack collaborator Jeremy Piven.

Many people criticize Crowe for being a stronger writer and a weaker director. I've said it once and I'll say it again: I don't think that's true. I think he's really strong in both areas. Say Anything... is by no means an elaborate production, it has no need for that. This film is incredibly realistic and Crowe shot it as such. The editing is perfectly suitable and gives you a great feel of the atmosphere the story presents. Crowe sets the film at a great pace and really captures what the story is all about: teenagehood, relationships and true love with comic and conflict, all sealed with an amazing amount of heart that feels right; not manipulated or sappy.

His direction is fine, but of course, there is his fabulous story and script. Most of us know that Crowe is a superb writer (sort of a pre-requisite since he wrote for "Rolling Stone"), and this wasn't his first time writing a script (adapting his book Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982 and co-writing The Wild Life two years later). Crowe creates such rich material out of what is a clichéd plotline: boy doesn't know girl, boy has crush on girl, boy wants to win girl's heart, wins heart, conflicts ensue all over. It's amazing how he takes something similar to this and makes it feel like such a fresh, new idea. Say Anything... blazes with a load of originality and leaves similar films of this nature in the dust.

It's how Crowe structures his story, his dialogue and his characters that makes it all shine and come together. He avoids a lot of stereotypes and clichés and gives us the unexpected. When you hear about the plot and then see the film, it's never how you thought it would be. The story may mostly take place after high school, but you're still dealing with teenagers no matter how you look at it. The dialogue is very realistic - no one says" Honest to blog" - and the words that come out of the mouths of every character really does seem like something real people would say. Lloyd's nervous words, Diane's cheerfulness, dad's protective guidance, graduation, the party scene... you name it, and you wouldn't be surprised if any of this happened to someone and those words were said. It's all very subtle and all very natural, which usually means honesty.

Music always plays a predominant role in supplementing the emotions in Crowe's films, and this is where it all started, so it's no exception. It is difficult to recall this tale without immediately remembering the image of Lloyd holding the boom box above his head outside of Diane's window. Through the lyrics and context of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes", Crowe has Lloyd express so much without uttering a word. The soundtrack also contains effective tracks by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aerosmith, Soundgarden, Depeche Mode, Fishbone, and The Replacements, which perfectly mesh with the images presented.

Say Anything... is a quintessential romantic modern classic. It succeeds where every single unsuccessful "teen" film failed. It's made of intelligence, wit, honesty and truth, being the work of someone who appreciates - and so many other miss - the fact that there's enough drama and comedy in human-scale relationships - especially among the raging hormone teen set - that you don't need to exaggerate in order to have an entertaining film. Low-key funny, elegant and touching, Say Anything... is the prototype for successful youth-oriented romantic comedy. This is it: what all the others wanted to be.

Here's a difficult film to write about. By principle I don't describe plots, no matter what film is concerned, but in this case I don't think I could, even if I wanted to. A mix of Hitchcock's Vertigo, Memento, some 'Lynchian' twists and with the sublime and yes, sometimes unconfortable touch of Almodovar. Unlike what I've read, I wouldn't describe this film as 'shocking', even though there are some delicate subjects. The homosexuality 'thing' obviously prevented this modern masterpiece from having the visibility and accpetance it deserved, unlike other Almodovar films, like Hable Con Ella or Todo Sobre mi Madre (both Oscar winners). However, the sexuality (or homosexuality) is never an inconfortable aspect, the sex scenes are never vulgar or unbearable. Well, except for some homophobic minds of course... Anyway, this film is a direct reflection from someone who actually grew up in the Franco era in Spain, with the strict religious schooling and the child abuse (who normally everyone preffers to ignore or deny).

Pedro Almodovar is one of the few GENUINE filmmakers alive! Fact. He creates stories, by himself, writes and directs them with the same passion and brilliance that he did 20 years ago and will 20 years from now. His passion for Cinema is well shown in Bad Education. It almost has a role of it's own throughout the film. All thumbs up for Gael Garcia Bernal aswell! A brilliant, powerfull performance! Perhaps the best of his career so far. After all, it's not everyday you have the chance to see an actor playing three different characters, all equally brilliant, in the same film.

An important, essential film for a restricted audience...

"Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself «slightly» killed."

One of the most dominant motifs in Alfred Hitchcocks work is the search for identity. Sometimes, this search is shown through a literal journey, as in The 39 Steps. Sometimes, the attempts at creating a new identity can only be accomplished once another, more dominant identity has been thrown off, as in Rebecca. North By Northwest differs from the rest of Hitchcock's work in that, instead of the main character alone, every major character in lacks an identity. This lack of identity is presented cinematically in a different way for each character. Nevertheless, for each character, the fake identity must die in order for the true identity to form.



Roger Thornhill, the main character of North By Northwest, lacks a true identity. This is shown in several different ways. One of the most important is his reflection. Thornhill is shown either looking in or being looked at through a mirror at four different points during the story. In each case, he is pretending to be someone he is not. Three of the four times, he appears in the mirror as what he is pretending to be. This is not true the final time, but here it is not Thornhill looking in the reflection.

The first incident occurs in a certain George Kaplan's hotel room. At this point, Thornhill, who has been mistaken for Kaplan, looks through Kaplan's personal items. When he looks in the bathroom, he glances in the mirror. From the camera's perspective, the mirror shows nothing but a blank wall. That is because Thornhill, in order to get into Kaplan's room, pretends to be Kaplan. However, Kaplan is not a real person. He is a fake spy created by the government, and as a non-person, he has no reflection. Thus, when Thornhill pretends to be Kaplan, he pretends to be no one. By showing Thornhill without a reflection, the camera is implying that Thornhill is successful in his pretending.

Thornhill looks at a mirror again when he pretends to be no one - in essence, to disappear. At this point, he is hiding in Eve Kendall's room on the 20th Century Limited train from New York to Chicago. By hiding from everyone outside of the room, he is pretending to be a person who does not exist. And so, when he looks in the mirror, the camera shows only Thornhill with no reflection. Again, he is successful in his pretending.

Thornhill's third encounter with a mirror happens in the train station in Chicago. When the police search for him, he enters the men's restroom and lathers up for a shave. Finally, Thornhill is shown with his reflection. However, this achievement is dubious, since the role he is playing at this point is that of a man. The camera, by showing him as what he pretends to be, implies that he is simply a non-descript man. He is not a man by Hitchcock's terms because he does not have an identity. He is still pretending to be a man, even though he will not become a man until later in the film.

When Thornhill is shown in a reflection for the last time, he has finally attained his identity. He is sneaking in the upper level of Phillip Vandamm's house when he is spotted in the reflection of a television screen by Vandamm's maid. Here, like in Eve's room on the train, Thornhill tries to go unnoticed by pretending to be a person who simply does not exist - to disappear. However, unlike his previous attempt, he fails this time. He is not able to pretend to be someone else because he has a fully formed identity. Once he is unable to fulfil his role, he has what he needs to be a true man - a full-formed identity.

In order for Roger Thornhill to attain his true identity, his various pseudo-identities must be eliminated. This is accomplished when Thornhill, in each of his fake identities, dies. He is figuratively killed at two points during the course of the film. After each "death", he takes a new identity, one that suits him until that identity is no longer useful to him. At first, he is a man without identity and without knowledge. He does not know anything about the spy games around him except that he is not George Kaplan and that he is not guilty of the crimes of which he has been accused. This persona is run over by a truck during the cornfield scene allowing Thornhill to come back to life with a new identity.

When Thornhill comes back from the death of his first non-identity, he assumes the identity of George Kaplan. While Kaplan, he learns Eve's part in the spy games, Vandamm's real name, and what he must do to be George Kaplan. He plays the part expertly, only coming out of character briefly when meeting the Professor. Nevertheless, when he and the Professor go to Rapid City, it is George Kaplan, not Roger Thornhill, who meets Vandamm and is killed by Eve. From the dead body of George Kaplan arises Roger Thornhill with a fully realized identity. Thornhill does not work for the government, he is not George Kaplan, and he is not guilty of the crimes of which he has been accused. However, he is not the mere victim of circumstances he was at the beginning of the film. Now he controls his own destiny, and he is able to save himself and Eve. Since his previous incarnations were fakes, they needed to be eliminated. Once Thornhill finds his identity, he can survive in the world and make his own decisions.

As Thornhill sheds his false identities to create his true one, Phillip Vandamm must rid himself of the mask he wears to find his true identity. Vandamm uses a false identity, only to have it fall away, revealing his true identity. When Vandamm first meets Thornhill, he uses the guise of Lester Townsend, a UN diplomat. At this point, Thornhill does not have any solid identity, and neither does Vandamm. Like the identity-less Thornhill, Vandamm is not the complete master of his surroundings. He is the subject of his wife's wishes, unable to take time out of his dinner party to properly do away with Thornhill. The next day, when Vandamm's plot to kill Thornhill fails, Thornhill tries to find the real Lester Townsend. Upon the meeting of Thornhill and the real Townsend, Townsend is murdered. Since Townsend's identity could be used by Vandamm, he does not have a secure identity. Without a secure identity, he is vulnerable to the attacks. Like George Kaplan, Lester Townsend must die in order for the man pretending to be him - Thornhill for Kaplan and Vandamm for Townsend - to arise as a fully formed individual.

Even Eve Kendall has a false identity that must die. Her entire existence is as a spy, so she lacks a coherent whole inside. She is just an actress, playing the role of Phillip Vandamm's girlfriend. Her nothingness is symbolized, not by a fake name or the presence of mirror, but by the juxtaposition of her face with nothingness. The closest close-ups Hitchcock gives of Eve's face are always near some great emptiness. The last shot in the train station in Chicago shows Eve's face in extreme close-up. This is followed by a dissolve to a large expanse of empty land. A cornfield with no corn, only a dirt road and a highway. By placing her image next to this open area, Hitchcock equates her with the emptiness of the land. This ultimately shows the nothingness at her core. Similarly, Eve's final close-up shows her face with a horrible drop behind her. She is hanging by her fingers, inches from her death, at Mt. Rushmore. Figuratively, Eve Kendall does fall here. This woman with no identity except the roles she played for the government is dead at this point. The woman who is finally saved from the abyss is Eve Thornhill, Roger's wife. This is the identity she must take in order to survive.

Throughout North By Northwest, characters must assume false identities in order to accomplish what they want. However, each false identity must be killed in order for a true identity to form. George Kaplan must die so that Roger Thornhill can live. Lester Townsend cannot survive in the same world as Phillip Vandamm, and Eve Kendall was just a woman waiting for Eve Thornhill to come along. And each of these characters' lack of a true identity is represented in a different manner. Eve is equated with nothingness by juxtaposition, Vandamm uses fake names, and Thornhill is shown in the mirror as exactly what he pretends to be. However, when the picture ends, the two protagonists happily ride off in a train with each other and their identities. This is the archetypal Hitchcock story, showing people go through terrible ordeals to get what is most valuable to them, their identities. It has been used in other Hitchcock films, but never quite so effectively as in North By Northwest.

One of my first Hitchcokian experiences. The definition of the word 'Thriller'.

One of the most strong and unbelievably emotional film experiences I've ever had in my life, and ever will. One of the dozens of Bergman's masterpieces. Such a beautiful and moving film that it could very well be a poem or a garden. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson give two (sometimes feeling like one, of how perfect they are at completing and helping each other) of the most memorable, history-making performances in cinema history.

Alexander: "If there is a god, then he's a shit, and I'd like to kick him in the butt.
Aron: Your theory is very interesting and appears to be justified."



I just sat there trembling. Fanny and Alexander, the 188-minute edit Ingmar Bergman reluctantly made for theatrical screening, just ended. The credits were rolling but that final shot of young Alexander (wide-eyed Bertil Guve) finding refuge on the lap of his grandmother Helena (a magnificent Gunn Wållgren), along with other mesmerizing images that miraculously fleeted with their uncanny burdensome implications stuck with me, paralysing my limbs temporarily.

Most cinephiles would refer to Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's most accessible work, the advisable first Bergman film to watch if you're planning to succumb to the Swedish director's mostly desolate filmography. My first Bergman film is Persona, a tantalizing and palpably painful work which shattered all trace of happiness in my body during the bare hour and a half I spent watching it. That film moved me, but not as much as how Fanny and Alexander did, which not only rattled my existential core but also delighted, frightened, and amused me in a way that was not shallow and ephemeral.

A flock of older women would not so quietly discussing the overt cruelty in this film. They would obviously relate more closely to the trials Alexander and her younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) had to go through, especially after the death of their father Oscar (Allan Edwall), seemingly the only sensible man in the Ekdahl household. Indeed, I find Bergman discomfortingly cruel to his younger protagonists (Alexander serves as Bergman's alter-ego in this film and both him and the character share similar experiences) but not because of the extraneous experiences they have to undergo, but because of their (more specifically Alexander) sudden realization of the bleakness of life and the probable futility of the afterlife.

Alexander is often haunted by his father's ghost, who often just stands with forsaken gazes, useless in the afterlife. In his conversation with his dead father in the puppet room of Isak (Erland Josephson), a Jew and very close companion of the Ekdahl matriarch, Alexander questions his father's inactivity and the reason why he is not with God, before starting to angrily challenge God's existence and nobility. God replies by instilling fear, rattling a cabinet and threatening to show all his terrifying majesty and glory to the young boy. Of course, there is no God; it was just a well-crafted puppet made by Isak's playful nephew Aron (Mats Bergman). The bigger picture is laid down for us, that in life, we are governed by a religion that promotes self-denial, pain, punishment, sacrifice, and fear as a way of life only to be utterly dismayed and disappointed in death, where one's ghost is left roaming unnoticed and hopeless within the halls of his former life. It is that uncertainty that really scares us.

Bergman weaves a colourful tapestry of life through the Ekdahl clan, a family entrenched in the local theatre. Their mansion, first seen abandoned in a hallucinatory daydream of imaginative Alexander (a memorable opening, tremendously horrifying), becomes alive for Christmas Eve dinner. Underneath the routinary yearly celebration are apprehensions, voiced out only in the privacy of their chambers - a sexual affair between Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle) and a pretty maid (Pernilla Wallgren) matures into a suffocating relationship that confuses financial freedom with actual freedom; Gustav's brother Carl (Börje Ahlstedt) is on the edge of frustration over his financial reverses and the servile predisposition of his foreigner wife; Helena recounts the exploits of her youth to Isak, while the latter doesn't regret the depletion of their youth as the world is getting worse, there's no better time to die.

Despite the normal intrigues of the household, there's much vitality within the mansion as compared to the abstinent life forcefully fed to Alexander and Fanny in the household of their stepfather (Jan Malmsjö), a bishop who woos their mother Emilie (Ewa Fröling) into marriage. The walls are drab, the servants are colourless and treacherous, the residents are cruel. The ascetic and self-flagellating lifestyle led has tortured these people to utter disfigurement (an obese aunt in her deathbed, a tormented sister, a stern and domineering mother); there is blatant abomination in this example of misconstrued piety and purity. Alexander turns into his imagination for comfort and defence (he and his sister have been abandoned and helpless, their father is a mere watcher and a lonesome presence, their mother is trapped in her own passions, and God seems to be on the side of the righteous bishop), inconsequentially sinning to an indifferent deity who may or may not exist.

Fanny and Alexander was supposed to be Ingmar Bergman's final film (which turned out to be Saraband, also made for Swedish television in 2003, four years prior to his death). It certainly feels like a grandiose summation of The Poet With the Camera's work - perfectly beautiful (lensed by legendary cinematographer and frequent collaborator Sven Nykvist), mysterious and magical, awing and hypnotizing, cruel, tragic, and fatal, but still a biblical celebration of life and of the living, their many facets and denominations.

Mrs. Armfeldt: "Your children are very beautiful, especially the young girl.
Fredrik Egerman: The young girl is my wife, Mrs. Armfeldt.
Mrs. Armfeldt: I believe you lead a very strenuous life, Mr. Egerman."



Successful lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) has a young wife (Ulla Jacobsson) he hasn't slept with, a son (Björn Bjelfvenstam) who lusts after his father's wife and maid, and a dormant love affair with a well-known actress (Eva Dahlbeck). After a visit to the theatre, he meets his former mistress' new love - a jealous military man (Jarl Kulle) prone to duelling and boastful claims of infidelity. But few in this arrangement seem content with the cards they've drawn, so the women begin planning the means by which they can get the men they truly love. Naturally, this involves several underhanded techniques, including a wife wagering her husband that she can seduce Egerman in under fifteen minutes, and a button that moves a bed from one room to the next without waking the occupant.

All of this is filmed with tongue firmly in cheek by master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, thus making Smiles of a Summer Night a traditional/romantic comedy, a bit of a departure for Bergman as we know him, but perfectly normal for a young (37, at the time) director largely unknown outside his native Sweden. When this film came out, in '55, Bergman had yet to make the masterpieces The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), or his "Faith" trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly (1961); Winter Light (1962); The Silence (1963) - and had yet to plumb the depths of despair, question the nature of God or inspire the term "Bergmanesque" for generations of film buffs to come. Still, this is Bergman, so Smiles of a Summer Night is a comedy not so much because it includes humour, but more because it lacks that all-encompassing sense of desperation we come to expect. It's like calling fifty degrees pleasant in the middle of winter.

Oh, but what a lovely fifty degrees it is. Beyond a token fall, the humour comes in sharp little stabs meant to be both devilish and witty at the same time. The film is dark, sadistic, amoral, and a lot of fun. Bergma's main skewer is Fredrik's son Henrik, a minister in training who spends long hours reading aloud the works of Martin Luther and preaching virtue, but is at numerous opportunities succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. For these indiscretions he is understandably tormented, but Bergman gets great delight not by showing his torment, but by ridiculing it as the idealism of a foolish youth.

There's no mistaking that the film views Henrik as an idiot. He has the respect of no one, not even himself, and he loathes a father who, from what we can tell, appears to be a reasonable man. But Henrik cannot seem to strike a balance between his actions and his beliefs. In one scene, he is sleeping with the maid, but the next morning when she attempts to seduce him, he runs away ashamed like a little boy. In a world where infidelity is tossed about minus remorse, this makes him the object of disdain.

Probably the best way to describe Smiles of a Summer Night is as a vicious comedy of manners. The jealous military man, Count Carl Magnus Malcolm, declares before his wife, "I can tolerate my wife's infidelity, but if anyone touches my mistress, I become a tiger.", then declares the reverse before his mistress, with little thought as to how either woman will react. Later, he challenges Fredrik to a duel of Russian roulette where between spins of the chamber, they toast to each other's health. Essentially what Bergman does is take a normal, Victorian scenario and infuse it with his world-view, his misconceptions, and his dark sense of humour.

Smiles of a Summer Night is a comedy, but more importantly it is a vital piece of the Bergman filmography for it shows a side of him that we don't often see, and rarely account for when we think of something as "Bergmanesque", even though it fits the criteria perfectly. We tend to forget that Bergman had a sense of humour, which is a shame, because it's dead razor sharp.

Trying to achieve the unachievable goal of watching Bergman's entire filmography... Been 'working on it' pretty much since I saw his first film and his 'end' ony motivates me even more. Wild Strawberries is, like probably most of his films, a perfect example of why he was, or is one of the most brilliant minds Cinema has ever known. A story that, I believe, has the ability to change anyone's life (the most magic thing a film can do). Last night, after watching the DVD alone, I found myself unable to think of anything else, completely numb, desoriented, sad and unexplainably happy at the same time. I wish I could feel that more often.

"Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses? Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles? How can we believe in the faithful when we lack faith? What will happen to us who want to believe, but can not? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? Why can't I kill God in me? Why does He live on in me in a humiliating way - despite my wanting to evict Him from my heart? Why is He, despite all, a mocking reality I can't be rid of?"



Not before or since the 1957 release of Ingmar Bergman's haunting masterpiece The Seventh Seal has the momentous theme of humankind's search for existential meaning - within or outside a religious framework - been treated of with such furious grace, intelligence and insight. All cynicism concerning the re-release of a "50th Anniversary Digitally Remastered Edition," in the year of the great filmmaker's death, must therefore be put on hold. Any reason to publicise or disseminate or roll back the technical decay of this supreme piece of cinematic art, whether or not the companies in question make some extra baksheesh by finagling historical contingency, is a good reason.

"Faith is a torment. It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call."

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is a crusading knight freshly returned to the shores of his native Sweden. He has lost all the moral certainty he left with, presumably having seen and participated in atrocities in the name of Christianity. The hypocrisy of this institution which teaches forbearance, peace and tolerance yet practices murder, torture and empire-like expansionism is too much for his reflective nature to bear without apostasy. He yearns for a meaning to life beyond the circumscribed and vague one offered by the Church.

While racked by these thoughts he is visited by Death made flesh (a brilliantly chilling Bengt Ekerot), who tells him that his time is nearly up. Desperate for a few more days in which to make sense of the world, he challenges Death to a chess match. As long as the game is played, Block lives. If Block wins, he goes free; if Death wins, he takes Block's soul. Death agrees to this stay-of-execution, knowing himself to be unbeatable at chess.

"Love is the blackest of all plagues... if one could die of it, there would be some pleasure in love, but you don't die of it."

Block and his squire travel across plague-ridden Sweden to his castle, along the way picking up an unlikely entourage of actors, a beautiful maiden, a mercurial blacksmith and his coquettish wife. Unwittingly, the knight has endangered the group by travelling with them while his fatal chess game is ongoing; seemingly companions of the doomed are also fair quarry. Death, meanwhile, shadows the group in various guises, often tricking Block into revealing his strategies.

The knight arrives home just in time to be beaten on the chessboard by Death who then harvests the mortals' souls with wordless implacability, a finale made all the more harrowing by its utter inevitability and the fact that Block has now inadvertently caused the deaths of his wife (with whom he has just been reunited after a decade's absence) and pure-hearted fellow-travellers. Yet in the intriguing epilogue, the human spirit - embodied by the actor Jof (Gunnar Björnstrand, the most versatile of all Bergman's actors), his wife and young son, spared by the Reaper - abides even as death, suffering and meaninglessness harangue it on all sides.

"I want knowledge! Not faith, not assumptions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His hand, uncover His face and speak to me."

It is difficult to find fault with any aspect of The Seventh Seal. Bergman's script is note-perfect. Performances from the principals are excellent, as are Gunnar Fischer's cinematography and Erik Nordgren's suitably clangorous score. Despite the film's reputation as an unleavened downer, the abutting of great metaphysical anguish against spells of revelry, pleasure and good-natured bawdiness is crucial to its artistic success. Each scene bristles with allegory yet the film barrels along at what seems, given the weight of the themes addressed, a brisk pace.

So is it ultimately an optimistic or pessimistic piece? Such are the complexity, passion and searing intuition of Bergman's masterwork (my personal favourite of what I've seen of his enormous filmography) that the answer to this question may prove as elusive as that sought by Antonius Block himself. What is beyond question is that cinema would be immeasurably the poorer for its absence. Endlessly interpreted, endlessly parodied (with at least one lampoon, the brilliant final sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, actually preserving some of the pathos and gravity of the original), The Seventh Seal is a work of incalculable, timeless magnificence.

"This is my hand. I can turn it. The blood is still running in it. The sun is still in the sky and the wind is blowing. And I... I, Antonius Block, play chess with Death."

The best Bond film ever made. No one will ever top this, just like no other actor will ever top Sean Connery.

Francine: "They're still here.
Stephen: They're after us. They know we're still in here.
Peter: They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.
Francine: What the hell are they?
Peter: They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.
Stephen: What?
Peter: Something my granddad used to tell us. You know Macumba? Voodoo. My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."



After the much-talked about Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, George A. Romero took a 10-year break from zombies, but not from the genre. He put out The Crazies in '73, as well as the failed Hungry Wives. He then took a stab at the vampire genre in '77 with Martin before returning to the sub-genre that he started. It was the year of 1979 (although the film premièred in Italy in '78) that saw the return of Romero's zombies for U.S. audiences with Dawn of the Dead, a film that was on a much bigger budget and scale compared to the first. Some people argue that Romero's Night is one of the highest-grossing films of all time: it cost $120,000 and there is no way of knowing exactly how rich it made Romero in the box-office. As for Dawn, it cost a bit more, $1.5 million, and it grossed at least $45 million world-wide.

That's not really important, except to show the level of amateurism - in a good sense - there was in that first film. Romero was 28-years-old, a kid, and that film was pretty much a dream put in action by a bunch of other kids from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and yet, it would forever change the horror genre. Dawn of the Dead is an obviously more crafted film (you don't get the feeling that you're watching something extremely raw and ground-breaking) and, while Night still is one of the greatest American horror films ever made, Dawn is my favourite instalment of the "Dead" series, and most definitely my all-time favourite horror film. I remember seeing it when I was but a wee lad, probably around the 100th time it was on TV. I was repulsed, I was disgusted, I was shocked, but most of all I immediately became a zombie/Romero fan for life.

Following in pace with its predecessor, Dawn of the Dead begins with an epidemic of zombies killing everyone. It follows two Philadelphia SWAT team members, a traffic reporter and his girlfriend as they seek refuge in a secluded shopping mall. Dawn of the Dead is a horror comic book come to life, with the challenge being survival. Imagine if you will, the dead are rising from their graves with no certain reasoning but that they are hungry to fest on the flesh of the living. And everyone they kill becomes like them, a mindless zombie surviving on instinct and hungry for the warm flesh of living mankind. The dead are everywhere. There's so many of them. The entire world is at war with the dead. So much as a vicious bite tearing into your flesh can spread the disease. The armies are over run. Towns are put into a state of warfare; there is seemingly no hope. And this is where the story of Dawn of the Dead begins.

The mall is the first of Romero's reversals. Night's would-be survivors were trapped in a rural farmhouse, and their only hope for survival was represented by the hope for escape to the City. Like much of America in era, Dawn's pampered protagonists abandon the unpredictable, ethnically diverse city in favour of the comforting anonymity of suburban USA - specifically, the suburban mall at which they land and eventually inhabit. Romero's distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can't be underestimated when explaining Dawn's appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the centre of a community that couldn't be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney's shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.

Once the four make unto themselves an idyllic paradise inside the mall, cleansing it of zombies and sealing if off for themselves, they inevitably cave in to the buyer's delight, so buried in furs, guns, diamonds, and leather (and, ludicrously, cash) that they ultimately end up oblivious to the approaching motorcycle gang that threatens to crash the party. Eventually the gang breaks through the barricades (and, somehow, the moat of zombies still drawn to the mall because, according to one character, it reminds them of something they used to need) and anarchically turn the film upside down, transgressively taunting the zombies, stealing their jewellery, smashing their pusses with cream pies, and chopping their heads off for sport, not survival. Again, the way Romero portrays the roving gang is a distinct retraction from how, for instance, he painted Karl Hardman's Harry Cooper character in Night. As least in the first film, opposition didn't equal antagonism. Here, Romero's world contains strains of humanity that, as demonstrated by their lack of respect for the zombies, could be justifiably considered "worse" than death.

Dawn of the Dead features make-up/special effects by the wizard of gore himself Tom Savini. Savini is a long time partner of Romero's and this was his biggest task to that date. By today's standards, and Tom Savini's standards most of the zombies are fairly tame looking in the film with skin discolouration being the most obvious visual disfiguration. But what you have to realize is that there was no previous standard before this. Night of the Living Dead had only one flesh eating sequence, which was more than enough to freak audiences out in 1968, but Dawn of the Dead is where is got messy. The open sequences feature a raid on an apartment complex infested with the living dead. And is loaded full of gunshots and flesh tearing. The end sequences are amazingly blooding as the zombies overcome and tear victims apart. Tom is a huge contributor to this film as well as the zombie and horror genre. He designed the zombies for Dawn, and perfected the look in Day of the Dead.

Dawn of the Dead is a dated film. It takes place in the seventies, feels like the seventies and makes social commentaries on the issues of that day, including the women's liberation movement, war, foreign affairs and even economy. There's seemingly danger in every aspect of the world. So if you're in the situation of our main characters with really no hope and survival being all that you can live for then the idea of holding up in an abandoned shopping mall could be the greatest salvation. There you have access to endless supplies, temporary shelter and a place to secure a plan. Problem is it's infested with zombies. And even if you re-kill all the zombies and board up the doors you're still sitting on one of the greatest bulk of supplies available and a prime target for other survivalists and small armies. Again no hope is in sight.

Romero directs with a real kinetic charge and Dawn of the Dead is the most out-rightly action-oriented of his films. What turned the film into a real cult hit and inspired a whole new generation of Italian filmmakers though is the splatter effects. The film's entire raison d'être is often the inordinate delight that Romero and Tom Savini find in the number of ways that people can be mutilated and killed on screen. The film really gets quite creative in this regard - shotguns blowing heads off at point blank range, the top of a zombie's head sliced off with a helicopter blade, dispatches via a screwdriver twisted into a zombie's ear, zombies biting chunks of flesh out of victims' shoulders, people held down and their intestines ripped out and devoured by clambering zombies. Upwards of 200 hundred killings take place on screen and any scene, from any film, shot after 1978 approaching those descriptions drew inspiration from here. Allow me to exemplify: Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead may have the single most impressive on-screen disembowelment in recent cinematic history, but it's only because Romero paved the way for filmmakers like Wright, Robert Rodriguez or Danny Boyle to rip our guts along out with some luckless character's entrails 30 years ago.

In the U.S., Dawn of the Dead was released uncut rather than face the choice of either cutting the gore down or receiving the dreaded X rating. An unrated film is usually considered commercial suicide, with many newspapers refusing to carry advertising for such films, but despite this Dawn of the Dead nevertheless became a cult success. It is my favourite horror film and it played a big role in why I started to be obsessed with films in the first place.

Dawn of the Dead explores the end of mankind, being destroyed by mankind physically represented by zombies. Romero's 'message' (if you wanna call it that), for those who assume there isn't any, is quite simple: man vs. man and how we deal with our own mortality and the horror of becoming mindless and uncontrolled. Or maybe it's just the coolest zombie flick ever made, period. Either way. Everything I learned about zombie films I learned from George Romero. Everything I'm still learning about zombie films I'm still learning from George Romero. Shopping malls in the '70s had ice rinks and gun shops. Romero zombies are slow moving and weak (they're dead, remember?) but there's an endless number of them.

I never feared for my safety walking through empty parking lots, darkened rooms or deserted alleys after watching any horror film made after I was born, but every night when I turn out the light after watching Romero's film, I wonder if somewhere in the shadows of my apartment there isn't a cold hand creeping up to grab me from behind. Dawn of the Dead illustrates the difference between old and new school horror: namely, that effective thrills come from giving life those mysterious things that go bump in the night, not simply shining the light in their direction when they leap out from the darkness.

I guess there's no real point in going on and on about how much - or why - I worship this film and the man behind it so much... I just do. I'll keep wearing my Dawn of the Dead t-shirts like I have for years and my Collector's Edition - The Original Director's Cut DVD will always be one of the pieces on my collection I'm the most proud of. I wouldn't sell it to you for all the money in the world.

Dr. Millard Rausch, Scientist: "This isn't the Republicans versus the Democrats, where we're in a hole economically or... or we're in another war. This is more crucial than that. This is down to the line, folks, this is down to the line. There can be no more divisions among the living!"

Field Reporter: "Chief, if I were surrounded by eight or ten of these things, would I stand a chance with them?
Sheriff McClelland: Well, there's no problem. If you have a gun, shoot 'em in the head. That's a sure way to kill 'em. If you don't, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat 'em or burn 'em. They go up pretty easy."



Regarded as the grandfather of the modern zombie film, Night of the Living Dead is a legendary achievement in both horror and independent filmmaking, one that, like all great horror films, retains its power even as our ideas of what's scary change. Deceptively simple, the film builds dread and fear with layers of psychological conflict, action, and a kind of relentless exposition that gives a nationwide scope to a claustrophobic problem. It was innovative in many ways, and though it didn't really create the zombie film as a genre, it crystallized it and set the pattern for future entries, becoming the standard by which they would be measured.

It was the late sixties. Vietnam was proving that America was not all-powerful, and asking questions about who were the good guys, about motivation, about the human race as a whole. Anti-war protesters were being beaten and gassed for what they believed, while America was attempting to destroy another place... for what they believed. Hippies were spreading a message of love, new ideas were flourishing in all areas, from making peace to making war, and technology was becoming more important and influential. The result was that the good guys were often over-looked, good deeds were mostly forgotten, and many lives were thrown away aimlessly and without purpose. Those who survived wondered why, and had no clue why they were here. It seemed outside, bigger forces were at play, and that unseen beings were controlling the public. Two films which would change the course of cinema were released: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

Barbara (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russel Streiner) are sister and brother,
who arrive at a cemetery in the countryside to put flowers on their father's grave. An old man wandering in the distant background suddenly attacks Barbara, and Johnny is killed when he intervenes to save her. Barbara runs from her relentless attacker to an abandoned farmhouse, and as more strange, mindless assassins gather around the house, she meets with fellow survivors of similar attacks: Ben (Duane Jones), a young African American who quickly takes control of the situation; Harry and Helen Cooper (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman), a middle-aged couple with an injured daughter (Kyra Schon); and Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley), young lovers out on a country drive. As the traumatized Barbara slips into a catatonic state and Ben and Harry argue about the best plan of defence against these monsters, radio and TV broadcasts gradually reveal that they're facing an army of the walking dead, animated by radiation from space and feeding on the flesh of the living. Things get worse.

One of the things that I always notice about the film whenever I see it is how big a role the media plays. The characters are as isolated as those in any other horror film, but thanks to technology they (and we) get to find out what's happening, even if this doesn't actually help them in the long run. That this was very much a contemporary film was significant at the time, as the general trend over the past decade had been towards Hammer's Gothic/Victorian monster-fests, as isolated from the present day as the Universal horror films of the thirties and forties. Here was something taking place on our doorstep, happening to regular people, and happening to everyone. While not unprecedented, this was still unusual, and the overall effect is to make the horror seem more pervasive and unstoppable; simply being smarter than the average horror film protagonist isn't going to get you out of this one.

The film broke a lot of rules that were informally in place. Certain characters die who would be thought invulnerable in other horror films of the day, the apparent heroine goes into shock and becomes absolutely useless for the rest of the film, and the zombies (never actually called that in the film) behave more like a "real" phenomenon than supernatural entities; the rules which apply to them have little to do with ritual or ceremony and everything to do with contagion and a kind of warped biology, their brains still being active and hence their one vulnerable spot, like a vampire's heart. But I think the emphasis on strategy is really what sets this apart. Everyone is forced to think in practical terms about what can be done right away, and the central conflict between the human characters is about the safest course of action for surviving the night. And it's here that the film gets really complicated.

Ben, as the eventual protagonist, is a proactive and charismatic figure, generally wise and level-headed. Harry is, let's face it, a jerk, twitchy, short-tempered and vindictive. But Ben's plans do have a way of going awry, and Harry does have the makings of a good idea in that he wants to stay in the cellar, which is the safest room in the house. But whether or not he's right doesn't matter, because he's more preoccupied with being right than with helping people out. The tension between the characters complicates the already difficult task of surviving a zombie attack, and as the series progresses we'll see Romero's interest in psychological and social obstacles as ways of showing how humanity just might find itself in a losing war against a brainless slow-moving enemy.

A larger theme of social upheaval is also present, as the zombies represent a kind of new society overthrowing the old. Even at points where it seems like the problem might actually be contained, it's at the cost of anything resembling a familiar status quo - the dead need to be callously gathered up and burned before they can revive, the bonfires a contrast to the cemetery of the film's opening. Homes and families are placed under siege and traditional community seems to fall by the wayside. (The legendary ending seems to suggest a final disintegration of essential humanity, even if humans manage to survive.)

The proceedings are always tense, even in the slower moments, something emphasized by a loud score and the frequent bangs of hammering. The performances are manic and generally strong. Judith O'Dea goes overboard at times, but at others is strangely effective (there's always at least one performance like this in a Romero film, for some reason.) While it's always clear that we're looking at a low-budget film, there's something very efficient about the timing and structuring of scenes, and it looks a lot better than it should. Gore-wise, the film may not be shocking any more, or frightening, but it is compelling and utterly intense. Its combination of black and white photography and grisly horror is particularly unsettling, and gives the film a grimy, realistic quality.

George Romero has said that he laces all his zombie films with social commentary. In Night of the Living Dead he cast an African American as the hero (the race wasn't specified in the script) who saves the white girl, in an era when civil rights were still very much an on-going debate. Add to this the fact that all of the mindless zombies have pasty white faces, and Harry the intolerant white man wants to hide in a safe place and not worry about anyone else. We have an African-American hero who may be up against the undead in the text of the film, but is faced with racism in the subtext. I don't know if the choice of filming in black and white was part of this metaphor (in 1968 it was a choice). But it looks so perfect that it makes me wonder why black and white isn't used much for horror any more. Perhaps it's because the majority of black and white horror films didn't go for grisly gore, and most horror films are cheap knock-offs of each other. When people came to copy Night of the Living Dead they copied the zombies, and the arguments, rather than things worth copying like cinematography and theme.

Night of the Living Dead is one of the best, greatest and most influential horror films ever made, but chances are you knew that. But it's always worth taking a second or twenty-third look at the film, especially around a certain time of the year or whenever you feel like not getting to sleep easily. It may not be the best of the series, but it's a close second, and it'll always be a classic in its own right. Horror films would never entirely be the same after this, and it's still got a few lessons to teach, forty years later.

Field Reporter: "Are they slow-moving, chief?
Sheriff McClelland: Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up."

John: "You want to put some kind of explanation on all this? Here's one as good as any other: we're bein' punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us. Maybe He didn't want to see us blow ourselves up, put a big hole in the sky. Maybe He just wanted to show us He's still the Boss Man. Maybe He figure, we gettin' too big for our britches, tryin' to figure His shit out."



Having to follow in the footsteps of two of the greatest - hell, the greatest - and most high regarded zombie films in history (Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead) isn't an easy task and perhaps that's why this third entry in George A. Romero's "Dead" series never really got the respect (or kudos) it deserved. Which is too bad as it ranks right up there with the other two films and actually is the most intelligently written of the three.

Initially supposed to be the final instalment of the "Dead" saga, Day of the Dead was and is an unusual change of pace. A grim, talky, but weirdly energetic and almost upbeat affair, the film turned off audiences and critics in its initial run only to become something of a cult item. Though certainly the weakest of the first three films, with more obvious flaws, Day of the Dead has a strong story and atmosphere, reflecting Romero's growing interest in building up a world around his zombies instead of focusing on the flesh-eating shenanigans.

The walking dead outnumber the living by 400,000 to 1. In an underground government facility located beneath the Florida Everglades, a slowly-decreasing group of scientists and soldiers work together to combat the zombie menace. Well, they do in theory; the military force, led by Capt. Rhodes (Joe Pilato) and consisting of the most macho, sexist, racist, and generally crude dregs of the army, is losing patience with scientists who still have no solution. While the chief surgeon Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), known as "Frankenstein" by just about everyone else, has the army round up zombies for his experiments in trying to control the undead and tame their aggression, it falls to Sarah (Lori Cardille), a chemist, to try and keep the entire operation from falling apart. Her soldier boyfriend (Antonè DiLeo) is headed towards a nervous breakdown as a result of working endless shifts, and the most sensible people in the operation seem to be McDermott, an alcoholic radio operator (Jarlath Conroy), and John, a helicopter pilot (Terry Alexander), both of whom live in a trailer outside the complex's safe zone and don't believe that anything good is going to come of the project. Logan has been showing some progress with an unusually intelligent zombie named "Bub" (Howard Sherman), but there's a question of just how stable the Doctor is, and how he intends to "reward" his subjects.

The film Romero planned to make and the one he made ended up being very different. The original script was a grand epic taking place on a tropical island, where a mad general had raised an army of trained zombies. However, the project was deemed too expensive - though both Night and Dawn had been huge hits, financiers would only put up the money if Romero could promise an R rating, which he ultimately couldn't. So he settled for an unrated picture and a lower budget, crafting this smaller-scale apocalypse that could mostly be filmed in an underground cave complex. (The actors, who arrived at the set pre-dawn and left after dark, suffered Vitamin E deficiencies as a result of not seeing the sun for long stretches.) This is a smaller film than Dawn, and not nearly as action-oriented - there is, to be honest, a lot of talk, and it's actually a long while before we get to the first proper zombie attack (though the film does have a brilliant opening wherein the team takes a helicopter to scout out a city that is inhabited entirely by the walking dead.)

As a result, the film does seem aimless at times, and Romero's dialogue and direction of the actors is not what you'd call realistic or understated. The soldiers are, as mentioned, near troglodytic in their machismo, and so negligent and shiftless it's hard to believe they passed basic training. McDermott, who is Irish (and drinks quite a bit) and John, who is Jamaican, both have very strong and faked accents, and in particular John, with his wise sayings and carefree attitude, comes dangerously close to the "Magic Negro" stereotype, though I'd argue that he gets enough depth in the end to avoid that. Pilato, playing Rhodes, gives what I'm just going to go ahead and call a Romero over-the-top performance, to the point where it's goofy and hard to believe at times, but completely appropriate to other moments - and he manages to improvise the PERFECT last line for his character, so I have to give him credit.

Of course, being comic-booky and exaggerated isn't necessarily a bad thing for a horror/zombie film, even a more dialogue-driven one. There's even an element of political satire, as the military's overriding nationalism seems to parallel the escalation of the Cold War and the return to "traditional values" heralded by the Reagan administration, and of course nuclear anxiety is also mirrored in the weary, nihilistic attitudes of John and McDermott, who are about ready to give up on the whole Western civilization thing and try to escape to an island somewhere. The conflict between basically three separate factions (one could even split it further, arguing that Logan is an entity unto himself) does provide a driving force for the film even when the zombies stay in the background.

Needless to say, the undead do come out to play in the end, and the climax of the picture features a richly satisfying zombie rampage, with make-up and gore effects once again by Tom Savini; the improvement from Dawn is that we no longer have zombies who are simply people with facepaint, and all the hordes of ghouls do look pretty realistic. On the human side, the acting is mostly energetic: Lori Cardille, the daughter of Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardille, who played a reporter in Night, is intense and believable throughout, and there's something enjoyable in everyone's performance, including Sherman's Bub, who's a masterpiece of purely physical acting. The best work, though, comes from Richard Liberty as Logan, who tweaks the mad scientist angle just a little to make his character disarmingly eloquent, soft-spoken, and likable.

Finally, I'd be remiss in talking about this film without praising the lush, Caribbean-tinged score by John Harrison (who would later become a director in his own right - his credits include the "Dune" miniseries.) This was actually the first film in the series not to include cheap "library" music as part of the soundtrack (Night used it entirely, while Dawn alternated the needle-drop material with an original score by Dario Argento's Goblin), and it adds an interesting kind of energy to the grim proceedings.

Day of the Dead is a film with some obvious problems - it's not quite as keen and relentless as the first two - but it has an undeniable charm to it. It's a genuinely original horror story, rendered with bloody enthusiasm and more than a little wit to it. If it wasn't really satisfying as the finale of the series, it was because nothing could top those two horror masterpieces. While pretty uneventful for the first hour, the script build-up is excellent and when the blood-spilling does commence it leads up to one of the most exciting finales in zombie film history.

Capt. Rhodes: [as the zombies are disembowelling him and eating his entrails] Choke on 'em!"

Michael: "Truck's not gonna make it to Fort Pastor.
Steve: No, forget the truck. That place is fucked, man. Bloodbath city.
Kenneth: How do you know?
Norma: We just came from there.
Kenneth: Is everyone there dead?
Steve: Well, dead-ish.
Kenneth: Is everyone there dead?
Steve: Yeah, in the sense that they all sort of, uh... fell down... and then got up... and started eating each other."



When first word on a possible remake of Romero's untouchable classic Dawn of the Dead was mentioned, a lot of people shunned the idea and thought it ridiculous. When it was revealed that James Gunn (the man who managed to write two of the most ridiculous screenplays in history, in less than two years) was working on the script, it didn't help matters either. Once the first trailer appeared online, people's minds were changed drastically, because it was actually beginning to look like a pretty decent zombie flick.

I went in watching this four years ago with an open mind, because, although my personal opinion on the concept of 'remake' is widely known, I don't consider Romero's work 'unremakable'. The "Dead" trilogy spanned three decades ('60s, '70s and '80s) and each film was a reflection on the kind of country the U.S. were at those times, as well as the way Americans viewed themselves. Things change. To remake The Exorcist or The Shinning would be preposterous, but Dawn of the Dead... somehow makes sense. I came out of the theatre very satisfied in terms of entertainment (which is what I primarily based my rating for this film on) but it must be said that, no matter how entertaining this may be, it doesn't even begin to approach the original's brilliance and vision.

Above all, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is true to itself. Without irony, cheek, or a gentle nudge to the ribs, it manages to exist as a pure experience - watching the dead rise from the earth, begin their flesh-feast, and eventually take over the world. There is no explanation, no resolution, and no political subtext; only a refreshingly straightforward story that attempts thrills and chills without poking fun at its obvious flaws.

There are genuine laughs to be had, but they are real, rather than the result of camp or mockery. In fact, this might be one of the first films in years to be the essence of horror without the Scream-inspired self-awareness. Yes, it's a remake (complete with the shopping mall setting), but it's not trying to comment on the Romero classic. It's not trying to be better than that film by showing it can be more clever and knowing. It is an update in that it has better effects and much more realistic carnage, but I would argue that it is aiming lower than the earlier film. Romero constructed a merciless satire of American consumerism, while Snyder's film would rather we witness the end of the world without comment. That's why the film is so much fun and easy to watch and the reason why I enjoyed it so much.

The ten-minute pre-credits sequence is a showstopper, an adrenaline-fuelled nightmare come to life as downright horrifying as any film opener since Apocalypse Now. Young nurse Ana (Sarah Polley) leaves the hospital she works at and drives to her home in the middle of Milwaukee's idyllic suburbs. She makes love to her husband Luis (Justin Louis) in the shower and goes to bed, missing all of the signs around her, including a news report, that something is seriously wrong. When Ana awakes to find Luis mortally wounded (a neighbour child has ruthlessly bitten him on the neck), only to have him suddenly attack her after his heart has stopped, she narrowly escapes. Pure chaos has rang out on the streets, leaving Ana fearful and perplexed as to what is happening in the world. Cue Johnny Cash's haunting "The Man Comes Around" and a marvellously innovative and atmospheric opening credits scene, and you have a flawlessly rendered set-up to a fine, graphically violent horror flick.

The pulse-pounding pace at the onset slows down soon after so the rest of the premise and characters can fall into place. After totalling her car in an accident, Ana finds herself joining police officer Kenneth (Ving Rhames), Michael (Jake Weber), and Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and his pregnant wife, Luda (Inna Korobkina), to hide out in the Crossroad Mall. From then on it's the discovery of what is really happening: a fast-acting virus spread through bites that will reanimate the carrier once they have died into a bloodthirsty zombie. Soon joined by some more humans, including three security guards and several other refugees, Ana watches as the days tick by and the number of zombies increase at the mall entrances. In lieu of waiting for their own doom, the group devise a plan to escape to the nearby marina and sail to a hopefully deserted island. First, however, they will have to get past the hoards of dangerous, angry zombies clustering the streets.

Romero's bleak vision of humanity learning to cope after a time of war featured sympathetic protagonists waiting out the apocalypse. It also featured terrifying gore effects courtesy of special effects king Tom Savini (who has a cameo here as a badass sheriff), brutal and hard-hitting action sequences, and an unrelenting sense of encroaching dread. Snyder's version can't hope to compare, so it ditches any notion of social statement and goes instead for the balls-out, adrenaline rush of 28 Days Later, minus the grade-Z digital cinematography in favour of the technical splendour of a slick car commercial. Result: it truly looks awesome.

Sarah Polley, a Canadian-born indie staple who rarely ventures into the mainstream, is exceptional as Ana, a young woman devastated by what is happening around her, but who refuses to give up hope. Polley brings to her lead role the stark, honest emotions and no-holds-barred reality that goes along with the situation. In the process, she elevates what could have been a standard-issue horror heroine part to one with three dimensions and worth rooting for. All other performances, namely Ving Rhames (as the little-talk hard-ass cop), Mekhi Phifer (as a street-thug-slash-soon-to-be-daddy, whose wife nurses a zombie bite and a swelled pregnant belly that's a gruesome set piece waiting to happen), and especially Jake Weber (in the Brendan Gleeson role from 28 Days Later, a de-facto dad for the band of survivors), are concentrated and unfailing. Nonetheless, most of the characters could have afforded the depth and care brought to Ana, who is the only one we see with a life before things literally go to Hell.

Amidst the heightened suspense and skilfully created terror, Zack Snyder does make a few key errors that keep the film from being the masterpiece it pays tribute to - 'cause really, that's basically what this is - and flirts with becoming. For one, it is suggested that what is occurring is strictly virus-based, but if this is the case, then it is implausible that the entire town would fall apart overnight. Where did the virus come from to begin with? And if he wants us to believe that the long-since dead have risen from their graves, then the film is missing any such clarification (a brief scene where Ana drives by a cemetery and witnesses the dead rising would have cleared this up, but is nowhere to be found). Any way you look at it, it is an unavoidable and clumsy plot hole. Likewise, a stronger sense of the interior mall setting should have been rendered, instead of the majority happening in front of the same store over and over.

Still, this new Dawn of the Dead is creepy, smart and good filmmaking. It takes no prisoners in its sole goal to scare you silly. And what the viewer is left with by the end is an unshakable sense of both pure despair (at the narrative's amazing outcome) and admiration (at the film's well-made nature). While Romero's Dawn of the Dead remains a classic of zombie and horror cinema, then Zack Snyder's version does it justice and honours it properly. Despite what naysayers and sceptics might have thought, it defies lowered expectations. Well-crafted in every way, Dawn of the Dead is another unforgettable, nerve-tingling ride through the American Dream gone hideously, gruesomely wrong. A very important contributor to the survival of the Zombie sub-genre.

Televangelist: "Hell is overflowing, and Satan is sending his dead to us. Why? Because, you have sex out of wedlock, you kill unborn children, you have man on man relations, same sex marriage. How do you think your God will judge you? Well friends, now we know. When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."

Mike: "They're pretending to be alive...
Riley: Isn't that what we're doing? Pretending to be alive?"



It was a long wait. First, Night of the Living Dead; a black & white masterpiece, and basically the film that introduced the modern flesh-eating zombies. Then, Dawn of the Dead; to many the greatest zombie film ever made. Lastly, Day of the Dead; a very underrated, dark, and almost nihilistic film, which closed one era of the living dead for 20 years. The man behind these films is of course George A. Romero, the big and gentle man, who has given some real horror classics to the fans during his long career. Something happened during the '90s though, when the "golden era of gore" passed and horror films weren't a household name anymore. Romero's dream to get the fourth film of his zombie-saga of the ground was shattered many times during the years, until something remarkable and ironic happened, when the film industry moved to the '00s.

Suddenly horror films were bankable again, and when Danny Boyle made 28 Days Later in 2002, involving zombies (though they weren't the actual living dead, but infected with virus) and Zack Snyder remade Romero's own Dawn of the Dead in 2004, it looked like zombies had again access to Hollywood. Throw in Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, and you could say that the young filmmakers once influenced by Romero now did him a small favour by opening those doors again, and also let Romero in through the back door. So finally in 2005, George A. Romero's Land of the Dead arrived, and it was really rare to read how all the fans wanted to support Romero by going to see his new film; a thing that rarely happens. Was it worth it? Course it fucking was!

Land starts with a small montage during the opening credits, where it is briefly explained how zombies are spread out everywhere. Things are not looking well. After that we meet Riley (Simon Baker) and his dumb, but handy right hand man Charlie (Robert Joy), who are observing the zombies walking in the old gas-station. In this scene we'll meet the lead zombie Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), and also learn that the zombies have been evolved even more from the times of Day of the Dead and its most memorable zombie "Bub". Somehow they can even communicate at a primitive level now, and attack as a group (but, they don't run, since Romero's zombies - real zombies - just don't run).

When men get back, Cholo (John Leguizamo) arrives at the scene, in his usual cocky and wise-ass attitude, and it's clear that there is no real love between Riley and Cholo. There is some respect though, at least that's how I saw it. Their mission is to go deep into the town which is full of zombies, and get some supplies like food and medicine. With this they need help from the "Dead Reckoning" (the name of one of the working titles of the film at some point), the special armoured car full of guns and ammo. It's a deadly machine on wheels, but also makes them feel safer than they actually are. They have also learned that by constantly shooting fireworks in the sky, zombies tend to stare, and during that time it's safer to collect supplies from the abandoned stores.

This is still a small issue in the big picture, since now the world, and life, has changed drastically. Outside are the zombies, and inside, surrounded by river from both sides and all the bridges being blocked up, is the isolated city called "Fiddler's Green", populated by rich people only. Just outside the city is a slum, where the poor live. All this is surrounded with an electric fence, and of course, soldiers. The city is ruled by the cold and greedy Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), and Cholo has been helping him for quite some time now, with his goal of getting his own place in the city. When, after their latest meeting, Kaufman basically shatters Cholo's dreams, he becomes yearning for payback, which just might happen, since Cholo has a plan. In the meantime, Riley has found some trouble on his own from the local bar, and during those events he saves a woman called Slack (Asia Argento). Both are being locked up, but after Kaufman hears about Cholo's plans, he might need some help from Riley.

Land of the Dead shows all the elements where Romero is at his best. A tight and intense screenplay, social commentary, black humour, and of course the masterfully executed scenes of zombies and gore. It's quite clear that Kaufman and his "city government" have been written with the Bush government in mind, and the basic idea of the city being protected with soldiers and fences, and where the rich people are divided from the poor has its resemblances to the modern day U.S. and their recent fears of terrorism (Kaufman even says the memorable line: "We don't negotiate with terrorists"). Class differences between the rich and the poor are of course a global problem, so in the end the finger is probably pointing in many directions.

I'm still glad that these "political hints" don't hide the real heart of the film, which is of course the living dead themselves. These zombies are now taken to almost perfection, thanks to make-up artist Greg Nicotero - who started his career in Day of the Dead, as an assistant to the other living legend, Tom Savini. The limitations from the earlier Romero zombie films are almost completely gone, and with the help of CGI in some more difficult shots, the zombies look now more real, with more character. They are now part of the actors. There are plenty of variations with the zombies (something that was lacking from the earlier films due to the budget restrictions), and also a few new inventive "zombie gags". Of course, a certain amount of gore and guts is always needed, and fans won't be disappointed in that department.

Acting-wise (although films like this don't really depend on the acting), Simon Baker is convincing enough as the pragmatic and charismatic hero; Asia Argento - making one of her father's dreams (to see her in a Romero film) come true - is insanely eye-pleasing, as always, as the punk-looking, tough and mean Slack; Robert Joy is slightly retarded but tends to see things very clearly as Charlie, Riley's right-hand man; once the very embodiment of counter-culture, Dennis Hopper is obviously having a ball as the bigwig owner/operator/ruler of the high-class enclosed skyscraper society, Fiddler's Green. But the biggest treat in the film is John Leguizamo, completely believable as an in-it-for-himself social climber who's still admirable for his courage.

The handful of notable zombie cameos has been well noted, but Tom Savini (reprising his Dawn machete thug) is the primary showstopper, with his single shot assault. As for Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright - also making a childhood dream come true - I honestly forgot to look for them the first time, but then it was a joy to find them the second time.

Even though the film is set in Pittsburgh (where Romero usually shoots his films), Land of the Dead was shot in Ontario, Canada due to tax reasons. Cinematographer Miroslaw Baszak has done a great job, since the film happens mainly at night. Blue-green shades at night and deep shadows work great for the film, creating mood and atmosphere when zombies creep in the darkness. Blood is red as it should be, and with the help of CGI-images and good art direction, the locations feel real. Quite a memorable shot is when the zombies rise from the water, a real new classic among the zombie films. It was also nice to see a couple of homages towards Dawn of the Dead; namely a scene (where the flashlight reveals a bunch of zombies feasting) that has its resemblances to the gruesome basement scene in Dawn. These scenes might not be that special to the average viewer, but for true fans they're great to spot during the film.

There were, of course, a number of ignorant scoffers walking out of Land of the Dead, unable to reconcile the barrage of gore, left-wing sentiment, and lack of truly chilling horror. On the level of pure fright, this film is miles away from Night and Dawn. It does, however, measure up pretty well with Day, ranking somewhere in-between them in terms of overall quality. Land is not without its flaws, of course. The blatant 9/11 metaphors, analogies, and political observations will surely alienate a portion of the audience, but agree or disagree with Romero's views, all should unite on the notion that these zombies are freakin' awesome.

In my heart, I loved Land of the Dead. Not to piss off the masses but the Dawn of the Dead remake was a scarier film, as was 28 Days Later, but this is a damned solid zombie flick and a very good horror film. While not a great one, it shows that Romero still has it. This rating of mine isn't exactly an 8 (more like a 7.5) but I like this film a lot, and I don't find it a disappointment as much as a new beginning. This is one that might be more fun the more you see it and the more you warm up to this world, but on an initial viewing, I have to say I was immensely happy to see Romero back where he belongs. It's nice to see someone who respects the genre, the fans, and the general audience enough to make a serious film that doesn't use cheap tricks, fancy editing, or hip actors to create a compelling and scary film. Welcome back Mr. Romero, you were deeply missed.

Kaufman: "In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word "trouble" loses much of its meaning."

The horror classic of horror classics. I'm one of the few, privileged people who can say they watched it in the theater. It was at a special screening on a horror film festival I went to a couple of years ago and I can honestly say it was one of the film experiences of my life.

The majority of the 'general' western audiences knows Lady Snowblood as one of the most significant inspirations for Quentin Tarantino (and Uma Thurman) in the creation of the Kill Bill films and the character of The Bride itself. In one scene in particular from Vol. 1 - the "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves" chapter - this is more than obvious. Anyway, I won't mention Kill Bill and Tarantino again, I promess. Lady Snowblood, although made more than 30 years ago, is a masterpiece in its own right.



This incredibly stylish film (check out all the shots that mix blood on white, whether snow or kimono) is a little known entry in the niche of female samurai films. The protagonist is a woman and a deadly one at that. Of course, she is stunningly beautiful, just in case one is not entirely captivated by her sword-wielding skills. With a great story, well-done action sequences, and talented acting, the entertainment value of Lady Snowblood could not be ruined even by the awfully cheesy 1970s Western music.

For those familiarized with Japanese history, the year is Meiji 6, and the country reels after the dissolution of the 300 year old Tokugawa shogunate. The empire is undergoing the first stages of militarization, which involves the first ever compulsory draft. Some unscrupulous shady characters run a "get out of the draft" scam, which involves spreading rumors that people dressed in white are government secret agents. The ruffians brutally murder a teacher on his way to the village where he is to work (he wore white), dispatch his son, and rape his wife. The wife manages to take revenge on one of the attackers but is arrested and thrown in jail before she could finish her task. In jail, she seduces every guard in sight in order to bear a child to complete her vengeance. This "child of the netherworld" is Yuki, Lady Snowblood (Meiko Kaji), and the film is the story of her cold revenge that takes place twenty years later.

The film is suffused with impressive imagery, and the narrative has several unexpected twists and turns. All for the better, as it keeps the story interesting beyond the visual candy, of which there is plenty. The blood and gore are also well-done, even if blood tends to spurt as if from a well-shaken Coke can. Most definitely a tad above the other (more famous) swordplay films, Lady Snowblood is a sight to behold. There's also a sequel, Love Song of Vengeance, which is not as good, but for Toshiya Fujita and Meiko Kaji fans, a must-see nevertheless.

Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece. A film of a sublime beauty, emotional power and honesty like no one can do anymore.

Only those who saw The Princess Bride as children can truly understand its real magic and meaning. Those who watched it later, in a time when their innocence and naiveness was gone, won't be able to.

WARNING: this review will contain a study of the film's plot. Try not to read it if you haven't seen it.

"There are more police on the street tonight than whores."

M is no doubt the most critical film made by the "Master of Darkness" Fritz Lang. Though cinema enthusiasts have acknowledged Lang's previous film, the Sci-Fi masterpiece Metropolis as the film that was far too many years ahead of its time, M stands on its own terms as the film that pushed the boundaries of time even further. It is mind-gobblingly astounding to think even today that an idea like M was conceived in the year 1931, when films with sound were only four years old.



It's a film that not only impressed audiences, it changed the way films were made and paved the way for many of the principles of modern cinema. For instance, M was the film where the concept of "Leitmotif" was introduced in films' scores. Leitmotif (for those who are unfamiliar) is a term used to define a recurring musical theme that is associated with a certain person or instance during the course of the film. Another important factor that M inspired is the use of traditional German Expressionist cinematography combined with realistic set design (which was uncommon to prior Expressionist cinema). Although M was released towards the twilight of Kammerspiel, it still remains a significant work of Expressionist cinema. It is widely regarded as the first of the films to inspire the American Film Noir movement. M was also one of the first films to use the techniques of cross-cutting between two locations, establishing shots of empty building interiors and montage sequences.

Berlin 1930s, the city is dwelling in fear from the recent emergence of a mysterious serial killer. Known only as the "Child Murderer," he is accused for the disappearance and murder of several children. Mrs. Beckmann (Ellen Widmann) is eagerly awaiting the return of her daughter Elsie (Inge Landgut) from school. In the meantime, Elsie is approached by a shadowy figure of a man who befriends her and buys her a balloon toy from a blind man. He is whistling to the tune of "The Hall of the Mountain King." The face of the man is not revealed. Mrs. Beckmann begins to panic and eventually leaves to look for Elsie. Unfortunately for her, she becomes the latest victim of the Child Murderer.

Following the latest strike of the murderer, the police increase the intensity of patrol all around Berlin and initiate a large-scale manhunt for the mysterious killer. Then one morning, the local newspapers receive a hand-written letter from the Child Murderer himself declaring his triumphant endeavours. Even with the aid of modern day criminology, finger-print matching and hand-writing analysis, the police are still unable to apprehend the criminal but they manage to confirm the fact that the person responsible is mentally ill. Simultaneously, the Killer is revealed to the audience to be Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre). Inspector Karl Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) initiates intense police raids all around the city and targets usual underworld spots. This event leads to disorientation among the citizens and a subsequent downfall in the underworld's business.

It's not long before the major representative heads of the various underworld gangs gather at a secret meeting to contemplate on the current issues of police action. More than the downfall in business, they feel disgusted for the fact that the police are searching for a psychotic murderer of children among their circles. They eventually decide that they must apprehend the deadly criminal themselves and put an end to his activities before any further damage is done to their reputation and to their business. They also form an alliance with the beggars union to keep a discreet watch over the children of the city against any suspicious individuals.

The race for the search of the Killer begins and the various underworld criminals scan through the city carefully examining suspicious personalities as the vast network of beggars keep a watch over the children. Temptation takes over Beckert and he lures another little girl into his web. But he makes the mistake of whistling his trademark tune as he passes by the same blind balloon salesman from Elsie's murder. The blind man instantly recognizes the tune and alerts a criminal who is keeping a watch nearby. The criminal follows Beckert and the little girl to a candy store and hides behind the trash cans. He sees that Beckert is carrying a pocket-knife and knowing he can't take him down on his own comes up with an idea. He writes the letter "M" on the palm of his hand with a white chalk and manages to imprint it onto the shoulder of the killer's coat by pretending to bump into him.

The word is spread. Every member of the criminal fraternity is notified of the identification mark on the criminal's shoulder and they proceed to follow him. Beckert discovers the branding on his shoulder from the mirror on a store entrance and immediately knows he's being tailed. He panics and leaves the child to run for his own safety. He ends up on a street and is found cornered in an office complex. Just then, the employees of the offices are dismissed and as they proceed to exit the premises, Beckert uses the crowd to his advantage to escape to the topmost floor and hide in the attic.

After the premises are closed, the criminals decide to take him out on their own as they storm the building complex from top to bottom in dozens. He is eventually discovered to be behind a locked door and as they plan to flush him out, one of the security guards activates the alarm and alerts the nearby police station. The criminals manage to leave the complex with the killer but one of them, Franz, is left behind, eventually to be arrested by the police. He reveals to Inspector Lohmann that they had taken Beckert to an abandoned warehouse to put him to an end.

As Franz had described, the criminal mob takes Beckert to an abandoned warehouse to put him on a "kangaroo" trial. Beckert is provided with a lawyer whose statements are eventually overruled and following a tear-filled confessional monologue by Beckert, it is decided that he will be killed. Just before they're about to do the deed, the police storm in and arrest Beckert, leaving the fate of the "Child Murderer" to an ambiguous ending.

The brilliance of the M lies in the execution of Fritz Lang's vision. The dark establishing shots, a mood of suspense and fear, the clear absence of a protagonist and the sheer excitement of the chase to the end are all part of what makes this film Lang's Magnum Opus. It is amazing how Lang fills the absence of a well-defined protagonist with the use of three separate segments of the society coming together in collaboration. The alliance formed between the criminals and beggars is both fascinating and impressive as an original idea. The portrayal of these usually negative characters as positive entities that keep a vigil over the city's children is simply unheard of and unbelievably fascinating even today.

Another important factor contributing to the film's greatness is the standard of acting excellence set by Peter Lorre in his role as Hans Beckert. His boyish appearance and fearful eyes manage to strike terror and at the same time bring out a sense of sympathy towards the character. When you see Lorre expressing his helplessness to the "demons" that haunt him, you get a crystal clear idea of what depths of darkness his character had endured. He is simply at his best in his monologue at the Kangaroo trial, where he goes from vengeful to helpless to devilish by just the use of his facial expression. This performance is simply one of the greatest in the history of world cinema.

Lorre's incredible run as Beckert is well supported by Otto Wernicke in his role as Inspector Karl Lohmann. Portraying an old, fat, determined police inspector, Wernicke delivers an assuring figure to the audience as if to say that as long as he«s on the case, the Child Murderer will not be able to get away from justice. He also provides much of the comic relief to the film.

Films like M are timeless due to the fact that they were conceived from the vision of a master who aimed to inspire and not just entertain. The world Lang shot here is essentially the same one we live in today. Criminals, cops, trusting children, mothers, serial killers... they all still exist. And they probably always will. If somebody were to take all the main elements of M and reassembled it in a contemporary context, it would still thrill everyone as it did in 1931. That has to be what genius really means.

"Just you wait, it won't be long. The man in black will soon be here. With his cleaver's blade so true. He'll make mincemeat out of YOU!"

"We shall build a tower that will reach to the stars!" Having conceived Babel, yet unable to build it themselves, they had thousands to build it for them. But those who toiled knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned. And the minds that planned the Tower of Babel cared nothing for the workers who built it. The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many - Babel! Babel! Babel! - Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart."



The city of Metropolis is divided into the brain and the hands. While the city's elite sit in the lap of luxury, the workers tend to the machinery for ten hours before retreating to their underground city "where they belong". The one thing that keeps them from revolting is the promise of a coming "mediator", a Messianic figure who will bring the hands and the brain together. The prophetic woman (Brigitte Helm) behind the legend believes the mediator to be Freder Frederson (Gustav Fröhlich), the son of the city's leader, who thanks to a deft switch with one of the workers, stumbles upon the meeting in the catacombs. Meanwhile, his father (Alfred Abel) is in cahoots with a mad scientist (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to create a life-like Machine Man to undermine the woman's message. The Machine manages to incite a riot, which endangers the worker's children. And who is there to save the day? Freder Frederson.

When time-travel finally does become possible ('cause it will), one of the first orders of business should be to go to 1927 Germany and grab a completed print of Metropolis. Due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, over a quarter of the film is lost and gone forever. So instead of Fritz Lang's uncut 153-minute original version, what we're left with is most of it and title cards that explain what we're missing. It's a damn shame too, because we seem to be missing a lot of good stuff, including an entire trip to the entertainment district by the worker who's switched places with Freder.

There aren't many films that could survive the loss of that much footage and still be a viable experience, it's just too much to overcome, but Metropolis manages somehow. As it now stands, the film is nothing short of amazing and we can only imagine how much better it was in its entirety. Really, with the amount of space here we can only scratch the surface. Lang's Metropolis is thrilling in every sense of the word. This is the standard on which all Science Fiction should be judged, and serves as the template for many a Sci-Fi world-view.

Apparently, Adolf Hitler considered this his favourite film, and while we would normally discard such information, I think it's worth exploring for a minute. In the early scenes we see the workers shuffling to and from work en masse like comatose zombies. For a while I thought they actually had undergone some sort of lobotomy, but they've just been so marginalized by the city's leaders that this appears to be the most effective way to get through the day. There's a certain sense of fear about them. Only when the Machine starts to appeal to their sense of justice do they come alive, becoming a raving mob that has little regard for the consequences of their actions. Is that drastic effect on a large group of people what appealed to Hitler so much? Maybe, although the Machine does get hers in the end. Is it the themes of a drastic class structure? Or is it simply the erotic dancer? Hard to say, really.

Throughout its duration, the film is so visually striking that it is always able to captivate the viewer. The city itself is amazingly well realized. Few visions of the future have been as original or as truly awesome as is that of Metropolis. In fact, the city is perhaps the film's most interesting character and is the most prominent element in each scene, overwhelming the actors, the narrative, and everything else with its incredible presence. Every corner of the city is a marvel, from its wild spires and sumptuous gardens to its dismal underground corridors, hellish machinery, and wretched tenements. Metropolis is a place like no other.

Brigitte Helm has the difficult dual role of Maria, the prophetic woman, and her Machine double. Essentially, she has to play polar opposites, as Maria is a paradigm of virtue, almost a Mother Theresa character, and the Machine is a wild, wicked troublemaker who spends her spare time seducing the men of Metropolis as an erotic dancer. Helm was nearly killed several times while shooting, once by a fall and another by the fact that one particular scene - a bonfire - was real. She was so rattled by her experience working with Lang that she thereafter refused to make another film with him.

Every element and image in Metropolis is brought to the film because of Lang's insistence on no less then absolute perfection. He was known as a sometimes cruel taskmaster, working his cast and crew like a dictator. He cast something like 37,000 extras (1500 of them for the Tower of Babel sequence alone) and worked them from morning till night. The water which covered the set for the climactic flood was ice cold. Many of the extras were soaked through from morning till night. Metropolis was made 79 years ago and it's one of the
most expensive films ever made. By today's standards, adjusting for inflation, Metropolis' budget would be around $200 million - same as Titanic and Spider-Man 2 - which would put in the top 10. Again, it was made 79 years ago.

I could go on and on... Metropolis - like all great films - invites lengthy discussions. It can be seen in at least a hundred different ways, as a foreshadowing of fascism or the tyranny of communism or just capitalism boiling over. But when you get down to it the best way to view Metropolis is not as a film to pick apart but simply as a film of its time. Lang created the story of a world gone mad while the world around him was going mad.

Classic? A film that had to be done in BW because there wasn't enough money, and still won pretty much every award it could around the world. There's no need to talk about the story or the 'substance', 'cause it's pretty much unexistent. Just an ordinary day in the life of two clerks. And still, brilliant. I still say Chasing Amy is Smith's most accomplished work, but Clerks will always be Clerks...

A future European classic. Appealing and persuasive picture of European integration and globalization, in which national and cultural differences lose relevance when human beings find themselves together. A fun and lovable, cozy mess of a film. Not to mention, set in one of my favourite places in the world: Barcelona.

José Mirano: "Why a Chinese girl? Do you know?
Laure: René said that he'd seen Maggie in a film and it seemed self-evident.
José Mirano: But why? Come on... I saw "Les Vampires" 30 years ago at the Cinémathèque. Irma Vep is Paris. She's the Paris underworld. She's working-class Paris. She's Arletty! Irma Vep is street-thugs and slums! "Les Vampires" isn't Fu Manchu, right?
Laure: I don't know. I've seen Maggie in the rushes. She has a nice body. She's graceful.
José Mirano: That's totally besides the point! I'm sure she's great. I saw her in that Jack Chan movie... what was the title? What a piece of crap! She was fine, but she's not Irma Vep!"



- WARNING: the following review will contain spoilers.

Bizarre and beautiful, Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep is a take on the madness inherent to independent filmmaking. It rivals Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion as the most realistic depiction of the innumerable trials and tribulations that accompany the creation of a new film. It was also Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung's first big foray into the international market - and she's luminously erotic here: reed-thin, encased in a shiny black latex catsuit, and possessed of a by then-unheard command of the English language.

Cheung, playing herself, is called to Paris by the fictional René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a misfortuned, confused director with the strange idea of remaking Louis Feuillade's masterpiece of French silent cinema, the fantasy serial Les Vampires. Having seen Cheung in Johnny To's The Heroic Trio, of all things, he decides then and there that she is perfect for the part of Irma Vep, the mysterious leader of a group of high-profile cat burglars in turn-of-the-century Paris. Arriving in the City of Lights, the easygoing, enthusiastic actress finds herself embroiled in a series of behind-the-scenes dramas: costume designer Zoé (Nathalie Richard) is infatuated with her; the director is inscrutable and nearing emotional collapse; and the production, such as it is, is behind schedule and rapidly degenerating. Entranced by her part, Cheung goes along with the barely controlled lunacy around her, briefly succumbing to it in a fit of late-night hotel thievery, and gives the production her all, though it's not long before things disintegrate entirely.

What does it mean, in fact, to try to remake Les vampires 80 years later? For every character in Irma Vep, both male and female - virtually all of them part of the workaholic atmosphere of a film shoot, and thereby part of the same capitalist treadmill affecting most of us - it has something to do with libido and the sexual fantasies unleashed by that aggressive energy. Fantasies all set in motion by Maggie Cheung.

This daisy chain of selfish desire and leering insinuation - in which no one listens to anyone else, or listens only in order to advance his or her position or to betray someone later - courses through the film like an electrical current, accumulating more bad vibes and tarnishing everyone but Cheung. Assayas records this feverish process in compulsive, twitchy camera movements as restless and neurotic as the characters, refusing to distance himself stylistically from this behaviour, allowing it to turn his attention and ours as relentlessly as a series of tidal waves. In this context, where no one is fully in control but everyone is driven, evil in an everyday environment is no longer represented by Irma Vep and her gang but by the film crew's thwarted energies and desires and their effects, creeping inexorably into one social situation after another.

Pervading the shoot is the poisonous atmosphere of alienated labour. Vidal himself, temperamental and nervous as only Léaud can make him, is regarded by the crew as a director who used to make good films and is now a basket case, a crumpled patriarch; Zoé - the character we tend to identify with the most - trades loads of ugly back-biting with the production supervisor (Dominique Faysse); and one of the actors bitterly complains about everyone else, recalling the professionalism of a Japanese crew he once worked with. Assayas is swimming in an atheistic world where neither art nor business can function as presiding deity, so sexual desire and aggrieved irritation take over by default. Vidal's erotic fixation on Cheung is apparently the only justification for the film, and even that's eliminated when another director of Vidal's generation (Lou Castel) - a friend of his, in fact - takes over and decides to replace Cheung with a French actress.

The most relevant criticism to Irma Vep is one usually associated with any film about filmmaking (Fassbinder's Beware of the Holy Whore, Godard's Contempt, Wim Wenders' The State of Things). Its subject isn't cinema but the body, its material isn't the image but the actor, its problem isn't representation but power. But because those three films no longer figure in the vocabularies of most film critics - who seem to think that Truffaut's Day for Night is the first and last word on the subject - it's the patriarchal Truffaut film that's invariably invoked to explain what Irma Vep is like. True, both are comedies about a film in production, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. To call Irma Vep a Day for Night of the '90s is to do it a gross injustice: for all the charm and bounce of Truffaut's film, it has next to nothing to say about the contemporary world.

I feel more comfortable using Godard, Wenders, and Fassbinder as points of comparison to Irma Vep because the film in some ways suggests a multinational, bilingual companion piece to their works. What mainly interests Assayas is the way news and rumours circulate, not the precise truth of the allegations people make about one another. This is why the world of Irma Vep is essentially atheistic; the truth is unknowable, and process is everything.

A Chinese star who grew up in England (which accounts for her perfect British-accented English, which usually surprises people) and who's appeared in about 80 films since 1984, Cheung is exceptionally gifted when she's doing comedy and pantomime. She gets a few chances at both here, but since she's playing a version of herself, this isn't an ideal showcase for her acting, though it does rely on her poise and star power. Indeed, Assayas is plainly so smitten with her himself that she can function here only as an idealized figure. At most she legitimizes the desire of others, but as a rule she seems to exist independently of the forces that plague everyone else - the only real pro in sight, uncontaminated by the projections of others.

But Maggie is still marvellous here, allowed to be herself and put her own personality into the film, improvising and reacting with genuine surprise and incomprehension to the insanity that ensues around her (she didn't speak more than half a dozens words in French at the time). The film consequently benefits from her exotic beauty and freshness, creating exactly the right impression of innocence that Assayas was striving to achieve. The film was in many ways (if not most) a love-letter to Maggie Cheung (the two would get married after Irma Vep, divorced in 2001, and work together again three years later in Clean) and there is nothing at all wrong with that.

Although Irma Vep takes an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the French film industry, it's quite critical of how it is funded, how it looks upon its cinematic legacy and how it is rife with complacency, seriousness, self-importance, petty in-fighting and jealousies that suffocate any real creativity. It's no coincidence that Vidal is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, the leading star for many of the French New Wave directors, who is representative of the crisis French cinema faced ten years ago. Here Assayas, following in the steps of the Nouvelle Vague directors by moving from being a film critic for Les Cahiers du Cinéma to making films himself, takes that journalistic approach, opens up the workings of the French film industry and exposes it to the world.

As critic turned filmmaker however, it was not sufficient for Assayas to merely criticise and expose the French film industry to ridicule - he needed to lead the way forward and show what could be done. As such, Irma Vep is something of a statement of intent, a mission statement and a manifesto by Assayas not only on the need for French cinema to incorporate newness and diversity - looking over, for example, to Hong Kong cinema and seeing what the insular French film industry can learn from its approach as opposed to the Hollywood model of filmmaking - but also showing through the film-within-the-film and in his incorporation of "real-world" characters and behaviour, exactly how to do it. Irma Vep flows beautifully in this way with an unselfconscious technique that allows the backs of people's heads to intrude on the compositions in the frame, giving the film a free and fluid ability to more authentically capture the situation it is depicting, imbuing the film with a wonderful freshness and lightness of touch.

In an interesting paradox, though Irma Vep invites and suggests many cinematic cross-references, its subject isn't "cinema" but cinema as a battleground, a treacherous terrain where power struggles are constantly waged. A few of these struggles are between business and art, but most of them are parodies of those between art-making and business, carried out on their fringes. They're struggles, in other words, about the way most of us live - unable to control the traffic of art or business, stranded on the margins of both, and doing whatever we can, usually to one another.

Irma Vep recalls the glory days of the French New Wave in its camera-work and editing, which jump between fluid tracking shots and jerky, hand-held episodes. Assayas' story smacks of improvisational techniques in which the players are wound up and let loose to run on about nothing much in particular. Irma Vep ends up a knowing, and fairly lucid, portrait of the filmmaking experience, that I can't really explain why I love so much. One hilarious scene has Cheung being interviewed by a young French reporter who repeatedly belittles his nation's cinematic prowess, prattling on and on about how audiences are far more interested in the "ballet of ultra-violence" of John Woo and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cheung, hard-pressed to get a word in edgewise, refutes his claims, and the scene is one of the most telling moments in modern French films. And she didn't even speak French.

"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.

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."

''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.

"For every shadow, no matter how deep, is threatened by morning light."

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is dozens of things, but primarily it's a film about love. Countless films address the same topic, or use it as a framework to tell a story, but few are as passionate and insistent in their focus. This isn't the superficial love of pop songs; it's not cynical manipulation. It's a naked, fearless film about Love and Forever, with strident capital letters, about a fierce, time-defying love that connects one couple through a thousand years of history. It's also a poignant mediation on how missed chances can echo forever. It's a bold artistic statement from a director who has never let a limited budget stand in his way. It might not always make perfect sense, but it's one of the best films I've ever seen.



Five hundred years ago, a conquistador named Tomas (Hugh Jackman) vows to the Spanish Queen Isabella (Rachel Weisz) that he will travel to Central America and find the Tree of Life so that they can live together forever. In the present day, a neuroscientist named Tommy Creo (Jackman) is frantically trying to find a cure for cancer to in time to save his wife Izzy (Weisz), who is dying of a brain tumour while attempting to finish a novel about the conquistador and his queen. In his desperation, Tommy turns to some bark from an "old growth" Central American tree, with surprising results. Five hundred years in the future, Tommy floats through space in a sphere containing a gigantic tree, travelling toward a distant nebula as the events of the past thousand years haunt him. According to the film, the Mayans believed that this nebula was their underworld; its location had helped Tomas find the Tree of Life; now Tommy is travelling there so he can be with Izzy forever. After 1000 years, Tommy has learned patience; he does Tae Bo in front of a blanket of stars, and tattoo rings on his skin to remind him of how long he's waited, and how he can wait a little while longer.

Some of the Eastern elements of future-Tommy's world are poorly integrated, and this prompted an involuntary guffaw when future-Tommy and past-Tomas' stories connect in an unexpected way. I wish the sap from the Tree of Life didn't look like Elmer's Glue. I wish Aronofsky hadn't gone with the cheap, artificial tactic of suspense-building music just before the beautiful scene on the roof in the snow. There are significant problems with the past segments of the film: Weisz seemed a little lost as the Queen, forced, as she is, to shoulder a little too much iconographic burden, and the segment lacks the kind of circular resolution that the other segments have. The love between Queen Isabella and Tomas the Conquistador would more properly be called worship, which is part of love but not all. What's missing is tenderness, which develops during the present-day segments. Whatever problems the film might have are all but forgiven here. Their scenes together are almost unbearably tender; it's as if we're intruding on private moments between them. Aronofsky's camera caresses Weisz; his adoration for her is palpable and catching. If she didn't seem up to the earlier segments, she blossoms here. And Jackman shines as well.

If Aronofsky owes a lot to other films, most obviously Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the specific vision and scope are all his. Many of the amazing special effects were created not via CGI, which Aronofsky felt (rightly) would ruin the film's timelessness, but via micro-photography of chemical reactions in petrie dishes. That's just brilliant: first, because the resulting effects have a vivid three-dimensionality that CGI effects often lack, and second, because the very method of creating the effects ties in with the themes of the film. Aronofsky's limited budget, cut in half after an earlier attempt starring Brad Pitt fell through, is a blessing in other ways. The exteriors are limited, forcing creative transitions between times and places.

I feel like, unlike so many films, The Fountain rewards repeat viewings; there are elements here, thought out in incredible detail, that I missed the first time but I picked up on when I saw it again the next morning. I liked how even in the cold laboratory settings of the present-day segments, Tommy walks through pools of warm, golden light, tying together the torchlight of the past and the nebular light of the future. At first it seemed out of place, but made sense when I thought about it as future-Tommy working through his memories. I liked how the same triangular pattern of the star system with the nebula in the centre kept popping up in the set decoration and shot framings, and also how the starburst pattern from Tomas' shrine to his queen kept showing up in much the same ways. But most of all, I loved how it made me want to believe in forever. There's not a trace of cynicism here, just incredibly honest and emotional filmmaking that's not afraid to slip up in its pursuit of something beautiful, yet flawed. It's cinematic poetry in an age when poetry is considered quaint. It's the kind of film that makes me want to get up in the morning.

"Together we will live forever."

This is probably the most perfect and representative portray of modern life ever done in the form of film! The cinematography is a little unusual... The narrative is divided in two parts and there are some unusual and astonishing camera techniques that I admit I had never seen in a film before! Obviously, being a Wai Wong film, the main subjects are love, art and human connections...

To describe Caché is almost as difficult as watching and understanding the film itself. But the first thing to keep in mind is that Michael Haneke isn't exacly an entertainer. I knew that since La Pianiste, one of the most painfully depressing films I've seen to date, but perhaps most didn't. That must be the reason why so many people (who probably only watched it because of all the 'buzz' around it, of all the awards in Cannes) didn't quite get the brilliance of this film. That's why most of the comments I saw here, or the 3 star rating for that matter, doesn't surprise me at all. Those same people's only motivation watching it was to find out the 'whodunnit', who was the stalker, when the whole point of the film wasn't about the tapes! Of course Haneke creates that illusion, the illusion that the voyeur is the villain, the one terrorizing the couple. Is filming the outside of a house terror? Or did Georges Laurent saw in those tapes what he wanted to? What his repressed and hidden guilt told him to? Basically what Haneke does is to play with our minds, only giving us what he wants to. He is a master of mental manipulation...



So, Caché isn't something pre-programmed. It's what we see in it. Some saw a psychological thriller that desappointed them at the end, I saw a social critique, a uniquely/brilliantly shot, written and acted piece of cinema about guilt, paranoia, alienation, and about the impossibility of hidding from our past doings and our conscience. A film way ahead of its time!

Tied with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring as my favourite Kim Ki-duk film. A quiet, mysterious, sporadically violent tale of love on the run that gradually turns into something spooky, poetic and ultimately sublime. So lyrical in its wordlessness that it's practically a dance piece. The kind of film that just doesn't belong to this Universe.

Well, first of all I must say that I had been 'after' this film for quite a long time now. I finally found a copy of it and, to my great satisfaction, it was worth every single penny!

I have to admit though, at first I never thought I'd enjoy it this much. Not because of the couple of negative, pseudo-intellectual reviews I had the chance to read or the misleading (and insulting) 7.2 avarage rating on IMDb, or even worse, the 44% on RT, but simply because the first time I saw the film's poster (especially the 'american' one), it seemed a little too typical and cheesy to my taste. I mean, the girl in a long red dress, the guy in a black suit. Both standing below the rain... A little too 50's romance-like. All I can say is that my first impression was 100% far from reality.



Obviously, the romance element is there, there's no denying that. But, unlike what the poster photo may suggest, it has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of dramatic approach of Romance (and Love) that we're more than used to see. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's less capable of making you cry, it just makes you laugh as hard. I'd describe it more like an allegory about love, a look at its nature itself.

The characters (Cotillard's and and Canet's) are just so deliciously mean to each other and unseparable at the same - wether when they're 10, 18 or 30 - while playing their 'game' (Jeux d'enfants means 'children's game', not 'love me if you dare') that the chemistry between the two is almost contagious! If there is a perfect debut, then Yann Samuell did it. I can only regret the fact that he accepted to direct the oh-so-insulting remake of My Sassy Girl. I hope it's just a mistake from an apparently talented filmmaker. Also, an extra special mention to the Soundtrack. Just... Mesmerizing! Piaf's "La Vie en Rose" will stick in your ears for weeks...

Again, Jeux d'enfants is anything but typical. In fact, I don't think there's a single moment of ordinarity or predictability in it. Now, that can work both ways. It can be a reason itself for some people wanting to watch it and assuming they'll love it and then - on the totally opposite side - it can also be a hint to a totally different 'specimen' of people, to just stay away from it. Those people, to which the closer a film comes to reproducing reality, the better or who strongly believe that a story always has to make 'sense', that characters' motivations and feelings always have to be clear was water and that normally feel too 'unconfortable' with the idea of not knowing what's going to happen next, leaving no room to their minds to work, those people will never enjoy and understand the brilliance and beauty of Jeux d'enfants.

I won't lengthen myself in the discussion of Realism vs. Expressionism (it would take much more than just a couple of hundred words) but let's just say that if you consider yourself a 'member' of that second group of people, who see Cinema as a numer of rules to follow, than you should probably rate this one as 'Not Interested'. Otherwise, if you're remotely imaginative and open-minded and like to be constantly suprised in the course of watching a film, then there's absolutely no chance you won't fall in love with Jeux d'enfants!

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.



There are no shades of grey in Kim Ki-duk's world, it's a black and white world of good and evil, although the two extremes are often difficult to separate. Films like The Isle and Bad Guy, in his early career, were violent and disturbing works, shocking and often sordid psycho-sexual melodramas.

The genius of this man doesn't lie there, but in the fact that he would, just a couple of years after that, shock and suprise everyone who called him a misogynist, by making two of the most poetic and visually arresting films of the 21st century: the very restrained and silent Buddhist fable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and then, a year later, the phantasmal and melancholy love story 3-Iron. There was violence in these films too but that remained mostly in background and was always shown in an oblique and artistically mature manner. Samaria - Silver Bear winner at the '04 Berlin Film Festival - continues the same tradition of those two films, although it somehow adds a certain amount of his early career's rawness. It's a film that moves and affects you one minute, only to utterly shock you the next.

As embodied in the child Buddhist monk in Spring..., for Kim even innocence holds innate the seeds of corruption. In Samaria, the innocence is that of two young beautiful schoolgirls, Yeo-jin and Jae-young. In order to save money to escape to Europe, the two best friends resort to prostitution, luring clients on the internet who are in no doubt about their underage status. Similarly to Spring..., the film is divided into three distinct segments:

The first, "Vasumitra", starts with one of girls reciting the mythical story of an Indian prostitute of the same name, whose clients turned devout Buddhist after having sex with her. The film then goes on to make a violent mockery of this naive and sentimental belief in the nurturing and spiritual potential of sexuality, as we see Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) 'managing' the 'transactions', procuring the clients and keeping look-out for police while Jae-young (Min-jeong Seo) has sex with her middle-age clients in downtown motels. The events come to tragic conclusion when Jae-young jumps off from a window and dies following a surprise police raid.

In the second part, "Samaria", which gives the film its title - essentially a metaphor, a bizarre, yet brilliant perversion of the Christian myth of "the good Samaritan" - Yeo-jin decides to atone for her sins, to make-up for what has happened to her friend and undo the harm that has been done. She goes back through each one of the clients, sleeping with them and paying them back the money they had been saving. The courage of her gesture moves these men to reconsider the evil of their actions, hence the Samaritan metaphor. The situation gets complex when the girl's father, a police detective who is still recovering from his wife's death, comes to know about the sordid degradation that his daughter is subjecting herself to. He becomes obsessed and starts stalking the men and finally murders one of them in a typically brutal manner.

Finally, the third - and most beautiful - segment, "Sonata", tries to tie everything together. The father and daughter go on an idyllic vacation through the countryside to visit her mother's grave, and try to confront their own inner demons without telling each other anything. The film ends bafflingly when the father, after giving his daughter preliminary driving lessons, leaves her alone and surrenders himself to the police. But only after he has seen his daughter crying silently in the night, and thus making sure of her essential virtuousness.

The film itself, as you can gather from the above, works not so much on a realistic and plausibility level but more in a metaphoric and thought provoking way, even though the film itself uses realism in its storytelling to convey unfolding events. The camera mainly stays handheld, which gives the film an intensity and the feel that you are never quite sure what will happen next, which is especially evident during the middle part of the film where we begin to follow the father. The film also uses natural sound which, along with Kim's usually gorgeous cinematography, makes it another feast for the eyes.

The acting is also exceptional, not least by the father, played by Eol Lee, whose pain we can feel just by his facial expression throughout. Starting out as the loving single parent, his journey takes him through the darkest days of parenthood as he watches his daughter grow up in the most alarming of ways. The two girls also put in strong performances, especially Ji-min Kwak, the "samaritan girl". Given more speaking opportunities that we would normally expect in a Kim Ki-duk film (in 3-Iron for example, neither of the main characters actually speaks) it is refreshing to see that he changes around this formula and is not typecast by the unique skill he has for telling a story in images alone.

Again, Kim Ki-duk (who's a Catholic himself) tries to overlap Buddhist teaching with Catholic dogma and the two completely fail to blend, giving out contradictory messages. Jae-young identifies with an Indian holy prostitute who brings men closer to God by having sex with them. Yeo-jin, on the other hand, likes to hear her father's stories of saints and miracles and comes to believe that her actions by sleeping with the men will redeem the wrongs that have been done. There are few directors who so vigorously cling to certain themes and explore them through different situations as Kim does in his films.

Samaria has both a depressing and pessimistic feeling towards human nature and this refreshing sense of hope, combined with an astute eye for social detail (13 and 14 year-old girls having sex like they're adults) and aesthetic composition. This is one of the most profoundly moving and strangely transcendent tales of guilt, original sin and innocence lost in recent cinema. In one of its many metaphoric images of intruded-upon (and violated) landscape, in the film's final shot, the errant sight of a wobbling, out of control car struggling to chase a sports utility vehicle through a flooded gravel road in the rural countryside, doggedly navigating the inhospitable terrain using an innate compass that elusively, but transfixedly, points home. A beautiful, beautiful film.

The best love story ever? Maybe...

First of all to compare Babel with Paul Haggis's hyper overated Crash is not only absurd, it's insulting! It's insulting for two geniuses (Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), who wrote and directed, respectively, a film about Humanity and it's endless complexity (and sometimes stupidity) with an incalculablely relevant message and no boundaries whatsoever (except for some people who still find it 'hard' to watch and enjoy a non-english language film). Insulting also to it's phenomenal cast. From Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi, both so incrediblely powerful and brilliant (I still can't help but laughing when I think of a certain pseudo actress who won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe instead of this two geniunely hearted acresses), to Gael Garcia Bernal's strangely disturbing character and Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, who needed a Franco-Mexican production to provide us his best performance of this decade.

Six years, three mastepieces. Inarritu is a masterful filmmaker. Unique and already unmistakable in his way of capturing essence and telling a story, which clearly can be inaccessible for some people. The multiple scenarios and supposedly unlinked characters, that comes back from the early days of Amores Perros are already a trademark of his own, and one of the reasons why I personally consider him one of the most gifted filmmakers of our short century. One thing I know, and no one will ever change: Babel is one of those films that I know I'll remember in years and decades to come.

BEST FILM Of 2006! Period.

After reading a couple of reviews of some of some Flixster friends of mine and some other 'strangers' (who probably only wrote them because of The Departed) I just had to write one myself! First of all, you can't compare both films, period! It's the same thing as comparing American and Asian Cinema, which doesn't make any sense. That's a mistake that lots of people are making. American Cinema tends to be more facilitated, with more easy and accessible material, less complex. In fact, I read here more than once that certain people were confused. Guess what? That was the point! There lies the main difference between both films, I think.



I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm no fool. I know perfectly that The Departed, cinematographically speaking, is as good, perhaps even better than Infernal Affairs. Pretty much perfect in almost every aspect. The acting is flawless, the direction is, as Scorcese himself, brilliant. Only the thing is... I'm still one of those (apparently few) people who believe that a film, before being a way of making money, is the result of a solitary act of creation and inspiration. An expression form. Which normally results in a screenplay. That's why (no matter how good William Monahan's adaptation is) I could never consider The Departed better than Infernal Affairs. Could never deny it's a huge cinematographic achievement, Scorcese's best film since Goodfellas and probably the best american remake ever (like my ****½ rating proves), but I could never consider it 'perfect'. Not when it's purely an 'americanization' of something that was already perfect.

"Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal."

T. S. Eliot

First of all, and a little warning to Samurai film freaks (like myself), the title (the international one, of course) can be deceiving. The presence of the word Samurai obviously makes us think of a typical Samurai film, which normally means lots of action scenes, swords and blood. Not the case. The main character (Seibei Iguchi) is Samurai, yes, but to be Samurai means (or meant) much more than just 'playing' with swords, Kill Bill style. It was a life philosophy, most of the time nothing to do with fighting at all. Anyone who has a little knowledge of Japanese Culture and History, know what I mean. So, The Twilight Samurai is no action flick, no high paced, bloodfull epic. Seibei is no hero. He's a struggling working man, a widower and a father of two daughters. Everyday after work ('Twilight'), unlike his collegues who go drinking, Seibei goes home to his beloved daughters and ill mother.



The film is set during the late 19th century, a time when the Samurai existence was challenged and criticized as Japan prepared to replace the old costumes by the Westernized era. This is the same period that the action epic The Last Samurai, for instance (an american production, therefore more known) is based on. Here lies the historical/social importance of this film (perhaps not that clear for most people). Yôji Yamada is an 'old school' film maker. His intention was precisely to capture the real essence of the Samurai ways, through a different angle. Honor, sacrifice, family importance... Values that were as important two centuries ago, as they are today. The story is told through one of the daughter's point of view (the adorable five year old Ito) in a sort of flashback mode. Hiroyuki Sanada, as Seibei 'Twilight' Iguchi, gives a once-in-a-life performance. Hard to picture anyone else for the role. I knew him already from his charismatic character in Ringu and his performance here was the beginning of a more international career (The Last Samurai, Danny Boyle's recent Sunshine). Lost the Best Foreign Language Award at the 2004 Oscars to The Barbarian Invasions.

Like I said before, don't expect the typical Samurai action-packed film. There are two short fight scenes. The Twilight Samurai is a drama. One of the best you'll ever see, but still a drama. Another masterpiece from the East and a must see for any asian Cinema fan!

"It is an instinctive desire to seek for novelties.
It is human to endure the passage of time.
It is specific to love to find novelties among repeated routines.
It is life to realize that nothing lasts forever in the passage of time."

Kim Ki-duk



Kim Ki-duk's 13th film, Time, marks the director's return to what was the essence of his early films: the bold, sometimes harsh commentary on contemporary Korean society. The gruesome opening images of plastic surgery that play during the film's opening credits free anyone who hasn't read the film's plotline of any doubts as to what theme he tackles here. Kim makes sure that he shocks his audience - or at least its majority - the soonest possible, which I found to be a striking, honest and utterly effective way to start a film.

One of the main characters of Time, Seh-hee (Ji-Yeon Park), has a problem. She thinks her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Jung-woo Ha), who she's been with for two years, is somehow slowly starting to lose interest in her, and she believes it's because of her physical appearance. Convinced that he is getting tired of her "same boring face", the irrational and obsessive Seh-hee makes the drastic decision to disappear from his life without warning and undergo extensive plastic surgery. Against his better judgment, a plastic surgeon agrees to operate and Seh-hee - who is remarkably beautiful - tells him that her goal is not to become prettier but to be transformed into a completely new person.

Six months later - the time it takes to fully recover from a plastic surgery - Seh-hee reemerges as See-hee (now played by Seong Hyeon-a), a beautiful, smiley and friendly waitress at the same cafe she and Ji-woo used to go to, and proceeds to seduce him all over again as someone else. Soon, after she's secured him, she realizes that she can't figure out what is worse - him longing for her old self, not being able to fully forget her or the idea that he could move on without her and find bliss with whom he believes is someone else.

Time requires a proper understanding of just how popular cosmetic surgery is in South Korea. A recent estimate reckoned 50% of women in their 20s have gone under the knife, and a growing number of men, too, to achieve the goal of ul-jjang, a perfect face. This isn't just movie stars getting implants or doing facelifts, it's regular, anonymous Korean citizens who are literally obsessed with plastic surgery. Behind this trend is a very ancient idea: that a physical transformation can change the way a person sees her, or himself. It can bring new life to a romantic relationship or stem the tide of aging. At least that is what marketers of cosmetic surgery sell: "Have a procedure, heal for six months, and things will be different".

While, in essence, Time may sound like an in-depth look at the alarming increase in popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea, the film itself quickly transforms (much like the main character) into something entirely different - a surreal study of love and time with an inventive backdrop and creative art direction that add layers to the drama. Time's imagery pay thematic and visual homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, and the spirit of the two Davids (Lynch and Cronenberg), altough certainly not a retread of any of the men's works. Completely original, Time is Kim's most fascinating and maddening puzzle.

Still, despite all the inspiration it draws from Western cinema, Time is still a Kim Ki-duk film. Meaning, it's a strange film. While it seems to play around with the issue of how society influences and defines how beauty should be perceived, it also encompasses the extreme lengths one might go in order to keep someone they love. While some (myself included) might say Seh-hee is a little paranoid and insecure in the beginning of the film, a character that makes it very hard for us to like her, her transformation later in the film not only redefines her, but also takes away some of her identity as well. This eventually comes back to haunt her as well as Ji-woo later the film.

Although it's no Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Time is another film whose look approaches visual poetry. Kim's trend of having excellent cinematography present within his films remains, as well as choosing great settings for his films to take place in. Even though the film's environments are repeated often (the cafe, and a sculptures park), each revisit is a delight to view because you can tell Kim put a lot of time and effort into each scene. Few modern filmmakers are as adept at crafting a haunting image as Kim. He has a way of grounding the weirdness of a situation in a concrete, comprehensible vision like I'm afraid no one can right now.

The film moves at a reasonable pace, and it was quite enjoyable - suprisingly enjoyable, actually, because one doesn't watch a Kim Ki-duk film with an enjoyment or entertainment purpose. The plot was filled with mystery and intrigue, and it kept me on my toes just trying to figure out the whole weird situation these characters are in. The acting was quite convincing, although at times I wondered why certain characters would take such drastic actions, and then I began to realize that people really do this type of outrageous stuff in real life, so it began to make sense.

It wouldn't be far-fetched to say that this is Kim Ki-duk's second most accessible film. Anyone who has seen a reasonable amount of his other films knows that they can be either overly dark or violent (which, in my case, is rarely a bad thing), but Time doesn't fall into neither of these categories. Like all of Kim's films, there is an underlying theme present, in this particular case, identity and individuality within society. To change one's identity in order to please another person will, in due time, confuse the identity of the one who changed in the first place, and Kim displays this ideology greatly, effectively raising questions while leaving the audience to come to their own conclusions.

Time now seats at number three in my favourites of Kim Ki-duk's filmography. As for the man himself, my admiration and fascination keeps reaching higher and higher levels and his work inspiring and enlightening me each time I lay eyes on it.

One of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 21st century. Will be as a classic in 20 years as The Godfather or Star Wars are for us today.

Is Cinema still an art form? It should be! It should always be about Human expression, a way of Mankind transcending itself. But the sad truth is that these days almost anyone can make a 'movie'. However, every once and a while there comes a film, a genuine piece of Art that restores my faith and love for the power and beauty of Cinema. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is one of those films.



This is a film of an extremely rare beauty. Visually stunning, from Spring to Winter you feel pulled into that place and you almost feel like you're actually there. That's how brilliant Kim Ki-duk is. There is one single location (the lake), no characters' names and almost no plot at all (one single piece of paper would probably be enough) and still, this is such a mind-opening piece of work. A reflection on life and its constant changes, full of symbolisms and with the Buddhist life philosophy in background. From childhood and its innocence, to youth and its complexity and finally 'grown up' life and its solitude. I loved the way the monk changes when he leaves the lake. Leaving as a kid in love and returning as a murderer from the 'world of men', like his master called it. The main message in my opinion. Nature vs. 'The world of Men'...

Let's face it. Asian Cinema has something that no one else has. I'm not sure what is it, I don't think anyone does, but I do know that I had never seen the essence of life captured on film, like Kim Ki-duk managed. A Masterpiece!

"Many books say "death is relaxing". Did you know that? No need to follow the latest trends. No need to keep pace
with the rest of the world. No more e-mail. No more telephone. It'll be like taking a nap... Before waking up refreshed and ready to begin your next life. That's what they say."



From David Lean's Brief Encounter to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris to Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, the chance meeting of strangers and the subsequent relationship they develop within a limited timeframe has long served as a fruitful filmic subject. There's something inherently tragic about the idea of romance cut short by the powers of fate, whether in the form of death, insuperable social taboo, or simply a planned relocation, as in the case of Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang's terrific fourth feature, Last Life in the Universe.

One of the first images we see in the film is a pile of books scattered across the floor, with a slipper on top. As the camera slowly inclines upward, we see a man's feet, with one slipper on, and then his legs hanging above the books. "My name is Kenji", a voice says over the soundtrack, "This could be me three hours from now. Why do I want to kill myself?" he muses, "I don't know. I wouldn't kill myself for the same reasons as other suicidal people. Money problems. Broken heart. Hopelessness. No, not me".

This is clearly a fantasy sequence, complete with two acquaintances of Kenji's entering the room and one fainting at the sight of his lifeless body hanging from the ceiling. But a moment later, we see the real-life Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) standing atop a neatly stacked pile of books with a noose around his neck. He's about to kill himself when he's interrupted by the doorbell. It's his gangster brother, who laughs upon noticing that Kenji was about to attempt suicide, an apparently routine recurrence. He hands Kenji a six-pack of Heineken, which Kenji immediately stocks, labels-forward, in his fridge, a character gesture that matches the clean order of his austerely decorated apartment (dozens of stacks of books and DVDs, and not much else line the walls of Kenji's living quarters).

This scene is an early example of Ratanaruang's rather mordant sense of deadpan humor. Perhaps the funniest and certainly one of the most brilliant comes a little later, when one character says to another that he watches too many yakuza films just before Ratanaruang, with a quick meta wink, cuts abruptly to a poster of Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer, featuring Asano's image; Miike himself even turns up in the film, in a small part as a yakuza boss.

Kenji works as a librarian at a Japanese cultural center in Bangkok. He has attempted to shut himself off from the chaos of the outside world, but things soon spiral out of control when his brother is killed while visiting his apartment and - out of self-defense, not revenge - Kenji shoots the man who's just murdered his brother. He leaves his apartment as it's beginning to stink from the rot of the two corpses, and is about to jump off a highway bridge, when, once again, his suicide attempt is interrupted - this time by a traffic accident. Following the accident, Kenji strikes up a sort-of-relationship with Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak), the sister of the young girl whose sudden, gruesome and masterfully shot death he witnessed just as he was about to take his own life.

It's obvious, at once, that Noi is Kenji's polar opposite. She's beautiful, but moody and mercurial, and her place is an authentic pig-house, cluttered and surely infested with god-knows-what, dirty dishes piled about a foot above the sink. Nevertheless, Kenji takes it up on himself to move in with her, and, somewhat reluctantly, Noi allows him to stay - much to her abusive boyfriend's responsibility. She's teaching herself Japanese as she plans soon (as in, next Monday) on moving to Osaka, but hasn't mastered the language to the point where she can speak fluently with Kenji, who himself struggles with Thai. So, they converse mostly in broken English as their relationship, marked by a mutual sense of isolation and subtle sparks of romance, gradually takes shape.



Writer-director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is a self-admitted fan of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki, and he shares some of their preoccupations, such as wryly downplaying the language differences of his characters and showing more interest in household detail than any drama going on outside. The film also reminds me of Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?, with its parallels, connections, and criss-crossing cultures. Some critics have also compared the film to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, in which a mismatched pair of travellers find each other in a cloud of melancholy. There's truth and untruth about that. Lost in Translation uncovers little bits of truth about people, and Coppola lets her characters - and her story - drift delicately through indistinct thoughts and honest emotions. Ratanaruang doesn't, he orchestrates his characters to attract or repel each other like magnets, adjusting the angles to arrive at an optimally clever conclusion.

Visually speaking, Last Life in the Universe is a little piece of perfection. Ratanaruang and master cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's longtime DP of choice and one of the finest working in cinema today) partner together to supply this offbeat love story with an appropriately dreamy visual design. (Both would work together again in Invisible Waves). If Doyle's photography, gorgeous as always, inadvertently calls to mind his past work on films like Wong's Happy Together and Chungking Express and Chen Kaige's Temptress Moon in its expressive use of light and spatial distance, Ratanaruang's haunting rhythms and idiosyncratic stylistic sense make Last Life a strikingly fresh trip down what may seem a well-worn path.

Doyle's camera glides through Noi's house, and at one point household objects hang in mid-air, recalling the swirling vortex of leaves in Hero. This sort of moody visual poetry is the highlight of a film whose pleasures come not from peace and understanding, and not even from observing human foibles, but from watching a lizard on an apartment and such scenes. The performances are spot-on (with great chemistry between Asano and Boonyasak), the ample humor is gentle and dark, and the guns and gangsters are thankfully minor. Ratanaruang's playful flourishes are exciting - he swaps actresses late in the game, experiments with dream-vs-reality, and shows his opening title some 30 minutes into the film.

One bizarre sequence, in particular, (it could be a dream or fantasy, a stoned hallucination, or just a neat time-lapse trick - and those who've seen the film, I imagine, know exactly which scene it is I'm talking about), is altogether unlike just about anything I've seen on screen before. In its ambiguity and eerie otherworldliness, it serves to epitomize the tone that Ratanaruang successfully sustains throughout the film - and that will very likely continue to stick with you hours, even days after viewing it. Just like the film itself.

Pure cinematic bliss. Extraordinary in its beautiful, lyrical simplicity. A quiet, sublime exploration of delicate relationships and uncommunicated frustrations, in a beautifully composed atmosphere of isolation. One of the most witty and strangely beautiful tales of friendship seen in recent years. Sofia ('cause there's only one Coppola) will be one of the most important filmmakers of our century. That could very well be a scientifically proved fact.

"La vida tiene sus maneras de enseñarnos. La vida tiene sus maneras de confundirnos. La vida tiene sus maneras de cambiarnos. La vida tiene sus maneras de asombrarnos. La vida tiene sus maneras de herirnos. La vida tiene sus maneras de curarnos. La vida tiene sus maneras de inspirarnos."

May very well turn out to be one of the greatest post-modern debuts by American directors. Tragic, haunting, and sometimes darkly comedic, it leaves a strong impression in its telling of a story about the destruction of innocence. A disarmingly poetic - and specifically female - vision of adolescence that it belongs in a category of its own. Kirsten Dunst gives - at seventeen - a fabulous performance that will always be a proof of the fact that she's a naturally talented actress. Devastating, haunting and of an inconceivable power.

Would certainly rank very high (quiçá #1) in a hypothetical "Most Watched Films of All Time" list of mine.

The kind of character study and breathtakingly cruel and quietly devastating look at human nature that only Mike Nichols can make. The most brilliant, often hidden thing about Closer, in my opinion, is that none of its characters is particularly likable, they all do and say terrible things to one another, but they never devolve into anything less than human. You're given no choice but to care for them, and that works even for those who claim to not like the film. Natalie Portman - with her big, eager eyes and knowing, seductive smile that are capable of making you believe in anything - gives what is in my opinion the best performance of her career.

"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. "

Psychiatrist: "Your parents say you're always lying.
Antoine Doinel: Oh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I'd tell them the truth and they still wouldn't believe me, so I prefer to lie."



In The 400 Blows, the first chapter in François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, we meet our hero (Jean-Pierre Léaud) as a disobedient 12-year-old Parisian. A child of whom his parents seem to care little, he has a penchant for dishonesty that gets him in constant trouble both at home and at school, so he decides to run away, promising to return when he has become a man. After he steals a typewriter, he's sent to military school, where he escapes through a hole in a fence and heads for the sea.

Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series is a landmark of cinema, as it marks a rare instance of an actor originating a character as a child then continuing to play that character in five films over the course of twenty years, but more importantly because it serves as a backbone of the French New Wave. The series as a whole is a fascinating look at how a young man such as Antoine grows up, matures (well, to an extent), and essentially adapts to life. All five chapters are good, but there's no question in my mind that The 400 Blows is the crown jewel. Partly because he is a child and children tend to not see potential complications, this is the most focus we see from Antoine in terms of his goals and desires. He knows simply that he does not like home or school and that he'd rather be elsewhere, whereas in later segments we quite often see Antoine torn between multiple options.

And why shouldn't he? Truffaut essentially tells us as much in the famous final shot - a shot that probably has influenced more filmmakers than any other - of The 400 Blows where Antoine, having successfully run away, reaches the ocean for the first time in his life. He takes a few steps into the surf, then turns back, but he is unsure where to go. He has achieved his goal of running away to the shore and now hasn't a clue what to do next, so he just stands there. At the height of his dilemma, Truffaut freezes the shot and zooms in on that face full of indecision. He is stuck, completely unsure what to do next, and that is the theme Truffaut continues to explore throughout the series.

As this is one of the first films of the Nouvelle Vague, he appears to be placing the art form as a whole on that beach with Antoine. The New Wave, many have said, birthed the modern film era, taking it out of the classic period with its tendency to follow formula and essentially breathed new life into it. Truffaut, Godard, and their cohorts showed a complete disregard for the conventions of cinema and made their films by any means necessary. This often included filming in the streets of Paris without permits, employing friends as actors, and working with little to no budget. But, necessity being the mother of invention, they found ways to create techniques, methods and images that would resonate world-wide. It could be argued that there isn't an American film from the last five years that isn't at least indirectly influenced by the New Wave. So Truffaut is asking the film medium what it wants to do. Does it want to go back to the military school and continue making the same films over and over again, or does it keep running into the unknown. The answer, of course, is the latter.

The 400 Blows is, at least to me, a deceptively simple film. At no singular point does it seem as if you're watching a great film. That is, there isn't that particular point where a single moment blows you away, but the sum total of the film does exactly that - it tears you apart. This is Truffaut's first film, finished at the age of 26, and it's easy to see the effect of that innocence on the screen. This is the look of a filmmaker who doesn't yet "know" what he can and cannot do, so he just does what he thinks will be the most effective. And he's pretty much correct every single time. The film, largely based on his own childhood as a rebellious child prone to skip school and go to the cinema, seems to understand children better than most, and it understands Antoine Doinel most of all. But it refuses to fully condone his actions, instead sympathizing with him in a way that makes them understandable, even if they are wrong.

He also bring a bit of whimsy to the film as he shows how the children as a group respond to authority. In a clever scene, the children are on a physical education run through the streets of Paris, trailing behind a gym teacher and his incessant whistle-blowing. Truffaut puts the camera on a roof and follows the class as the students peel away from the group and head for freedom until finally there are only two students following him. They are either the least clever of the students or the most obedient or a combination of the two. Regardless, they are tied to the status quo while their classmates are off living their lives in the Parisian streets. Morally, Antoine Doinel and his like may be classically wrong, but they are choosing to do things by their own rules, and when you live by your own rules, it's hard to judge those actions by classical morality.

What is hard to describe is how a film that takes in all of this can be beautiful and thrilling, how something that sounds like a run-of-the-mill drama can be a masterpiece. Maybe that's ultimately a sign of true cinematic mastery, its essence can't be captured on a page (or a keyboard), you have to watch it. The 400 Blows is one of those films whose importance and legacy goes way beyond those of a simple film. It changed filmmaking and helped to inspire a new generation of filmmakers with more attention to the smaller details of film production. Without Truffaut's story of a young boy adventuring out on his own, we might not have The Goonies or Home Alone, but without Antoine Doinel, cinema in general would be a far different and less multi-faceted art form than it is today.

Reporter: "How did you find America?
John: Turned left at Greenland."

A faux documentary of a typical day in the life of Britain's greatest band, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night captures Beetle-Mania in full force as our heroes prepare for a television appearance. With Paul's grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell), a "very clean" old mixer, causing trouble along the way, they escape hordes of screaming girls, visit a nightclub, and bust Ringo out of jail, while occasionally taking time to perform one of their new songs, of course. It is, from beginning to end, a delightful lark.



Our intrepid heroes play themselves (or at very least versions of themselves as presented by screenwriter Alun Owen) as four boys who want nothing more than to enjoy life. While everyone else around them is focused on the task at hand, the Fab Four are more interested in hitting on girls, playing cards on a train, and goofing off in a field when they're supposed to be preparing for the show. They seem unconcerned with mundane tasks like answering fan mail or rehearsing and show little regard for how they're perceived by the world at large.
There's a memorable scene where George Harrison, having been mistaken for a member of a focus group, willingly sits down and gives his opinion on some shirts and the model for some fashion line. He doesn't bother to tell them who he is and they fail to notice. It's one of the film's delightful quirks that they are either mobbed by screaming fans or go completely unnoticed. But these people in the fashion industry never realize they are talking to one of the most famous people in the entire country, and since his opinion doesn't mesh with their market research, they dismiss it out of hand as the work of a troublemaker.

Reporter: "Do you often see your father?
Paul: No, actually we're just close friends."

What's perhaps most remarkable about A Hard Day's Night is just how comfortable the Beatles are in front of a camera. With the influx of MTV and VH1 and the like, we tend to forget that in 1964, it was a rare thing for a musician to be on TV and rarer still for them to appear in any capacity other than a performance. So for all four of them to come off so well in an actual film where they are required to act is no small feat. But even beyond that, they're not just passable, they're actually quite good. Better, in fact, than some 'real' actors.

The film takes time to give each of them a storyline with which to work, from Paul's interactions with his grandfather to George's focus group to Ringo's diversion to live life and subsequent arrest, but the best of the lot is John Lennon, who has an ongoing feud with the band's manager, Norm (Norman Rossington). It is a simple feud. Norm wants the band to stay put, be well-behaved, and generally act as mature model citizens. John, being a born troublemaker, attempts to make this as difficult as possible. He misbehaves at every opportunity, and while it certainly is a childish way to be, it has the dual effect of humanizing him. As the band's de facto leader (and eventual martyr), there was always a mystique around Lennon, but the film contrasts that by showing him as nothing more than a big kid. Particularly in a scene where he's taking a bath and, as little kids are prone to do, is focused more on playing with his toy ship than anything else. It's easy to see why half the world was in love with him.

Reporter: "What do you call that collar?
Ringo: A collar."

It would have been simple for director Richard Lester to just follow the Beatles around with a camera, and with the state of Beatle-Mania in full effect, he probably would have been guaranteed a hit. But it's obvious from the beginning that Lester put a lot of care into making the best film he possibly could. He strives to not only capture the essence (such as it is) of the Fab Four and Beatle-Mania, but also of the culture as a whole. He constantly creates scenarios where his protagonists are cast opposite the straight members of society, and at every instance they find some way to minimize it, or at very least have a good time. They are unwilling to conform, and as an audience we love them all the more for it.

In a film like this, done largely as a documentary, you'd expect it to be noticeably flawed, for there to be stretches where the film drags and generally starts to lose momentum. It's a problem inherent in this type of film, but somehow A Hard Day's Night avoids that pitfall. Partly because of the raw charisma of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but mostly because from top to bottom this is an expertly-made film. Without question it is the standard-bearer of the genre. But beyond that, I cannot imagine someone with any amount of appreciation for the Beatles or their music who would not thoroughly enjoy this film.

Reporter: "Has success changed your life?
George: Yes."

Probably one of the most underrated films of the 90s. It has been extremely rare to hear about Gattaca as much as Titanic or Shakespeare in Love, when the truth is that it's actually extremely close to be a masterpiece. A smart, beautifully crafted piece of not-so-science-fiction that manages to successfully mix social commentary and suspense into a generally captivating story. When you look at the actors (especially Hawke and Thurman), it becomes quite clear that the film is less a Sci-Fi epic than a simple (and simply wonderful) lesson in humanity and the direction in which one hopes it's not heading. The kind of film that can righteously call itself visionary.

Almodóvar's most accomplished work ever, only defied by All About My Mother.

One of the greatest pictures American animation has ever created. The first glimpse in the form of film at Brad Bird's writting and directing talent. A fun, entertaining and occasionally heartfelt, eighty-some minute diversion from the trials and tribulations of being a kid. A personal childhood favourite of mine.

Arguably the best super-hero/comic book adaptation film ever made. The best example of modern cinema of how to rightly use special effects and CGI in the interest of the film and its characters.

"We kill for our future. We kill for peace."

Nothing Steven Spielberg has made quite prepares you for Munich. Not the assault on Omaha Beach or the target practice of Ralph Fiennes' Nazi commandant Goeth. Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List are the obvious comparisons within his previous 23 features, but neither is as bold or shocking. War of the Worlds - with its trite allusions to terrorism - was merely a feint. This is the sucker punch - the bravest film of his career.



At the 1972 Olympics, the world's grandest statement of peace, eleven Israeli athletes are taken hostage and killed. The world watches, live, in rapt attention, rooting for either death or salvation with a fervour beyond that which any event could muster. Once the deaths are confirmed, Israel moves quickly, assembling a team of assassins led by Avner (Eric Bana), a former bodyguard of the Prime Minister. Their task is to as publicly as possible eliminate eleven Palestinians who helped organize the massacre, so that the world may know that the killing of Jews will no longer be tolerated, that Israel's vengeance will be swift and severe. The inexperienced team is well-funded, but they do not officially exist. As they work through the list, they become better assassins, but in many ways they also become worse patriots, beginning to question their country's motives and developing the paranoia of the hunters becoming the hunted.

It is this evolution of the assassins that serves as the film's true narrative core. Bana and his team begin as idealists, men who have signed up for this mission because they could not imagine living with themselves had they not. They are willing to throw themselves headlong into certain death, if need be, out of a pure sense of loyalty and duty. By design, none of them are trained for this sort of thing. Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), the bomb maker whose bombs tend to malfunction, is a simple toy maker who has some training in dismantling bombs, but none in building them. They start to get better at it, though, and with that experience comes the knowledge that not everything is as it seems.

They begin to recognize hidden agendas and affiliations the way a spy would, which leads them to begin asking questions. But beyond that, the team (Avner especially) begins to be both tormented by the repercussions of what they're doing and as members of the team start dying, a growing paranoia that they may be next. Even a man throwing a cigarette out the window of a moving car is enough to alert Avner's sense of panic. Bana's performance here is better than anything he's done since Chopper. He is given the herculean task of being the film's conscience and acquits himself brilliantly.

To say Munich is an important film is to state the obvious, as parallels to the War on Terror exist in its very DNA. Spielberg frames his tale as a vintage '70s thriller, and, with the help of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, crafts a taut, engrossing thriller. It is flawed where it needs to be flawed, seamless where it needs to be seamless, and save for the somewhat unfortunate sex scene at the end, there may not be a wasted shot in the entire film. By any standard, this is a very good film, and by some standards it is a great one.

It would be easy for Spielberg, the world's most famous Jewish filmmaker, to approach a film about the 1972 Olympics from an entirely pro-Israel standpoint, to treat the group as an extension of God's righteous wrath, both terrible and just. But he doesn't. At multiple turns he questions Israel's motives, their evidence, even their fundamental choice of revenge. He allows the targets every opportunity to establish their humanity, and it is the humanity that plants the seeds of doubt in Avner's mind. It isn't hard to look at a photo of someone who's been called a terrorist and shoot them from a distance, like in a video game, but watch that same man kindly lecture outside a bookstore or make small talk with him on a hotel balcony and he becomes a real person, not just a target. Even the most heartless killer may hesitate before killing someone with whom he's shared a moment, no matter how small. As things progress and he gets sucked deeper into this world, Avner begins to realize that while his allegiance still lies with his home, that home is no longer a plot of land in the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea that's been designated as Israel, but with his family, where he can live in peace with his wife and child.

There's an old saying that "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind", for it creates an entire cycle of violence that has no logical end. Did the Israeli government really think killing eleven of the terrorists would be it, that Palestine would say fair is fair and ask for a truce? Perhaps. But in that assumption they failed to see that the Munich Massacre was no doubt a response to something else, like the way Israel has treated the Palestinians in the years since being awarded their own country. To them, Munich evens the score for a previous transgression, so any response from Israel is a fresh assault on their people. Is that the healthiest world-view for Palestine to adopt? Perhaps not. But what's so refreshing about Munich is that Spielberg doesn't spend time taking sides with a country. Instead, he takes the side of peace, because when peace wins, everyone wins, and men like Avner can sleep at night.

Allen's tribute to Sir. Alfred Hitchcock and the Mystery/Thriller genre itself. Fun and endlessly entertaining as expected, but also incredibly and surprinsingly thrilling and exciting as an actual thriller. The Allen-Keaton dynamic and chemistry is, even in their 50's of 60's, a big part of the film's fun. Also Zach Braff's first real acting job, age 18, as the Liptons' son, Nick.

Last night, after watching Once, as I came home, I wondered how would I rate it. At first I thought a 4, maybe a 4½... But then I suddenly realized just how beautiful the film I had just seen really was. How close to perfection it got. Once I realized that I knew I had no problems whatsoever giving it a perfect rating.



Luckily recognized by some - winner of the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival - John Carney's film is an authentic anthem to filmmaking. A modern day musical with a ridiculously low-budget that is the ultimate proof that YOU DON'T NEED MILLIONS to make cinema. Shot in a documentary-ish way and with a stunning and compelling soundtrack (probably the best of the year) Once is a film of pure and shinning beauty. A little unannounced masterpiece that is one of the highlights of the year.

A simple and sweet story of a busker/vacuum-cleaner repairman and an immigrant flower seller/cleaning lady who meet in the streets of Dublin and spend a week writing and making music. Unnamed Girl (19-year-old Czech singer/songwriter Markéta Irglová) meets unnamed Guy (irish band The Frames' lead singer/guitarist) as he plays for loose change in a Dublin street. She's drawn to his music. He's drawn to her... An immediate and powerful bond is formed bethween the of them as they spend a week making music. Writting, rehearsing and eventually recording songs, haunting and powerful songs.

As they grow closer, so does the intensity of their music, almost as a way to distract them from their feelings. The songs' lyrics match their stories and speak as much as the dialogues, just like musicals are supposed to. The chemistry between Hansard and Irglová (who had already recorded together before) on screen as well as musically speaking make every song and every scene a joy to listen and to watch. There are some memorable scenes, like the one in a music store where they play together for the first time or a certain one in the back of a bus that have sheer genius written all over it. The film breathes, emantes music. There aren't just two main characters, there are three.



Even though it may begin to apeear so, this isn't your typical 'boy-meets-girl equals happy ending' kind of film. What they feel for each other may be real but, like in real life, things don't always end like we want them to... She is married and has a 2-year-old daughter who she hopes doesn't grow up without a father and he still loves his girlfriend who packed off for London. Their destinations aren't the same, but their love for music is, which will lead them to a nothing less than perfect week. And us, a nothing less than perfect film.

Once is the kind of film that reminds us why we love movies. The kind that changes lives. For anyone to whom - like myself - Cinema and Music are everything, this little irish pearl is everything you could possibly dream. Unmissable!

"I wish I knew how to quit you."

That Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, an epic mixture of a Western and a love story, was the prohibitive favourite for a Best Picture win at the Oscars a couple of years ago (losing it, unacceptably, to Crash) says a great deal about how far we have come as a society from the days when Rock Hudson kept his sexuality a secret out of fear that to do otherwise would ruin both his career and his life. That it is jokingly referred to as "the Gay Cowboy Movie" in major publications says a great deal about just how far we have to go.



Granted, this is clearly one of the most controversial films of the last decade, as homosexual love stories in mainstream cinema (not cinema itself) are rare enough, but for it to be so "graphic" and to star two masculine film stars such as Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, would always ensure it'd be brought to the forefront of the public attention. For the average straight male, this should, in theory, be a bit of a difficult ride, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that the sex scenes between Ledger and Gyllenhaal aren't nearly as revealing as the scenes between them and their respective wives.

It is perhaps Ang Lee's sly joke that shortly after the first gay love scene (containing mostly darkness, struggling, and heavy breathing) he gives us a good look at a sheep that's been ravaged by a wolf. It's as if he's asking us to consider which image is more difficult to take in. If we're honest with ourselves, the answer is probably the dead sheep. It is safe to say that the number of people who would find the images in Brokeback Mountain difficult to digest is far fewer than the number who would have problems with the subject matter itself.

More important than any trumped-up controversy is the film itself, which is nothing but captivating. With stunning landscapes, gorgeously photographed by Rodrigo Prieto, a haunting, evocative score by Gustavo Santaolalla, and Ang Lee's gentle touch, this is a truly beautiful film. Coming from a Chinese background, Lee (who, along with Santaolalla and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, took home the Oscar the film itself should have gotten) understands the type of personal repression that's so inherent to this story. A great deal in this world is unspoken, yet understood. Ledger and Gyllenhaal's characters are under this assumption that they alone carry this burden, but many of the people close to them either know, or at least seem to know, and with that knowledge comes a great range of emotions from anger to sympathy.

At times you wish they had the courage to confide in those closest to them, that perhaps they would be able to find some redemption or comfort, but the potentially negative consequences weigh too heavily on their minds. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) has a vivid memory from his childhood of a gay man being brutally murdered, so any risk of that, no matter how small, is a risk he is unprepared to take. If there is any small bit of comfort for Ennis, it is that time may provide him relief. Perhaps not in Wyoming just yet, but in time.

Much has been made of the performances in Brokeback Mountain, and they are universally good, but the turn by Heath Ledger is stunning. He steals the entire film as he absolutely disappears inside his character. There's a tendency to assume he's just channelling Clint Eastwood, but he brings so many more layers to the performance. Every so often an established actor comes from nowhere to shock us with actual acting ability above and beyond anything they seemed capable of. Anyone who tells you they thought Heath Ledger had this in him is a damn liar. The world has truly lost a great actor. Jake Gyllenhaal, for his part, is sort of a microcosm of his entire career - good in one scene, average in the next, and a bit all over the map. His Jack Twist is the ying to Ennis' yang, but he seems to be spending too much energy showing us how good he can be instead of just being good. If the film has a weak link, he may be it.

Long story short, this is a great film, a heartbreaking subversion of the western by one of the world's greatest working directors and a piece of cinema that no true Film lover should afford to miss. It may be ten minutes too long and one of the lead characters may be simply good as opposed to great, but that's no reason to avoid seeing it. And neither is the subject matter, unless of course you hate seeing the entrails of sheep. If that's the case, just cover your eyes and it'll be over before you know it.

Perry: "My $2000 ceramic Vektor my mother got me as a special gift. You threw in the lake next to the car. What happens when they drag the lake? You think they'll find my pistol?! Jesus! Look up "idiot" in the dictionary. You know what you'll find?
Harry: A picture of me?
Perry: No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!"



In the 1980s and early 1990s Shane Black was the go-to man if you needed a buddy action film written - Lethal Weapon being the most famous one. He was as endowed as he was wealthy - his expertise was in crowd-pleasing and profanity, over-the-top action sequences and homophobic humour. Then, something very common in Hollywood happened: he just disappeared, making way for a hundred overexcited hacks to find employ on every 'blood and bullets' escapade that followed. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is his return - as a writer - and debut - as a director. It could very well have a 'What I learnt in Hollywood' tagline. From the in-jokes to the character stereotypes, nonsensical action sequences and sardonic outline - Black's seemingly yanked every memory of his Hollywood years from his head, put them down on paper and taken a Nikon to it. The result? A blast - and there are no explosions.

The film opens at a Hollywood party held by sleazy studio executive Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen), where we're introduced through narration to Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.). Explaining how a guy like him got where he is now, Harry leads us into a flashback. During a failed robbery of a toy store, his friend gets killed, and Harry busts into a screen test while hiding from the cops. Playing along in hopes of avoiding suspicion, his emotional stress actually ends up getting him the part, and next thing you know he's living the Hollywood movie star lifestyle. Harry ends up befriending - sort of - a detective/film advisor named Perry (Val Kilmer), who happens to be gay, hence his nickname Gay Perry. When his childhood friend Harmony (Michelle Monaghan) ends up in a spot of trouble, Harry enlists Perry's help, and the two of them try to solve a murder case without contacting the police. But every move they make end up getting them deeper and deeper into trouble, and Lockhart begins to revive some serious feelings for Harmony in the process.

The plot flirts with being incomprehensible, in the tradition of the greatest of the genre - Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, Carol Reed's The Third Man - and this allows all manner of freedoms for the filmmakers. We're required only to sit back and accept what we're seeing, even if it's Downey Jr. talking over the on-screen action, changing tack and rewinding the film, skipping ahead, or whatever. This is post-modern film noir, and it works, it truly does. Black clearly loves this style, and despite having fun with its conventions, he scatters many references to the old masters throughout - the use of chapter headings all sourced from Raymond Chandler novel titles is the most obvious, but there are several, more subtle, homages within.

The film is based on author Brett Halliday's novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them. Like most Shane Black scripts, this one is just plain fun. It's one of those films that follows a familiar formula, but never takes itself too seriously. In fact, Black takes several opportunities through the narration to flat out poke fun at Hollywood films in general and Hollywood itself. The character of Harry Lockhart is likable, but extremely flawed. He's not smooth, nor is he all that smart. In many ways he's a terrible hero, but that's part of the charm that makes it work so well.

Robert Downey Jr. is terrific in the role, using every opportunity to build on the character's inadequacies. Val Kilmer - who, before this, was certainly among the less probable actors to play a gay character - is very good as well as 'Gay Perry'. This film is 99% dialogue - brilliant dialogue - and most of the film's highlights (which are hundreds) come from some of the hilarious jokes that his character constantly shoots at us. Most importantly, his character isn't insulting for a second and isn't overplayed like it easily could've been. Truth be told, he's used rather sparingly, which gives his presence more of an impact when it's there. The real co-star here is Michelle Monaghan, who despite her initially smart introduction, is in many ways just as screwed up as our hero. It's nice to see a fresh, talented face - while certainly still hot - in the female lead, as opposed to the "flavour of the month" female. These three carry the film in style and intelligence and complement the screenplay in a brilliant fashion.

Action film producer extraordinaire Joel Silver helped get this film made, at an impressively low-budget of $15 million. It's impressive because this film looks every bit as good as most big-budget studio spectaculars. They've done a lot with a little here, and it proves you don't have to break the bank to make a solid action film. Shane Black succeeds behind the camera, and directs this flick with every bit as much style as some of the bigger names we'd expect to see on a film like this. His cavalier attitude toward the script and characters is so great that just about anyone could find something to enjoy here.

The film also manages to pull off some cool twists and turns that the average filmgoer won't see coming. The plot runs a little close to being too complicated, but the witty narration by Downey Jr. covers for it, practically reading our minds as we watch the events unfold. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang May - and this would be a bold statement in any other occasion - is one of the best and smartest comedies I've ever seen, and for unusual reasons at that. It's so similar to great action films that have come before it, and yet so unique in its own way. Surely a future cult classic.

Perhaps the easiest way to express how good KKBB is would be to say that it was received with a standing ovation when it premièred at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival - and anyone who knows Cannes knows how rare that is. But to truly appreciate it, you have to watch it over and over again. This is one of the coolest and most memorable films of 2005. This review was written after my 3rd viewing and I already want to see it again. I'm sure I will, very soon.

Harry: "What is it out here with these women?
Harmony: Oh please, Harry, they're no different from anywhere else.
Harry: Yes, they are. These are damaged goods, every one of them, from way back. I'm telling you, you take a guy who sleeps with 100 women a year, go into his childhood - dollars to doughnuts, it's relatively unspectacular...
[putting a cigarette in his mouth] ... Now, you take one of these... gals, who sleeps with 100 guys a year, and I bet you if you look in their childhood, there's something rotten in Denver.
Harmony: Denmark.
Harry: [closing his cigarette lighter] That too. But it's abandonment, it's abuse, it's "My uncle put his ping-ping in my papa!"... and then they all come out here!
[continuing] I mean, it's literally like someone took America by the East Coast and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.
Harmony: OK, everyone who hates Harry raise your hand!
[all the girls in the club raise their hands]
Perry: See that? Obedient little bitches too.
[girl screams "Fuck you!" and throws a glass, which he dodges]"

"Let's deflower the kid."

Almost Famous is Cameron Crowe's pet project, a heavily autobiographical tale based on his mid-'70s adventure as a fresh-faced teenage journalist on tour with the Allman Brothers, which produced a Rolling Stone cover story that kick-started his career as a rock writer and, eventually, as a filmmaker.



The average film gives me 90-or-so minutes of mindless satisfaction. I sit in darkness, munching on some snacks staring straight ahead at the screen. Chomp, blink, sip, stare. Lots of films entertain me, but few entertain and inspire me. Almost Famous was, for me, one of the first films to accomplish both. It's an honest and touching look at many big themes such as family, friendship, love and fame, any one of which could have made for a great film. Yet, like the large cast, Crowe managed to give balance to all without shorting anyone, including the audience.

Almost Famous' opening credits are dazzling. A hand writes (just as our upcoming boyhood hero) furiously into a notebook. Then it takes us to 1969, William Miller (played by Michael Angarano as the young William) and his mother Elaine (Frances McDormand) are walking home from the movies after seeing To Kill a Mockingbird (on the marquee it reads Don't Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker's rockumentary on Bob Dylan and Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, which was a major influence on this for autobiographical reasons - Truffaut based himself as Antoine Doinel as played by Jean-Pierre Leaud).

No doubt Elaine plants these ideas of becoming an honest lawyer into William's head. She is a very hard woman, sweet under a rough exterior, a vegetarian college professor who forbids rock music into the house. William's sister Anita (well played by Zooey Deschannel) sneaks Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends album under her coat but Elaine catches her. She moves out to become a stewardess using Simon & Garfunkel's "America" to explain her reasons why and leaving William all her albums. (Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, Rolling Stones' Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, Led Zeppelin's II, Joni Mitchell, etc. and most importantly, The Who's Tommy, with a note: "play Tommy with a burning candle and you will see your future"). End of prologue.

It is 1973, William is 15 and a senior, he's not well-liked at school, all he does is write and listen to rock music. He meets his hero, Lester Bangs (played to perfection by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Bangs is a real-life character - he was editor of Creem magazine and Crowe's real-life hero. His knowledge scattered through the film is worth the price of admission alone. His rants in the radio station, cafe, on the sidewalk and particularly end monologue in his home (the "uncool" one) are all some of the best dialogue and knowledge I've ever heard of. Anyway, Miller sends Bangs some of his writing journalism and Bangs puts him on assignment. He has to go to a Black Sabbath concert and write about it. He is to be paid $35.

He goes to the concert with strong discouragement from his mother ("Don't Do Drugs" is her constant motto) and meets a group of groupies ("a group of groupies", ha!) played by Bijou Philips, Anna Paquin, Fairuza Balk and most importantly Kate Hudson, as Penny Lane. Penny revolutionized the role of the groupie. She calls them "Band Aides", as they're there for the music and not for the sex with someone who's famous. Miller can't get into backstage with the groupies - a huge guard won't let him - so he gets backstage with Stillwater, a rising rock band. They are: audacious, arrogant lead singer Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee), drummer Ed Vallencourt (John Fedevich) and bassist Larry Fellows (Mark Kozelek) - both real-life musicians, not really actors - and finally the star, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). He is, as Jeff describes him, "the guitarist with mystique" and the only who really befriends Miller.

Rolling Stone then hires Miller to write a piece on Stillwater on the road. He is to be paid $1000, and have a trip not to forget. He is only to be gone for a few days and not miss one test at school but as it turns out, he stays longer involuntarily and misses graduation. The trip changes his life. He loses his virginity in a tastefully done, mirage-like threesome, falls hard in love with Penny and really hurts when married Russell uses her for sex. This develops an interesting love triangle: there's Miller who is affectionate for Hammond but falls for the first time in love for Penny who is his really around his own age, Lane, confused, is sweet and nice to Miller but cares for Hammond whom she thinks she's in love with. There are some flashes of the two in genuine love but nothing comes into fruitation. Russell, however, with his hard exterior, looks like he cares for Penny but also sells her for $50 and a case of beer in a poker game, to which she gracefully replies, in an absolutely heartbreaking scene, "what kind of beer?" It was Heineken.

The band, the Band Aids, William and his dysfunctional family, the staff at Rolling Stone - there's a large cast to keep track of. With so many characters and so many areas of potential conflict, it would have been easy to gloss over certain aspects or only go half way with the entire film. Instead, everyone is given an equal voice and the opportunity to show growth. This is an ensemble cast where everyone shows up. While Hudson, Fugit and Crudup may be standouts, that's not to mean that the rest of the cast slacks off. Besides McDormand, Hoffman, and Hudson's fellow groupies, there's also fine work by Noah Taylor as Stillwater's manager, and SNL's Jimmy Fallon, unrecognisable in a beard, as the smarmy half-manager that comes into the picture when Stillwater gets a little success.

Being a CC film, one of the its primal strengths hinges on its use of some absolutely incredible music. The soundtrack periodically drifts in and out, flooding scenes with heartfelt emotion and feeling. Many of the film's best moments are marked by a silence accompanied by several moving rock classics (the bus scene, at the sound of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer", being my favourite). Crowe knows that something special was going on in the '70s and he takes every opportunity to show his love for the period. Almost Famous is as much about music and rock as it is about growing up. Luckily, it manages to succeed without being cheesy or melodramatic. Instead, it's filled with honest moments of love and frustration as we watch a young, talented man slowly coming to terms with his youth and becoming the man who'd eventually go far and accomplish great things - including writing and directing Almost famous

Using personal and professional discovery as a frame for his film, Crowe shows a maturity of his own. Several of his prior films, such as Say Anything... and Jerry Maguire, have touched on similar themes but neither has quite the same 'real' feeling Almost Famous has. This is, of course, due to how autobiographical the film is, although I'm sure many things were the product of his imagination (I'm not sure if the fact that he might have lost his virginity with three groupies makes me admire him more or envy him to death). By making such a personal film and getting his life out and onto the screen, Crowe appears ready to tackle subjects outside his safe zone. After watching Almost Famous for the fourth time, I'm once again inspired to politely nod at my nay-sayers and hit the road (symbolically speaking) to chase my dreams and challenge my own safety zone.

To put it simply, Almost Famous made me want to live in the '70s. Just like Truffaut and Kubrick's films make me dream about the '60s. It made me want to listen to old Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums that were now just collecting dust. Crowe has accomplished something enormously special here, something that can't be undervalued. He's told a story that is both simple and complex, fictional, but believable, funny, yet heartbreaking. Will always remain one of my favourite films from one of my favourite filmmakers.

"If you think that Mick Jagger will still be doing the whole rock star thing at age fifty, well, then, you are sorely, sorely mistaken."

A masterpiece on urban cinema. Sublime social and political critique on French society by Kassovitz. The fluid black-and-white camera work captures 24 hours in the Paris projects like no film has till this day. One of Vincent Cassel's finest performances.

Richie: "I wrote a suicide note.
Chas: You did?
Richie: Yeah, right after I regained conciousness.
Chas: Well, what does it say? Is it dark?
Richie: Of course it's dark, it's a suicide note.
Chas: Can I read it?
Richie: No.
Chas: Well, could you at least summarize it for us?"



Ten years ago, in 1998, Rushmore opened at the Toronto Film Festival to much acclaim around the world. It was a decidedly wacky and strangely upbeat film about a sad little high school genius in love with his teacher, and it was also the film that introduced Wes Anderson to the world. Whether its idiosyncratic, offbeat style appealed or not, Rushmore is certainly a film hard to forget.

Rushmore was the second feature by writer/director Wes Anderson and writer/actor Owen Wilson, old University of Texas classmates who began their respective feature film careers by home-growing Bottle Rocket (1996), a "crime spree" road movie of sorts. Five years later, The Royal Tenenbaums - arguably Anderson's best film and, therefore, the best Anderson-Wilson collaboration - mined much the same funny-sad territory as their previous films, only on a grander, much more ambitious scale.

The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family. There's a father and a mother, three grown children, two grandchildren. And the mother's new suitor. And his son. And a neighbor. And the spouse of one of the children. And a kid he's treating for a neurological disorder. And a faithful servant. You don't have to actually be related to be a family.

The father, Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), screwed up his relationship with his family years ago, through his selfishness and casual cruelty. The mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), raised the children more or less on her own. The children all excelled at an early age: Chas (Ben Stiller) made a fortune before he was out of high school; Richie (Luke Wilson) was a championship tennis player; and Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) a prize-winning playwright in the ninth grade.

Through twists of fate that would seem improbable if we didn't come to realize how desperate they all are, the Tenenbaums all end up living under the same roof again. Royal claims to be dying and says he wants to reconcile with his family before he does, but in fact he's just broke. The children are rightly suspicious and resist his attempts to befriend them. Besides, they've all got their own problems. Chas, traumatized by the death of his wife, is busy trying to protect his two sons from any possible threat to their safety. Margot is chronically depressed and so secretive that, though she's smoked since the age of twelve, nobody in the family knows it. And Richie, well, he's in love with Margot.

The Royal Tenenbaums is mostly a comedy, but one of the most admirable things about it is its refusal to be confined to that genre. It's a comedy about deeply troubled people, and it is not at all shy about showing us their troubles. Their problems aren't funny, but the way they deal with them - or refuse to deal with them - very often are. There's a huge range of emotions in this film: laugh-out-loud moments, poignant moments, heartbreaking moments.

The script, by Anderson and Wilson (who plays the neighbor, Eli) keeps us slightly off balance. A character's actions might seem funny until you realize the pain that causes them. Or a situation may shock you until someone's offhand comment makes you laugh. The characters and situations are exaggerated, but the feelings behind them are genuine.

Anderson's direction is precise and focused. Every shot is meticulously framed, every set decoration tells a story. The costumes, the hairstyles, Margot's ridiculous eye makeup, all speak volumes. The characters are carefully arranged in family tableaux, shot in deep focus so we can see every expression. Nothing about this film seems accidental. Anderson also constructs the film as equal parts homage to Orson Welles and literary time, with a prologue - which introduces the family dynamic and individual characters' histories - chapters, and epilogue, title pages and omniscient narrator (a charmingly husky-voiced Alec Baldwin).

The strong, often brilliant ensemble cast at work in The Royal Tenenbaums battles Anderson and Wilson's writting for what is the film's strongest quality. Angelica Huston (for the first time on an Anderson film), Danny Glover, the brothers Wilson, Bill Murray (sadly underused). Special mention for three: Ben Stiller's characteristic sarcasm and barely controlled rage are perfect for Chas, a man almost at his breaking point. Gene Hackman is brilliantly funny as Royal, walking the line between manipulative schemer and devilish anti-hero. And Gwyneth Paltrow shines as Margot, packing more shades of sadness into one expression - literally, one expression through the entire film - than most actresses could even dream of.

The Royal Tenenbaums has few huge belly laughs, but it's never boring. It makes you appreciate the people in your life, forgive them their trespasses, forgive even your own. It's like a family: sometimes it makes you laugh and sometimes it makes you cry.