Though it didn't burn up the box office during its theatrical release, Danny Boyle's jittery zombie flick is actually a far more satisfying small-screen experience. Gone is the distracting texture of large-scale digital video, and gone too is the weight of expectation (will it be better than The Beach?). Instead, the movie simply plays as it is—a brashly original post-apocalyptic B-movie.
Richard Linklater's emotionally ambivalent high school homage is a cutting riposte to the rosy teen nostalgia of both American Graffiti and the entire John Hughes canon. Set in Nowhere, Middle America, 1976, during the first day of summer break, it lazily and amiably follows Hollywood freshmen, including Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey, as they drink beer, smoke grass, and cultivate the slacker apathy of future generations.
Collecting all four Python movies. And Now For Something Completely Different was a 'greatest hits' retread of sketches from the early TV shows, Holy Grail is worth seeing for Cleese's French knight alone, the wry and occasionally profound Life Of Brian was the best of the bunch, and The Meaning Of Life had some truly wonderful tunes. Did I say "indispensable". yet?
Released in 1972, Federico Fellini's extended love letter to his adopted home city is less of a linear drama than an impressionistic anthology of autobiographical memories, sketchy anecdotes and documentary-style snippets. With sumptuous cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno and a lush Nino Rota score, Roma is a minor Fellini work but a ravishing and innovative visual symphony.
Steve Martin darkens his usual screwball comic persona for Novocaine, playing a suburban dentist implicated in drugs and murder charges in a noir-tinged comedy thriller which turns increasingly Hitchcockian as it unfolds. Helena Bonham Carter's femme fatale, Laura Dern's dental assistant and Kevin Bacon's hilarious cameo appearance lend extra clout to a patchy but commendably accomplished feature debut from writer-director David Atkins.
Director Metin Hüseyin's breezy adaptation of Meera Syal's terrific fictionalised memoir about growing up Anglo-Asian in the West Midlands in the early '70s suffers a little from British film's TV smallness, feeling at times like an extended episode of Goodness Gracious Me. But the crisp script and immense charm of 14-year-old newcomer Chandeep Uppal as the sassy prepubescent heroine Meena bring Syal's rites-of-passage story to life.
Gary Oldman, miscast but blowing hard in Peter Medak's 1993 thriller, is a sleazy cop who takes bribes to spend on his wife (Annabella Sciorra) and mistress (Juliette Lewis). As if that wasn't enough girlie action, he lusts after hot hitwoman Lena Olin, but his dick leads him into a world of violent trouble. Wilfully sexist and almost camp, but hey, you can't say it's dull.
