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Woody Allens first UK film and his 40th over all, Match Point promised to be a welcome return to form mostly lost since Crimes and Misdemeanours in 1989. But, for British reviewers at least, the movie has proved to be disappointing, described as laboured, unconvincing and a misfire. Centering on
Continuing the Femmes Fatales season, Raoul Walshs They Drive By Night (1940) features the fascinating Ida Lupino as the femme, as in so many of these classic 1940s B-movies, Humphrey Bogart. Set in the world of Los Angeles truckers, Walsh examines both the squalid and the noble motives of
Woody Allen’s first UK film and his 40th over all, Match Point promised to be a welcome return to form mostly lost since Crimes and Misdemeanours in 1989. But, for British reviewers at least, the movie has proved to be disappointing, described as laboured, unconvincing and a misfire.
Despite its dangerously dumb title The 40 Year Old Virgin is not the crude sex comedy you might expect. Steve Carell plays Andy Stitzer who suffers from the unfortunate affliction described in the title, and the world being what it is, has to find an urgent cure with a little
As an adaptation from one of the novellas in C. S. Lewiss classic series, Disneys The Chronicles of Narnia is as faithful as it is necessary to be with material that is sacred to its devotees, though Shrek director Andrew Adamson is perhaps disadvantaged by the string of previous fantasies
The first of a series of dangerous women in this chronological Femmes Fatales season featuring a different actress in the role each week, The Devil is a Woman (1935) stars Marlene Dietrich as the fatale Concha Perez in Josef von Sternbergs carnivalesque story of seduction and malice. The directors personal
Memoirs of a Geisha takes the familiar Cinderella story and locates it in the oriental setting that may or may not have existed in pre-war Japan. Widely criticised for not showing the reality of the geisha culture, the film, adapted from the novel by Arthur Golden, tends to melodrama,
Peter Jackson, undisputed master of the fantasy fiction genre, is back with his CGI-enhanced remake of King Kong, a version of the story that cannot fail to impress, even though at 3 hours in length, it may be something of a special effects marathon. Freudian interpretations aside, the human
Rumor Has It is a Rob Reiner comedy that sort of takes off where The Graduate left off in some comically intriguing ways. If you can believe in Dustin Hoffman mutating into Kevin Costner, and Anne Bancroft, the original Mrs Robinson, into Shirley MacLaine, then the addition of bubbly Jennifer
La March De LEmpereur (The March of the Penguins), the highly acclaimed French documentary about Emperor penguins in Antarctica will be shown in the original French version.
Tea at four. Dinner at eight. Murder at midnight. You get the picture. Upstairs- downstairs interaction and genteel back-stabbing in this Agatha Christie-like English country-house murder mystery. Not immediately identifiable as Altman territory, but on closer acquaintance, Gosford Park is full of his unmistakable trademarks: a large
Realism again in a political thriller set in and around the UN building in New York in Sidney Pollacks The Interpreter. Nicole Kidman is the UN interpreter who overhears a death threat against the African dictator (probably Robert Mugabe),with Secret Service agent Sean Penn investigating. Apart from a few
Part 2 of Lars von Triers projected US History trilogy that began with Dogville, Manderlay is thus the second installment of his finger-wagging chronicle of American ugliness. Race relations, this time in 1930s Alabama, where slavery continued unchecked since the Civil War, again come under scrutiny in the abstract
The Best Movie Ever Made- Griffin Mill. Not surprisingly, Griffin Mill is the character played by Tim Robbins, a Hollywood studio executive who has the power to hire or fire and finds himself inundated with death threats from a rejected writer, with whom he has several bizarre and conclusive encounters.
Dumbed down gritty realism down on the ranch (Wyo) in rapidly declining Lasse Hallstroms An Unfinished Life, and unpretentious (i.e clich-ridden) reconciliation movie not afraid of pain, suffering and trauma, but perhaps too fond of melodrama and sentimentality, (and bears). Widowed Jean (surreally immaculate Jennifer Lopez) and her
Judy Foster does a sort of airborne Panic Room routine in German director Robert Shwentkes tightly plotted, intriguingly unraveled Hitchcockian whodunit thriller Flightplan, as the mother of a daughter who inexplicably vanishes on a transatlantic flight. Mysteries within mysteries complicate any pretensions towards a comfortable relationship with reality, but the
Robert Altmans controversial update of Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, willfully torpedoes Chandlers highly regarded literary detective story and creates in its place a 1970s parody of Phillip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) as a shabby, disorganized, confused and confusing private eye, only loosely enclosed in Chandlers meticulously crafted criminal underworld. Another
Potterphiles will dutifully flock together for their annual pilgrimage to Hogwarts and Potterphobes will never know what theyve missed. Suffice to say that by all accounts, HP4 The Goblet of Fire is far and away the best of the movie franchise so far, darker, scarier and even more compelling than
Generally considered one of the truly great movies of the 1970s, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is Robert Altmans poignant anti-Western Western, a genre-subverting multi-layered tour de force shot in grainy, washed-out colours and gloomy shadows in the snowbound landscape of the north-west frontier at the
Youre always trying to break up with me and were not even together, says life-saving terminally upbeat flight attendant Claire (kooky Kirsten Dunst) to suicidal shoe designer Drew (bland Orlando Bloom) some way into their relationship, having first met on a flight as he is called to attend his
Prepare to be disappointed be the maverick, eccentric and intermittently brilliant Terry Gilliams original, inventive and frantic take on the famous fairy tale creators Wilhelm and Jacob, The Brothers Grimm. Conceived as roving charlatans peddling their tales to a gullible German public in the time of Napoleon, the brothers are
As its title suggests, Robert Altman's masterpiece is set in the world of Country music, but with its cast of 24 characters and almost the same number of intertwined and intersecting stories, it delves deep into the conciousness and conscience of America circa 1975 in Altman's unmistakable mosiac
