Film, Issue 611

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Fresh from the critical and commercial success of his Oscar-feted Spanish horror-fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro returns to Hollywood with a second blockbuster adaptation of Dark Horse Comics’ cult supernatural title. A…

The Wackness

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…

The Strangers

THRILLER/HORROR Even in 2008, sleeper hits (low budget, low forecast films that become box office hits) still happen. Take writer-director Bryan Bertino’s taut thriller The Strangers which cost ten million dollars to make (a paltry amount in today’s…

Ben X

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…

College Road Trip

Aiming for the generational conflict of Freaky Friday, director Roger Kumble’s family-comedy-drama focuses on trust issues between high-flying teen Melanie (Raven-Symoné) and her over-protective father, police chief James Porter (Martin Lawrence). When…

Her Name is Sabine

DOCUMENTARY As an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire has worked with some illustrious French filmmakers including Maurice Pialat, Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. Her Name is Sabine, her own impressive directorial debut, is an intimate and…

Somers Town

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…

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

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…

Mad Detective

THRILLER ‘Apply emotions to investigate!’ is the motto of the mad detective at the centre of Johnny To and Wai Ka-fai’s follow-up to 2003’s My Left Eye Sees Ghosts. The an unfortunately-named Inspector Bun (Ching Wan-lau) is a police investigator…

Get Smart

After the financial/emotional excremental woes of Evan Almighty and Dan in Real Life, comic Steve Carell shores up his career with a safe property: Peter Segal’s tent-pole blockbuster revamp of 1960s spy spoof Get Smart. Maxwell Smart (Carell) is an…

Step Brothers

COMEDY ‘Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream’ is the George W Bush quotation which opens new Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. Such crude expression sets the tone for a sporadically funny but generally gross comedy in…

Trouble In Mind

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

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…

The Lion in Winter

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…

The Producers

COMEDY Mel Brooks’ classic and surely – with full respect to High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles – his greatest film still stands up brilliantly forty years on. For those unfamiliar with its plot, we meet a rapacious Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and…

Robert Carlyle set for role in feature-length 24: Exile film

Robert Carlyle has a major role in the highly-anticipated 24 feature-length film 24: Exile. Featuring the first new material in over a year-and-a-half, the film picks up from the last time audiences saw Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), standing by a…