Confused and rather dull boy-loses-girl story which inexplicably got some pant-wetting reviews. The greatly admired David Gordon Green loosely introduces us to the small-town Romeo and younger college girl who fall in love, only for her brother to kick up a rumpus and for her to break hearts. It's all wilfully vague and indecisive, and her infidelity doesn't make sense. Terrence Malick meets Dawson's Creek.
Angst on the farm in the debut from young French auteur Damien Odoul, a simultaneously harsh and dreamlike account of the coming of age of Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc, a confused, alienated teen trapped on his uncle's dilapidated spread, where older farmhands introduce him to liquor and mannish ways, with ruinous results. Shot in pristine monochrome, it's a memorable experience, aiming, albeit a little self-consciously, toward a surreal poetry.
This is a workmanlike, halfway-successful attempt to consolidate charmless lunkhead Vin Diesel's status as the action star of the moment. Actually, he's not half bad as the widowed (and therefore vengeful) narcotics agent Sean Vetter, but veteran action director F Gary Gray (The Negotiator) is absolutely treading water. Best saved for a Friday night when you've got nothing else to do.
A collaborative highpoint for director Wong Kar-Wai and cinematographer Chris Doyle. Happy Together's account of two gay Hong Kongers (Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung) adrift in Buenos Aires is one of the most visually striking films ever made, sadly only denied masterpiece status by the vagaries of Wong's leisurely narrative pacing.
You'd think that seven films lasting up to 90 minutes each would offer limitless space for a thorough examination of the past, present and future of the blues, but Martin Scorsese's grand concept adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
Sean Connery's over-inflated reputation allows him to text his dozy performance in. He's not the only one snoozing through an utterly uninspired, token "imagining" of Alan Moore's superb comic book. A low-rent X-Men, with clunking script outdone only by haphazard effects and nonsensical action sequences. And the supposed "invisible man" is rubbish.
The cult of Michael Moore reaches back to '94 for his non-documentary debut, a satirical comedy about a PR-inspired American war with Canada that pushes all the Moore-ish buttons (rapid-fire jibes about corporate domination, hawkish Republicans, arms proliferation and conspiracy theories) while remaining alarmingly unfunny.
With this triple-pronged DVD release, GN'R are freeze-framed forever: caught in a moment, celebrated and finally tucked away as a fond memory. The video collection tops and tails an extraordinary achievement while, live, the band are at their most untouchable and preposterous. Surely Axl must have sacked, then sued, the stylist for the lycra micro-shorts...
Timely release for Otto Preminger's gripping and surreal Zionist propaganda that casts blue-eyed Aryan poster boy Paul Newman as Israeli agitator Ari Ben Canaan, espouses terrorist attacks as a legitimate means of nation-building, and reveals how, in 1948, the bloodthirsty Arabs were in fact commanded by, er, German Nazis.
