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Film Reviews - UK - Moon: A space odyssey with a contract
2009-11-10 09:00:04When you have an icon such as David Bowie for a father, showing the world you have an original artistic identity independent of family ties cannot be simple. Yet the creative talents of young director Duncan Jones, or Zowie Bowie if you prefer, are winning over audiences and critics throughout Europe and his film Moon continues to gather acclaim and awards. Having premiered at Sundance...
Film Reviews - Portugal - Using technology to play with destiny in Lopes' Twist of Fate
2009-11-10 09:00:04Seventy-three-year-old Portuguese director Fernando Lopes presented the premiere of his latest work, Twist of Fate, at the Estoril Film Festival. The comedy on the pleasures and displeasures of daily life was very warmly received by audiences. The film centres on Carlos (Rui Morrison), a middle-aged man and father of a 30-year-old son, a faithful husband and good worker, a lover of boleros...
review: Entre les murs (The Class) (Cannes 2008: Palme d'Or)
2008-06-02 14:06:18After the exotic locales and 1970s setting of Vers le Sud (Heading South), French filmmaker Laurent Cantet returns to the contemporary social and work-related issues of his earlier features for his 2008 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Entre les murs (The Class). Again an austere but acutely observed drama with a quasi-documentary style, Entre les murs impresses with its veracious tone and nuanced characterisations, though when late into the proceedings Cantet tries to impose a more rigid order on the until then Altmanesque portrait of banlieue-school dynamics, its narrow focus on a particular incident diminishes the force of the film as a whole. After winning the Palme d’Or, distribution in all European countries is as good as guaranteed.
review: Gomorra (Gomorrah) (Cannes 2008)
2008-06-02 14:06:18The Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra, gets the Syriana treatment in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah), one of the most incisive organised-crime films to emerge from any country since the 1970s. Bundling five storylines culled from Roberto Saviano’s sprawling non-fiction novel of the same title, Gomorra could be considered as the first Italian hyperlink film since that term was coined a few years ago. Garrone’s near-perfect alignment of the efforts of a team of six screenwriters (that includes the director and Saviano), editor Marco Spoletini and his own work as a director make the film one of the most complex yet clearly understandable Italian films of recent years. Like the bestselling novel that has been translated into 33 languages (including English), Gomorra the film should find success far and wide.
review: Il divo (Cannes 2008)
2008-06-02 14:06:18The uncrowned king of post-war Italian politics, Giulio Andreotti, might be the subject of Paolo Sorrentino’s nominal biopic Il divo, but it is as an incisive portrait of Italian politics in general that it impresses. Unlike Stephen Frears’ The Queen, in which an icon of power became human through solid acting and a strong screenplay, Andreotti, a seven-time Prime Minister and senator for life, remains an impenetrable enigma in Sorrentino’s film, hiding, like he does in real life, behind a barrage of funnily ironic remarks and a smoke screen carefully orchestrated by himself and his kowtowing entourage. The first 30 minutes of the film are pure filmmaking genius but the remaining 70 minutes might prove rather abstract for those unfamiliar with Italian politics, though as an allegory of how the Italian political machine works in general it is still as close to reality as any film is likely to get. The film is one the Competition entries at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
review: Aanrijding in Moscou (Moscow, Belgium) (Cannes 2008)
2008-06-02 14:06:18Crossover hits from Flanders are rare and Flemish working-class romantic comedies even less so, but director Christophe van Rompaey may have actually made both when he made his feature film debut Aanrijding in Moscou (Moscow, Belgium). Especially during its first hour, the Flemish box-office sensation toys with cliché material with such an assured sense of direction and such a strong screenplay that it simply is a pleasure to watch. The closing 40-odd minutes do not sustain this sense of wonderment over the near-perfect almost-familiar, but thanks in large part to a wonderful cast led by Barbara Sarafian the film is still something that might light up screens elsewhere in Europe. The film is part of the Critics’ Week selection here at the Cannes Film Festival.
review: Tulpan (Cannes 2008: Un certain regard prize)
2008-06-04 12:00:14The details of the exotic trappings on display maybe relatively new but the rites-of-passage story is as old as civilisation itself in Kazakh filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan, a timeless and endearing coming-of-age tale for the Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel (The Story of the Weeping Camel) crowd. The director’s comfortable background in non-fiction films is clearly on display here, with the story of a herdsman-in-learning looking for a bride offering opportunities for real-life livestock birthing and other scenes in which the fictional story takes the backseat to what is simply part of daily life on the Kazakh Betpak Dala or Hunger Steppe. The film took the top prize in the Cannes Un certain regard section and could light up screens in arthouses across Europe in limited engagements.
review: Soi Cowboy (Cannes 2008)
2008-06-22 05:00:06Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) might have found a European acolyte in the surprising person of UK director Thomas Clay, who shot his second film Soi Cowboy on location in Thailand. The story of a portly European (Denmark’s Nicolas Bro, Offscreen) and his local girlfriend saved from the red-light bars is also a bifurcated drama with two only loosely connected stories, but rather than reaching the heights of the Thai Boy Wonder’s films, Clay’s follow-up to the promising if extreme The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael only proves that it requires more than just pointing a camera somewhere to create mystery and meaning. The fact that the first twenty minutes are without dialogue and that more than half of it is in black-and-white will mean the death knell for this film in any commercial ventures. The film is part of the Un certain regard section at the recent Cannes Film Festival.
review: Mataharis
2008-06-26 05:00:07Three female detectives rummage around in their own lives as much as in the lives of others in Icíar Bollaín’s Mataharis, the director's first film since her laurelled domestic abuse drama Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes). While a female perspective is still a welcome change in Spain’s cinematic landscape, having three different female protagonists is perhaps too much, as Bollain and Tatiana Rodríguez’ screenplay only succeeds in reducing each woman’s story to its soap-opera essentials, with the detective bureau-setting adding to the TV-series feel. Acting from the three leads is far above the average TV series from Spain (or elsewhere), but is not enough to disguise the basic small-screen appeal of Mataharis. The film did middling business in Spain upon its release in September. It opens today in Belgium and will open in August in the Netherlands.
review: Cash (Ca$h)
2008-07-02 05:00:25A small-time crook with a Europol officer on his tail runs into some bigwig colleagues, which may or may not have been premeditated by any one side in the convoluted caper comedy Cash. The second effort as a writer-director of the busy French screenwriter Eric Besnard (Travaux…, Babylon A.D.) certainly looks the part, but the battery of stars (Jean Dujardin, Valeria Golino, Jean Reno, Alice Taglioni), exotic locales and flashy filmmaking cannot throw up enough of a smoke screen to hide the film’s problematic screenplay that seems more in love with the abstract idea of countless plot twists than the actual plot twists themselves. French audiences plunked down the hard-earned titular goods over a million times during its home run, but more discerning foreign audiences will unlikely fall for this con so easily.
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European cinema and movies.