Film Reviews by Kurtz

The blurb says “a plea for peace”, but giving one of the would-be bombers an articulate five minute speech towards the end of the movie on why he wants to go through with the plan is a risky strategy at least given the number of impressionable types out there. The film is chilling in its depiction of the preparation of the bombers- the rituals, the “martyr videos” and the icy calm that descends on the pair as they get close to their mission. The director tries to be even-handed; not only does he make clear the indignities of life on the occupied West Bank, the checkpoints, the arbitrary road closures and the constant presence of heavily armed soldiers, but he also shows the warmth of family life that the bombers are sacrificing for paradise and a piece of bloody history.

Unremittingly glum tale of a glum French farmer and his glum mates who glumly go off to fight in an unnamed war (probably one of the Gulf conflicts, judging by the burning oil wells on the skyline.) Here they don’t encounter the enemy but manage to lose their commanding officer and then embark on an ill-advised revenge mission that royally hacks off the locals. The survivors end up back on their glum French farms, where they continue to be glum. Director Dumont says he prefers to work with non-professional actors, and his direction to these people is “do nothing” so all the script is delivered in a flat monotone and no-one ever reacts to what’s going on. Very hard to like.

The most surprising thing about this movie is how unsurprising it is- it really is a straightforward tale of revenge: Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster try to stress the inner torment of Foster’s vigilante but inner angst is a bit less interesting to watch than a spunky woman with a gun cutting a swathe through assorted lowlives, and we see a lot more of the latter than the former. Terence Howard is wasted as the sympathetic cop whose investigations bring him close to Foster.

A film that tries to address the vexed issue of what some older members of modern German communities got up to during the Nazi period. A young girl starts trying to do some research into who did what in her town during the war, but soon meets a wall of silence, hostility and eventually intimidation. The director throws us all kinds of curve balls and alienation techniques to underline the film’s artifice- characters address the camera, scenes take place against back-lit projections and once, memorably, the family’s front room is transplanted into a crowded market square- all so that we can’t just take refuge in the story and have to ponder the issues. He also keeps dropping in unexpectedly humorous moments to break the mood of menace. All in all, an unsettling but intriguing watch.

There’s nobody better qualified than Anton Corbijn to document the rise and fall of Joy Division, as his moody black and white photos of the band graced many a copy of NME during the band’s brief heyday. Twenty years on, he gets to make a film on the band, inevitably focussing on Ian Curtis, their lead singer whose suicide in 1980 stopped the band in its tracks and signalled a change of direction into the more commercial New Order. There are many good things about the film- Sam Riley’s performance as Curtis, Toby Kebbel’s brilliant portrayal of JD’s acerbic manager Rob Gretton, and Riley and his actor bandmates and their spirited stabs at the band’s doomy but uplifting music. Sadly, though, a film charting a character’s slide into suicidal despair via illness and marital strain is going to end on a bit of a downer, and although JD fans will love it, the uncommitted will find it heavy going, to say the least. “24 Hour Party People” presents a considerably livelier version of the same story, with the unfortunate addition of The Happy Mondays.

I'm prepared to bet that this is the finest film about Hungarian ticket inspectors that you will ever see.

The story of an intense friendship between two teenage girls during a surprisingly sunny English summer in what looks like Yorkshire. Natalie Press is excellent as the downtrodden Mona who gets a glimpse of what life could hold beyond the valley she lives in, while Emily Blunt’s plummy stirrer seems more of a stretch at times but is always watchable as she’s the one with all the ideas.

Yes, it’s a sexual relationship, but the film is never salacious and these scenes are sensitively done by director Pawlikowski, who shows himself worthy of moving into Shane Meadows territory- no higher praise than that! Speaking of Meadows, solid support in this film from Paddy Considine as the unlikeliest born-again Christian you ever did see.

...it might have been his grandkids cutting a swathe through the Rome underworld of the late twentieth century like the central characters here. I’m not making the “Godfather” reference lightly, either: this is a blinding film which is a worthy descendant of the Coppola classic. There is crunching action, great performances and a clear point being made by the director about how the material wealth that the characters build up fails to make them any happier, more fulfilled or even safer. So although they get the glamorous lifestyle, in many ways they are as trapped as any wage slave trying to make the mortgage payments. This modern take on crime, an adept interweaving of great political events in Italy into the story and a thumping contemporary soundtrack brings it into “Goodfellas” territory. And with a pedigree like that, how can the world resist “Romanzo Criminale”?

Enjoyable long-con drama from Argentina. If you’ve seen “House of Games” and “Matchstick Men” you’ll know the drill, but the central pairing is effective: Gaston Pauls’ young trickster is outwardly bland but harbours a great talent for what he does, whilst Ricardo Darin is excellent as his oily mentor. The ending is a touch theatrical, but part of the pleasure in this type of film is trying to spot where the rug is being pulled out from under our feet, and I have to admit that the director Bielinsky certainly did a number on me.

OK,the Pixies are my all-time favourite band, so I was always going to love this- the concert performances are wonderful and they capture the band’s delighted amazement that a) they can still cut it as performers after nearly ten years apart and b) that a young fanbase has come to love their music despite the band’s rather modest commercial success in their first incarnation- but the insight into the backstage and offstage lives of the four godparents of grunge is what really sets this documentary apart. They are quietly nudged into exploring the tensions that tore the band apart in the first place, and which clearly are still simmering, and their struggles with addiction, relationships and ailing parents are affectingly laid bare. All together now…Cariboooooooouuuu…….

Intacto is a stylish and original film that spawned a Pendulum video. Unlike “Voodoo People,”it tells its tale in an unhurried way, but interrupts its ruminations on fate and fortune with bursts of action, most of which are centred around Monica Lopez’ identikit trigger-happy cop-with-a –past, or increasingly bizarre trials of luck. Possibly to redress the balance, the director has made nearly all the other characters rather cold presences, especially Max von Sydow’s arch-gambler who is so cool, even in a sand-coloured suit, that he can’t even be bothered to learn Spanish for the movie and delivers most of his lines in his inimitable Sydowese English which we are expected to believe that all the Spanish characters understand perfectly. Didn’t work for us on holiday in San Sebastian!

This film is perfectly OK in that it has a nice script with a few Seinfeldisms and an amusing turn from a self-mocking Ray Liotta to keep the adults happy: it looks fabulous with a golden colour palette and the animators have lots of fun with the movements and flight of the bees. But the central concept- young bee pitches up in the big (human) city, strikes up a friendship with Renee Zellweger’s fetching florist and begins a lawsuit against mankind when he realises that we are helping ourselves to his honey- is desperately lazy; I mean surely that’s a central rule for all these types of films- “A Bug’s Life”, “Antz”, “Toy Story”, even “Lady and the Tramp”- the characters can show awareness of the human world but can never properly interact with it because they can’t talk! But in “Bee Movie” we’re soon being asked to swallow (and somebody nearly does) bee lawyers in a human courtroom, bee reporters at a human press conference, bees being treated in human hospitals, bees flying airliners etc. etc. Grrr! I was itching for a rolled up newspaper by the end! My twelve year old said it made perfect sense to her, though- maybe it’s just me they’re not talking to!

A relic of the drive-in cinema age, released in 1962 by a director who had up until then majored in health education films, “Carnival of Souls” is interesting nowadays only as an indicator of how far film-making and acting has come since the early sixties, and as a blueprint for the “caught-between -two –worlds” type thrillers like “Jacob’s Ladder”and “The Sixth Sense”.Other aspects have dated horribly, the stilted acting and the leaden dialogue, particularly in the less “intense” scenes, proving particularly hard to forgive. When things start to unravel for our heroine, there is admiiedly a vaguely spooky feel and the “Carnival” of the title is not somewhere you’d like to wander at night, but eye-rolling close-ups of lead actress Candace Hilligoss have you wriggling more in embarrassment than fear.

Yes, Christian Bale does damaged and dangerous again, but this offering doesn’t have an ounce of the dark humour (or diverting sex scenes) of “American Psycho”. Here, it’s all deadly serious, but after twenty minutes in the company of Bale’s character Jim and his adoring mate Mike, played by Freddy Rodriguez, you really start to weary of the constant fist-tapping and shouts of “Homeee!” None of this mateyness can conceal the fact that Bale’s Jim is a vicious bully and Mike is too spineless to make the break; even the long-suffering female characters do little to shake things up, obligingly tattooing themselves with their boyfriends’ names like primary school pencil cases and cooing such immortal feminist lines as “I would be happy to be killed by the man I love”. Most chilling is the fact that the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security offer Jim a job, claiming he’s “just what they are looking for”- sure, put a big gun in his hand and we can all sleep easier in our beds.

“Night of the Sunflowers” is an absorbing drama about a shocking crime and the effect that it has on a tiny community in a disappearing rural Spain. It has a singular structure, following each of its characters in turn into the moral maze as they struggle to deal with the consequences of an attempted rape, and casting them adrift as they succumb to the temptations of revenge and corruption. This rather unnatural narrative device can be a little frustrating at times as we are introduced to character after character who we know to be destined for ultimate misery, but it’s well acted and the director has clearly stuck to his guns and resisted the temptation of a neat Hollywood-style finish.