Film Reviews by Steve

A sincere, dedicated teacher serving poor kids in New York, is trying to help a troubled thirteen year old girl, when she discovers his heroin addiction, and the wreckage of his own personal life. Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps really make you care, despite the slightly contrived set up and the bleak themes.

A jilted man and a spiky, unpredictable woman are brought together by a dating site, to walk and talk in the picaresque Linklater style, through the streets of a b&w LA at New Year. And we begin to care for them. A sweet and sour, and feelgood, indie date movie.

Herzog investigates the life of Timothy Treadwell, a conflicted loner who had spun some minor celebrity out of his close cohabitation with grizzly bears in Alaska; and he and his girlfriend's death by them. A story of two obsessives, Treadwell and the dry, inquisitive Herzog, with a brilliant narration from the director.

A Danish soldier in Afghanistan who is presumed dead, loses his wife to the wastrel brother who has just been released from prison. Bier exhumes the hidden and denied agonies within the family relationship while charting the distress generated by this incident. A mature, emotionally volatile film in the Dogme style.

Ki-duk wrote, directed and appeared in this piece of philosophical minimalism, set entirely on a tiny floating house, about a monk teaching his apprentice about tolerance, compassion and forbearance. A film almost without incident, but exquisite and illuminating.

Police procedural, Nordic noir about secrets hidden in the past of a small town... A grey and gloomy film is saved from stifling genre convention by a strain of deadpan and surreal peculiarity that plays throughout.

Bleak, desperate and bizarre tale of the events surrounding the visit to a remote town of a rather dismal circus whose main attraction is a dead whale. Sort of a very black comedy; possibly an allegory on human misery. It's hard to say. But this beautiful looking film takes us to places only Bella Tarr knows.

Documentary (with extensive reenactments) about the extraordinary experiences of two mountaineers. At first I I was alienated by the prospect of watching two rather smug Brits talk about extreme leisure activities. Then I was transfixed by a journey into the heart of an amazing fight to survive.

Loach's first film with an American theme typically finds him engaged in social politics on the side of the oppressed: an illegal Mexican immigrant working as a cleaner in an LA office block fights for the right to unionise. Typical Ken: a funny, moving and righteous film about labour relations!

While a million people are slaughtered during the tribal wars of 1994, one man keeps Tutsis alive by offering shelter within the grounds of his luxury tourist hotel. Humbling and convincing depiction of an encroaching horror indicts us all for our indifference. Wonderful performance by Don Cheadle as this extraordinary man.

Deeply felt story about a boy entering his teens who finds a family among the skinheads of the No Future generation of the Thatcher era, offering him the identity he can't find at home from his single mother. An extremely authentic view of a time and a place which manages what only great films can do; it feels utterly real. A very British experience: quite bleak, but with a sense of humour all the same.

Philip K. Dick is rotoscoped (the film is digitally processed to give the effect of animation) in a paranoid, dystopian conspiracy thriller featuring Woody Harrelson, Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey as drug damaged drop outs! Only, Reeves is a cop, and every day he puts on a scramble suit to go to work! Can be watched sober.

Typically schematic (for Bier), forensic dissection of a couple who become bizarrely disengaged following the serious injury of the man in a car accident. Shot in the dogme style on digital cameras, this raw and intense film deservedly broke Bier and her star Mads Mikkelsen, outside their own country.

The best of the director's films with fragmented narratives demonstrating the interdependence of things. A gunshot in the North Africa has repercussions for ordinary people across the world. Inarritu shows us world where everyone tries to communicate, but no one is listening.

Entertaining and likable rerun of that American teen perennial: the freedom of the last summer before going to college and the pursuit of the elusive perfect girl. This one is set in a dilapidated and comically failing amusement park where Jesse Eisenberg wonders what it all means.