Review

Sleepover

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Alexa Vega in Sleepover

Alexa Vega – the girl component of Spy Kids – gets her own teenage vehicle, and it’s the sort of film it’s very easy to be snarky about, especially if you’re not the target audience. It’s the usual teen/tween fare, in fact, about girls who are obsessed with friends, boyfriends and status and focusing on Alexa and her mates who must embark on a scavenger hunt against the film’s obligatory Rich Bitches to win a treasure hunt. The hunt itself has no importance except to keep the film going but then there are a lot of films that use the flimsiest of pretexts to keep things bubbling along. In other news, Ferris Bueller’s … Read more

Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events

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Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Somewhere near the end of this highly anticipated children’s adventure movie there’s a cameo by Dustin Hoffman. He just blurs on, says a couple of indistinct phrases and is not seen again. The pointlessness of his appearance is indicative of what’s wrong with this film, a series of disconnected and poorly motivated events which no amount of star power – Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, Billy Connolly, Timothy Spall – can give shape to. There’s even narration courtesy of Jude Law, though it could be Father Christmas for all the difference it makes. The plot follows three young orphans, bookish Klaus, resourceful Emily and gurgling infant Sunny, as they are farmed out to a … Read more

Ella Enchanted

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Anne Hathaway and Hugh Dancy in Ella Enchanted

Cinderella updated, with Anne Hathaway as the luckless teen Ella and Hugh Dancy as Prince Char. You see what they’re doing with the names? As with the names so with the film – it doesn’t quite work. For starters we have Hathaway herself – so sweet and milky she could double up as a bedtime drink. Then there’s the plot, which has Ella being given a special gift by her fairy godmother (Vivica A Fox). This “gift” is that she must obey any order she is given. This is someone’s idea of a clever feminist twist on the old story – girls and their constrained life choices – but it hamstrings the plot, … Read more

Heading South

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Charlotte Rampling and Ménothy Cesar sit on a bed

Charlotte Rampling often gets a free pass in films. Sometimes that’s for all the right reasons, such as her association with great directors such as Visconti, Lelouch or Ozon. Sometimes for the wrong ones – the more generalised cultural cringe before the French, with whom she’s also had a long association. The films she’s in often get the free pass too. Let’s take this drama, ostensibly something very daring about matronly white women heading to Haiti to be boned by the local black youth. There are many ways of describing this film but in all honesty it is an interminable drag and actually at its most boring while Rampling and fellow harpies (including … Read more

The Omen

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Amy Huck as the nanny obeying Damien's orders in The Omen

Thirty years on, a pointless remake of the film that put quite a few bums on seats in 1976. Back then Gregory Peck was playing the American diplomat slowly realising he’s bringing up the spawn of Satan, and Lee Remick (an expert in lip-tightening panic) was the wife. This time Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles have the dubious honour. In spite of the disaster movie craze and the example of the late career of Bette Davis, it was still quite unusual in the mid-1970s for a big star like Peck to appear in a horror movie – genre was for wimps. But the studios were realising that the likes of Jaws were changing … Read more

Forty Shades of Blue

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Dina Korzun in Forty Shades of Blue

An oblique drama which appears to be about a retired Memphis music producer and ends up being more about his much younger Russian, possibly cash-up-front, wife. Rip Torn plays Alan, the legend, blustering egomaniac and serial boozer whom everyone appears to idolise, on the surface at least. The remarkable Dina Korzun is Laura, the Russian import whose eyes tells us she’s dealt with far worse than Alan, but even so she wishes he’d treat her with a bit more respect. The film does little more than observe them as they go about their muted life… until Alan’s son, Michael (Darren Burrows) turns up to throw a metaphorical hand grenade into the mix. There’s … Read more

Wah-Wah

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Emily Watson and Gabriel Byrne in Wah-Wah

Richard E Grant’s autobiographical book With Nails (a reference to his film debut in Withnail and I) having been something of a hit, it was probably only a matter of time before he tried his hand at directing. He’s once again in loosely autobiographical territory in this drama set in Swaziland during the late 1960s Indian summer of British colonialism. Grant dissects his cuckoo class through a “personal is political” story – the breakdown of the marriage of his own parents (played by Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson) and the arrival of a new mum (Emily Watson), an American with a clearer, brasher view of matters, a woman who says what she thinks (the … Read more

Colonel Redl

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Klaus Maria Brandauer as Colonel Redl

Colonel Redl is an adaptation of John Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me and charts the rise and fall of a soldier with opportunism where principles should be. It’s a sumptuous affair set in the dog days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and builds slowly towards a painfully frenzied climax, as did the previous collaboration between director István Szabó and actor Klaus Maria Brandauer. And as in Mephisto we’re following a man of few scruples making his way from relative obscurity to the top of his tree – the secret service in this case. Redl was a real man, an officer in the espionage wing of the Austro-Hungarian army who sold his country’s war … Read more

Viva Zapatero!

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Sabina Guzzanti Viva Zapatero

After a slew of documentaries from the US, not least Michael Moore’s prodigous output, here’s a reminder that Europeans can make political documentaries too. Viva Zapatero! is a pop at Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi by Sabina Guzzanti, whose politically satirical TV programme was axed by Italian state broadcaster RAI for being “political” – after legal pressure was applied by rival media outfit Mediaset (proprietor: Silvio Berlusconi). Guzzanti then goes further and accuses RAI of being stacked with Berlusconi stooges, effectively his employees. Should a public service broadcaster be headed by political (ie Berlusconi’s) appointees? Of course not. Though precious few in Italy have had the balls to say so, such … Read more

Imagine Me and You

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Piper Perabo and Lena Headey in Imagine Me and You

A duvet-day rom-com in the Four Weddings mould but with a pair of lesbians doing the canoodling. As seems to be de rigueur these days, the plucky Brit babe is played by an American. And Piper Perabo makes a decent stab at an English accent, playing the newlywed falling for the girl (Lena Headey) who did the flowers for her big day. It is all terribly terribly fragrant and London looks as lovely as this part of West London generally does on a sunny day – stucco houses, canals, the odd auction house on hand to add an antique armoir or chaise longue to the picture. You get the point – this is … Read more