JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH is a stunningly made, deeply affecting, beautifully acted, chamber drama about the events that led to the real life assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969 at the age of just 21. His age is startling when we see him portrayed with such power, conviction and charisma in an award-winning performance by British actor Daniel Kaluuya. His Hampton is thickly accented, profoundly articulate and rousing in his stirring message of black activism and social aid. We are carried away by his powerful presence, just as Dominique Fishback's quiet poetry-loving student Deborah Johnson is, and her subtle but profound performance is equally award-worthy.  She is swept up in Hampton's activism, falls heavily pregnant and has to look on in admiration but also fear as he becomes increasingly convinced of his forthcoming martyrdom. So much of her performance is wordless, and she manages to convey so much conflicting emotion through her eyes. It's deeply impressive. 

The third person in this four-hand psychological drama is LaKeith Stanfield's William O'Neal. When we first meet him he's impersonating a cop and boosting cars. The Feds hold the threat of jail time over him and force him to become an informat. Pretty soon he's Hampton's trusted head of security, and we feel that he absolutely believes in Fred's mission even while snitching on him. The deep tragedy of  O'Neal's situation - conveyed in a subtle and heart-breaking performance by Stanfield - is the counterpoint to the tragedy of Deborah Johnson's situation.  We know that she will have to raise her child alone as the widow of a slain activst. And we know that O'Neal's guilt at his role in that FBI assassination will lead to his suicide, despite his on-tape assertion that he just did what he had to do.  

The final player in this four-hander is Jesse Plemons' FBI agent Roy Mitchell. He is also an equivocal character. This is best summed up in the final scene between Mitchell and O'Neal in a restaurant peopled entirely by white diners and staff.  Both characters are ostensibly setting up an assassination and doing so willingly - Mitchell to serve the Bureau's political aims; O'Neal to secure financial freedom.  But each looks utterly uncomfortable. Mitchell knows the FBI is rotten and that this is unjustifiable extra-judicial murder but he's a career man. And O'Neal is just so far stepped in blood it would be as hard to wade back as to go forward.

The resulting film is a profoundly moving and important biopic that teaches us how impressive Hampton was, and how despicable was the plot to take him down, and the toll it took on those who did it, and those who were left behind. It cleaves as closely to the historical record as a work of fiction can. It is perfect? Not quite. A cameo from Martin Sheen as J Edgar Hoover was utterly unnecessary and cartoonish. But pretty much everything else is so beautifully rendered as to make this one of the most outstanding films of the year. I cannot wait to see what director Shaka King does next.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH is rated R and has a running time of 126 minutes. It played Sundance 2021 and was released on the internet on February 12th.

SELMA

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:



SELMA is a handsomely made, beautifully acted and devastatingly searing movie about the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It's also a movie about the difference between having a right in theory and having a right in practice, and as such, is a profoundly important and timely film.  What it isn't, and thank goodness for that, is a conventional hagio-biography in the Great Man does Great Things genre.  This isn't, and sorry to keep going on about it, as dumb as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

The movie opens with Martin Luther King already a major political force. He has the ear of President Johnson and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But despite the end of segregation by Federal Law, in Governor George Wallace's Alabama, African Americans are still subject to extreme racism.  In an elegant, swift and brutal opening triptych we are therefore given King's Nobel acceptance speech; the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and Annie Lee Cooper being denied her application to register to vote on the most spurious and humiliating of grounds. 

ASK ME ANYTHING

ASK ME ANYTHING is a coming of age drama starring Britt Robertson (TOMORROWLAND) as Katie, an 18 year old girl who takes a year out after school, works as a nanny and starts a ruthlessly honest anonymous blog about her life.  At first she seems like your average mixed-up teen, smoking and drinking too much and making bad decisions about her sex life. But as we progress we realise that Katie has real emotional issues to do with her childhood and her family. These play out in her relationships with five men:  her alcoholic father (Robert Patrick); an old bookshop owner she worked for until her stepdad found out he was a sex offender (Martin Sheen); the married man she nannies for (Christian Slater), her older guys she's sleeping with (Justin Long), the college boyfriend she's also sleeping with, oh and yes, a sixth - the clinically depressed  friend she serially lets down.  To say that her relationships with men are highly sexualised is an understatement but what's interesting about writer-director Allison Burnett's film is that while other people try to put labels onto her - she's a whore, or in need of therapy - the film portrays a more nuanced picture.  I really liked Britt Robertson and found that even though her character often does unlikeable things, we are always sympathetic toward her - and that's a hard trick to pull off. Burnett also manages to make a film about a girl who is highly sexualised and vulnerable without making the film feel exploitative or voyeuristic. And unlike many films, the final twist doesn't feel cheap and unearned, but necessary and intelligent and genuinely thought-provoking. I can't wait to read the book, Undiscovered Gyrl, upon which this was based. 

ASK ME ANYTHING has a running time of 100 minutes and is a straight to video release.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

Yeah so we all know the deal with Spidey, no?  He's was bitten by a mutant spider and got spidey-powers with which he solves minor league crime in New York City.  In this reboot sequel he's played by Andrew Garfield as a mumbling charismatic nerd which is just about perfect.  He's in love with Gwen Stacey but thinks they shouldn't date because he might put her in danger - foreshadowing anyone?  Meanwhile his friend Harry Osborn is dying of a genetic disease and wants to inject himself with Spidey-blood to save his life. Because that will go well. Meanwhile, Harry's employee, a nerd played by Jamie Foxx, has had a massive electric shock that has turned him into, you guessed it, Elektro!

Everything about this Sony produced sequel feels second-rate when compared to Marvel comic book movies.  It's not that it's bad. In fact, it's a lot better than the Tobey Maguire movies. For a start it has an amazing cast - everyone just feels more committed and acting their pants off - just compare Dale deHaan as Harry Osborn with James Franco, who looked bored and embarrassed to even be in a comic book movie.  It's just that it feels a bit mechanical - a bit Tab A into Slot B.  The effects are all big and glossy but left me uninvolved.   The only reason to watch this movie is the Gwen-Peter relationship which really is heartfelt.  And that suggests to me that what you need to do is wait for this film to come out on DVD and then fast forward through the action sequences.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 142 minutes.  The movie is on global release.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 2

Bella's journey from whiny reactive teen to Ripleyesque super-mum.

And so the fantastically successful commercial juggernaut that is Twiglet drifts to a close, with this polished, camp but ultimately rather silly final film.  The movie picks up in media res, with our previously whiny, reactive, pathetic heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) opening her colour-enhanced, fake-eyelashed eyes as a sparkly vampire, all her spider-senses tingling.  The first forty-minutes of the flick see her hop skip and jump through a new world of heightened colour and smell, astonishingly controlling her urge to feed off humans, and coming to terms with the fact that her child, Renesmee, survived because her old flirt-friend and werewolf (Taylor Lautner) "imprinted" on her.  And where's Bella's husband in all this?  Looking on smugly as his "new-born" wife kicks ass and looks hotter than ever.

In the movie's second act, Bella's in-laws, The Cullens, gather up a brood of global vampires to testify to the fact that Renesmee isn't an  out-of-control, dangerous child vampire, but actually a half-human cute little moppet.  Their aim is to reason with the Vampire world's equivalent to the Papacy, led by Michael Sheen's hilariously camp Aro, that Renesmee shouldn't be killed, and failing that, to do battle.  This leads us to the final act of the film, which seeks to give fans of the almost absurdly bloodless novels a humdinger of an action sequence, while also remaining faithful to the more talky, banal denouement of the book. Suffice to say that, as one would expect in this world of emasculated, proto Christian revival vampires, all ends happily for the good guys, and even for the bad guys, because basically the entire plot motivation of this movie has been a gross misunderstanding. 

There's a lot to like in this instalment of the series. Production values are top notch.  Guillermo Navarro's photography of Bella's newly heightened world is beautiful; the bleach blonde dye jobs on the Cullens are less cheap; the CGI wolves are superb; and the Volturi superbly over-the-top.  The acting is just fine, with the exception of Stewart who really does sell it well. Michael Sheen is, of course, stunning, and Dakota Fanning seems to share in his sense of mischief.  I can honestly say I had a fun time watching this movie.

Of course, it doesn't really hang together.  Aro's speech to pre-emptively kill the unknown quantity that is Renesmee kept cracking me up as a caricature of Tony Blair's pro Iraqi war campaign.  The knowing homo-eroticism of Lautner stripping off for Charlie (Billy Burke) broke any seriousness this movie might have had.  And, as with the X-MEN movies, I'm always struck by the disparity and ill-use of the super-powers handed out to the different characters.  Bella has self- control and a defensive shield. Awesome. But this other guy can CONTROL THE ELEMENTS!!! I mean, isn't that game over for the Volturi right there? And as for Alice's power to see the future, so crucial in allowing the screenwriters to have their cake and eat it, if she can see various potential outcomes, doesn't that rather confuse which  of her prophesies to believe in?

Ah well, I guess this isn't a movie we should think about too deeply.  In today's recessionary climate it seems like a nostalgic throw-back to the boom years in which it was written - when beautiful people drove beautiful cars, and a virginal young girl who waited till  marriage would be gifted a beautiful cottage stocked with pretty handbags and shoes. I mean, who needs an education anyway? And let's not even get into the sheer creepiness of poor Renesmee being promised, in utero, to a guy who's already gone through puberty.  To all those pop-culture commentators praising Bella as a modern heroine I say, no no and again no.

But like I said, better not to overthink it.   Better to enjoy the camp hilarity of Sheen's maniacal laugh and Gap ad models ripping each other's heads off. 

BREAKING DAWN PART 2 is on release pretty much everywhere except Armenia, Cambodia, Germany, Singapore and India where it opens next week; Hong Kong where it opens on December 20th and Japan where it opens on December 28th. 

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

To state the obvious, there is no need for THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN to exist other than that Sony needed a superhero movie for their 2012 production slate. A mere ten years after the critically and commercially successful Sam Raimi revamp is too soon for a reimagining.  And director Marc Webb ((500) DAYS OF SUMMER) seems to acknowledge this with has artistically cowardly retread of Raimi's first film.  There are superficial differences.  Andrew Garfield's Spidey is more emo and Method than Tobey Maguire's.  There's no Daily Bugle. Emma Stone's slightly bored-looking Gwen Stacy is substituted for Mary-Jane Watson. But a lot of the beats of the film - the individual scenes - seem to safely restate what was established by Raimi, especially in its first hour which retells the origin story.

In the second half of the film, Spidey tries to investigate the death of his parents - an event taken for granted in Raimi's version.  Apparently papa Spidey was a genetic scientist - a fact that sits oddly with me. I had always thought Spiderman was compelling because he was a blue collar hero, battling small-time crime, in sharp contrast to his better educated more moneyed superhero peers such as Batman.  Anyways, it is what it is. Following the trail of his father's research leads Spidey to Dr Curt Connors aka the Lizard (Rhys Ifans) - a pretty weak two-dimensional villian more from a cheap pantomime than a modern superhero movie.

The best I can say about the new Spiderman is that it's pretty harmless. And I guess it would've been to much to have expected a genuine reboot along the lines of Nolan's Batman.  Maybe my disaffection stems from the fact that Sony seems to be pitching this film at a younger audience than the typical superhero fare.  There are just too many juvenile jokes - Spidey shooting web at a guy's crotch - Spidey using his superpowers too skateboard better - Spidey biting on FOOTLOOSE in the boat-yard -  for me to take this film seriously, no matter how Method Garfield goes.

Meh.

THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN is on global release.

Some thoughts on WALL STREET (1987)

Oliver Stone is left of centre in his personal politics. How ironic, then, that his iconic 1980s morality tale, WALL STREET, single-handedly persuaded the teenagers of my generation that, rather than being teachers, doctors or engineers, what we really wanted to be when we grew up was Liquid. “Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, Buddy. A player. Or nothing.” Sure, the movie was an alleged morality tale and social critique. It took a naïve kid called Bud Foxx who traded insider information and his loyalty to his father’s little airline for a ticket to the big time. Naturally, he then got skull-fucked by his supposed mentor, Gordon Gekko. Foxx ended up in jail, and so did Gordon. But before we got to that point we saw a young kid living in a flash Manhattan apartment, date a hot blonde chick, eat at the best restaurants, and bask in the glory of the most charismatic man alive, Gordon Gekko. We wanted what Bud wanted, and so what if Gordon was a bit too sharp? – when he spoke about taking sleepy companies and making them profitable, it made sense! This man was dangerous PRECISELY because he was right. Greed was good. Greed was going to turn around over-unionised, over-bureaucratised corporations and increase profits. And don’t think Oliver Stone didn’t know what he was doing. As much as he gives Hugo Chavez a more than fair hearing in his latest documentary, half of what Stone’s doing isn’t applauding Chavez' Marxist policies but being dazzled by Chavez' power. WALL STREET is a film about power – and what makes it a great film – is that it shows how power is both repellant and fascinating. This is the ultimate human tragedy.

WALL STREET was both genius by design and favoured by good fortune. The good design lay in three things: a great script; great direction; and a great leading performance. To start with Stanley Weiser’s script, it’s about as near to perfect as you can get. You start with something rock-solid but not unusual: starry eyed boy tempted by fortune, sells his soul, loses everything, but finds himself. But then you add something truly original – you put that archetypal story in a world that few ordinary people have experienced – Wall Street – but which they were bound to be fascinated by, given its power and glitz. Finally, you express this story in a series of eminently quotable one-liners - “Lunch is for wimps” - “Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another” - “If you need a friend, get a dog.” 

And then you anchor the whole package in a speech so logical, so persuasive and so dangerous, that today most bankers of my generation can still quote it in full: 

“The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you.” 

If we look at the direction and the leading performance, that iconic speech is a great place to start. Michael Douglas, with his good looks, slicked back hair, designer suits, and charisma, was everything Gordon Gekko should be. He was the guy whose self-belief was so over-powering you wanted to be in his world.    And look at how Oliver Stone films that great speech. It’s basically a still camera, with no cut-aways. In other words, Stone has the good sense to let the man take centre frame and hold our attention with his words.

True success requires not just talent but luck, and Wall Street had the luck of being released at a time when a lot of people realized that something was afoot, but hadn’t yet seen it articulated. We knew that bankers were becoming more aggressive and that ordinary people were getting caught up in an equity boom – we knew that Reagan and Thatcher had somehow changed the rules of the game – that we could want to make money without being embarrassed about it – but no-one had come out and just plain said it. Gordon Gekko took what everyone was feeling, took it to its logical conclusion, and brought it out into the open. He scared us with his candour – but there was also a crucial recognition and identification. WALL STREET didn’t just echo the zeitgeist, it told us what it was and reinforced its importance. So much so, that when we look back at that era, it’s Gordon Gekko, with his DynaTac phone, who still best articulates the mood of the time.

WALL STREET was released in 1987. Michael Douglas won the Best Actor Oscar beating William Hurt for Broadcast News; Robin Williams for Good Morning, Vietnam; Jack Nicholson for Ironweed; and Marcello MAstroianni for Dark Eyes.

LOVE HAPPENS - undeserved

LOVE HAPPENS is the excruciatingly dull and self-important debut feature from writer-director Brandon Camp. It features Aaron Eckhart as a self-help guru who coaches grieving Americans on how to reclaim their lives. Irony being that he has yet to confront the death of his own wife. He will do this through his nascent romance with an earnest florist (Jennifer Aniston in a beanie hat and pigtails, which is how we know she's earnest and tree-hugging). Their budding romance is egged along by her quirky girlfriend (a typecast Judy Greer). The final act emotional breakthrough is nursed along by the grieving father-in-law (Martin Sheen). In a movie filled with trite one-liners about the grieving process, and written to a quality that is undeserving of its profound subject matter, the only really authentic emotion is expressed by John Carroll Lynch (SHUTTER ISLAND) in his role as a grieving father.

LOVE HAPPENS was released last autumn and is available on DVD.

Pantheon movie of the month - BADLANDS - Such things I do

Terrence Malick makes movies that look so beautiful and feel so intense, they're heartbreaking. His first feature, BADLANDS, may be the least intricate of his films, but it's also one of the most memorable thanks to the evocative use of an orchestral motif from Orff and a pair of truly brilliant and disturbing performances from Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. Spacek plays Holly, a bland-looking, introverted teenage girl who lives with her dad in dull, dusty South Dakota. She meets, Kit, a 25 year old handsome rebel, in the style of James Dean. She thinks he's dreamy. He recognises in her the desperation and vacuousness that will make her a perfect audience for his self-deluding grandeur. For Kit dreams of being a romantic hero, just as Holly dreams of being swept off her feet in romance. For no reason other than to kick up a melodrama, Kit takes Holly on a killing spree, starting first with her protective, worried father. He wants glory - even if its notoriety. He wants the place where he's been captured to be famous. Their journey takes them into the psychological badlands - arid scrubland with isolated ranches where a friendly farmer can be shot in cold blood. The isolation of Holly and Kit is physical and psychological. He may be a reckless kid with a gun - a narcissist with a death-wish, but as the movie unfolds it's Holly who's the more disturbing. She watches Kit kill people with a moral detachment that is far more eery than his activity. She doesn't want or feel anything. Indeed, unlike Bonnie and Clyde, these kids aren't even sexually involved.

The resulting film is brilliantly slippery. It simulatenously presents us with the romantic vision of the two lovers on the run from the law, and the reality of two psychopaths, together alone.

BADLANDS played Venice 1975. Bizarrely it didn't win any awards to speak of and isn't in the IMDB Top 250.

BOBBY – a love letter to the America that no longer exists

The BOBBY of the title is Senator Robert Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate who was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Before the London film fest screening, writer-director (and for a whole generation, Young Gun) Emilio Estevez declared that BOBBY was his love letter to America. He noted that in test screenings in Europe, people told him that the movie reminded them of what they used to admire in America and how much we miss that America. He declared that “he misses it too.” The America he misses is the America that Kennedy referred to: the America of compassion and civil liberty – of redistributive social policies, the rule of law, environmental concern and peace. It is the America that embraces the poor and the ethnic minorities.

The main thing to say about BOBBY is that it is not an old-style Oliver-Stone-political thriller. Estevez does not spend his time delving into the murky under-world of big business, politics, spies and conspiracies. Indeed, we are never told who shot Bobby or why. Estevez is far more ambitious than that. What he is attempting to do is express the hopes and fears of liberal America in 1968 as his camera wanders round the Ambassador Hotel and homes in on different characters.

We have a young high-school graduate (Lindsay Lohan) who is marrying her class-mate (Elijah Wood) to keep him from being posted to Vietnam. We have the widowed ex-hotel manager (Anthony Hopkins) who lingers in the lobby because he has no home to go to, playing games of chess with his best friend – an African-American (Harry Belafonte.) We have the current hotel manager (William H Macy) who is cheating on his wife (Sharon Stone) with the operator (Heather Graham). We have the drunk lounge singer (Demi Moore) who is frightened at getting old commiserating with the hair-dresser (Stone). We have a sweet rich couple (Helen Hunt and Martin Sheen) re-discovering their love for each other. And in the kitchens, Christian Slater’s racist manager is making Freddie Rodriguez work a double shift and miss his baseball game. And finally, to leaven this mix of good people struggling through, we have a couple of campaign staff dropping acid with Ashton Kutcher’s hippie. This is a judicious piece of writing – at once showing the counter-culture of 1968 but also giving us some laughs amidst the pious politics.

As you can see from that little summary this movie is stuffed full of big name stars and none of them disappoint. Sharon Stone and Demi Moore in particular give nuanced performances and their scene together is the heart of the movie. In addition to being beautifully written and acted, the period costume design is also superb. I also want to draw attention to the brilliant directorial decision not to cast an actor as Bobby Kennedy but to let archive footage and selective framing take his place. The blending of the two is seamless.

My quibbles are minor. First, on occasion the movie straddles the fine line between the emotional and schmaltzy. And while Laurence Fishburne acts all bar Stone and Moore off the screen, his wise old man routine is a little grating to my cynical English ears. My only other quibble is in Estevez’ presumption that the audience is American. Estevez betrays this presumption in the opening titles, when he speaks of the hope that Bobby Kennedy brought to “our” country. This is a little alienating for European audiences,

For all that, BOBBY remains an astutely judged directorial effort for Estevez.

BOBBY played Venice, Toronto and London 2006. It opens in the US on November 17th 2006. It opens in Belgium and France in January 2007, the Netherlands in February 2007, Spain in March and Japan in May.

THE DEPARTED - subtle, it ain't

Why remake an already much-heralded brilliant Hong Kong thriller? Because people in the West won't read subtitles? I just don't get it. But I really wanted to give THE DEPARTED a chance because the basic concept is so cool that any chance to revisit it is a pleasure.

In this version, Leonardo di Caprio plays a young cop from a mixed-up background who is recruited by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg's characters to infiltrate the Irish mafia. No other cops know his real identity. di Caprio does well in the organisation but finds the violence and deceit are getting to him. He turns in increasing desperation to an attractive shrink and his bosses - he wants his identity back. Meanwhile, the Irish gang-leader - a sleazy mass-murderer called Costello (Jack Nicholson), has planted a mole in the State police service. That mole, played by Matt Damon, is ironically tasked with finding out who the mole in the police service is. So begins a cat and mouse game in which each side knows there is a leak and the two moles run ever decreasing circles around each other.

In this movie, Martin Scorsese stays pretty close to the plot of INFERNAL AFFAIRS but tinkers with the delicate balance of the original. He spends a lot more time on the back story of the characters and on their relationships with a shrink - a big mistake as it holds the movie up, and focuses attention on the one weak link in the acting. Scorsese also beefs up the role of Costello - the gang leader. As a result, whereas INFERNAL AFFAIRS was about two men and their relationship with each other in absentia, THE DEPARTED is really about each man's relationship with Costello.

Which brings me to my real problem with this movie. Scorsese takes a movie that is subtle, emotionally searing and actually not that violent and transforms it into a movie loud, violent mess. And no-where is this more evident than in the characterisation of Costello - the mob boss played by Jack Nicholson. Nicholson gives the kind of performance we have come to expect over the last few decades. He verges on self-parody - almost at times playing The Joker from Batman - not least when literally bearing his teeth and trying to sniff out a rat in his organisation. The egregiousness of the movie is summed up by the fact that, when the final climactic scene reuniting the two moles occurs, we are too benumbed to be blown away by it. Indeed, the audience in the screening I attended laughed at the unintentional humour of the bombastic closing scenes. And then we have the closing shot of the movie, that literally has a rat running along a balcony. I mean, could you lay the symbolism on any heavier?

Which is not to say that this is not an accomplished movie. Scorsese is backed up by his usual high-class crew. The camera is operated by Michael Ballhaus, Thelma Schoonmaker cuts the movie. Sandy Powell does the costumes and Krista Zea does the producton design. That means we get the fluid camera-work that Scorsese is known for and some gritty Boston-looking locales. But frankly, as beautiful as this movie sometimes looks, it's no match for Christopher Doyle's work in the original. And that can be said for the acting too. Leonardo di Caprio gives a career-best performance as Billy Costigan, but it still pales in comparison with the subtlety and emotional depth that Tony Leung brought to the same role. Matt Damon is just fine. He doesn't set the pulse racing in the way he did in RIPLEY or Andy Lau did in the original. In smaller roles, Ray Winstone, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin are given little to do. And as I said before, I have big problems with Jack Nicholson's choices. The only guy I thought was outstanding was Mark Wahlberg.

Overall, I found THE DEPARTED over long, dreary, heavy-handed and a riot where we could have had a much quiter, much more affecting movie. I was prepared to take it on its own merits and not compare it with the original - and I only wish that Scorsese had come up with a good Scorsese movie - big and loud yes, but gripping and unforgettable. Instead, we just get this over-blown mess.

THE DEPARTED opens this week in the Philppines, Malaysia, russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, The UK and the US. It opens next week in Indonesia, Asutralia, New Zealand, Singapore, Estonia and Latvia and the week after in Italy and Spain. It opens in November in Iceland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France and Israel. It opens in Germany, Sweden and Belgium in December; in Argentina and Poland in January 2007 and in Japan in March 2007.

This month's self-explanatory environmental doc.: WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? is another in the current trend for interesting high-quality consumer advocacy and environmental documentaries. Written and directed by newbie, Chris Paine, the clue is as ever in the title. To quote the tagline, "In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline...........Ten years later, these cars were destroyed." The story is a chilling one. Back in the early 1990s General Motors developed an electric car, followed closely by a number of other car-makers. They were spurred to do so by the California state legislature, which enacted a law demanding that a certain percentage of cars sold in the state were zero-emmision. That percentage was going to be ramped up over the years until the old gas-guzzling, pollution-emmiting combustion engines were a matter of history. Paine interviews a bunch of people who had these cars and loved them - from ordinary drivers to the likes of Mel Gibson and (via Letterman?) Tom Hanks.

What happens next is the dark side of capitalism. A whole host of people from Big Oil to Big Autos to the Federal Government combined to squish the electric car. California withdrew their pioneering state legislation and soon all the cars had been withdrawn and just tossed on the trash-heap.

This documentary is a pleasure to watch, not just because it has structure and is well-filmed. It is one of the most balanced documentaries I have seen. Chris Paine is not afraid of presenting the opposing case - something that Michael Moore is often loathe to do - and even the website catalogues the pros and cons of each side's argument.

In short, watching WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? may not be the most fun time you can have at the cinema, but it is definitely worth checking out, if only on DVD. And remember, this isn't some local dispute. California is the world's fifth largest economy. What happens there impacts on the rest of us.

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? showed at Sundance 2006 and is currently on limited release in the US and UK.