Film Reviews
Straightheads (18)
Published: 27 April 2007
Masculinity in Crisis, part 364. Writer-director Dan Reed serves up a debut feature that stews together a male sex fantasy with tabloid ultra-violence and hopes that we'll all go, oooh.
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (12A)
Published: 27 April 2007
"He's got a way of disappearing", someone says of Scott Walker at the beginning of Stephen Kijak's documentary, which tries to account for the elusive, fragmentary career of pop's mystery man.
Reno 911!: Miami (15)
Published: 27 April 2007
Bungling policemen have been a comic staple of film since the Keystone Cops, but you'd have to stretch the definition of comedy beyond breaking-point to allow this rot membership of the genre.
Next (12A)
Published: 27 April 2007
Get this: Nicolas Cage plays a Las Vegas lounge magician whose secret gift is to be able to see two minutes into the future.
The Breed (15)
Published: 27 April 2007
From the Wes Craven stable comes a nugatory horror movie that crosses The Birds with "Scary Lassie".
Distant Voices, Still Lives (15)
Published: 22 April 2007
They don't make 'em like that any more. But then, they never did. The films of Terence Davies remain a unique, marvellous anomaly in British cinema. Released in 1988, his first feature Distant Voices, Still Lives had some sort of a context then: it echoed a lineage of British films about working-class life, but also had some kinship with the deeply personal, poetic (and more explicitly avant-garde) films of Derek Jarman and contemporaries. Now re-released, Davies's feature strikes you as not having dated at all - partly because it was never "of its time" - but also as a melancholy instance of a path opened up in British cinema, and barely followed since.
Alpha Dog (15)
Published: 20 April 2007
Nick Cassavetes' film combines an aimless ramble through juvenile depravity in the affluent suburbs of LA and a quite disturbing evocation of the true-life murder of an adolescent boy in 1999. The film is notable for the acting debut of Justin Timberlake, acquitting himself just fine as one of a gang that kidnaps a 15-year-old boy (Anton Yelchin, also good) whose ne'er-do-well brother (Ben Foster, wildly overacting) has welshed on a drug debt. The possibility of warming to any of these drug-addled, potty-mouthed, homophobic thugs is slim, but the quasi-fraternal tenderness that springs up between Timberlake and the abducted boy (who has the time of his life, even while fate is closing around him) is compellingly, and even touchingly, observed.
Reign Over Me (15)
Published: 20 April 2007
Mike Binder's comedy drama concerns the emotional and psychological fall-out of September 11, a delicate issue, you might feel, and not something you'd want Adam Sandler within a mile of. But here he is, playing a shambling, dislocated fellow named Charlie with hair like Bob Dylan's and a pair of headphones to shut out the rest of the world. Charlie is whizzing about New York on his electric scooter one evening when he's spotted by Alan (Don Cheadle), his old college room-mate, now an uptown dentist with a problem marriage and a patient (Saffron Burrows) who's become sexually obsessed with him. Alan knows that Charlie is in hopeless denial about losing his wife and three daughters in the World Trade Centre attacks, and thus launches him on a slightly tiresome journey towards catharsis.
The Reaping (15)
Published: 20 April 2007
Southern-fried Gothic has rarely tasted as cheap and nasty as this, and God knows there's been some competition. Hilary Swank plays a former Christian minister-turned-rationalist stickler, exposing religious "miracles" as a lot of bunkum. Then she's sought out by a small-town schoolteacher (David Morrissey) in the Louisiana swamplands, where a child has been murdered and the river has turned to blood. Soon the place is getting the whole biblical nine yards - plagues of frogs, boils, locusts, etc - and Hilary starts to wonder if the forces of darkness exist after all.
Fracture (15)
Published: 20 April 2007
Ryan Gosling stars in his second movie of the week, this time as a hotshot attorney who's about to leave behind public practice for the corporate super league. First, however, he must deal with an open-and-shut case in which a cuckolded husband (Anthony Hopkins) has attempted to kill his wife (Embeth Davidtz), now comatose from a gunshot wound.
Pathfinder (15)
Published: 20 April 2007
Vikings in America - who knew? This is derived, with only perfunctory acknowledgement, from a brilliant 1987 Norwegian film, Ofelas, about a Lapland kid who, back in the Dark Ages, is forced to be a pathfinder to a savage bunch of Viking raiders intent on slaughter and pillage. In this regrettable remake, the Lapps are now native Americans, the Vikings hairy monsters in Orc armour, and the kid-hero a greasy-locked Muscle Mary played by Karl Urban.
The Lives of Others (15)
Published: 15 April 2007
A drama about the all-enveloping surveillance culture of the old East Germany, The Lives of Others, will come to most viewers as a revelation - a description of the mechanisms of daily life in a now barely imaginable country that no longer exists. For Germans who didn't experience life in the GDR, the film will be closer to home: it shows people living in surreally grim conditions just down the road, only two decades ago. But for viewers who actually lived in the former East - and to whom we must bow for any assessment of the film's accuracy - The Lives of Others depicts a reality that will be mundanely familiar. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film certainly impresses as aiming to make a serious, intensely researched statement about the GDR. It indulges in none of the kitsch "Ostalgie", that fond hankering for the old East, that affected Wolfgang Becker's glib 2003 comedy hit Good Bye Lenin!.
Unknown (15)
Published: 15 April 2007
Unknown (15, 81 mins) is a nifty little puzzle picture in which five men wake up in a locked warehouse. They figure out that the gas from a fractured canister has given them temporary amnesia, and they figure out that two of them have been kidnapped and at least two of them are the kidnappers. But who's who? And can they escape before the criminals' accomplices return to refresh their memories? It's Reservoir Dogs meets Saw, except with more twists and fewer amputations.
Curse of the Golden Flower (15)
Published: 15 April 2007
Curse of the Golden Flower (15, 114 mins) is the triumphant conclusion to Zhang Yimou's martial arts trilogy, although it seems at first to do without martial arts altogether. Initially the drama - or rather, melodrama - is confined to a sumptuous palace in 10th-century China. The dazzling décor might have Willy Wonka reaching for his sunglasses, and the empress (an impeccably cast Gong Li) may be dressed as a Fabergé egg with cleavage, but heavy is the head that wears the fabulously gilded crown. Her husband, Chow Yun Fat, is poisoning her daily dose of medicine, and the three princes have secrets and ambitions of their own.
Shooter (15)
Published: 15 April 2007
Mark Wahlberg stars in Shooter (15, 126 mins) as a retired marine sniper who's framed for an assassination attempt on the President. For a while, the story flees down the same route as The Bourne Identity and The Fugitive, allowing us to thrill to the lone hero's ingenuity, and learn how to treat a bullet wound with the contents of a grocery bag. But it's the focus of the film's first half which makes the sprawling second half such a let-down. Gradually, the plot and the action become more and more overblown, until there are helicopters everywhere, and Wahlberg keeps walking away in slow motion as buildings explode behind him. I suppose it makes sense that a film about a sniper should be at its best when he's furtive and precise. By the time he's using bombs and napalm to slaughter everyone in sight, Shooter is way off target.
Wild Hogs (12A)
Published: 15 April 2007
Wild Hogs (12A, 100 mins) parcels out four mid-life crises to John Travolta, a bankrupt businessman, Tim Allen, a bored dentist, Martin Lawrence, a hen-pecked plumber, and William H Macy, a virginal computer nerd. Swapping their suits for leather jackets, they rev up their Harley Davidsons and agree to spend a week burning rubber from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. A short driving holiday doesn't seem like much of a basis for a comedy adventure, and, sure enough, Wild Hogs is never in the least bit wild, even when the men bump into a biker gang, led by Ray Liotta, which doesn't take kindly to dilettantes. Still, it's a harmless time-passer with some nice desert scenery and a few well-executed visual gags. And there's something to be said for a film whose heroes have so many miles on the clock.
Perfect Stranger (15)
Published: 15 April 2007
Besides, there are even less distinguished options for middle-aged movie stars whose careers aren't what they used to be, to wit, the dreary Perfect Stranger (15, 110 mins), starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis. Berry's undercover reporter suspects Willis's sleazy advertising tycoon of murder, so she investigates by temping at his firm, and by flirting with him in an on-line chat-room. It's the kind of muddled, glossy, would-be erotic thriller that could have starred Michael Douglas 15 years ago, but these days you get more scenes of people sitting at their computers, typing.
Curse of the Golden Flower (15)
Published: 13 April 2007
Set in China during the 10th century AD, Zhang Yimou's opulent epic recounts the story of the most dysfunctional imperial family since the Caesars. Gong Li, at her bewitching best, plays the Empress whose illicit affair with her stepson, the Crown Prince, is about to unravel; Chow Yun Fat is her husband, the Emperor, who has been secretly poisoning her with distillations from a brain-ravaging black mushroom. A power struggle is played out between them that will result in the most spectacular carnage since, well, since Zhang Yimou's previous martial arts outings, Hero and House of Flying Daggers.
Unknown (15)
Published: 13 April 2007
Reservoir Dogs meets Memento, and the encounter furnishes more intrigue than you might imagine. Five men wake up, locked in an abandoned warehouse, without any idea of how they got there: their memories have been scrambled by inhaling nerve gas. Little by little they realise that they are part of a ransom plot, but who are the kidnappers and who the hostages? With the rest of the gang due to show up by sundown they need to find out, and quick. Bafflement thickens into mutual suspicion, which in turn makes the group's attempts to escape the warehouse a pressure cooker of tension.
Wild Hogs (12A)
Published: 13 April 2007
Not very wild. Four suburban males, fearful of middle-age decline, decide to jump on their motorbikes and discover the romance of the road. This amounts to a run-in with a gang of psycho-bikers led by a menacing Ray Liotta. The template is Billy Crystal and chums doing a cattle-drive in City Slickers, which now looks like Easy Rider in comparison with this. John Travolta plays the bankrupt one, Martin Lawrence the henpecked one, Tim Allen the disgruntled one and William H Macy the nerdy one as they trade threadbare quips about homophobia, mount their bikes and putter towards their paychecks.
The Lives of Others (15)
Published: 13 April 2007
Perfect Stranger (15)
Published: 13 April 2007
Halle Berry's post-Oscar career has begun to look almost wilful in its terrible wrong turns. Here's another dog (kennel it alongside Gothika and Catwoman) that she ought to have left well alone, a psycho-thriller in which she plays a reporter investigating the murder of a childhood acquaintance. Chief suspect is a philandering ad exec (Bruce Willis, barely rousing himself to smirk), for whom she baits a trap, first by working undercover at his agency and then by getting all hot and heavy with him in an online chat room.
