Film, Drama

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Flashbacks of a Fool

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 113min Between Bond outings Daniel Craig has made good use of his greatly increased clout to get this interesting, if not outstanding drama about the repercussions of childhood folly, green-lit. Set in present-day California and an English…

21

10 Apr 2008

ADAPTATION (12A) 123min Robert Luketic’s unfaithful adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House: The Inside story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas For Millions can’t decide whether it’s high stakes or high school. In real life a…

Four Minutes

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 115min How about this for an enjoyably overwrought contemporary German melodrama? Traude Kruger (Monica Bleibtreu) suffered the trauma of seeing her female communist lover hung by the Nazis during WWII, and has spent the last 60 years…

In Memory of Me

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (U) 114min (Artificial Eye DVD retail) What happens when life no longer tastes so sweet? One option is to undergo a period of spiritual training that will eventually lead to the priesthood. As with much of the best Italian cinema in recent…

Son of Rambow

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (12A) 95min It’s the summer of 1983. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party are winning their second landslide election victory and NASA is putting the first American woman in space, two schoolboys from the south of England are about to…

Bloody Sunday

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 110min (Optimum DVD retail) Better known for his bigger budget work on The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum films and United 93, Paul Greengrass’ 2002 docudrama showing the events that led up to the tragic incident on 30 January 1972 in Derry…

How She Move

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (12A) 91min The latest entry in the competitive step-dance cycle initiated by Bille Woodruff’s 2003 Honey, Ian Iqbal Rashid’s How She Move adds little to the tried-and-tested format of recent entries Step Up and sequel Step Up 2 The Streets.

My Brother is an Only Child

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 103min It is sometimes worth remembering that there was a time of passion and politics in Europe before mass consumerism and cultural deception helped nullify and stupefy the general populace. This nostalgic idea runs through Antonio…

You, the Living

27 Mar 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 93min In an unnamed Nordic city a moustachioed tuba-player starts talking about savings and pensions, while making love to his wife who is wearing a military helmet. A dog is dragged along a pavement, attached to the walker of its…

Benny's Video

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 105min (Tartan DVD retail) ‘How beastly the bourgeoisie is,’ DH Lawrence once proposed, and they don’t get much worse than in Benny’s Video. Not that the parents in Michael Funny Games Haneke’s film are especially cruel or vindictive, it’s…

Children Of Glory

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 120min Made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the doomed Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 (which cost some 5000 lives including that of the executed prime minister Imre Nagy), director Krisztina Goda’s Children of Glory…

Flight of the Red Balloon

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (PG) 113min Taiwanese New Wave cinema pioneer Hou Hsiao-hsien makes his French language debut with this eloquent drama loosely inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s much-loved 1956 short, The Red Balloon. Taking as its starting point that film’s…

Harmony Korine

13 Mar 2008

Harmony Korine was thrust into the limelight aged 22, when his sensational script for Kids garnered him the status of overnight sensation. Then came Gummo, a film made in the best traditions of German maverick Werner Herzog, which established the young…

Lars and the Real Girl

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (12A) 106min If, as the American columnist and poet Don Marquis noted, ‘fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in bad clothes’, then he should try a few hours in the sub zero Wisconsin town where Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) lives.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA/FAMILY/FANTASY (PG) 95min When newly divorced mother of three Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) moves her kids to the secluded rundown Spiderwick estate, once owned by their great great uncle Spiderwick, the children are less than impressed. Twin…

Water Lilies (Naissance Des Pieuvres)

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 83min The literal translation of this film’s French title is ‘Birth of Octopuses’, which is a far more apt description of how the growing pains of a trio of 15-year-old girls translate into arrogance and sexual confusion. Set in a new…

Paul Taylor - We Are Together

28 Feb 2008

Director Paul Taylor had just finished his first year studying film at Bournemouth in 2003 when he went off and worked for a few months at the Agape Orphanage in South Africa. A year later he returned with a camera and documented the kids. In some ways…

Garage

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA (18) 84min Director Lenny Abrahamson follows his quirky junkie comedy Adam and Paul with another tale of oddballs living life on the margins of Irish society. Stand-up comedian Pat Shortt plays against type as the gas station attendant Josie…

Margot at the Wedding

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA/COMEDY (15) 92min Writer/director Noah Baumbach starts proceedings on his latest feature with a block capital title caption, forewarning the audience that his latest offering pays homage to the French New Wave, in particular the work of Francois…

Bergman: The Faith Trilogy

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA (15) 260min (Tartan DVD retail) As with much of Ingmar Bergman’s work this trilogy of early 60s films on the issue of faith are really chamber pieces, where a sense of claustrophobia weighs heavily on the characters’ lives. Whether that’s the…

Don't Touch The Axe

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (PG) 138min Adapted from Balzac’s The Duchess of Langeais, Jacques Rivette’s latest film tells the tragic story of a French general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), back from a difficult trip in Africa, who falls for married…

The Edge of Heaven

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA (15) 121min With Goethe’s assertion that ‘We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens’ ringing in his ears, the seriously gifted Turkish/German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head-On, Crossing the Bridge) delivers something completely…

There Will be Blood

14 Feb 2008

EPIC/DRAMA (15) 158min As the American industrialist Jean Paul Getty noted, ‘Oil is like a wild animal. Whoever finds it keeps it.’ It’s a notion that lone silver prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) soon discovers when he finds black gold…

My Blueberry Nights

14 Feb 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (12A) 95min Wong Kar-wai’s compelling 1997 Buenos Aries-set Happy Together demonstrated that he can successfully transplant his inimitable style away from Asia, but here the director of Chungking Express and In The Mood for Love has made…

Omagh

14 Feb 2008

DRAMA (15) 102min (Optimum DVD retail/rental) On August 15 1998 a peaceful small town was blown apart both literally and figuratively by a bomb blast that killed and wounded many of its citizens. Written by Paul United 93 Greengrass but directed by…

The Italian

14 Feb 2008

DRAMA (12A) 99min It’s 2002 in a rundown orphanage in a remote, god forsaken corner of Russia. The boys live in hope of being picked out by one of few visiting couples keen on adoption. Sweet six-year-old Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) is one day lucky…

Penelope

(U) 89min

31 Jan 2008

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away from self-conscious satire, there lived a girl named Penelope (Christina Ricci). With her moneyed background, good sense of humour and French language skills, Penelope should be a bit of a catch. Sadly, Penelope…

Chromophobia

(15) 135min

31 Jan 2008

Writer-director Martha Fiennes’ follow-up to her impressive debut, Onegin, is a disappointment. The cool manner with which Fiennes told the story of the emotionally distant St Petersburg aristocrat in that film is here frozen solid, so that what’s…

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - interview with Marie-Josée Croze

31 Jan 2008

‘When I first met the director Julian Schnabel to discuss being in his version of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I remember that Julian was wearing these beautiful silk pyjamas. They were the same pyjamas that Bauby…

The Frightened City

Crime/drama

31 Jan 2008

Chiefly notable for an early screen appearance from Edinburgh’s most famous former milkman, this somewhat pedestrian 1961 British film noir features Sean Connery in one of his last supporting roles, here playing a cat burglar the year before he was cast…

Things We Lost in the Fire

(15) 117min

31 Jan 2008

Danish director Susanne Bier’s films Open Hearts, Brothers and After The Wedding all revolve around the fallout from a tragic and unexpected accident. Now the director is trying to repeat the feat in an American setting and with Hollywood stars. The…

The Savages

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 114min Nine years after her 1998 feature debut Slums of Beverley Hills, writer-director Tamara Jenkins returns with this richly observed and terrifically acted character study. The Savages of the title are a pair of intellectual…

Invisible Waves

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (18) 115min (Tartan DVD retail/rental) Half noir, half melancholic meditation on sins that won’t go away, Last Life in the Universe director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s film is a mixture of the clumsy and the allusively accomplished. Sometimes it…

Sherrybaby

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 92min (Metrodome DVD retail/rental) A useful companion piece to the much more lauded Half Nelson, this story about a woman trying to get her life together after a prison sentence and a drug habit, utilises a quirky visual style to…

Slacker

17 Jan 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 93min (Metrodome rental/retail) Originally released in 1991, Richard Linklater’s fine low-budget second feature may bring to mind one of contemporary cinema’s most over-used storytelling devices: the multiple character tale. But…

The Good Night

17 Jan 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 93min Not above cashing-in on family connections, writer/director Jake Paltrow’s romantic comedy casts his older sister Gwyneth as the dowdy, disaffected partner of commercial jingle writer Gary (Martin Freeman). A kind…

4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 113min The winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s impressively acted 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days explores a long, dark night of the soul in late 1980s Romania, unfolding towards the end of Nicolae…

A Successful Man

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (12A) 104min (Network DVD retail) Along with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Strawberry and Chocolate, The Twelve Chairs), Humberto Solás is one of the most prominent of the filmmakers to emerge from Castro’s Cuba, and this film from the 1980s is…

Beloved

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (12A) 100min (Network DVD retail) After her wealthy slave-trading father’s death, Amada (Eslinda Núñez) wiles away her time on his estate, living with her blind mother and her unfaithful husband. Clearly she wants and deserves more from…

Charlie Wilson's War

4 Jan 2008

REAL LIFE/DRAMA (15) 101min Directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Primary Colors) and starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, the chief virtue of Charlie Wilson’s War is a commendably tight script by Aaron Sorkin. The West Wing’s creator provides…

Someone Else

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 72min (Soda DVD rental/retail) Watching dramas about women hunting for boyfriends is about as interesting as hearing your mum talk about her dreams – despite what those lurid celebrity magazines may claim. But when a British filmmaker…

The Hottest State

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 113min (Revolver retail/rental) Actor, writer and now director Ethan Hawke’s respectable feature debut didn’t receive a cinema release in the UK, despite premiering at last August’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. Adapted by…