With untenable Leone motifs and broad comedy caricatures, this final part of Shane Meadows' "Midlands Trilogy" (after Twenty-Four Seven and A Room For Romeo Brass) is a disappointment. Robert Carlyle is solid as the Glaswegian rogue determined to win back ex-partner Shirley Henderson. Yet, despite a re-shot 'dramatic' ending, it feels slight.
Bizarre variation on The Phantom Of The Opera, with Vincent Price as a deformed musician seeking revenge on the doctors who accidentally killed his wife, and achieving it by murdering them in a spectacularly imaginative series of set-pieces. A truly mixed supporting cast (Joseph Cotton, Terry-Thomas) and a memorably stylish approach, with Price on monstrously hammy form.
Utterly demented female assassin action from Korea's Je-gyu Kang, who comes across as the bastard son of John Woo and Luc Besson (without the flair of either). Kang chucks in a load of contemporary political context, which is interesting, but falls victim to the current vogue for assembling your final cut half an hour too long. Enjoyable but overlong and confusing.
A Dogme film in danger of giving a tiring genre a good name, Susanne Bier's love tragedy is deeply involving and intensely moving. When a woman's lover is paralysed in a car accident, she falls in love with his married doctor. Not once in its two hours does the film hit a dishonest note, there's subtle humour, and the acting's exemplary. You'll be tenderised.
This respectful ode to the early days of the US movie industry was the third consecutive box-office flop for Peter Bogdanovich, and the movie that put an end to his wünderkind status in Hollywood. Not fair: Nickelodeon is an accomplished, unjustly-maligned movie very much in the same whimsical period vein as Paper Moon, reuniting the father/daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O'Neal and throwing in an on-form Burt Reynolds. Watch and be charmed.
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki's maverick reputation is built on a series of inspired, lugubrious comic gems, but this latest film—about a coma victim who wakes up with no memory of his past life—suggests he's in need of a new direction. The film looks terrific, but the gags are mannered and the story twee. Not so much deadpan as dead dull, it's a film about an amnesiac that's appropriately forgettable.
Young Adam's David MacKenzie makes an impressive directorial debut with this low-key but unpredictable thriller about two travellers who stumble across a strange community in the remote Scottish Highlands. It benefits from a nice mix of quirky humour and quiet menace, plus a sprinkling of the supernatural for good measure. Bleak, but still well worth the journey.
The Omen echoes throughout Simon Wincer's camp but sporadically affecting 1980 re-imagining of Rasputin. Here the Mad Monk has been replaced by Robert Powell's mysterious glam-rock psychic healer, who cures the leukaemia-stricken son of venal senator David Hemmings and uses magic to expose the senator's crimes. It's clunky and dated, but Powell's typically messianic performance smoothes over the cracks.
