Drama

Año Uña

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE Inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short La Jetée, the young Mexican writer/director Jonás Cuarón (son of filmmaker Alfonso) has constructed a feature film that consists entirely of still images. Over the course of a year he photographed…

Changeling

27 Nov 2008

CRIME/DRAMA Clint Eastwood’s feel for actors doesn’t desert him in this true story of 1920’s Los Angeles featuring Angelina Jolie in a similar Oscar-baiting vein to her role as Mariane Pearl in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart. Jolie…

Quiet Chaos

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE Nanni Moretti’s 2001 film The Son’s Room explored a middle-class Italian family’s attempt to cope with the unexpected death of a teenage son. Quiet Chaos, which stars and is co-written by Moretti, but is directed by Antonello Grimaldi…

Summer

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA There is no Shakespearean ‘eternal summer’ for Shaun (Robert Carlyle) and Daz (Steve Evets). Shaun looks after wheelchair bound Daz in an impoverished ex-mining community in Derbyshire. Daz is mouthy, bitter and demanding while Shaun is silent…

Body of Lies

13 Nov 2008

(15) 128min As with 2001’s Black Hawk Down, South Shields’ most famous filmmaker Ridley Scott again attempts to pull a callous zeitgeist from international news headlines, with unconvincing results. CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo Di Caprio…

Choke

13 Nov 2008

(18) 92min Unrepentant sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has always believed that life is about making other people do stuff for you. By day he does as little work as he can at a historical theme park and by night he cons money in restaurants…

Conversations With My Gardener

13 Nov 2008

(12A) 108min When a successful Parisian painter (Daniel Auteil) returns to the rural childhood home he has inherited in the Rhone-Alps region of southern France, he places an advert for somebody to rejuvenate the property’s unkempt garden. The first…

Max Payne

13 Nov 2008

(15) 99min The film noir influences on the Max Payne video game series made a cinematic outing inevitable, but John Moore’s abortive fantasy-thriller exemplifies everything that’s wrong with console to big-screen crossovers. Jockstrap-fresh from…

Quarantine

13 Nov 2008

(18) 89min Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s grimly effective Spanish-zombie movie [REC] gets the Hollywood treatment in John Erick and brother Drew Dowdle’s scene-by-scene remake. Quarantine purports to be the surviving document of what happens…

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

13 Nov 2008

(18) 149min Based on the non-fiction book by Der Spiegel editor and journalist Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a compelling and engrossing attempt to explain the trajectory and political position of arguably the most incoherent post-war…

Waltz With Bashir

13 Nov 2008

(18) 90min An animated feature about war, memory displacement and the hideous genocide committed by Christian militiamen on Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanese War may not sound particularly inviting but, like last…

Red or dead

13 Nov 2008

Bernd Eichinger is best known internationally as the writer and producer of Downfall and after having forced the German public to look back at their relationship with Hitler he has now turned his attention to the Red Army Faction (RAF). Whether these…

Gillian Slovo - Black Orchids

13 Nov 2008

Evelyn wishes to be ‘rescued from the boredom of her life’ and it’s in Emil, the beneficiary of a rich Ceylon family, that she finds her non-white knight in shining armour. What seems like an exotic fairy tale in 40s Ceylon, however, is an altogether…

Saxon

13 Nov 2008

(15) 92min Semi-blinded Eddie (Sean Harris) has to pay off his debts otherwise he’ll lose an eye to the gangsters who plucked out the other one. He’s handed a lifeline by childhood sweetheart, the wealthy Linda (Sarah Matravers), who is looking for…

The Devil’s Whore

13 Nov 2008

DRAMA Having coped admirably with the distasteful task of bringing the early political career of Margaret Thatcher to fruition during The Long Walk to Finchley, Andrea Riseborough steps into the shoes of another headstrong historical female. Born…

The Voyage

13 Nov 2008

(PG) 97mins Vittoria de Sica (Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan) was one of the great voices of the Italian neo-realist film movement. He was also, alas, not always the most innovative of filmmakers, and this, his last completed film made in 1974, is…

Summer scoops top prize at Bafta Scotland awards

10 Nov 2008

Summer, Grand Theft Auto, Gary’s Wrr and Lorraine Kelly were amongst the winners last night at the Lloyds TSB BAFTA Scotland Awards. The ceremony, at Glasgow’s City Halls with an audience of over 800, was broadcast live online worldwide.

Hunger

(15) 95min

30 Oct 2008

In 1981, IRA member Bobby Sands allowed his body to become the ultimate instrument of protest when he led the Maze prison hunger strike in order to win political status for imprisoned members of the IRA. Directed by Turner Prize winning artist Steve…

Babylon

30 Oct 2008

The long overdue DVD release of Franco Rosso’s seminal 1980 tale of working class black youths and their music in South London really is something to celebrate. A kind of reggae counterpart to Quadrophenia, Rosso’s naturalistic film details the…

Easy Virtue

30 Oct 2008

England, the 1920s. Dashing young socialite John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) returns to his ancestral pile with his spunky new American wife Larita (Jessica Biel). A hotbed of dysfunction, xenophobia and bankruptcy the family home contains his highly-strung…

Let's Talk About the Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie)

30 Oct 2008

In an interview to promote their 2004 feature Look at Me, the French actors/filmmakers Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri felt that they couldn't pitch their films at Hollywood meetings, and their latest collaboration Let's Talk About the Rain again…

La Zona

16 Oct 2008

DRAMA The titular area is a gated community in Mexico City, and the opening sequence establishes the Eden-like quality of this affluent enclave, with its pristine lawns, rows of immaculate houses, and smartly uniformed schoolchildren. But as the…

The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA In January 2004, British photography student Tom Hurndall died after being left in a coma for nine months, the victim of a bullet fired by a member of the Israeli Defence Force. The fact that the killer, Taysir Hayb, was handed an 11-year…

Brideshead Revisited

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Julian Jarrold’s revamp of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel pares back the opulent trimmings of the television series to expose the bare bones of Waugh’s lament for the civilised past. Charting blithe social-climber Charles Ryder (Matthew…

Gomorrah

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Movies like The Godfather have tended to make life in the Mafia seem glamorous, Shakespearean and operatic. Heck, it’s so appealing that at times it seems like the Mafioso is the best Italian export since pasta. Now it’s time for the more…

Good Dick

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Glasgow-born, Los Angeles-resident 27-year-old filmmaker Marianna Palka has written, directed, co-produced and taken the leading role in her feature debut, which she is currently self-distributing in America. That’s an impressive achievement in…

Babylon

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA/CRIME The long overdue DVD release of Franco Rosso’s seminal 1980 tale of working class black youths and their music in South London really is something to celebrate. A kind of reggae counterpart to Quadrophenia, Rosso’s naturalistic film…

Import Export

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA The great Werner Herzog would surely approve of the way the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days) dissolves the traditional boundaries between the ‘real’ and the fictional in his films. With Import Export he works without a traditional…

Nate Powell - Swallow Me Whole

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Although Nate Powell’s graphic novel about the growing pains of a pair of step-siblings living in small town America is in the magic realist mould, the fantastic elements here are definitely – and in no way contrarily – of the mundane variety.

Times and Winds (Bes Vakit)

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA It’s taken a couple of years for Times and Winds, the fourth feature of Turkish writer-director Reha Erdem, to find a British distributor, but it’s been worth the wait: this magnificent work provides a striking vision of childhood in a…

Unrelated

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA British TV director Joanna Hogg’s debut feature, shot during a hot summer in the Tuscan hills, has none of the trappings of Merchants Ivory’s A Room with a View, that other British heritage film made in the same location. Forty-something…

What Just Happened?

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Tales about the mechanics of the movie industry and the bloated egos that work within it are the stuff of fantasy to filmmakers. Robert Altman’s The Player is pretty much the definitive account of Hollywood, although that hasn’t stopped films…

Mat Johnson & Warren Pleece - Incognegro

18 Sep 2008

DRAMA Comics of course can tackle any subject matter – it’s a medium not a genre after all (despite the predominance of superhero titles), and Vertigo at DC has been pushing leftfield stories into the mainstream since its inception in 1993. Set…

Merlin

18 Sep 2008

DRAMA It would perhaps be unfair to describe this new BBC1 post-teatime ‘is it ok to let the kids watch?’ show as ‘Robin Hood meets Doctor Who’, but you can see what the schedulers were going for when they plopped this fresh take on the Arthurian…

Angel

4 Sep 2008

After years of gleeful, near bi-polar genre shifting, France’s greatest living film parodist, Francois Ozon (5x2, 8 Women, Sitcom), makes the film that every gay teenager, who has grown up in the latter part of the 20th century, would kill to…

The Banishment

4 Sep 2008

Fledgling master Russian filmmaker Andrei The Return Zvyagintsev’s flawed second feature is a nonetheless interesting fusion of British gangster flick Sexy Beast, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and (thematically at least) Scenes from a Marriage as created by…

The Duchess

4 Sep 2008

In his second film feature UK filmmaker Saul Bullet Boy Dibb retells the tragic true life story of 18th/early 19th Century aristocrat Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. Celebrated beauty and socialite Georgiana (Keira Knightley) is married off…

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

4 Sep 2008

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the nine-year-old son of a Nazi Commandant (David Thewlis). When his father is seconded to manage a concentration camp in a remote area of the Fascist empire, the lonely Bruno makes a new friend, Schmuel (Jack Scanlon), beyond…

The Pope's Toilet (El Baño del Papa)

4 Sep 2008

DRAMA (EL BANO DEL PAPA) (15) 98min Like the recent Couscous, The Pope’s Toilet works up a great deal of narrative tension out of what are very believable anxieties. Its strength is that it generates a plot out of real life and real concerns.

The Wackness

21 Aug 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA Jonathan Levine’s follow-up to the surprisingly good horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is another voyage into nostalgic romanticism and teenage growing pains. This time Levine is pining for his lost youth with a film set in 1994…

Ben X

21 Aug 2008

Mock-documentary Ben X introduces us to teen Asperger’s sufferer Ben. Moving backwards and forwards between his so-called life of bullying and high school torture and his escape into online role-playing games, the film’s doom laden narrative is led by…

Pierrepoint

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Every now and again, the general public, as represented by the reactionary tabloid press, will rise up and demand a debate on the return of capital punishment. Fortunately, the process has never gone any further than some screeching headlines…

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Teenage Hana Makhmalbaf, the youngest of the Iranian filmmaking family that comprises famous father Mohsen (Kandahar), mother Marzieh (Stray Dogs) and sister Samira (At Five in the Afternoon), follows in the footsteps of her relations to make a…

Somers Town

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Shane Meadows’ seventh feature takes its title from the working class residential area situated between London’s Euston and King’s Cross railway stations. Originally financed by Eurostar as a short film to promote the service’s new terminus at…

The Lion in Winter

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Still looking good 40 years on, this bawdy, witty chamber piece confined within a medieval French chateau revolves around King Henry II’s obsession with choosing an heir to his throne, and the efforts of his scheming wife Eleanor of Aquitaine…

Trouble In Mind

21 Aug 2008

CRIME/DRAMA ‘A little bit of everybody belongs in hell’ say Kris Kristofferson’s former cop, a man who’s recently served time for killing a mobster. Then there is Keith Carradine’s man on the make who changes his image from country boy to androgynous…

Under the Bombs

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE This piece from former documentary maker Philippe Aractingi speaks loudly of his own artistic origins in reportage. In it, a mother returns to Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006 in order to find her son, who has…

Kings of London

14 Aug 2008

DRAMA Channel 4, Wed 20 Aug, 11.35pm Amid yet another summer of bland sport and tedious evictions, it’s reassuring to know that there are still programmes being made which at least try to bend our minds a bit. However, this latest instalment of C4’s…

The Cup

14 Aug 2008

COMEDY DRAMA BBC2, Thu 21 Aug, 9.30pm Do we really need another fly-on-the-wall docu-comedy-drama about flawed individuals living out their largely miserable lives? Apparently so, as The Cup smashes its way towards us with more ‘subtle’ humour and…

Tropical Malady

14 Aug 2008

DRAMA/FANTASY (12A) 118min (Second Run DVD retail) Thai architect, artist, writer and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made a handful of experimental documentaries and fictional films that are so wayward and quirky in structure that they…

Elegy

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 112min Philip Roth, arguably America’s greatest living writers (and certainly one of the major chroniclers of middle class ennui), hasn’t been well served by adaptations. Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) and The…

Married Life

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (PG) 90min Suburban America, 1949. President Harry S Truman has just unveiled his Fair Deal plan and the People’s Republic of China is in the process of being born. As befits his business class status, mild-mannered Harry Allen (Chris…

Spooks: Code 9

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA BBC3, Sun 10 Aug, 9pm The spin-off show is a seemingly inevitable symptom of modern TV production: when ideas are running on empty, just grab a programme, give it a shake and see what kind of sub-version can be made out of it. So, here we are in…

Before the Rains

31 Jul 2008

DRAMA (12A) 98min Inspired by Israeli short Red Roofs, scripted by the late American Cathy Rabin (to whom the film is dedicated), directed and photographed by Bollywood filmmaker Santosh Sivan, starring Brit Linus Roache, yank Jennifer Ehle and…

Cass

31 Jul 2008

CRIME/DRAMA/BIOPIC (18) 108min Films about football hooligans have resulted in some of the worst examples of British filmmaking in the last ten years – Green Street, Rise of the Footsoldier, The Football Factory have all scored own goals. So it comes…

The Long Day Closes

31 Jul 2008

DRAMA (PG) 81min (BFI DVD retail) Following on from the recent releases of The Terence Davies Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Life comes the arrival on DVD of what Davies loosely described as the third and final part of an autobiographical series of…

In Which They Serve

17 Jul 2008

The British Film Institute’s re-release of the rarely seen and now beautifully restored David Lean film The Passionate Friends is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the celebration of the centenary of the great British filmmaker’s birth. In…

Burn Up

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA BBC1, Wed 23 & Fri 25 Jul, 9pm Meet Tom McConnell (Rupert Penry-Jones), VP of Arrow Oil, the most powerful business in the world. He’s square-jawed, blue-eyed with a cut glass accent and a line in motivational patter to rival stick-thumping…

Irina Palm

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 103min Maggie (Marianne Faithful) is desperate. Her grandson is dying, her husband is dead and she needs money so her son can take his sick boy to Australia for radical treatment. In her mid 50s, she is apparently too old to do…

La Leon

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 78min (Soda DVD retail) There’s a formal rigour to so many of the films coming out of Argentina that it’s a pity many of them – Lucretia, Martel and Lisandro, Alonso excepted – haven’t worked through the subtle storytelling elements…

My Winnipeg

17 Jul 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DRAMA (15) 79min Guy Maddin is a most acquired taste. Filming in black and white and creating images that resemble silent cinema, Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World) is a postmodernist with a yearning for a time when…

Paris

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 130min Having explored Barcelona in Pot Luck and St Petersburg and London in Russian Dolls, writer/director Cedric Klapisch comes back to the French capital with this sentimental ‘choral’ drama. Romain Duris, Klapisch’s perennial…

Summer Hours

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (12A) 102min In summer sunshine in the countryside north of Paris it’s the 75th birthday of widowed matriarch Helene (Edith Scob), and attending the celebrations are her three children, university economist Frédéric (Charles Berling)…

Savage Grace

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (18) 97mins Sixteen years on from his debut, the New Queer Cinema-defining Swoon, Tom Kalin finally makes a return with his sophomore feature, a flawed but nevertheless fascinating examination of dysfunction among the American aristocracy. Based…

The Visitor

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 106min Ageing widower and economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a grouch. He spends his days giving his students a hard time. When he is sent to Manhattan to present a dull paper, a series of misunderstandings lead him to…

Tick Tock Lullaby

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 72min (Peccadillo DVD retail) In one particular scene of this film, a good looking thirty-something notices that he’s been trailed by a couple of ladies, and comments that it’s the first time he’s been cruised by two gay women, and that…

The Edge of Love

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 110min Dylan Thomas, he of the milk wood, once remarked that: ‘When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.’ The Edge of Love is the story of how the great Welsh poet burnt a very big bridge, one that connected him to an…

Adulthood

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 99min Despite a fairly miserable showing at the box office 2006’s Kidulthood has spawned a sequel. Like its predecessor Adulthood’s London-centric depiction of inner-city struggles won’t speak as immediately to a Scottish audience but it’s…

Couscous (La Graine et le mulet)

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 154min Filmmaker Abdel Kechiche builds on the promise that he displayed with 2003’s L’Esquive by creating a drama similar in style and spirit to Vittorio De Sica’s 1951 neorealist fantasy Miracle in Milan. The man in need of a miracle in…

Fallout

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA Channel 4, Thu 3 Jul, 9pm The issue of young people and crime is such a hot topic that it was only a matter of time before documentary-makers got in gear and happy slapped Channel 4 commissioners into submission with a series to mark the sorry…

The Happening

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA/SCI-FI (15) 90min The best and worst of M Night Shyamalan’s questionable talents are on display in The Happening, but after The Village and the dire Lady in The Water, it’s good to see Shyamalan hitting any sort of form at all. The apocalyptic…

The Waiting Room

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 105min Elderly Roger (Frank Finlay) sits in a suburban London train station, forlornly waiting for his dead wife to arrive, his presence providing the catalyst for a Brief Encounter-style chance meeting between Anna (Anne-Marie Duff) and…

Wenders season offers insight into world of major film figure

10 Jun 2008

The GFT's Wim Wenders season consists of five of the director's most well known films: Kings of the Road, The American Friend, Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and tonight’s film Alice in the Cities made in 1974.

Gone Baby Gone

5 Jun 2008

THRILLER/DRAMA (15) 113min Ben Affleck’s long delayed (because of the Madeline McCann case) child abduction crime drama finally stumbles in to British cinemas. Based, like Clint Eastwood’s 2003 film Mystic River, on a novel by Irish Bostonian Dennis…

Sex and the City

5 Jun 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE/COMEDY (15) 145min As Carrie Bradshaw might say – ‘I couldn’t help but wonder how four ageing divas were going to resurrect Sex and the City: The Brand’. Is it possible that Charlotte, Samantha, Carrie and Miranda could pull off the same…

Alexander Terekhov - The Rat Killer

5 Jun 2008

ALLEGORICAL DRAMA (Alma Books) Alexander Terekhov wrote this political allegory when he was 27. Bad timing meant it failed to make waves outside Russia, as critics were busy unearthing older, established writers suppressed under the communist regime.

Un Secret

5 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 106min Veteran French writer-director Claude Miller (Garde à Vue, La Petite Voleuse) revisits France’s traumatic experiences under German Occupation during World War II in this polished and suspenseful melodrama. Adapted from Philippe…

Mongol

22 May 2008

EPIC/DRAMA/HISTORY (15) 125min Life’s hard when you’re a Mongol. For Genghis Khan, starting life in 1192 as nine-year-old Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren), the problems start when his selection of a bride is interrupted by the assassination of his father by…

California Dreamin’ (Endless)

22 May 2008

DRAMA/COMEDY (15) 154min Tragically Cristian Nemescu, the 27 year-old writer-director of California Dreamin’ died in a car crash whilst working on the post-production of this richly ambitious film (together with his sound designer Andrei Toncu), hence…

A Walk with Love and Death

22 May 2008

ROMANCE/DRAMA (15) 90min (BFI) Made immediately after his boisterous Scottish historical romp Sinful Davey, this long lost, now cult, 1969 film was a much more personal project for the great John Huston. Based on Dutch writer Hans Koningsberger’s…

Bandit Queen

22 May 2008

DRAMA (18) 115min (Metrodome) Made in 1994 Shekhar Kapur’s (Elizabeth) brutal retelling of the true story of Phoolan Devi, India’s only modern day female outlaw is still a compellingly tough watch. Jailed in 1983 and released in the year Bandit…

Change of Address

22 May 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (12A) 85min French horn teacher David (Emmanuel Mouret) is improbably picked up by impulsive Anne (Frédérique Bel). She convinces him to come and live in her small Parisian flat. These oddballs are obviously perfect for each other but in…

Strays

22 May 2008

ROMANCE/DRAMA (15) 79mins (Revolver) Although a big name now, Vin Diesel couldn’t get work before this film was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize in Sundance back in 1997. Written, directed and produced by the man of muscle himself, this is half…

Honeydripper

8 May 2008

DRAMA (PG) 124min God may have given rock’n’roll to us but Alabama gave us the electric blues. The story of its genesis is one that writer and director John Sayles (Lone Star, Matewan, Silver City) sets out in his latest film treatise in search of the…

Heartbeat Detector

8 May 2008

DRAMA (12A) 135min Visually spare, leisurely in pace, wordy and featuring an eclectic, occasionally jarring soundtrack, this French corporate thriller is demanding and rewarding in equal measure. Adapted from François Emmanuel’s novel La Question…

XXY

8 May 2008

DRAMA (15) 90min What would you do if your only child was a hermaphrodite? Would you let this anomaly of nature lie or would you welcome the intervention of major surgery? This is the dilemma at the centre of Argentinean screenwriter Lucía Puenzo’s…

Caramel

8 May 2008

DRAMA (PG) 95min Dedicated ‘to my Beirut’, the charming, bitter-sweet debut feature of writer-director Nadine Labaki centres upon the ‘Si Belle’ beauty parlour in the Lebanese capital. The 30-year-old proprietor Layale (Labaki herself) is guiltily…

Cashback

8 May 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 102min In the words of Faithless’ Maxi Jazz, art student and late night supermarket shift worker Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) ‘can’t get no sleep’. Ever since he split up with his girlfriend Suzy (Michelle Ryan) he’s been wandering around…

Charlie Bartlett

8 May 2008

DRAMA (15) 96min In a crafty move that befits its wheeler-dealer anti-hero, teen comedy Charlie Bartlett arrives on the coat-tails of the highly publicised Iron Man, which also features Robert Downey Jr. The star gives a pleasing supporting…

Honeydripper - John Sayles Interview

8 May 2008

‘Some of the plot of Honeydripper comes from this rock’n’roll legend called Guitar Slim who was a New Orleans guitar player in the early 1950s. He had a huge hit with a song called ‘The Things That I Used to Do’ which was arranged by Ray Charles when he…

Midnight Man

8 May 2008

CRIME DRAMA STV, Thu 8 May, 9pm Were James Nesbitt to be handed a script featuring the worst excesses of humanity, it would be difficult not to imagine him desperately looking for the jokes. Asides from his role as Ivan Cooper, the real-life civil…

Pink String and Sealing Wax

8 May 2008

DRAMA (PG) 86min (Optimum) This is the debut feature from Robert Hamer, the talented but troubled (by the bottle) filmmaker who went on to make the superb Kind Hearts and Coronets and terrific School for Scoundrels. Having contributed a segment of the…

Smart People

8 May 2008

COMEDY DRAMA (15) 94min Another week and another dysfunctional American family comedy. Scripted by novelist Mark Poirier and directed by newcomer Noam Murro, Smart People examines the improbable rejuvenation of widowed, middle-aged English professor…

The Last Mistress

8 May 2008

DRAMA (15) 114min Despite suffering a cerebral haemorrhage in 2004, the French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has returned with her most entertaining and accessible work to date. Based on the 19th century novel by the controversial writer Jules-Amédée…

Under the Bombs

8 May 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 98min This heartfelt road movie from Lebanese writer-director Philippe Aractingi was filmed during Israel’s 33-day bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. It follows a wealthy Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) and a…

Private Property

24 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 95min ‘The story of an explosion in a closed world’ is how the young Belgian writer-director Joachim Lafosse has described Private Property, his emotionally complex and mordantly amusing family drama, in which the boundaries between parents…

Beaufort

24 Apr 2008

WAR/ACTION/DRAMA (15) 125min The Beaufort of the title refers to a castle built by the Crusaders during the 12th century in southern Lebanon. In 2000 this mountaintop fortress is occupied by IDF (Israeli Defence Force) troops, who are preparing to…

Indiscretion of an American Wife

24 Apr 2008

DRAMA (U) 69min (Freemantle DVD rental/retail) Coming in at just over an hour, this is a film that can be found in different versions (another one goes under the title of Terminal Station). This one’s strength lies in another of Montgomery Clift’s…

Stop-Loss

24 Apr 2008

DRAMA/WAR (15) 111min ‘Stop-Loss’ is the rule that stops American soldiers leaving a conflict even after they have completed their tour of duty. This fate befalls Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), a former star college footballer, whose return from Iraq…

Happy-Go-Lucky

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 118min The social realism-orientated cinema of British filmmaker Mike Leigh takes on a slightly different tone with Happy-Go-Lucky, his most recent foray into a kind of filmic anthropology of (to use the great filmmaker’s own words) ‘how we…