The American newspaper heiress' kidnapping and brainwashing by the self-styled urban revolutionaries of the Symbionese Liberation Army, as retold by Paul Schrader. In the title role, Natasha Richardson goes through the trauma with committed desperation, but, despite being based on Hearst's own memoir, you never feel any closer to her, even if Schrader's film is often as claustrophobic as the cupboard in which she was imprisoned for 50 days.
Eleven years after his original expressionist classic, Dr Mabuse The Gambler, this 1933 sequel from Fritz Lang, banned by the Nazis for its political undertones (Mabuse/Hitler parallels), follows the titular crime lord's activities from beyond the grave, and features the original Lynchian'creepy velvet curtain' scene, plus one of cinema's first breakneck POV car chases.
Dour, long-winded erotic thriller, directed by Jane Campion like her favourite recent films have all been made by Joel Schumacher. Meg Ryan, apparently auditioning for a re-make of Klute, is the New York teacher shagging Mark Ruffalo's homicide cop who she begins to suspect is a serial killer. Bollocks, frankly.
Ninth-rate martial arts animé about a killer with the mind of a six-year-old child. Frankly, a six-year-old child would have written something more entertaining than this—the only imagination on display here is reserved for the gore and violence, which is accompanied by a great deal of noise but no sense, and even the animation is unimpressively low-rent. Utterly worthless.
This not-as-crap-as-you'd-fear rehash of the much-loved '60s caper, with director F Gary Gray ensuring it isn't all just gung-ho car-chase action, throwing in stylish backdrops and a good joke or two for good measure. A shame, then, that the charisma-free Mark Wahlberg leads, and perhaps they should've opted for a fresh title, but a stellar cast including Ed Norton, Charlize Theron and Donald Sutherland can't be all bad. Lively enough.
Lou Ye's beguiling movie tells the hazy, cut-up tale of a motorcycle courier once hired to follow a woman he then fell for, who subsequently threw herself into the river but seems to have been reborn as a nightclub performer dressed as a mermaid. With its drifting, subjective camera capturing jump-cut collages of street life in the neon-splashed city, it's a fascinatingly intimate portrait of the Shanghai river front, wrapped around a mystery.
Since the career peaks of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers' previously astonishing career momentum has noticeably faltered. O Brother, Where Art Thou? had some good things going for it, but is probably best remembered for its soundtrack.
Filmed last year in Nashville, this finds Skynyrd—now under the leadership of JohnnyVan Zant—still plying their raucous brand of southern blues-rock, wheeling out the hits (notably "Sweet Home Alabama", "Travelin' Man" and "Free Bird") to an enthusiastic crowd. This is noticeably well-filmed with superior sound quality.
Tran Anh Hung's 1992 debut begins in 1951, as 10-year-old peasant girl Mui travels to Saigon to serve in a middle-class household. As she grows into a woman, we witness her daily domestic tasks, and the growing fractures in the family and society around her. A headily serene, hypnotically sensuous movie, observing reality in such close detail it becomes poetry, a song about work, life, and how the two run together.
