The Hours (US-UK, 2002)

Seeing this film again is a reminder of how Nicole Kidman (above) has lost her way as an actor somewhat as the commercial movies have taken over from the thoughtful ones. Here she is absolutely terrific but may even be ‘beaten’ by Julianne Moore. Meryl Streep, of course, is wonderful. All this may suggest that [...]

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long, Taiwan-Hong Kong-USA-China, 2000)

This film was first foreign language film to break $100m at the North American box office suggesting that if brilliantly fulfilled its purpose: introduce western audience to wuxia – roughly ‘martial arts’. Eastern audiences found it slow and so do I now, but in 2001 I greatly enjoyed the choreography of the fight sequences and [...]

Hiroshima mon amour (France-Japan, 1959)

I guess there is still a ‘canon’ of ‘great’ films that all cinephiles should see and in these days of DVD plenitude there are few of them that are not available. Canons are elitist and, to an extent, discredited (particularly in literature where, in the west, it is/was based on white, male writers) but are [...]

Ordinary Boys (Chico normales, Spain, 2008)

The premise of this film is fascinating: it’s set in a Moroccan village where the Madrid bombers originated and looks at the ordinary lives of its residents. It doesn’t quite work for me but there was much that was engaging.
The film attempts to look at the social context – poverty – that leads individuals to [...]

The Grandmother (US, 1970)

This is a very early David Lynch short that mixes animation, pixelation and live action to typically obscure effect. Lynch is one of those directors for whom the auteur theory does work and the ’seeds’ of his later work are apparent here; particularly the disturbing soundscapes he produces. On the ‘The Shorts of David Lynch’ [...]

Sex Traffic (UK-Canada, 2004)

Channel 4’s brilliant two-parter lays bare the mechanics of sex trafficking through three intertwined narratives: John Sim’s do-gooder NGO; a victim (brilliantly played by Anamaria Marinca); the capitalist ideology that creates the conditions for thousands of women being entrapped into sex slavery.
If the ending is slightly pat, at least the ‘happy-ever-after’ is compromised by the [...]

Bigger Than Life (US, 1956)

After the insipidly directed, if well acted, Revolutionary Road it was great to have an opportunity to see this classic ’50s melodrama at the Bradford Film Festival (celebrating James Mason’s centenery). Everything that was wrong with Revolutionary Road is right with this film focusing on Ed Avery’s increasing megalomania as he gets addicted to cortisone [...]

Still LIfe (Sanxia haoren, Hong Kong-China, 2006)

A fascinating film set in town about to be submerged by China’s Three Gorges damn. It mixes the naturalism, common in Chinese cinema, of following ordinary people’s ordinary lives with the utterly surreal landscape of a city being destroyed. Jia Zhangke has an astonishing eye for composition so a shot of men sledgehammering a building [...]

Babylon (UK-Italy, 1980)

The first black British feature Pressure preceded this by five years and there aren’t, nearly 30 years later, many other black British films (I can think of Babymother, 1998); Babylon is, institutionally, a white film but deals brilliantly (I guess) with the young black experience of the 1970s. The ’70s was not a good decade [...]

Gran Torino (US-Aus, 2008)

There are few Hollywood stars who last into their 70s but Clint Eastwood’s still going strong and both stars and directs this fascinating melodrama. On the face of it the film’s a culture clash between Eastwood’s racist old man and the Humong (SE Asian ‘hill people’) who live next door but Eastwood’s persona makes the [...]