Demob Happy

Ten past three 5/10 The release of ‘3:10 to Yuma‘, coinciding with that of ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford‘, got some critics excited about the re-birth of the Western. While two films from Hollywood in one year hardly signifies a renaissance, Ed Harris’ 2008 Western ‘Appaloosa’ certainly suggests there is [...]

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Lucky charm 7.5/10 I have to admit my hopes for Happy-Go-Lucky were not particularly high, so unmoved was I by Mike Leigh’s portentious 2004 period piece ‘Vera Drake’. And for the first twenty minutes or so I felt vindicated, as the jokes come thick and fast and very very flat. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a [...]

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More CGI and not enough trompe l’oeil 4/10 It seems an odd condition of contemporary cinema that two films on such niche subjects could be released almost at the same time. Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’ (which I haven’t seen) and ‘The Illusionist’, both about turn of the century stage magicians, were released very close together. [...]

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Notes on Notes On A Scandal 7/10 I resisted seeing – or indeed even reading about – ‘Notes on a Scandal‘, as I had wrongly assumed it was the kind of tasteful, Oscar-baiting ‘Quality British Drama’ that I loathe. With Cate Blanchette in tow, I thought I could smell theatre-honed, BAFTA-approved method acting a mile [...]

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“Christmas time … mistletoe and [lots and lots of] wine” 7/10 I’m not going to try and summarize the tangled human relationships that characterise Arnaud Desplechin’s striking ‘Un Conte de Noel’ (A Christmas Tale), so fiddly and time-consuming that it would be. The premise is an extended and admirably dysfunctional family gathering for Christmas in [...]

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Fine revisionist Western 8/10 ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford‘ is a thoughtful and atmospheric film about the American outlaw myth. A careful and occasionally brutal revisionist western in the mould of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece ‘Unforgiven‘, Andrew (‘Chopper‘) Dominik’s epic has been crafted with a painstaking, sometimes self-consciously meticulous eye. Like [...]

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Wildly overrated 4/10 ‘Into the Wild‘ is an apaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling true story about Christopher McCandless, a middle-class graduate who dropped out and hit the road in search of “ultimate freedom” in Alaska. Sean Penn’s treatment of the story is an embarassingly self-righteous and romanticised interpretation that says much more about the director [...]

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Re-birth of a Rainbow Nation? 8/10 Based on a novel by South African playwright Athol Fugard, ‘Tsotsi‘ a slickly-produced, powerful drama set in a giant township outside Johannesburg. Presley Chweneyagae stars as the eponymous Tsotsi, a baby-faced assassin forced into surrogate fatherhood by the baby he unwittingly kidnaps during a bungled car jacking. Protecting the [...]

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Things to do In Bruges when you’re dead 7/10 Theatre director Martin McDonagh’s debut film is a memorably off-beat crime film based around two hitmen (played by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson), sequestered to the Belgian city of Bruges by their foul-mouthed cockney mob boss (Ralph Fiennes). The first two thirds of ‘In Bruges‘ are loose [...]

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La vie en rose of a not-so-Little Sparrow 7/10 ‘La vie en rose‘ (or La Môme – “the kid” – as it is known in its native France) is a refreshingly unconventional biopic of the diminutive chanteuse Edith Piaf. While it charts the singer’s childhood – first in a brothel, then as a street performer [...]

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