The Dark Knight (US, 2008)

It’s heartening that the year’s big movie is going to be such a thoughtful film. Of course that doesn’t mean the millions of people who’ve seen the film have necessarily thought about it but at least it raises interesting questions compared to, say, last year’s Transformers which, despite some witty dialogue, merely painted by (American) [...]

Ten (Iran-France, 2002)

Ten is terrific on both a formal level and in its content. Consisting of 23 hours of footage from two very small digital cameras attached to a car’s dashboard, edited down to 90 minutes, the film is anti-director; the mise en scene is the interior of the car and the passing landscape. Much of what [...]

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 2006)

It was no surprise that The Lives of Others should win an Oscar: technically proficient, superbly acted and humanist whilst bashing the ‘commies’. It is a gripping thriller but, as Anna Funder points out in Sight & Sound (May ‘07) utterly ridiculous. The Stasi member who is humanised by music and a poem by Brecht! [...]

Man on Wire (UK, 2008)

How do you make a thriller exciting if you know the outcome? Make it real. That’s the ‘trick’ of this stunning documentary because although we know Petit succeeds in fulfilling his idea fixe the intensity of the reconstruction – much of it contemporaneous home movie – is such that the enormity of the event is [...]

The Orphanage (El Orfanato, Spain, 2007)

Boy or ghost?
WARNING: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. This movie pinned me back in my seat in the cinema but, as it’s an example of the ‘fantastic’ – where everything might simply be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination – I wondered whether it would work on a second viewing: it does. The opening half [...]

Couscous (La graine et le mulet, France, 2007)

Father-daughter love
This is a terrific film. I don’t think I’ve seen scenes of such emotional rawness since Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967). The improvisation gives certain scenes a documentary intensity.
The use of narrative is also striking: the two set piece ‘meal’ scenes go on for an extremely long time compared with the succinctness of much [...]

West Side Story (US, 1961)

Ultra-stylised violence
Prompted by going to see this in the London revival later this week, I watched the Bernstein-Robbins-Sondheim classic again. It was even better than I remembered. Terrific music, choreography and book with stylish, often Expressionist, direction. Whilst there is a tension between the oxymoronic dancing-hoodlums, the emotion on show heightens the hackneyed narrative. Great [...]