Film, Reviews

Baby Mama

17 Jul 2008

COMEDY (12A) 99min Each generation gets the Mary Tyler Moore it deserves; as creator and star of NBC’s 30-Rock sitcom, Tina Fey has earned herself the right to be 2008’s funny-girl. And even though writer/director Michael McCullers seems intent…

Batman: Gotham Knights

17 Jul 2008

Intended to fill the gaps between Batman Begins and Dark Knight, Gotham Knights offers us six animated shorts, much in the same way as The Animatrix did for The Matrix. Each story is self-contained and created by a different writer (including Greg…

Film Books Round-up

17 Jul 2008

In terms of wealth of research and weightiness of tome Richard Brody’s biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything is Cinema (Faber) ••••, should be a masterpiece. Yet for all its detail Godard remains an enigma, and this seems neither for want of research…

Lou Reed's Berlin

17 Jul 2008

CONCERT MOVIE (12A) 85min In 1973, Lou Reed was primed for a stellar pop career, following up the success of Transformer’s glam pop thrills with Berlin, an ambitious rock opera showcasing Reed’s versatile capabilities. But Berlin tanked, both…

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)…

WALL-E

17 Jul 2008

ANIMATION (U) 103min Can Pixar do no wrong? On the evidence of the CG animation studio’s ninth feature film, the answer is a resounding no. Once again Pixar pushes the envelope in the field it’s been trailblazing since the early 1980s, delivering…

Also Released - Film

3 Jul 2008

Garbage Warrior (15) 88min ••• Hippie, sustainable housing architect and all round recycling guru Michael Reynolds presents his self sufficiency vision of the future in this absorbing documentary. The film follows Reynolds attempt to make his dream of…

DVD Round-Up

3 Jul 2008

The time has come to celebrate British cinema. Not the British cinema of Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, David Lean or Robin The Wicker Man Hardy, but the cinema of subsidies and struggle, the results of which have barely seen the inside of a cinema…

Hancock

3 Jul 2008

SUPERHERO/COMEDY (12A) 91min The writers and director of Hancock take a hyper-powered leaf out of the Mystery Men and Return of Captain Invincible school of heroism with Hancock. Will Smith plays a nihilistic superhero who has fallen out of favour…

Interstate 60

3 Jul 2008

ROAD MOVIE (15) 111min (Scanbox DVD retail) Subtitled ‘Episodes of the Road’, this plays more like an edited version of a primetime US television comedy aimed at teenagers. Written and directed by Bob Gale, comic book writer and regular Robert…

Intimate Enemies

3 Jul 2008

WAR (15) 100min (Contender DVD retail) Will the Algerian war turn the humanist lieutenant at the centre of Florent Emilio Siri’s film into a monstrous shadow of his former self? After being posted to Algeria, Terrien (Benoît Magimel), the…

Jules et Jim

3 Jul 2008

NEW PRINT/ROMANCE (PG) 105min French New Wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut’s third film, made in 1962, was undoubtedly his masterpiece. Set in the 1910s and 20s it is the story of a freewheeling love triangle between alpha female Catherine (Jeanne…

Kung Fu Panda

3 Jul 2008

COMEDY/ANIMATION (PG) 91min In the words of Carl Douglas’ 1974 disco hit: ‘Everybody is kung fu fighting.’ Everybody, that is, apart from overweight panda Po (voiced by Jack Black). He dreams about joining his heroes, the Fierce Five, in butt-kicking…

Mes amis, mes amours

3 Jul 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE (15) 106min Mes Amis, Mes Amours resembles a Gallic version of a Richard Curtis movie, set in an affluent, quarter of London and peopled by French expats: it’s less a romantic comedy than a sentimental fantasy of city living among an…

Paris Lockdown

3 Jul 2008

GANGSTER (18) 143min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) This brutally efficient, thoroughly gratuitous French gangster film from Frédéric Schoendorffer, director of Scene de Crime and Spy Bound, explores the lives of various gangsters on the make.

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 Apartment

3 Jul 2008

NEW PRINT/SATIRE (PG) 125min Billy Wilder’s corrosive 1960 lampoon of corporate America is now so familiar to most people that it barely seems to deserve the time investment that this new print demands. Look again, though, and there is plenty of…

The Graveyard

3 Jul 2008

HORROR (18) 83min (Revolver DVD rental/retail) Michael Hurst’s horror-by-numbers film harks back very ineffectively to the three decade old genre conventions of Friday The 13th and Halloween without evoking the slightest hint of the atmosphere. In…

The Mist

3 Jul 2008

HORROR/SCI-FI (15) 126min After The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, writer/director Frank Darabont continues his one-man championing of the Stephen King estate with an adaptation of novella The Mist. After a thunderstorm in an isolated rural…

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…

14 Kilometres (14 Kilometros)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

This issue-driven Spanish drama isn’t afraid to draw on several stock clichés of the well-trodden road movie genre. Three Africans undertake the arduous journey from Niger to Spain, crossing deserts, trying to get through corrupt border controls and…

Before The Rains

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Santosh Sivan, US/India) 98min Set against the backdrop of the decline of the British empire and growth of the nationalist movement in southern India in 1937, this tale of forbidden love between an English spice merchant (Linus Roache) and a local…

Bigga Than Ben: A Russian's Guide to Ripping Off London

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(SA Halewood, UK) 85min Allegedly based on the diary of a young Moscovite who came to London in the late 1990s, Bigga than Ben is, for the majority of its running time, a distracting black comedy. Cobakka (Ben Barnes) and Spiker (Andrei Chadov) are a…