Thursday 11 March, 2010
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THE JEWISH CHRONICLE ONLINE
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Film reviews
Review: Green Zone
March 11, 2010I had a sense of what to expect from Green Zone because I had seen director Paul Greengrass's 2002 Bloody Sunday as well as his Bourne films. In Greengrass's version of the 1972 incident in Ulster, he implies that the killings were a deliberate massacre by the British Army - even inventing a sinister posh-voiced general who tells the Paras it is time to teach the Fenians a lesson.
Review: Crazy Heart
February 18, 2010Hollywood adores alcoholic or addicted artists as movie subjects. This may well have more to do with the culture of the filmmaking community than with any appeal the subject might have at the box office or its intrinsic fascination.
Review: The Wolfman
February 11, 2010This noisy revamp of the 1941 shocker offers suitably nasty CGI man-to beast-transformations as it delivers gore galore for genre fans.Review: Invictus
February 4, 2010Hollywood has a problem with films about South Africa and apartheid. The opportunity to take a firm stand against a distant, obviously egregious racist system — and then bask in undeserved praise for courage, conviction etc — plays to the worst instincts of the film community. It usually leads to very bad films. Invictus is not a very bad film. But it is probably the worst film Clint Eastwood has made since he started directing three decades ago.
Review: Up In The Air
January 14, 2010Director/co-writer Jason Reitman’s acidly funny follow-up to his marvellous Juno showcases George Clooney’s award-worthy performance as a corporate “downsizer”. He is the hired gun whose job is to constantly travel around the US firing luckless employees of the companies who hire him. Clooney, smooth as a perfectly mixed cocktail, is perfectly cast as a narcissist who uses fellow-travellers for sex without commitment. Until, that is, his peripatetic affair with fellow executive Vera Farmiga takes an unexpected turn.
Review: All About Steve
January 14, 2010Seriously weird crossword compiler Sandra Bullock stalks TV news cameraman Bradley Cooper in a truly dreadful rom-com. Avoid.Review: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
January 7, 2010Andy Serkis’s riveting tour de force dominates Mat Whitecross’s fascinating biopic of 1970s punk star Ian Dury who achieved stardom despite childhood polio and, reportedly, brought the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” into common English parlance.Review: Avatar
December 17, 2009In the 1980s and ’90s, director-writer James Cameron made a series of outstanding science fiction films, all of which broke new ground in special effects and as stories. In Aliens and Terminator 2 — Judgment Day, Cameron invented a new kind of action hero — a tough, hard-muscled woman with a child in one hand and a gun in the other. But then came his Titanic. It succeeded wildly, presumably thanks to its extraordinary special effects, strong performances by a perfectly chosen cast, and the way its romantic storyline appealed to a new generation of young film-goers.
Review: Hello Goodbye
November 20, 2009All the international star power of Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant cannot really rescue this thin comedy drama about the perils faced by a smart Parisian couple when they have a joint mid-life crisis which makes them move to Israel. Alain Gaash ("with two 'a's") is a typical secular Parisian Jew, a well-respected gynaecologist with a gorgeous but apparently not very bright wife, Gisele, who converted to Judaism when the couple married 25 years before.(Quite how Alain, who was never circumcised, got to marry in shul, is not explained at this point.)
Review: Praying with Lior
November 16, 2009Lior Liebling is 13 years old. He likes wrestling with his brother, annoying his little sister, and is finding it hard to concentrate on writing his Dvar Torah. But Lior is no ordinary barmitzvah. Lior has Downs Syndrome. That he can undertake a barmitzvah at all is astounding. But perhaps even more compelling is that what Lior loves most in the world is davening, leading some in his congregation to believe he is ‘close to God’, a spiritual genius.
Review: Ondine
March 4, 2010Mythology is filled with beings that are part-man, part-beast, or which change from one to other. There is a whole subgenre of these that are connected with water: mermaids, sirens, lorelei, water sprites and so on. Mermaids are of course the best known and have inspired the most films. But the much more obscure creature from Scots seafaring folklore called a selky or selkie - a creature that changes from seal to (beautiful) human being and back -- has inspired two. The first was John Sayles The Secret of Roan Innish; the second is Neil Jordan's Ondine.
Review: A Single Man
February 11, 2010Colin Firth gives a powerful and poignant performance as a gay British literature professor in California mourning the loss of his long-time lover (Matthew Goode). The sensitively directed adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1951 novel by fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford follows Firth through one day as he tries to come to terms with his new-found loneliness, interacting with enthusiastic student (Nicolas Hoult), a Spanish rent boy and his neighbour and best friend, divorced Englishwoman Julianne Moore.
Review: Food, Inc
February 10, 2010Early in Robert Kenner’s polemical documentary, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, says: “The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating — because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.” Kenner all too believably proves it in an uncomfortable indictment of how the majority of US food production — animal and vegetable — is controlled by big business. This passionate film is undoubtedly one-sided but still very effective.Review: The Boys Are Back
January 22, 2010It was hard not to approach The Boys are Back without dread. For one thing it is directed by Scott Hicks, who came to fame with 1996’s Shine, the sentimental and dishonest Oscar-winner about schizophrenic pianist David Helfgott, and who then made far worse films like Snow Falling on Cedars and No Reservations. For another, the trailer makes this tale of a widower raising two sons amid golden Australian wine country landscapes look dull and cloying.
Review: 44 Inch Chest
January 14, 2010Sexy Beast writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto are reunited with Ray Winstone for a stagey, foul-mouthed, unentertaining drama. Winstone is joined by fellow East Enders John Hurt, Ian McShane and Tom Wilkinson as he seeks revenge on the French waiter who has slept with his wife. As appealing as a winter power cut.Review: It's complicated
January 7, 2010Meryl Streep strikes a blow for sixtysomethings playing a divorcee who, after a night of wine and warmed-up memories, embarks on an affair with her former husband Alec Baldwin (bravely stripping off to reveal a very un-Hollywood pelt and paunch). Writer and director Nancy Meyers creates a mellow if hardly memorable rom-com which, for once, is not necessarily aimed at younger moviegoers, peppered with witty lines (although Steve Martin as the dull architect dating Streep could have done with some more effective comic material).
Review: Sherlock Holmes
December 22, 2009There are no deerstalker hats or curved calabash pipes to be seen in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Never once does the famous detective say, “elementary, my dear Watson.” He does however reveal himself to be a formidable martial artist, as adept with his hands and feet as he is with a stick and a gun, and able to take part in a brutal bout of bare-knuckle boxing.
Review: Where the Wild Things Are
December 10, 2009The trailers for Where the Wild Things Are that have been playing for the last six months were so thrilling and so moving — I know adults who reduce themselves to tears watching them on the internet — that it would be almost impossible for any full-length feature to live up to their promise. And the film does not.
Review: A Serious Man
November 19, 2009Given the leading role that Jews have played in the history of Hollywood, there have been relatively few feature films that are mainly about Jews or set in Jewish communities.
Review: Shattering Silence
November 16, 2009Eric Friedler’s sharp documentary takes a biting look at Germany’s richest family, and asks the question the Quandts hoped they could keep silent forever – where did they get their fortune from? The family have always claimed their fortune came from their ownership of car giant BMV. But in Shattering Silence Friedler goes back to explore Gunter Quandt’s role in the Third Reich, and his exploitation of thousands of slave labourers in his factories, Jews, resistance fighters and prisoners of war.
