Film Reviews by Kurtz

This is a glum Aussie thriller featuring, if you’re that way inclined, extensive lesbian love scenes with Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis of “Top Gun” and “Witness” fame.

Porter plays a private investigator searching for the murderer of a truly abysmal young poet named Mickey (seriously, anyone forced to listen to her work would have been a suspect- I started to feel homicidal myself!) and she interviews McGillis as a potential witness before their involvement deepens into an affair. It’s a slow-moving story with a predictable outcome- even the sex is rather a yawn. At least we’re safe from Volume 2 of Mickey’s poems, though!

"Atomised" is a searching examination of what happens to damaged people in a society which stresses individual happiness and freedoms over social cohesion and the family unit. Two half-brothers, routinely parked by their self-seeking parents with older relatives, react differently to their abandonment- one becomes a reclusive maths genius who cannot relate to other people, the other a hopeless sex addict. The film charts their lives as they approach middle age, contrasting the sometimes comic escapades of Moritz Bleibtreu’s Bruno as he skirt-chases across middle-class Germany with Christian Ulmen’s Michael, who contemplates allowing the ice that encases his heart to crack as he meets his childhood sweetheart again. This yin-and-yang structure is a bit contrived, but there are good performances that make you care about the fate of the characters.

As you can see from the reviews, this one will divide audiences- some will loathe its stagy feel and preachy script and will find it hard to love the imagine-it-yourself set, complete with actors pretending to open and close non-existent doors. Even so, you’ve got to hand it to von Trier- it takes guts to sell this concept to high-rolling actors and producers and he ultimately delivers something fresh, original and completely unlike the stuff we see every week. Shame so many people hated it!

I had high hopes of this film because people whose judgement I respect had raved about it.For me though, it was rather a let-down because it was basically a two-hander and this put an immense burden on the two leads as they were the focus for the entire running time of the film. Both do a reasonable job too, Wilson is watchable throughout despite spending most of the film lashed to various bits of furniture and Page's contribution is a prime specimen of that common visitor to our shores, the Lesser Spotted Damaged American Teen.Once the lively opening is done and the trap is sprung, though, all you have is two people arguing for an hour with a bit of mutilation thrown in. And frankly, I can get that at work. (Have you met my boss??)

This is a self-consciously kooky story of a hesitant love affair between a rather weird couple and their circle of equally weird pals. There are a lot of awkward pauses, some extremely solemn children and a constant backing track of dreamy plinky-plonky keyboard to remind you what kind of film you are watching just in case you thought you’d stumbled across a quiet patch of “Reservoir Dogs.” I lost patience with most of the characters after about twenty minutes and started to admire the sunsets. Once the lead character makes a film within a film starring her shoes, you pretty much know what to expect. “I’m just passing the time” explains another character. Not my time, you’re not. Click.

Now I’ve seen everything- a stagey French farce populated by annoying French stereotypes that’s FUNNY! Somehow, despite it being largely based in one location and featuring a tiny cast of characters, it succeeds in being genuinely amusing throughout, largely due to the effortless clowning of Jacques Villeret, as adept with physical comedy as he is with wordplay. Some of the supporting characters feel a bit bolted on and Thierry Lhermite’s angst-ridden wife appears to be in another movie altogether, but it’s brilliant to see Lhermite’s smug bourgeois certainties crumbling in the face of Villeret’s hapless ineptitudes.

Outstanding – director Chan cheerfully tramples on every taboo you can think of in this twisting tale of human vanity and the dark places it can take us. Miriam Yeung is the insecure trophy wife who is trying to keep one step ahead of her errant husband’s desires, so she turns to Aunt Mei, who has a special (and very gruesome) recipe for dumplings with rejuvenating properties. It’s beautifully shot by Christopher Doyle and it gives some amazing views of the Hong Kong you don’t really see. Brilliant- you’ll never look at your sixty-four –year-old aunt in the same way again.

A pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart road-tests the teen sulks, sorry, misunderstood adolescent angst in this average haunted house thriller. It’s OK with some creepy moments featuring the usual kid that can "see", blissfully ignorant parents who don’t notice a thing, a mysterious farmhand, and something nasty guess where?? -but there’s nothing much here to take the movie beyond the run-of-the mill.

Sophie Marceau has been a French national treasure ever since appearing as a gamine 14-year old in “La Boum” and “La Boum 2”. Now in her forties, stylish, sexy and smart, she is the French ideal woman. Who better to play a Resistance heroine, then, in this high-stakes adventure as an ill-matched group of women are dispatched to rescue a stranded Brit from Nazi-occupied France, and then to kill the Gestapo officer who has stumbled on the Allies’ D-Day invasion plans? She doesn’t do a bad job either, but Moritz Bleibtreu is the most eye-catching thing in this breakneck yarn as he gives QT’s Christoph Walz a run for his money as an urbane multi-lingual Nazi officer.

John’s unremarkable existence starts to unravel when he gets involved with an attractive pair of neighbours who seem to know an awful lot about him. Just like in one of my favourite films, “Don’t Look Now”, the two mysterious women, although rather menacing, are actually there to give an insight into the male character’s state of mind and inclinations and by the end of the film you’ll be sorry they did. To be avoided if you’re after a date movie; John’s mind is a dark and nasty place to be.

Ang Lee serves up a feast in this steamy 40’s-set thriller, with Tang Wei joining Lee-Hom Wang’s band of courageous but naïve resistance fighters trying to draw Tony Yeung’s collaborationist police chief into a honey trap. He’s a smart cookie, though, and by the time he’s ensnared by Wei’s undoubted charms she herself is no longer sure where her loyalties lie. It’s a visual treat with wartime Shanghai a cosmopolitan delight. Make sure the kids are in bed, though, because there are some fairly graphic sex scenes in the last third.

A rare glimpse inside revolutionary Iran shows a distinct lack of shoe-bombing fanatics à la Daily Mail and a surprising number of features that we can quickly recognise; football as a national obsession- spot the Inter Milan and Brazil shirts- anxious parents, mouthy girls, jobsworth soldiers and the logistical challenges of using the toilet at half time. You’re left with the feeling that if we all ditched politics and spent more time on sport, we’d all get on a lot better…

You’d have thought that vampires would have worked out long ago how much fun they could have in the sunlight-free Arctic winter, and Danny Huston’s stylishly savage band of bloodsuckers literally paint the town of Barrow, Alaska red, with only asthmatic sheriff Josh Hartnett and his unfeasibly gorgeous (estranged) wife Melissa George offering much resistance. Huston and his über-vampire mob dispense with all that “You’ve- got- to- invite- me- in-first” and “Ooh-I’m- scared- of- garlic” rubbish, casually smashing their way into houses, fending off bullets and outrunning cars, leading Josh and co. to resort to more basic tactics. It’s great fun with some memorably gory and shocking attacks by both vampires (boo!) and humans (yaay!).

We are big fans of Ryan Reynolds in our house, and the trailers made it look like a mouth-wateringly mind-bending thriller, but in the end this movie just fizzles out. Certainly it’s quite fun trying to keep up with the altered dynamics as the same actors switch roles, and something is clearly going on, but the final reveal is very disappointing- if you’ve seen “Existenz” you’ll know the drill. Reynolds is dependable as ever but as most of his characters here are stuck in a pampered Hollyweird bubble, and the character changes he has to deal with only really involve sprouting or trimming facial hair and discarding a baseball cap, so this isn’t that much of a stretch for him. Could have been great all round, but it doesn’t really deliver on any level .

After the success and controversy of “Etre et Avoir”, Nicolas Philibert decided to go for a lower key (not to mention obscure!) subject for his next film- remembering an early job as an assistant director of a film that told the story of a nineteenth-century murder and the legal battles that surrounded it, he goes back and interviews many of the non-professional cast some thirty years after the film to assess its impact on their lives. Not exactly “Die Hard 5”, but the film again shows Philibert’s skill as a documentary maker- his camera work is so still and his interviewing so unobtrusive that his subjects open up and you get some touching moments of “real” life. However,the squeamish would be well advised to keep the remote at hand when he follows one of his subjects to his pig farm and films him slaughtering a pig armed only with a mallet and a breadknife…..