Imagine Ghost replayed as a slow, spiritually-charged polemic set in the bleak housing complexes of martial law-era Poland, and you're close to Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1984 drama. The spirit of a dead lawyer watches over as his young wife descends into grief and one of his former clients is pushed toward compromise to save his neck. In cinema terms, food for the soul—but it really needed Whoopi Goldberg and a potter's wheel to make it a hit.
Philip Seymour Hoffman—in faint danger of over-exposure recently—does a Michael Moore, fronting a hand-held, ramshackle documentary which asks why Bush is so bad and the Democrats only marginally better. He hits those hanging chads and Supreme Court sinners with the help of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Jesse Jackson, Courtney Love and Eddie Vedder. Lively.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That rarest of things: a film about a racehorse that'll run and run. In the mid-'30s, Seabiscuit was an unlikely loser turned winner, trained by a too-tall jockey (Tobey Maguire), a distressed millionaire (Jeff Bridges) and a jaded cowboy (Chris Cooper). Gary (Pleasantville) Ross, who also wrote, directs the three actors (and the horses) without excessive mushiness.
A silent classic from the halcyon days of German expressionism, Der Letze Mann is FW Murnau's dreamlike melodrama of hubris—a big-budget 1924 masterpiece of light, shadow and set design. Restored to a crispness that's worthy of '40s film noir, it stars Emil Jannings as a shambling, walruslike doorman who's demoted to the hotel lavatories. Slow and emotionally laboured but fluid and spectacular to watch.
