Excellent, thought-provoking love triangle drama, with Mark Ruffalo for once living up to his overcooked reputation. He's entwined in a threesome at college, but years down the line all the participants have evolved... except him. About to marry, he craves a rekindling of the flame. Not wise. Writer/director Austin Chick keeps it sparky and twisting like a fish, always a jump ahead of you.
Muddled straight-to-DVD sequel to the 2000 classic. As in part one, a class of schoolchildren are sent to an island to fight or die for the pleasure of their elders. But this time they're battling the survivors of the first film, who've formed a guerrilla army dedicated to overthrowing the sadistic adults responsible. After a promising start, it never recovers from the death of veteran director Kenji Fukasaku during the shoot.
Nine out of ten people will tell you Pam Grier starred in this 1973 landmark blaxploitation 'classic'. She didn't: it's Tamara Dobson as the CIA's tough female agent, taking out drug dealers with athleticism, attitude and a healthy amount of sheer spite. The soundtrack is very cool but in truth the film's pretty rubbish: comic-book at best, lazily indulgent throughout. Bring on Foxy Brown!
It's very long and extremely po-faced, and most of the performances are pretty wooden, Yul Brynner's imperious pharaoh aside. Even so, Cecil B DeMille's 1956 account of the life of Moses (Charlton Heston) still has some impressive sequences-notably the Exodus from Egypt, with 60,000 extras—and remains the definitive Biblical epic.
Arthur Penn's smouldering anti-western tells the story of Nicholson's Montana horse-rustlers and the pursuit of them by Brando's regulator Lee Clayton. The action is rationed into short, ferocious bursts and used as a counterpoint to the director's paced dissection of power and politics on the anarchic frontier. Brando's whispering Irish accent flirts with parody, but ultimately helps to lend Clayton a compelling air of psychotic menace.
Errol Morris' latest Oscar-winning documentary is no Moore-style polemic but an artful interrogation of infamous US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, who gave Morris 23 hours of filmed interviews in 2001, before 9/11 and the Iraq war, though unspoken parallels are hard to ignore. A formidable intellectual bruiser at 87, the old Cold Warrior seizes what may prove to be his last chance to make peace with history. Riveting.
Denys Arcand reunites the Quebecois characters who made '86's The Decline Of The American Empire so witty and engaging, and despite their age, disillusion and failing health, they're as intellectually provocative as before. Yes, it's talky, but as one lies dying, his friends reminisce about days of drugs and libido, and his son finds a backbone. A moving, note-perfect Oscar-winner.
Shot in 1929 by German émigré EA Dupont, this sinuous, shimmering melodrama centres on a London nightclub where the sensuous table-top shimmy of scullery girl Sho-Sho (Anna May Wong) catches her boss' eye. Under his patronage, she's toast of the town, but stirs murderous passions. Flitting between glittering Jazz Age highlife and foul Limehouse backstreets, it exudes an atmosphere of almost illicit potency.
The memory of Dennis Potter is not well-served by this inferior feature version of the fine '80s BBC TV series that confirmed Potter as one of Britain's most original and daring screenwriting talents. Here, Robert Downey Jr takes the Michael Gambon role of Dan Dark, the chronically ill pulp fiction writer who, delirious in hospital, finds reality merging with the fantasy world of his novels.
Recorded at the LA Troubadour in 2000—and gaps like that never bode well. Though it covers moments when the band were at their defiant best—"Olympian", "For The Dead", "Fighting Fit"—it still feels like they're going through the motions. And that's a shame as Gene always had a lot more to them than their ill-deserved reputation as Britpop fops. Worth seeing for what could have been.
