Review

Mission: Impossible 3

by
Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ving Rhames, Tom Cruise and Maggie Q – the Mission Impossible team

Remember the tagline for True Lies, the Arnie Schwarzenegger actioner in which he plays a secret agent whose wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) is unaware of his job – “When he said I do, he never said what he did”? Pretty much the same thing is going in M:I3, with impossibly happy semi-retired agent Tom Cruise unable to tell his fiancée (Michelle Monaghan) that he’s off on a perilous secret mission. In something of a departure from the previous two films, Tom does actually have more of a Mission Impossible team with him this time – Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q. This is all much more in keeping with the TV original, … Read more

The Family Man

by
Tea Leoni and Nicolas Cage in The Family Man

On with the florid jumper, down with the heavy meat-based meal and away we go for Christmas. Oh no it isn’t, I hear you shouting. See, you’re getting it. But, inexplicably, when this festive-themed movie was released in the UK on DVD, it was decided that the middle of the summer was the time to do it. Windows, that’s the reason – the scheduling slots decreed by the suits to give the cinemas time to milk the product first, before the home entertainment departments get their hands on the big cash-laden teat. It’s that sort of film too – two sets of concerns vie for a hold on the central character, played by … Read more

Your Friends and Neighbors

by
Aaron Eckhart, Ben Stiller and Jason Patric in Your Friends & Neighbors

Like writer/director LaBute’s In The Company of Men, his 1997 debut, Your Friends and Neighbors deals with a theme that’s current in cinema – that all men are rubbish. LaBute focuses on three self-obsessed friends, travelling further into their psyches as the film progresses. And the further he travels, the shallower the trio appear. Contemporary gents, LaBute appears to be saying, have benefited enormously from the liberalising cultural shift of the 1960s, but these days instead of being high, they’re more high and dry. For some people this film might be a bit preachy, a bit speechy, and it’s true that LaBute’s origins as a writer for the stage seem fairly evident. Perhaps the … Read more

Rushmore

by
Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore

Hollywood in look but in tone something else, this is the odd tale of an intellectually precocious, loquacious, speccy, blazer-wearing 15-year-old (Jason Schwartzman) who falls for one of his teachers, pretty Olivia Williams (think of a non-irritating Liz Hurley with a couple of decent dinners inside her). Unfortunately, misanthropic  local steel baron Bill Murray (back on Groundhog Day form) is equally smitten. Faint heart never won fair lady and the oddly mismatched and yet similarly obsessive love rivals are soon at it hammer and tongues. Very weird and often touching romantic comedy ensues as these two strange characters are dissected, helped along by acting that’s all played straight, no one raises even so … Read more

The 39 Steps

by
Madeleine Carroll handcuffed to Robert Donat in The 39 Steps

There are several filmed versions of John Buchan’s novel. The other two notables have Kenneth More and Robert Powell in the lead. But this one, in spite of its antiquity, is the best. It stars debonair, pencil-moustached Robert Donat as the innocent man forced into going on the run after accidentally getting caught up at the wrong end of someone else’s spying caper. The “innocent” theme was something Alfred Hitchcock was already comfortable with in 1935 and one which he’d return to repeatedly, most notably in North by Northwest. If you’ve read John Buchan’s original book, you’ll know The 39 Steps is a taut thriller full of derring-do, a rattling good read even … Read more

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

by
Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Based on the breakthrough novel by former spy John Le Carré, shot in black and white to suggest that espionage is unglamorous, dirty work and starring a hollowed out Richard Burton, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is as far from James Bond as it’s possible to get – further, even than Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer of the Ipcress File. Telling the story of a jaded spy who is busted to a desk job in London and then recruited by East German intelligence – or that’s what they think – it’s a bleak marvel, as redolent of the drab side of the 1960s as the smell of a wet duffel coat. Martin … Read more

The Tao of Steve

by
Greer Goodman, Donal Logue and Nina Jaroslaw in The Tao of Steve

“Men and women both want to have sex, but women want to have sex 15 minutes after us, so if you hold out for 20, she’ll be chasing you for five.” Everyone knows a shlubby, none-too-handsome guy in a low-status job who seems to do OK with the ladies. The Tao of Steve analyses that phenomenon, and casts the incredibly likeable Donal Logue as Dex, its hero. His quest – to get laid as often as possible. This he does with ease since he follows “The Tao of  Steve” a babe-magnet philosophy borrowed from all the chilled Steves of the world (McQueen, McGarrett, Austin – his list, not mine). Dex may be overweight, he may … Read more

Ultraviolet

by
Milla Jovovich in Ultraviolet

Now I like a film in which an attractive young woman gets into skimpy clothes to kick butt as much as the next man. But, still shaking my head over the tragic mess that was Aeon Flux, here’s Ultraviolet delivering more of the same, and no amount of Milla Jovovich in stomach-revealing, futuristic outfits can help it. Speaking her handful of lines in the now standard Clint Eastwood growl, Jovovich plays the genetically modified super-athlete, part-vampire cross – a Hemophage – who is attempting to protect a young child who knows the secret of the whereabouts of the Holy Grail / can prevent the creation of Skynet, or something similarly important. It really … Read more

State and Main

by
Rebecca Pidgeon and Philip Seymour Hoffman in State and Main

An intelligent and acidic if somewhat stagey comedy about a film production descending on a small New England town and the effect that each has on the other. It’s written and directed by David Mamet, not known for out and out comedy, but clearly feeling flighty at the moment, flighty enough to turn out the sort of farce you might expect from the French, or from Michael Frayn. And Mamet has the cast to perform it – Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Julia Stiles and a surprisingly good Alec Baldwin, all of them upping their game in homage to a master of the blunt misanthropic object who has spent enough time writing … Read more

Pitch Black

by
Vin Diesel in Pitch Black

A sci-fi shocker high on SFX, low on survivors and set on a planet where the self-serving and rather motley crew of an interplanetary cruiser are forced to pitch down after some unforeseen space ructions. It turns out that they are not alone on the planet. In fact this alien world is populated by some very unpleasant flying creatures who only come out in the dark. And – guess what – there’s a ginormous eclipse of the planet’s three suns on the way. Luckily, one of the spaceship’s number is gifted with uncanny nightsight. Unluckily, he is a vicious murderer locked in the ship’s brig. So there’s an awful lot of sucking of … Read more