Rock Steady

Having failed to make his wife Madonna into a movie star and likewise botched his attempts to fashion a crime caper out of the ancient Jewish Kabbalah, mock-cockney chancer Guy Ritchie goes back to his roots for the surprisingly effective and determinedly entertaining Rocknrolla.

Opening with a flashy montage of the cast and a typically pounding juke-box soundtrack, Rocknrolla centres on…well, that’s the thing. Working from his own convoluted script, as he did in Lock, Stock... and Snatch, Richie once again creates a sprawling, character-heavy world where geezers and hoodlums rub shoulders with celebrity and high society, a legion of movers and shakers who wind their way through the story while at the same time becoming embroiled in the main plot, by accident or design.

As far as I can make out, that main plot involved a pair of wise-cracking London gangsters, One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), who become involved in a land deal with the dangerous Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) that goes belly up. The pair, given an extremely short due date for the debt, are serendipitously recruited by crooked accountant Stella (Thandie Newton), to steal a bag full of money from her Russian oligarch paymaster Uri (Karel Roden). Into this already meaty soup, Richie throws a missing painting (which we never see), a missing-presumed-dead rock star Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell) and an out-of-their-depth pair of American music producers (played by Jeremy Piven and the rapper Ludacris). Acting as a guide, in voiceover, is Lenny’s right hand man Archie (an excellent Mark Strong), who discovers a dark secret about his boss that will test his loyalty.

Although too easily distracted and belaboured with some clunky dialogue and overly-flashy photography, Rocknrolla is a return to form for Richie, aided by a talented cast, Kebbell in particular, and an irrepressible energy. All the Richie motifs are present and correct; criminal slang and inventive swearing, coincidental comedy, surprising violence, car chases and whip-crack edits. Although essentially another rethread of the ‘missing valuables’ story, Richie shows his mastery of character, filling out the presentation with funny asides, mainly at the expense of his floundering would-be hero Butler.

As you’d expect from the title, the shiny action is underlined by a blistering, brilliantly-chosen soundtrack, Richie’s trademark skills at matching sound and visuals reaching a peak with the fuzzy, growling 'Have Love Will Travel' from 1960s garage-rockers The Sonics. Currently preparing his Sherlock Holmes adaptation with Robert Downey Jr, Ritchie has already said Rocknrolla will form the first part of a trilogy of interconnected crime capers, a development to be cautiously welcomed.

Stranger Danger

Minimalist American home-invasion thriller The Strangers is a bit like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games without the fun and games; a stripped-down, carefully modulated examination of what happens when a young couple are subjected to a night of terror at the hands of three masked psychopaths.

Returning late to their remote holiday home after a friend’s wedding, Kristen and James (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) were supposed to have a romantic night of champagne and swing music, but she has just turned down his proposal of marriage. The atmosphere already strained, things get worse when a strange girl bangs on the door at four in the morning, asking for someone who doesn’t live there. Slowly and steadily, the situation escalates, more banging on the door, strange messages written on the window, things going missing until, eventually, the intruders are inside the house.

On debut, writer and director Bryan Bertino shows his acute understanding of the fundamentals of horror storytelling – the unknown is terrifying, tension is everything and panic is contagious. After a lengthy set-up, the first encounter between madman and victim is well drawn, ending in a chillingly choreographed reveal as the masked psycho looms into frame behind Tyler’s back. We might have sent his sort of thing a thousand times, but it’s still frightening, particularly when Bertino focuses on sound to add an extra sensory dimension to the coming apocalypse. From that point, the stage set, the director pulls the few strings in his cat-and-mouse story taut, extending the stresses across his carefully composed widescreen with scenes played momentarily longer than expected and vibrato screams pitched just short of dog whistles.

What should result is a sense of dread and fear, but the mood is broken by nagging irrationalities and clumsy exposition. In these modern times, in order to properly isolate characters being lined up for gory execution, at least twenty minutes must be spent disabling their mobile phones. Here, in her first clue that something might be amiss, Tyler’s mobile is thrown on a fire by an unseen hand. Like filling out forms in a dentist’s waiting room, these scenes require processing before the real action can begin, but they are tiresome and time-consuming. Having established the victims as a couple on the verge of splitting up, Tyler and Speedman have nothing to do but race from one end of the house to the other, dodging the maniac’s thrusting blade, until they come to realise that their interpersonal problems don’t amount to much in the bigger scheme of things. In this, Speedman is a convincingly anonymous everyman but Tyler struggles to overcome her famous face, her absolute lack of ordinariness dragging us out of the fantasy.

In as much as you can extract a message from a film where young lovers are chased to their deaths by sadistic killers for 90 minutes, The Strangers real thesis emerges when, in a particularly sticky moment, Kristen asks James to find “his Daddy’s shotgun”. In a culture that sees itself as being under constant threat from and unknown and unreasonable external force, and must take every effort to defend itself, the first priority is an armed response. Kristen and James were unprepared, and look what happens to them.

As an exercise in controlled bedlam, The Strangers is efficiently, effectively scary, but it owes too many debts, from Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs to James Foley’s Fear, via the mocking European ironists like Haneke and the French thriller Them, which it more or less remakes, without acknowledgement.

Life In Black & White

Following his triumphant examination of 1980s sink-estate Britain in This Is England, director Shane Meadow’s re-recruits his teenage star Thomas Turgoose for the contemporary follow-up, Somers Town, a minutely-observed portrait of youthful friendship set in an underdeveloped part of 1990s London.

Turgoose plays Tommo, a bright but troubled sixteen year-old who, for reasons we never quite discover, runs away from Nottingham to pitch up in Somers Town. On his first night on the streets, he is robbed by a gang of thugs who take his clothes and his money. Loitering in a café, Tommo meets Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant teenager who lives in a nearby tower block with his father, a builder on the Channel Tunnel railway line.

The two lads are well met; Tommo is a talkative, cheeky troublemaker while photographer Marek is more sensitive and less certain of himself. With nowhere else to go, Tommo convinces Marek to allow him to hide in his room while his father is at work, or out drinking, and the pair form a bond through their shared isolation, boredom, lack of money and a growing obsession with French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski).

It doesn’t sound like much in synopsis, but over the course of his just-too-short 70 minutes, Meadows and his regular screenwriter Paul Fraser spin an affecting, unassuming story of outsiders making the best of difficult circumstances. Despite the bleak landscape, Meadows balances his theme of urban poverty and the immigrant struggle with customary earthy humour, relying on the natural, unaffected grace of his two inexperienced leads for semi-improvised banter. There could have been more of it, though.

Turgoose and Jagiello’s essentially optimistic performances are central to the film’s success, sharing a freewheeling chemistry that lights up the screen, particularly in their interactions with local wide-boy Graham (Perry Benson) and a long scene where they wreck the flat after swilling down their first bottle of wine. Meadows and cinematographer Natasha Braier present the story in glowing monochrome high-definition video with a simple, gritty lyricism that finds unexpected flecks of beauty in the corners of a city in transition.

The Devil's In The Details

The phenomenal success of his Spanish Civil War fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth turned Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro into a force in world cinema, but he goes back to his comic-book roots for his follow-up Hellboy II: The Golden Army, delivering an even-better sequel to his 2004 comedy-action-adventure, this time pitting his demonic hero against a mechanical army led by a goblin king determined to rid the world of humans.

Having already shown us Hellboy’s beginnings, summoned from hell by Rasptin (to help the Nazis fight WWII), Del Toro opens with his adopted father Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) telling the red-faced, horned and now five year old demon a bedtime story. Here, in a beautifully realised stop-motion animation, we see the origins of the story to come – an ancient war between humanity and goblins - while teasing us with just how achingly gorgeous it will be.

In the short version, man and fairy share an uneasy truce: we get the cities, they keep the forests. But humanity has reneged on the deal, and destroyed the natural world. In an effort to save his people, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) defies his father the king of the goblins and plots to awaken the Golden Army: 70 times 70 robot warriors buried under the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim. Standing against him in the upcoming battle is the fire-engine faced Hellboy (Ron Perlman), his fire-spewing lover Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and super-intelligent merman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who all work for a secret government agency, keeping the real world safe from fantastical creatures. Tensions mount when their boss (the very funny Jeffrey Tambor) drafts in a new mission specialist, an ectoplasmic German called Johann Krauss who has been transformed into a wisp of shape-shifting smoke, trapped inside a clanking bell-diver’s suit.

Ron Perlman gives another winning performance as the cigar-choming, wise-crack spouting anti-hero, his massive chest carved with arcane tattoos and his right arm cast in crunching concrete. He’s tough on the outside, but tender underneath, loving kittens and Barry Manilow and desperate not to lose the love of his life, Liz. This romantic element is sustained with surprising effectiveness throughout the adventure to come, a sign of the film’s true intentions, to marry explosive action and eye-popping monsters with the grand themes of love, unity and ecology. This last element, the death of the natural world, is lyrically communicated in a vast sequence where Hellboy must battle a leafy, green God of the Woods and later, strike a bargain with the Angel of Death, a gruesome creature with a hundred eyes strewn across its black wings.

There are echoes of the classics of fantasy cinema throughout Hellboy II; a princess carrying a powerful charm from Star Wars, the half-forgotten fairy folk asserting their right to live as they do in Narnia while the endlessly fascinating Troll Market brings to mind the hidden places of Harry Potter. Del Toro isn’t paying homage; he goes deeper than that, taking as his source the stories that inspired these stories. Filled with moments of genuine visual wonder, the film is a unique accomplishment, standing in stark contrast to the soulless production-line of summer blockbuster entertainment, made to achieve a profit margin. Del Toro has loftier targets to hit.

This is a filmmaker with a unique way of seeing the world, but better than that, he has an innate understanding of how myths legends work in the mind of the viewer. He knows what it is about legends that entertain us and how, when properly told, they can still deliver powerful messages.

Bra Vo

Winner of the Best First Film award at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh, Marian Quinn’s charming, tender 32A is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in Dublin’s Raheny in 1979. We first meet 13 year-old Maeve (Ailish McCarthy) as she tries on her first bra, the measurement the same at the bus route to her suburban estate. Maeve and her friends are obsessed with breasts and bras, staring chest-height at other women and endlessly discussing their burgeoning pubescence. From there, the formative events of Maeve’s young life are covered in a familiar rite of passage, from her first period to her first kiss and her first disco (the Northside’s legendary Grove, complete with DJ Cecil Nolan in a cameo). When they meet at a party and spend an innocent night racing around a garden, Maeve starts dating the local heartthrob, sixteen year old Brian Power (Shane McDaid). Her friends can’t believe it, and their sense of injustice is doubled when Maeve skips an important meeting to go on a date instead.

Quinn places these emotional moments, humiliations and embarrassments against the backdrop of Maeve’s mother Jean (Orla Brady) spending time in hospital with “women’s problems”, while across the road, her best friend Ruth (Sophie Jo Wasson) is looking to reconnect with her long-lost father (Jared Harris), against the wishes of her bitter mother (played by the director herself). Although each element of the storyline fizzes with the same mood of teenage angst and shares the same sense of observation, the film struggles to tie these separate threads into a compelling whole, sketching outlines of an emotional landscape but leaving perceptible blank areas on the canvas.

Despite that uncertainty, the young cast give lively, unaffected performances taken, no doubt, from their own recent experiences. As Maeve, newcomer Ailish McCarthy is a real find; beautifully expressing the excitement of discovery through a big pair of blue eyes and later, nimbly finding the faces required to express frustration and disappointment without letting anyone other than the camera know. Her gang of friends (Wasson, Riona Smith and Orla Long) share an irrepressible energy, guiding one another over the various teenage hurdles before falling out, snubbing one another with consummate authenticity. More than boys and bras, its here at the centre of a gaggle of girls that 32A finds its heart.

From the magenta masthead on the Evening Press to the precise shade of industrial green paint on the walls, Quinn recreates late 1970’s Dublin with tremendous facility. Costume, production design and soundtrack are all note-perfect and the film is superbly photographed by PJ Dillon.

Mommy Issues

The third instalment of Stephen Sommer’s Mummy franchise, The Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor finally nails the lid down on the dusty old sarcophagus, seven years after the original revival gave a significant fillip to the action-adventure genre while handily providing Brendan Fraser with something to do in movies.

Last seen battling the supernatural Scorpion King in Egypt in the 1930s, Fraser’s thrill-seeking archaeologist Rick O'Connell is now retired in the post-war English countryside, living the life of a country gent with his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, stepping in for Rachel Weisz, who has graduated from this sort of thing). He’s learning how to fish and shoot while she writes adventure novels but they both yearn for the old excitements. When a spook from MI5 arrives at the house and asks them to deliver the mysteriously glowing Eye of Shangri-La diamond to a museum in Shanghai, they quickly agree, in the process reuniting with Evelyn’s brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and their twenty-year old son Alex (Luke Ford), a dashing adventurer and a chip of the old block.

Alex has recently discovered the long-lost tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Kung Fu superstar Jet Li) hidden in the vast underground chamber that holds his terracotta army. The opening prologue has already told us how, thousands of years before, the ruthless Emperor betrayed the powerful sorceress Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh) by killing her beloved after she had agreed to grant him a magical immortality. Instead she imprisoned him and his legions in clay and buried them underground. Now, with the O’Connell’s having delivered the diamond that revives him, the undead Dragon Emperor is returned to power and starts a new campaign of death and destruction.

In his first film since the disastrous Stealth, director Rob Cohen masticates this material into an unattractive bolus of computer-generated mush. The resulting goo lacks any genuine thrill or sense of entertainment, but it is noisy and belligerent. Late on, Li and Yeoh face off in a typically nimble sword fight, but it's a fleeting moment. Fraser and Ford are closely matched as father and son, in that both give equally bland and tuneless performances, not helped by the witless script’s cheesy one-liners, aiming for sparkling Golden Age repartee and landing on news anchor banter.

The usually edgy Bello is hamstrung by not being Rachel Weisz. A wobbly cut-glass accent and scant reason to be there finally collapse her. Even further in the distance, John Hannah’s familar slapstick comic relief suffers the same inane scripting; being at one point upstaged by an airsick animatronic yak. Liam Cunningham does his best as Mad Dog Maguire (no relation), a wild-eyed Irish pilot with a limited sense of self-preservation and a propensity for inappropriate balladeering, but there's nothing anyone could do to revive this corpse.

ET, Phone In

The X Files was the monumental success story of television in the 1990s, the seemingly endless adventures of moody crackpot Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his reluctant medical sidekick Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), devoted to uncovering conspiracies, chasing monsters and seeking out E.T. Now, ten years on from their first big-screen adaptation and nine years after everybody stopped caring, the partners are reunited in I Want To Believe when a female FBI agent is abducted in snowy West Virginia and a psychic priest claims to know where she is.

Spooky Mulder is now a recluse, living under the radar in a remote farmhouse in self-enforced retirement, spending his days clipping strange stories from the newspapers and cultivating a rabbinical beard. His former partner has left the FBI and is now a hospital paediatrician, working on a particularly tricky case of a young boy with a brain disease. When the agency – in the form of rapper Xzibit and Amanda Peet - come and ask Scully to reconnect them with Mulder, she convinces him to take on the case, in the process rekindling their romantic relationship and convincing him to leave the house. The plot thickens when another woman is abducted from a swimming pool and Father Joe (Billy Connelly) once more leads the cops to uncover vital clues, seemingly driven by angelic visions. But the priest is a convicted paedophile, the missing women have mysterious connections and the new FBI agents don’t trust the old guard anymore.

It’s a complicated story, but not that much more so. Remove the supernatural X-Files hook and this is just another gloomy cop drama, steadily traipsing through a procession of ethereal clues and not-so cunning misdirections, feeble stand-offs set against tepid chases and choreographed procedure. As the agents race around the snow-bound landscapes searching for the missing women, Scully is drawn into a battle with the religious hospital administrators when she suggests treating her dying patient with experimental stem-cells. This she accomplishes by googling “stem-cell research”, printing off a ream of documents, scratching her head and then, in the next scene, confidently injecting the child’s brain with a syringe filled with pink goo.

Duchovny and Anderson do bring a convincing maturity, call it tiredness, to their best-known creations but their chemistry is not nearly enough to carry the lumpy story, which starts without involvement and doesn’t improve. Opposite them, Connelly is miscast as the spooky priest, unable to add any complexity or emotion to what is an underwritten, lazily sketched character, polishing his Scottish burr on the choice dialogue. In the end, all three resort to gimmicks and tics to struggle through the signposts; wearily pitting God against Science and seemingly uninterested in the outcome. Written and directed by the series originator Chris Carter, there is just enough here for hardcore fans on a nostalgia trip but almost nothing of the old mystery remains.

Highly Strung

‘Breathtaking’ is a rather over used word in film criticism; a handy catch-all phrase that describes everything from a starlet’s liquid eyes to pyrotechnic stuntwork or pretty landscape photography. It is only rarely employed to express the actual sensation of gasping in a cinema seat, but that’s what happens in James Marsh’s dizzying documentary Man On Wire, about a day in 1974 when a daredevil Frenchman strung a high-wire across the gap between New York’s Twin Towers and walked out into the ether.

A circus performer from a young age, the pixie-like Philippe Petit had already attracted the world’s attention by traversing the towers of Notre Dame cathedral and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but as he tells it himself in a series of interviews, from the moment he saw an architect’s drawing of the World Trade Centre in a newspaper, he knew would have to try to cross it. From that half-cracked idea, Petit and his team of accomplices spent eight months planning the execution of what they called their ‘coup’ in painstaking detail. Like a team of bank robbers preparing a heist, they would have to find a way to gain access to the top of the half-finished towers, carry the 200 foot cable into position, secure it against the high winds at 1350 feet and do it all without getting caught.

Structured like a thriller, Marsh (who previously directed the oddball Wisconsin Death Trip and the equally edgy drama The King) uses new interviews, archive footage and seamless reconstructions to bring us inside Petit’s unique world of risk and danger, brilliantly evoking a time and place and making the audience - even those unaffected by acrophobia - feel like part of the adventure.

Petit, who was only 24 when he completed the walk, makes for an engaging interview subject; still driven by his unique artistic vision and an endless supply of adrenaline. His accomplices, including his then girlfriend, exasperated best friend and the inside man, a thrill-seeking American lawyer, each give their chronological version of the event, recalling the constant sense of danger but also the simple joy involved in pulling off a high-concept prank. The result is an engaging and compelling documentary that dances on the line between art and obsession, the knee-trembling images beautifully matched to Michael Nyman’s evocative score.

Jokers Wild

After successfully redrawing the origins of his superhero character in Batman Begins three years ago, British director Christopher Nolan continues his story in the morbid and dangerous Dark Knight; a thrilling crime story cut with an acid misanthropy and one of the films of the year.

Opening with a brilliantly choreographed bank robbery, the film soon establishes Batman’s (Christian Bale) struggle to bring peace to Gotham City. As the media accuse Batman of being an all-powerful vigilante, the mafia have tightened their grip on the underworld, with the help of malevolent outside influences disguised as investment capitalists. But even the collected criminal gangs are unprepared for a new threat, the dangerously psychotic Joker (Heath Ledger), an amoral criminal who believes in nothing but disorder. While the Joker hatches his plans to destroy the city and its masked hero, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) are positioning themselves to affect a political solution to the crime wave, with the help of Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman).

Seeing an opportunity to rescue Batman from the camp excesses of the 1990s, director Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan elevate their superhero from the doldrums of genre-bound familiarity and in the process, redefine blockbuster entertainment. This is a movie that takes the mythology and accoutrements of its familiar central character and turns it into a meditation on bleak themes and unsettling politics that speaks directly to how the world is today. The Dark Knight is a morality play that casts good against evil, order against chaos but more than that, it comprehensively blurs the lines between right and wrong, carefully measuring out how far the good can go to do the right thing, and directly questioning the morality of those methods. These are not issues the malevolent Joker is overly concerned with, as Alfred says “some people just want to watch the world burn”, these are aspects of Batman’s own consciousness, closely wrapped in his own struggle with his identity, his motivations and his reasoning. Nolan creates a shadowed world where being a hero is a Sisyphean struggle, where triumph is snatched away as soon as it is won and order is impossible.

Batman is only as strong as the villain that opposes him, and Ledger provides an indelible bad guy. Arriving fully formed and unexplained, The Joker is a creation of pure untrammelled evil, a creepy sadist in an unsettling green suit, flashing his favoured knives (“so I can savour the moment”) and compulsively licking his torn lips. From behind his greasy white makeup, smudged black eyes and livid red scars, Ledger gives a chillingly hypnotic performance; frightening and violent but also intimate and occasionally sympathetic. More than what he looks like, it is what he represents that is the true horror of The Joker and Ledger clearly revels in becoming the unknowable engineer of bedlam, who believes in nothing other than himself. He has no morals, no conscience, no ambition beyond anarchy, no scheme to foil. He is the ultimate terrorist, and Batman can only stop him by, in part, becoming like him.

Faced with this powerhouse, Bale’s Batman is reduced, relying on a hoarse rasping delivery and all-powerful physicality when suited up and the actor’s easy charm and confidence when playing the playboy Bruce Wayne. The rest of the cast are again perfectly chosen. Michael Caine returns as the desert-dry butler Alfred and Gary Oldman reprises his honest cop Gordon, now promoted to Commissioner. Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over for the hapless Katie Holmes, playing the lost-love Rachel as a smart lawyer determined to fight for good while Aaron Eckhart is outstanding in the thanklessly straight role of politician Harvey Dent, aided by a stomach-churning transformation into the half-mad Two-Face, who should perhaps be nicknamed Half-Face.

More than his skill with the actors, Nolan has a consummate sense of place, creating a Gotham where even daylight is cast in a sombre blue, a beautifully realised place of towering skyscrapers and ash-blown cellars. Even in gloom, this is a beautiful production, emphatically photographed, edited with skill and precision and underlined with a driving score of throbbing chords and abstracted heavy metal. Six of the film’s most elaborate special effects sequences have been shot in the 65 millimetre IMAX format, adding a breathtaking sense of scale and pin-point visual precision to the already hyperkinetic action.

The Dark Knight is scattered, confused and frightening. It unfolds in fits and starts, breaking from one carefully positioned dramatic moment to rain chaos down on its characters. If Batman Begins showed us that in Nolan’s hands, this material is not just for the comic books, the sequel underlines that ambition. This is a haunted tragedy that recasts the ancient myths of the hero in an ultramodern nihilism, achieving a complexity of feeling that is difficult to achieve in any kind of art, let alone the multi-million dollar studio summer movie. It is simply unmissable.

Memento Mori

In one-of-a-kind Guy Maddin’s paean to Manitoba’s cold and sleepy capital city, the Canadian surrealist analyses his relationship with his home town, its history, the people and his own family for My Winnipeg, an archly comic, monochrome pseudo-documentary.

Over the course of his nine features and umpteen short films, Maddin has honed his unique method – influenced by silent films, industrial shorts, golden age melodramas and camp science fiction serials – to create a flavoursome, visually breathtaking body of work unlike any other. It is also one which you will either love or hate on sight. In My Winnipeg, commissioned by the local government, Maddin pens a fluid biography of the snowbound city, using old stock footage, puppetry, video and painstaking recreations, one of which opens the film. We then cut to a long poetic sequence on a moving train as Maddin, (played by Darcy Fehr) tries one more time to leave Winnipeg for good. Maddin narrates his story in a sonorous baritone, blending old legends and questionable history with an acid critique of the town’s efforts to modernise itself and fantasies about his youth and his family.

As Maddin tells it, Winnipeg is a place of dreams, its citizens sleepwalking through the streets at night dreaming of the ancient natives and lost underground rivers. They dream of lost back streets, forgotten department stores, old sporting glories and strange historical happenings; like when horses fled a stable fire and were trapped in a freezing river to, overnight, become a macabre sculpture garden for local picnickers. Maddin recreates it all, from the waving skaters astride the staring, icy horse heads to an infamous Masonic séance that channelled the god of the bison through a psychic ballerina. The director himself plays a role in these intricate restorations, describing how he made a facsimile of his childhood home and cast actors to play his siblings. His mother, he tells us, was herself an actress, starring in a local soap opera called Ledge Man where, every day for 50 years, she talked a suicidal man down from the side of a building with sweet words and gentle encouragements.

We are told Mrs Maddin is playing herself, but in fact, the role is taken by Ann Savage, a leading lady in 1940’s noirs, most notably the surreal classic Detour. I didn’t recognise her - she is 87 now - but seeing her name in the credits, I was tempted to find out what else Maddin had invented. Are the city streets in fact named after famous brothel keepers? Is there a by-law that allows Winnipeggers to keep the keys to their old homes? Was his convent school really named “The Academy of the Super Vixens”? Did a corrupt mayor once fix the result of the annual Golden Boy male beauty pageant? No, of course not, but it doesn’t matter. In Maddin’s singular imagination this is how it happened and he spins from those fragments a fascinating, funny tale of place and time, loss and remembrance.

Maim Mama!

Theatre director Phyllida Llloyd makes her feature debut with this starry-cast but horribly saccharine adaptation of the stage musical, based on the lyrics of Abba songs.

The story of Mamma Mia! is wafer thin. Meryl Streep plays Donna, a fifty-something former showgirl who owns a dilapidated hotel on a Greek Island. Her twenty year old daughter Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried (the dippy blonde in Mean Girls) is about to marry her sweetheart Sky (Dominic Cooper), with the ceremony to be held at the hotel. Having read her mother’s secret diary, Sophie has discovered that her father could have been one of three former lovers that Donna met over the course of a very busy month years before. Desperate to meet her father before her marriage, she invites all three, (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård) to come to the island. Thus met, the gang then race around looking for reasons to sing Abba songs - lyrics crammed to fit the situation - before a predictably sweet and sun-kissed conclusion. For ‘Dancing Queen’, they have a dance and crown a queen. ‘I Have A Dream’ allows Sophie dreams of her real dad. 'Money, Money Money' brings about a discussion of the hotel’s precarious finances. On it goes, a race through twenty songs from the back catalogue, each of the principals getting their moment in centre stage, the story trailing along behind them.

So it’s rubbish. Upbeat, inoffensive and determined to entertain, but rubbish nonetheless. The biggest challenge of any musical is integrating the songs into an interesting, credible story; so it feels ‘natural’ when the actors suddenly break into song. That never happens here. Mamma Mia! is jazzed-up karaoke, a feeble excuse to run through the Abba classics, hanging limply from the bare branches of a gossamer story.

Streep, who last sang on screen in Postcards From The Edge, has a fine, clear voice, with her natural exuberance covering most of Donna’s character inadequacies. Likewise, Julie Walters gives it both barrels as best friend Rosie, belting out her numbers and kicking her heels to disguise a shaky, uninvolving presence. As the pairs preening rich-bitch friend Tanya, comedienne Christine Baranski carries most of the film’s sense of camp, a burden that proves too much for her.

From the men, only Pierce Brosnan shows any sign of having twigged the ridiculous nature of proceedings. He nervously warbles his way through a few numbers, his strained expression and awkward movements betraying his acute discomfort. Firth, as the millionaire lawyer Harry, plays a former punk but that still doesn’t excuse his tuneless screeching. As the adventurer Bill, Stellan Skarsgård doesn’t even attempt an entire number, wisely delivering his few lines in a croaking sing-song and hiding somewhere during the more bombastic set-pieces.

If the singing is a disappointment, the unconvincing sets and chocolate-box photography are even more so; the airy, fluent location exteriors crassly matched with the over-lit, unconvincing studio settings. Director Lloyd, who originated the stage show, lacks the basic technical and narrative skills to make the film bounce. A broad, flat and silly film, Mamma Mia! is strictly for the fans.

Going Gently

The tangled life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is told through the lives of the two women who loved him in Love Is The Devil director John Maybury’s artful, awkward The Edge of Love.

Opening during the Blitz in a tube station, we first meet the beautiful Vera Phillips (Keira Knightly) as she sings an uplifting song to the huddled Londoners. Watching her is a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who trails her to a nearby pub when the all clear is sounded. There, Vera has meet her lifelong friend the poet Dylan Thomas, in the city to work on a propaganda documentary. Propping up the bar with the tempestuous writer is his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and soon all four are joined in a squared-off relationship, Killick and Thomas butting heads over Vera’s affections while she and Caitlin strike up a thorny friendship, clouded with elements of jealously and rivalry. Before he is sent overseas, Killick and Vera marry and she returns with Thomas and Caitlin to a seaside town in Wales to wait for his return. There, away from the world, the competition between the two women becomes more irrational and intense.

As the twinned objects of the poet’s affections, Miller and Knightly give fine, nuanced performances, in turn delicate and boisterous. Miller in particular is a revelation as the fiery, feisty Caitlin, brilliantly evoking the pain of living with genius, made even more anxious by the imminent prospect of death and ruin in wartime. Knightly as her rival and best friend plays Vera in much the same way as she did her lead in Atonement, her practical façade cracking under heartfelt emotional pressures. Their relationship is the heart of the film, and both prove worthy of the assignment.

Although he looks the part, Rhys cannot find the power in his voice to match the poet’s words, unable to match the rolling, tumbling intonation of the poet, a disappointment given that Thomas recorded much of his work on tape. His recitation in voice-over of one of Thomas’ best known poems, Lament (“When I was a windy boy and a bit…”) is weak and flat. Worse than that, the actor gives such a dislikeable performance, full of actorly tics and goggle-eyed mooning, that he never gives us any reason to believe that two women would have fallen so deeply in love with him. His lechery seems half-hearted, his alcoholism and depravity an overly careful, measured descent. Murphy, as the damaged soldier Killick, gives a far more interesting performance, full of bravado and wit but the war absents him for long sections, returning him in a shell-shocked trance as a remote, jealous misfit. Pushed by his own demons into an act of desperation, Murphy brilliantly evokes the man’s panic and fear but the constantly self-referencing script noticeably deflates his performance, repeatedly underlining emotions the actor is well able to communicate himself the first time.

Despite being flawed in its execution dramatically muddled and jumpy in tone, The Edge of Love is a well mounted and, for the most part, well acted drama about fascinating people in extraordinary circumstances. It tries very hard to distil these freewheeling characters into easily digestible nuggets of information, but Maybury cannot give them their required force, leaving us still waiting for the definitive film about Dylan Thomas.

I Know Kung Fu

In DreamWorks funny and charming Kung Fu Panda, the titular black-and-white bear is Po (Jack Black), son of noodle-selling father Mr. Ping (James Hong) with secret dreams of becoming a kung-fu expert like his heroes, The Furious Five. One day, the Kung Fu Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) has a premonition that the evil snow leopard warrior Tai Lung (Ian McShane) will escape prison and destroy the town unless a warrior is chosen to stop him. Tai Lung is a former student of Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), the trainer of the Furious Five, Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross). Through a series of misfortunes, the mystical Oogway picks Po as the champion, and so begins a familiar, but inherently entertaining, story of overcoming obstacles and achieving dreams.

In real life, Black’s incessant jabbering has made him an increasingly difficult presence but in animated form his childish, high-tempo act suits the simple-hearted, easy-to-assemble Po, requiring little more than gumption, crisis and the battle for glory to construct a worthy hero. From the outset, Kung Fu Panda is a winning combination of knockabout farce, ticklesome one-liners, easily digested lectures and blur-motion fight sequences. It’s a wuxia story that’s a framework for jokes, not the other way around. The period setting eliminates any of the incessant pop culture references that blot other animations, and there is no discernable trace of the self-aware cynicism that can find its way into the new wave of digital cartoons, aimed squarely at the audience’s more worldly chaperones. Kung Fu Panda is innocent entertainment, a cartoon first and foremost.

And what an attractive animation it is. The opening dream sequence is a striking, Samurai Jack inspired arrangement of blacks and reds, swooping shapes and punchy action. The character designs are extraordinarily charming. Po has a waddling walk and big-boned presence, dwarfing his tiny Yoda-like mentor and clashing with his team of limber animal ninjas, their distinctive moves taken from the fighting styles they represent. The animators have crafted an array of beautifully lit, artfully composed background vistas, peopled with a constant rhubarb of sweetly observed villagers –pigs and ducks and rabbits. It is DreamWorks’ best-looking movie so far, stunningly rendered and presented with obvious affection for the long history of Asian martial arts cinema.

Pixar’s eco-themed Wall-E is likely to steal much of this bumptious film’s thunder, but if kids are looking to see both, grown-ups shouldn’t complain.

Green Eyed Monster

Louis Leterrier’s surprisingly compelling re-imagining of The Incredible Hulk (more the 1970s television show than Ang Lee’s overly lyrical misfire from 2003) sees Edward Norton takes over from Eric Bana as Bruce Banner; a government scientist blasted by gamma rays when a nuclear experiment goes wrong and condemned, Jekyll & Hyde-like, to carry a monster within him that he cannot control.

Be in your seat on time because much of this Hulk’s origins are explained in the opening credits, flashes of prologue flitting between images of mutating cells and pumping veins, accompanied by a reworking of the haunting score from the 1970s television show. As an on-screen graphic explains, Banner hasn’t had an ‘episode’ for 150 days, thanks to the meditation techniques he has learned from a martial arts master at his hideout in Rio de Janeiro’s favela. Banner’s attempts to control his body are part of his search for an antidote to his unique condition, which famously becomes unmanageable when he is angered.

But his military paymasters, personified by grim-faced General Ross (William Hurt), who also happens to be the father of Banner’s girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler), want him back in the US so they can use his irradiated blood to create a new breed of genetically-modified super-soldiers. Ross sends a crack squad of commandos, led by the deadly Blonsky (Tim Roth) down to Brazil to bring Banner back. Following a breakneck chase, he escapes, making his way back to Betty’s office in a university campus and a painful reunion. But the army are close behind, and Ross has found a way to create a worthy adversity for the all-powerful Hulk by injecting a willing Blonsky with a sample of his blood.

Norton, always willing to take a risk, gives an excellent performance as the tortured boffin desperate to exorcise a curse of his own creation. At least, until the computers take over and he morphs into a giant, green, imaginary object. Even Norton cannot act through such a dense binary mask. Nevertheless, when in human form, Norton is always interesting and self-contained. Alongside him, Liv Tyler offers heart and hope as the loyal Betty with the two of them presenting a likewise credible and frequently touching romantic relationship, quickly drawn in tight, emotional scenes and well sustained throughout.

Director Leterrier, working from a script by comic-book specialist Zak Penn and Norton, brings his high-octane action movie sensibilities to the material, staging a well-measured succession of blistering set-pieces and pyrotechnic fight scenes. Banner and Betty don't become fully rounded characters, but this lack of probing insight suits the material far better than his predecessor’s tortured art-house moping. This Hulk hasn’t got time for angst; the film is driven at a breathless pace by a straight-ahead plot and endless action. There are frequent asides for summer-friendly comic moments – Marvel creator Stan Lee gets his obligatory cameo and the original television behemoth Lou Ferrigno pops up as a pizza-munching security guard.

Never short on spectacle, this bravura blockbuster noticeably collapses in the last twenty minutes into a mush of over-digitized combat - the streets of New York are again, flattened-but what had gone before was solidly entertaining, hitting all the marks expected by fans with careful - probably too careful - precision.

We Are Three

It's the third blog-a-versary here at Confessions of a Film Critic. Yay me. Thanks to those that read the posts, nobody seems to comment much but thanks to those few that do and roll on another year.

It Keeps Happening...

Reading these guys pick apart just how awful The Happening really, truly is, almost makes me want to see it again.

Just to keep up with the dissection, like an anatomy student in a glass-walled gallery flipping through a textbook. In comparison I was only prodding the corpse with a stick, from four feet away.

It goes to show you how important film criticism is, even if only to shield the audience from the gore. And a surgeon gets to wear rubber gloves.

What Happened?

M Night Shyamalan might have come a long way since The Sixth Sense frightened the tar out of us back in 1999, but it’s been steadily downhill. Signs was a misfire, The Village a mess and Lady in the Water an abomination. His star has fallen so far that his latest film, The Happening, almost didn’t happen at all. The script was rejected by his usual backers, with the writer/director eventually finding the funds to make the film from an Indian conglomerate more used to producing Bollywood musicals.

Whatever the film’s genesis, in keeping with the director’s Hitchcock-aping affinity for narrative contortion, it would be unfair on any prospective audience to reveal too much about the story. In short, New York is subjected to a suspected terrorist attack, where suddenly and for no apparent reason, a deadly toxin is released into the atmosphere, which causes people to kill themselves. Soon, this strange phenomenon spreads throughout the North-Eastern United States causing everyone to flee in panic, although they are unsure what they are fleeing from. After an opening credit sequence of gradually darkening clouds and a quick introduction to the mayhem, the film settles on Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), a high-school science teacher and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) as they escape the city for the supposed safety of Philadelphia, trying to figure out the mystery and find refuge in the remote countryside.

Judging by his jaunty line-readings and ludicrously befuddled expression, Wahlberg appears to be under the impression that he is in a comedy about a whiney, passive-aggressive child-man struggling to complete a particularly tricky crossword. He is just awful, unable to muster an iota of threat or panic, constantly checking the colouration on his “emotionally significant” mood ring – yes, mood ring – for guidance on how to arrange his face. Blue is happy, red is sad, purple is, honest to God, horny. So good in Boogie Nights and The Departed, Wahlberg can do nothing right here, and it’s entirely the fault of his director. Beside him, Deschanel plays the dutiful wife as if heavily medicated, unable to rouse herself from a dippy-eyed, half-smiling trace even as she flees for her life. Dependably cute and disarmingly pretty she is comprehensively wasted here but she is not alone.

Alan Ruck is given a momentary cameo as a grave faced school principal. Spencer Breslin remains anonymous from under a mop of curls. John Leguizamo appears as best friend Julian, mangles his cloth-eared dialogue for twenty minutes then disappears once his assigned task – placing his daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez) in the couple’s care – is completed. In an attempt to add some tension between them, unnecessary given the apocalyptic circumstances, Shyamalan introduces an undercurrent of emotional adultery (even playing the part of the other man, thankfully only on the phone), but this is just another mishandled, tedious element of what quickly descends into a litany of bad ideas, unintentional jokes and logical hiccups.

The Happening is truly a terrible film, a stupid premise poorly executed and, even at a scant 90 minutes, an ire-raising waste of time. For a film that revels in showing various inventive ways to commit suicide, makes umpteen po-faced and misinformed speeches about climate change and repeatedly evokes the spectre of terrorism and the ghosts of 9/11, Shyamalan’s childish character construction and inane dialogue is startlingly wrong-headed. Emotionally false, torturously contrived and dramatically rushed, this is a mindless, mirthless assemblage of reheated cliché, cod Hollywood science and half-hearted doom-mongering. But hey, it’s just another pompous, self-important dud from the diminished Shyamalan. It’s not the end of the world.

From The Vaults: Denzel Washington & Deja Vu

Denzel Washington marches into the plush hotel room in Paris, folds his lanky frame into his seat and immediately laughs very loudly at nothing in particular. It’s a laugh of impatience from this famously reticent actor, never entirely comfortable when meeting the press; a noise made to signify his presence and mark his space, like a lion roaring at sundown. Before we start into the questions, Washington makes some general chit-chat about the French weather (cold, wet) and the approaching Christmas season (family, food, church) before smoothing down his shirt-front and jutting his chin out, awaiting the first of my enquiries.

It would appear that we’re in Paris to talk about the action movie Déjà Vu simply because the movie has a French title, although when it comes to the phenomenon itself, that unsettling sensation of recall that almost everybody gets now and again, Washington hasn’t much in the way of personal insights to share. “I can’t give you a specific example, you know, but to me that uncanny feeling comes when I hear something or see something that strikes me as familiar, somehow. It’s difficult to describe, but you know they say we only use ten percent of our brains. I think that instinct and intuition, this is my own little theory, come from an old part of our minds that we don’t use anymore, like a muscle that’s not used all the time will weaken, will fade away. I believe there’s an echo of that in it”.

In the film Washington plays Doug Carlin, a smart, intuitive agent for the US bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and, the movie tells us, the newly added ‘Explosives’), who is called to post-Katrina New Orleans to investigating a terrorist bombing on a ferry loaded with military personnel. Assisting him in his investigation is a shadowy government spook, played by Val Kilmer, and a team of fast-talking boffins, led by Adam Goldberg, who are using a top secret time-travelling machine which allows them to ‘see’ four days into the past. The only clue Washington has is the body of a recently dead, innocent young woman (played by relative newcomer Paula Patton), whose death holds the key to catching the bomber (played with religious-inspired zeal by Jim Caveizel). Washington figures out that the only way to solve the case, and get the girl, is to use the secret machine to physically travel back in time. It’s a wild mix of a love story, pseudo factual sci-fi and gritty police procedural, as spectacular as it is preposterous, that marks the double-Oscar winning actor’s third collaboration with the master of breakneck pyrotechnics, director Tony Scott and his blockbuster producer, Jerry Bruckheimer.

Washington prepared for the role like he does every other role, he thought about it long and hard, and spent face-to-face time with the professionals. Tony Scott thinks the actor is almost unique in his methods, saying that “many actors talk about doing research, but in fact very few of them do. When you put their feet to the fire, they’re lazy. Whatever Denzel does, audiences trust that he is giving an honest representation of the man he’s putting on the screen. Also, and this never hurts, he’s sexy and charming and he’s got all of those movie star elements as well.” Scott’s six-time producer Jerry Bruckheimer is just as complimentary, saying that the actor “reeks of intelligence. He is just a very smart man and I think audiences love that about him. The sense of authority he brings to a role is an extension of that – he is a very powerful actor and a powerful human being”.

Washington deflects the not altogether unexpected compliments with a wave of his hand and seems reluctant to analyse his approach to his work. “I’m just me, and what you see is what you get. I’m not the kind of guy who just works all the time. For me, this work is simply how I make a living. When they call ‘wrap!’ - he claps his hands – I’m gone. Zoom.” He does pay homage to the real-life detective the writers, Bill Marsilli and Terry Rossio, based his character around. “His name is Jerry Rudin, and he’s a 20 year veteran of the ATF. He was the first investigator on the scene of the Oklahoma bombing back in 1995 (the film references that atrocity a number of times) and what I took from his is that he is the kind of a guy who likes to sneak up on a situation. He doesn’t wear a uniform; he prefers to blend in and walk around and work quietly and unobtrusively but still has this tremendous sense of authority.”

The film had just started shooting in and around New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in late August 2005; an event that the actor admits took on a special resonance. “It was important to me that we stuck it out, and returned to New Orleans to continue filming as soon as we could. Three months after the water receded, we were filming in the 9^th Ward (the area of the city most devastated by the flooding) and we did that intentionally, to show the people that big projects like ours were not going to abandon them when they needed us the most. Think about a big movie production, the amount of people employed and all the others services that depend on it, from catering to hotels or what have you. I thought our presence sent an important signal, but I’ll say this on the whole thing; Spike Lee made a brilliant movie called When The Levees Broke, and that puts the Katrina story into perspective far better than I could, in the time we have now”.

I don’t get the sense that Washington is being deliberately evasive, but since the film makes pointed references to the War in Iraq, 9/11 and the earlier Oklahoma bombing as well as Katrina, all still issues very much at the forefront of the American consciousness, he is perhaps choosing his words carefully. Regardless of the real-life events the film includes in its story, Washington doesn’t believe Déjà Vu has any overt political message. “This wasn’t, for me personally, a political film, even if we touch on those issues. The movie wasn’t shaped like that in the first draft of the script, but it became that with what was happening around us, the research that Tony did, the input from a guy like Jerry Rudin, who was on set a lot during filming, but its not meant as a political film, no”. Before Washington arrived, I had asked the same question of Bruckheimer, specifically if he saw the film’s incorporating real-life tragedy as a deliberate effort to remind Americans that their problems are not all coming from overseas. The ultra-smooth producer was having none of it. “I don’t think that was out intent, really, I think we were just trying to make an entertaining and exciting story, and that was the way it was written. I like verisimilitude and I know the audience can spot baloney, but there’s no specific message."

Bruckheimer didn’t bite and for his part, Washington doesn’t either. Not that there was much chance of my line of questioning getting past the actor, who has a BA in Journalism from Fordham University and twenty five years of celebrity behind him. I’m not really getting anywhere, so move the discussion on from the sad realities of the modern world to the realms of science fiction and the film’s central notion of travelling through time. I ask him if he needs to have a concrete, philosophical belief in a script before he accepts it, particularly when it relies on a babble of science double-speak to get over the humps in the plotting. He stops me before I can finish the question, with a wry smile. “Well, you’re assuming that I know what philosophically sound is, you know. But, it hasn’t been proven that man can travel through time, but it hasn’t been proven that we can’t. So, I ask you, why not?” (Earlier, while trying to explain the story, Tony Scott told me, rather redundantly, that he ‘isn’t a quantum physicist, but…’). “I personally don’t think it’s that far fetched. You know, thirty years ago nobody would have said this (he reaches into his pocket and extracts his swanky, slimline mobile) that this was a telephone. For me to bring everything down to my level of understanding is limited thinking. Just because we as humans can’t figure something out, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If that was the case, then the world would be flat and the human mind wouldn’t be inquisitive and able to make connections and remain thirsty for knowledge".

The science of moving through time and the Theory of General Relativity aside, the film is also a more prosaic love story, albeit one constrained by the early death of the female lead. When Washington’s character, rather cleverly, discovers the woman is still alive, albeit in another timeline that he must visit, he sets out through a specially opened wormhole to save her and stop the attack taking place. The actor says he always saw the film as being a romance first, and was at pains to point that out to the director and producer before they started filming. “When they talked to me about the script the guys were like, ‘it’s a love story told in reverse’, and my response was, no it’s not – she might be dead when he first meets her, on a slab in the mortuary, but as the story evolves into something else, so does their relationship, which I found to be very real. I take elements like that one step at a time in a movie. I don’t like to get ahead of myself, because I think it will affect the performance. Paula’s character and my character have strange journeys in and out of the timeline in this movie, so I didn’t even want to get into thinking through all of that. I think it is better, sometimes, if I don’t know, or at least haven’t thought about, where this guy’s emotions are likely to bring him at any given point”.

Real Real Gone

Say what you like about Ben Affleck as an actor - I certainly have and none of it was kind – as a director he shows some considerable promise. For his feature debut, Affleck follows another performer turned helmer, Clint Eastwood with Mystic River, in adapting a tough novel from Denis Lehane about the disappearance of a small child in Boston.

Gone Baby Gone opened in the US last year but the release here was postponed owing to sensitivities surrounding the Madeline McCann case, to which the film bears a superficial resemblance. The director’s younger brother Casey, mesmerising in The Assassination of Jesse James, plays Patrick Kenzie, a low-rent Boston private detective who, together with his girlfriend and business partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), specialise in exposing adulterers and finding bad debtors. They are dragged into the investigation surrounding the abduction of a four year old girl, Amanda McCready (Madeline O’Brien) when the child’s frantic Aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) and her husband Lionel (Titus Welliver) knock on their door, thinking that low-profile locals who aren’t carrying badges or guns might be able to uncover fresh evidence.

The police investigation is being led by the soon-to-retire Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), head of the Crimes Against Children task force and his two best investigators, Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton). They’ve interviewed the child’s mother Helene (Amy Ryan) dozens of times, but the inexperienced Kenzie and Angie ask different questions and get better answers. The drug-addict Helene has been dragged into a cocaine supply operation by a boyfriend, and the two soon discover there seems to be a connection between her and a powerful local drug lord, who has recently lost a pile of drug money.

There is infinite darkness here. Was the child abandoned or abducted by a paedophile? Kenzie and Angie use their street-smarts to isolate a suspect, but even to them, this development appears suspiciously convenient. Helene herself is clearly hiding something, but perhaps she is afraid of drawing any more attention to her hard-partying lifestyle. Then there is the police investigation, partly played out on the television news, which follows the standard procedure but with a distinct air of futility.

When we sit down to watch a hard-boiled detective story, typically the desire is to see somebody smart and straight-backed solve a problem, applying their curiosity and gut instinct to restore order. Here however, the issue transforms in the third act, from the hunt for a missing child into a bleak moral inquiry, a question of right and wrong that Kenzie must make a call on, even as he realises the case has become a zero-sum game without any hope for a satisfactory outcome. If he does the right thing he will cause people to suffer, if he does wrong, someone else will. He cannot do nothing.

In these late scenes, Affleck the director uses his brother’s mournful face and strangled voice to brilliant effect, even as he struggles to find a role for Monaghan’s point of view beyond providing a conscientious sounding board, looking to create a divide between the lovers that is undermined by the timid way their relationship has been drawn beforehand. Despite some decidedly shaky character development and the film’s uncomfortable resonance with the headlines, this is a film of genuine moral complexity, well played and handsomely photographed, made all the more involving by its immediacy and authenticity.

Never Mind The Blahniks

In case you are today just emerging from a decade-long coma, Sex & The City is a television show about four mickey-mental New York women who shop, eat, frolic and gossip, mostly about the ins and outs of their torturous romantic lives. Through six series and millions of DVD box-set sales, the show has become a cultural phenomenon amongst women, but having seen say, seven minutes of it in total while flicking through the channels, I couldn’t care less about it.

And having watched the long-delayed yet crushingly inevitable big-screen outing, I still couldn’t. Written and directed by series originator Michael Patrick King from Candace Bushnell’s original chick-lit novel, the saga continues with a bumptious opening crawl of flashbacks to high-points of the tv series, by way of reminding us who these characters are. We see the grand nabob Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) try on shoes, man-eater Samantha (Kim Catrall) enjoy a fulsome orgasm, boffin Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) scratch her red head with a pencil and nice-but-dim Charlotte (Kristen Davis) simper sweetly.

The players established, and that’s about as three-dimensional as it gets, the story picks up four years after their small-screen farewell with Carrie still madly in love with Mr Big (Chris Noth) and preparing to move into a cavernous Manhattan penthouse just as soon as she can have the wardrobe space expanded. After a coy proposal over chopped tomatoes, the two are planning to marry. Big, for his part, has already been hitched twice, so is somewhat nervous about the proposition, fearing it will bring about change and of course all men, even billionaire property developers, are terrified of that. Such concerns are made real with word that the fire has gone out between Miranda and husband Steve (David Eigenberg), leading him to adultery and her to develop a scowl that doesn’t leave her face for the remainder of the film. Charlotte, the ever present cheerleader, is blissfully married to Harry (Evan Handler) and parading their adopted five-year old Chinese girl like a Hermes bag. Samantha, the most obviously pantomime character and as a result the most fun, flits in and out of the story from LA, where she is now a high-flying agent for toyboy Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis), busy guiding him to stardom by being snippy on the phone, sipping champagne and balancing her sunglasses on her head.

For all the early character-establishing shenanigans, after the first hour the film remains virtually plotless. It nips along at a lively pace, but remove the central narrative – Carrie and Mr Big’s stumbling walk down the aisle – and there is little else to engage. Gathering these characters together again apparently took considerable negotiation, not to mention large wads of cash, but the results are nowhere near worth the delays and reported bickering. Although these women can deliver reams of quick-fire, back and forth dialogue, when the script asks them to actually act, in scenes designed to expose the loneliness of the middle-aged, the weary trudge of life after romance or the complications of marriage, they crumble. Although all four are still game, there is nothing to stretch them here, with both situations and dialogue lifted straight from the cheesiest soap opera, dramatically coarse and shabbily arranged.

Part of the blame here lies with the director, whose idea of a motion picture is four episodes of television without any advertisements. Running just shy of 150 minutes, Sex & The City is lavishly lengthy but almost entirely empty, composed of endless product placement, easy montage (moving house, trying on wedding dresses), tittering sex-chatter and slapped-face surprise. Emotionally underwhelming and lacking any real imagination or wit, there seems to be little point to the film beyond window-shopping; oohing and aahing over lovely frocks and just-so accessories, a banal catwalk of splashy colour and orthopedically-taxing jewellery. Brands, botox and bullshit, basically. It will be a smash hit.