Film and Romance

Hot Rod

(12a) 88min

16 Aug 2007

ROMANTIC COMEDY Originally created as a vehicle for Will Ferrell, who acts as executive producer here, Akiva Schaffer’s low-rent comedy in the Tallageda Nights/Blades of Glory mould features a number of fresh-faced Saturday Night Live alumni who are…

Not Here To Be Loved

2 Jul 2007

Divorced, cheerless, well heeled 51-year-old ‘huissier de justice’ (bailiff) Jean-Claude (Patrick Chesnais) lives a life of silent misery. Between repossessions and visiting his cantankerous old dad (Georges Wilson) at the nursing home, he has managed…

Water

21 May 2007

After 2002’s abysmal effort at cinema fusion Bollywood/Hollywood, Toronto based Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta serves up Water, the final part of her elements trilogy. The good news for those who missed Fire (1996) and Earth (1998) is that this is a…

Black Snake Moan

7 May 2007

Writer/director Craig Brewer does here for the blues what he did for hip hop in sleeper hit Hustle & Flow. In that film Brewer used the synoptic imagery contained in gangster rap to show the reformation of a pimp through music. Here he uses that…

DVD - Romeo, Juliet and Darkness

Romeo, Juliet and Darkness

11 Apr 2007

ROMANCE Jirí Weiss’ fine 1960 film is a tale of moral ambivalence and youthful idealism. Set in 1942 Czechoslovakia at a time when the Nazis were occupying the country and the Jews were hounded out of it. Pavel (Ivan Mistrík) falls in love with…

The Namesake

(12A) 121min

26 Mar 2007

HISTORY/DRAMA/ROMANCE Not only is Mira Nair one of the world’s pre-eminent women directors, she has also taken over Spike Lee’s mantle as the most intuitive director making movies about ethnic minorities in America. Having started off making…

Stomp The Yard

13 Mar 2007

After the death of his younger brother, LA street dancer DJ (Columbus Short) avoids blame and recrimination by enrolling in the historically African-American Truth University in Atlanta, Georgia. Once there, however, he finds a whole different type of…

Becoming Jane

27 Feb 2007

As the occasionally inspired Boston Globe film critic Mark Feeney pointed out: ‘Once the implicit aim of biography was to uplift now it is to unveil.’ And so it is that we reach the point where it seems OK to release a film about the secret love life of…

Glasgow Film Festival - Cashback - Sean Biggerstaff interview

Money talks

30 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Sean Biggerstaff has just returned from the seventh annual British Film Festival in Israel where Cashback was screened simultaneously in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But though the film was well received, Biggerstaff wasn’t…

Play

29 Jan 2007

‘Times were hard but they were modern’ runs the unattributed Italian proverb at the beginning of this vibrant debut feature from young Chilean writer-director Alicia Scherson, which provides a real tonic for jaded cinematic palates. Described by its…

Dirty Dancing: 20th Anniversary Edition

(15) 100min

29 Jan 2007

For the few who don’t know the plot of Emile Ardolino’s 1987 romantic musical: it’s the summer of 1963 at Kellerman’s Holiday Resort. Misunderstood, frustrated in-house dance teacher, Johnny (an unconvincingly teenage Patrick Swayze), meets…

The Fountain

15 Jan 2007

Plagued with production problems - most infamously star Brad Pitt exiting over creative differences, causing the film to close down - Darren Aronofsky’s labour of love has been a long time coming. Before rewriting the script and recasting a scaled down…

Ballad of a Soldier - DVD review

Ballad of a Soldier

15 Jan 2007

WAR/DRAMA/ROMANCE This long overdue DVD release of Grigori Chukhrai’s 1959 anti-war film arrives thankfully clear of the hideous dubbing that so marred previous incarnations of the film. It is not difficult to see why Chukhrai’s film picked up the…

Do You Remember Dolly Bell? - DVD review

Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

11 Dec 2006

COMEDY/ROMANCE Emir Kusturica usually works a combination of nostalgia and rumbustiousness, but often the former loses out to the latter and many of his films (like Underground, Black Cat, White Cat) end up like crazy multiple circus acts. Which is…

Dark Horse

11 Dec 2006

The first hour of Icelander Dagur Kári’s follow up to Nói Albínói is just as good as his quirky debut. Daniel (Jakob Cedergren) is a graffiti artist who makes money by taking commissions to write girls’ names on walls for men who are trying to impress…

Gabrielle

6 Dec 2006

‘I love her as a collector does his most prized possession’, announces Jean (Pascal Greggory), a wealthy publisher in pre-WWI Paris, of his socialite wife of ten years Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert). The husband’s arrogant self-regard is punctured…

PS - DVD review

PS

18 Sep 2006

ROMANCE Films set in or around art schools are still something of a rarity (although Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential should be touching down sometime in 2007) so it’s something of a shame that Dylan Rodger Dodger Kidd’s second feature never…