Pussywhipped by Madonna into remaking Lina Wertmüller's 1974 film, Guy Ritchie betrays the fact that he can't direct outside the bad-lads genre, while Madge proves, for the umpteenth time, her inability to act. She's a rich socialite falling for a poor Italian on a desert island: watch Nicolas Roeg's Castaway instead.
Mike Figgis' one-take, four-camera, split-screen Hollywood satire is avant-garde without being pretentious, innovative without being wearisome. Here, like a Dogme remix of The Player, Figgis and his nimble cast ridicule the aching venality of the movie industry over one long and ultimately homicidal November afternoon.
The 1985 film that launched the careers of the Brat Packers. This finds Emilio Estevez drooling over Andie MacDowell, Demi Moore coked out of her box and Rob Lowe being annoying and fratboyish—like much of the script. A must for those who thrill to the antics of self-absorbed young Americans.
A return to classic Mike Leigh terrain, this examines desperation, loneliness and family tragedy on a grim south London housing estate. Leigh regulars Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville are long-suffering parents who manage to invest their bleak lives with tenderness, truth and humour. Leigh may sail dangerously close to self-parody here, but nobody does it better.
Underrated comedy-drama from Chuck & Buckteam. Jennifer Aniston's fine as a frustrated store-worker who cheats on pothead John C Reilly with Jake Gyllenhaal, in another Holden Caulfield-type role. The feel reminds you of James Mangold before he went shit.
That a Kathryn Bigelow movie starring Sean Penn and Liz Hurley's gone straight to video tells you much: it's a muddled attempt to carry two parallel stories, one ancient (with Sarah Polley), one modern (where Penn recites bad poetry while Hurley rubs ice cubes over her nipples). Confused, pompous.
Occasionally ponderous 1983 thriller set in pre-Glasnost Russia (in fact filmed in Helsinki). William Hurt stars as the cop who teams up with Joanna Pacula's Soviet dissident and Lee Marvin's American businessman to investigate the mystery of three bodies found in Gorky Park.
After an almost imperceptible slight to his honour, gruff Napoleonic soldier Harvey Keitel challenges effete cavalryman Keith Carradine to a duel. The duel is fought, the outcome is inconclusive, and thus begins 16 long years of sporadic but all-consuming bouts between these two barely acquainted foes. An ambitious 1977 Cannes Award-winning debut from Ridley Scott, The Duellists is visually sumptuous, and is nicely underplayed by both Keitel and the endearingly camp Carradine. Yet it's a film defined by the brevity of its source material, a 'short' short story by Joseph Conrad.
Neil Labute adapts an AS Byatt novel and rather blots his edgy image. It follows Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart through Yorkshire and Paris as they uncover the personal secrets of a late-Victorian poet. Labute's emasculated in the company of academics, and the overall tone's uncertain and vague.
