A COMPLETE UNKNOWN**

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is a deeply frustrating biopic of Bob Dylan.  Rather than challenging his misogynistic bullshit, the film replicates it.  Director James Mangold (WALK THE LINE) is not interested in interrogating the complexity of Saint Bob. Rather, everything must be packaged neatly in a convenient narrative arc.

That arc is massaged to within an inch of its life. Young Bob - choirboy turned gravelly voiced folk-singer - makes a pilgrimage to New York to meet his chronically ill hero Woody Guthrie.  Scoot McNairy (IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) stuns in an entirely wordless performance as Guthrie, struck mute with Hungtington's Disease, but still keen to be surrounded by music. Such is Bob's evident talent that he is taken in by a kindly, paternal Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his wife Toshi, a couple whose life was devoted to preserving the American folk music tradition.

Bob finds fame and massive music sales with his protest songs against a backdrop of the civil rights movement.  But this is the era of the Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and he feels trapped in amber by the historicity of the folk movement.  He hires a blues rock band and records what will be his first electric rock album, Highway 61 Revisited.  

The narrative arc poses a big showdown at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will Bob play nice and play folk? Or will he disappoint everyone around him and play electric rock?  We all know the answer. And we all know that what transpired afterwards didn't happen at Newport but in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later. But that doesn't fit Mangold's neat and claustrophobically American narrative. Nowhere do we see Bob travel to London and the influence the Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street vibe had on him. He just goes from one scene to the next transformed from shabby folk clothes to extra tight Carnaby Street suits and winkle pickers.  

The problem with the way this film is constructed is that most everyone is a single-dimension character, giving the excellent cast very little to do. Pretty much everyone just looks at Bob with an air of disappointment.  Elle Fanning (The Great) plays Sylvie Russo - a thinly veiled version of Bob's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo - and just looks at Bob disappointed and heartbroken.  Monica Barbaro plays folk icon Joan Baez and just looks at Bob disappointed and contemptuous. Peter Seege looks disappointed and paternally heartbroken.  You get the picture.

And what of Bob himself? Timothee Chalamet (DUNE) plays Bob with pads in his cheeks to give him a boyish round-face, and has admirably mastered his growly deliberately ugly style of singing and playing. It's a great impersonation, but for my money, outclassed by Scoot McNairy in the acting department.  You get the ferocity of Bob, his uncompromising attitude toward music.  But the film skips so lightly over his way of mooching off women, or his initial passive-aggressive barb that Joan Baez sings too well.... Imagine a film with this cast that really wanted to get into the verbal attack on Joan in Like A Rolling Stone, or his womanising, or his fundamentally dishonest appropriation of a persona.  

But no, this is a film for fans that wants us to see (rightly) just how bloody brilliant his early music was. Where the film shines is in giving is so much music so brilliantly rendered. But by including so much music it squeezes out the time that could have been spent on personal relationships.  I feel like maybe this was a deliberate choice and a cowardly one too.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes.  It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.

NIGHTBITCH*** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 9

For around sixty minutes of its running time, NIGHTBITCH is a film that has the following messages: giving birth is physically savage; transitioning from being an urban career woman to a suburban stay-at-home mum is emotionally savage; and your still-at-work husband is probably going to have trouble empathising. As messages go  it’s not rocket science or particularly new but in Amy Adams hands it is compelling and wonderfully playing against type.  How marvellous to see her lean into spite and anger and animalistic power and feminist separation! And so the film should have continued.

But, the film does continue and it bottles it. The message of the back end of the film seems to be that actually being a single mum and mounting an art exhibition is, in fact, super easy, and a dickhead husband can suddenly become super-supportive, and one can be happy and have it all in suburban Williams-Sonoma bliss! 

I blame writer-director Marielle Heller (A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD) for her milquetoast approach both to the early doors body horror and the messaging of the back end.  I also felt that for a single-issue movie it’s about 20 mins too long. 

It makes for an interesting contrast with yesterday’s superb SISTER MIDNIGHT, which had similar-ish subject matter but has far more imagination and conviction.

NIGHTBITCH is rated R and has a 98 minute running time. It played Toronto and London 2024. It opens in the USA on December 6th.

BLONDE*****

 

Andrew Dominik is a director of rare talent. THE ASSASSSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD remains one of my all-time favourite films, and its worth considering BLONDE in that context. Because as with that film, BLONDE is about exploring the reality behind an avatar, a myth, an icon, and about trying to find some kind of emotional truth in a story that everyone thinks they know.

It is also worth stating, given some of the criticism that has been levelled at this film, that neither the film nor the book by Joyce Carol Oates upon which it is based, are meant to be straight biographies. Oates states very clearly in her prologue that if you want a factual, historic book about Marilyn Monroe, then this isn't what Blonde provides. Instead, she and Dominik are creating broad categories of experience, inspired by the known facts, and partly by speculation, to interrogate the myth of Marilyn Monroe and the lived emotional experience of what it could have been like to be Norma Jeane. If you approach both the book and film from that perspective, you will reap dividends.

The film is faithful to the book but adds something further thanks to a sensitive, vulnerable, brave performance from Ana De Armas as Norma Jeane, and Dominik's deep knowledge of, and visual invention around Monroe's iconic films, looks and performances. There's a moment where we see Armas' character in tears facing herself in a mirror and putting on the megawatt smile of Marilyn. It's a masterclass in acting the part of a woman who feels alienated from her own creation. Behind the lens, Dominik's use of black and white versus colour and different shooting techniques adds to the impression of a woman so divorced from her own image that the centre cannot and does not hold.

We begin with Norma Jeane's horrific childhood in Hollywood - at first at the hands of a mentally ill mother, then in and out of foster homes, and escaping early into a marriage. We then fast forward to Marilyn in Hollywood, a pin-up star who is raped by Mr Z at her first audition. This movie does not shy away from the sexual empowerment of Norma Jeane and the sexual exploitation of Marilyn Monroe. She isn't always a victim. She chooses her first polyamorous relationship and her two marriages. She also chooses to leave The Former Sports Star (Bobby Cannavale) when he beats her. And in her professional life, as in that aforementioned scene, Norma Jeane is able to put on Marilyn the character for her own financial advantage and is also able to out argue The Writer about his plays. We see her negotiating pay with her agent. Norma Jeane has agency and control.

But as Marilyn, she is serially exploited on and off screen, by producers who rape her, directors who condescend to her, and finally by the President who rapes her, then aborts her child. This last flight of imagination is the most controversial in reviews of the film, but I feel gets to the emotional truth of how the inspiration for The President treated the women in his life, and how powerful men treated Marilyn. Did JFK actually knock her up then abort the baby? I have no idea. What this film is saying is something truthful about power-relationships then and now. I also found it painful to watch how graphic the scene with the President was, but it felt it was absolutely right to show it that way. The film shows the reality of sexual exploitation. It does't cut away. But it also doesn't frame it in a way that is fetishising the actor's body. It focuses on her face, her reactions, her internal monologue as she's experiencing the abuse. How can you tell a truthful story about this woman without showing that?

As you can tell, I both really admired this film and got really frustrated by the reactions to it. I feel that people aren't judging it on its own terms but as something that it isn't: a truthful by the numbers biopic. And in doing so, they are missing out on a vital, provocative and incredibly well-acted account of a woman who attempted to wrestle Hollywood to the floor and got stomped on in the process. 

BLONDE has a running time of 166 minutes and is streaming on Netflix.

DESTROYER - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Five - Official Competition

DESTROYER is a movie so tightly written, so well directed, so brilliantly tense, that by the end of the screening it was hands down the best film I had seen to date in the festival - and all that despite the fact that the make-up work is so over-done it kept bringing me out of the film for its entire running time. 

The film takes place over three time periods.  The earliest is when Nicole Kidman's young local cop, Erin Bell, is teamed up with Sebastian Stan's Fed, to go undercover with a gang of bank robbers led by Toby Kebbell's Silas. In this era, everyone in the gang is playing their age, but Kidman is playing 25 years younger with some very well done subtle make-up and hair.  The next period is maybe a few months or a year later. The young couple are ensconced in the gang, and living rough has made Erin - well - rougher:  her hair is messier, her eyes start to get dark circles.  Still very credible.  And then we move forward 16 years to the current day. A now older Erin still works for the police, and is investigating a murder that signals to her that her old adversary, Silas, is back and settling old scores.  Erin is maybe in her early 40s, so actually younger than Kidman.  But she looks at least mid 50s and incredible worn by what we have to assume is heavy drinking.  The circles under the eyes, the red bloodshot look, the extreme weathering of the skin, the sunspots on the hands.  To me, this all felt just way too much. And it's not helped by the fact that director Karyn Kusama (JENNIFER'S BODY, AEON FLUX) decides to focus on Bell's aged face at both the start and the end of the film. The guy who designed the make-up - Bill Corso - has done a fair bit of horror work before, and even DEADPOOL more recently. I just feel that a more naturalistic look may have worked better here. And I'm very curious to see whether other viewers found the make-up as distracting as I did. 

Anyway, the good news is that this film more than survives the bad make-up.  That it does is down to a genuinely tricksy, beautifully constructed script by long-time writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi; a sound-track that is alternately pulsating and violent or sweet and melancholy from Theodore Shapiro, and a landscape that is bleached out, harsh and lonely, created by DP Julie Kirkwood and the director. This bleak landscape beautifully frames our complicated, dark, angry protagonist - a woman trying to deal with the damage her past decisions have caused.  Some of this is done with smarts, but there's a fair amount of brutal violence, and what I love about the direction is that every punch, every kick, seems to really hurt.  This is no typical Hollywood violence. This has consequences. And the broken battered face and body of Erin Bell - just as of Jake in CHINATOWN - symbolise corruption - except this time it isn't the city, but the person. In other words, where DESTROYER creates that same tense thriller style of the great LA Noirs, the real subject isn't the system, but the personal struggle of a woman to protect those she loves, and ultimately to be at peace with herself. That this protection can only come with violent vengeance is fascinating - because it creates a female character as tough as any we've seen on screen, but one that is also hurt, fragile and trying to love. And that complexity is what makes this film so gripping. 

A final comment from Mr Phil:  The score was very reminiscent of 1970s David Shire scores from films like THE CONVERSATION and this is a good thing.

DESTROYER has a running time of 123 minutes. The film played Toronto 2018. It opens in the USA on December 25th and in the UK on January 25th.

GONE GIRL

GONE GIRL isn’t as frightening or as visually inventive as David Fincher’s previous films. It doesn’t deliver that gut-punch head-fuck of brilliance that stays with you over repeated viewings. The movie, though technically accomplished, doesn’t push the envelope technically or strike one as self-consciously modern. Worse still, it’s a movie based on a bizarrely popular and intensely badly written thriller by Gillian Flynn - a book so bad at the sentence level I only forced myself to read it to inform this review. The poor quality source material hampers Fincher in two ways. First, even those who haven’t read the book probably know whodunnit and how. Second, even with all of Fincher’s intelligence brought to bear, there are certain leaps of faith and improbability that trouble the careful viewer.

For the very few out there who don’t know, however, GONE GIRL is a contemporary thriller centred on the married couple Nick and Amy Dunne. They fall in love and marry but years later they have descended into mutual dissatisfaction - something that we might at first believe is caused by financial difficulties after they both lose their jobs and move back to Missouri, making Amy a fish out of water. However, as book-readers will know, the conceit of the novel and film is that for the first half both Nick and X are unreliable narrators. It turns out that he is adulterous and selfish and that she has a history of seeking extravagantly worked out revenge on men who get in her way.

What carries this movie is the central performance of Rosamund Pike who has to play five shades of her character: the young girl who falls for the handsome writer; the disaffected and calculating housewife; the frumpy “gone girl” on the lam; the ultra-glamorous Sharon-Stone-esque murderer; and finally the icy cold but contained returned wife. At each stage, even thought we know what happens next, we are captivated by her narcissism, cruelty and slipperiness. It’s just plain impressive to see her alter her physicality and demeanour to encompass the roles.

Sadly everyone else in the film is just reflective paper for her to work off of. Affleck and Carrie Coons are credible and just fine as the twins upon whom the accusations of murder fall. Missi Pyle is just fine as the by now cinematic cliche of shamelessly ratings-seeking muck-raking journalist. And Tyler Perry is - well - himself. The most ill-used actor is however Neil Patrick Harris as Amy's obsessive high school boyfriend Desi. He’s just a cartoonish stalker in a classy suit. I mean, there was something melodramatically over the top and stupid about his final scenes, but was anyone still taking it seriously at that point? If so, only because of Rosamund Pike.

Ultimately, the film is worth watching. It’s compelling and well-made. Will it be remembered among Fincher’s cannon? No. It cannot surprise the rather thin and trite finger-pointing at the media and the decidedly implausible plot. But I guess at least Hollywood knows who to turn to when it comes to the inevitable BASIC INSTINCT remake.

GONE GIRL has a running time of 149 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

12 YEARS A SLAVE - LFF 2013 - Day Ten

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Steve McQueen is a young British artist turned director whose previous two movies - HUNGER & SHAME - both gave us an unflinching portrait of dark and complex issues - the IRA hunger strikes and sex addiction. Both combined strong central performances from Michael Fassbender with stunning visuals and painfully held tableaux.  Both were the stand out movies of their year at the London Film Festival.

Accordingly, 12 YEARS A SLAVE came to the London Film Festival on a sea of hype - so much so that twitter had been filled with unblemished praise from critics who had seen the film that morning.  And even Festival Director Clare Stewart seemed speechless in her introduction to the film.  After the screening, the BFI tweeted pictures of standing ovations at the cinema. Everyone agrees the movie is moving, important and destined for Oscar glory.

I'm sad to say that I don't agree.  Yes, the film in important and unflinching. It's beautifully shot - all the more horrible to contrast the beauty of the Southern landscape with the cruelty of slavery. And yes, the movie hinges on a powerful central performance from Fassbender.  But too much of the rest of it seemed to me to be redundant, and a worse crime, to descend into emotional manipulation.

But let's start at the beginning. The film is based on the true life story of Solomon Northup, a successful free black man in Saratoga, married with children.  He was tricked into a business trip, captured and sold into slavery, first to a relatively benign slaveowner called Ford and then to a more complex sadistic coupled called the Epps.  Finally, he is freed when he manages to get a message out through a liberal white Canadian, although that reunion is tinged with bitterness at leaving his fellow slaves behind. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor is said to have given the performance of his career as Solomon, and to be sure he has grace and power, but I personally prefer him in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS.  I do, however, hope that he wins awards for this because let's be honest, as a black actor, how many other starring roles of this gravitas is he likely to get?  In minor roles, I really liked American Horror Story's Sarah Paulson as the sadistic, jealous Mistress Epps, erging on her deeply troubled husband to whipping the slave, Patsey, that he seems to be sexually obsessed with.  I also rather liked Paul Dano as the classic nigger-hating plantation overseer Tibeats whose jealousy at the favour Ford shows Solomon leads to Solomon being chased off the estate. He brings real insecurity and violence to that role.  It's truly sinister.  But perhaps surprisingly, the one mis-step is perhaps the usually note perfect Benedict Cumberbatch as the nice plantation owner Ford. Admittedly, Cumberbatch has little to do in this rather thinly drawn part, but his Southern accent doesn't seem convincing.

For me, this film belongs to two actors - Michael Fassbender as the tortured Epps and Lupita Nyong'o's slave Patsey.  Fassbender brings layers of menace, vulnerability and borderline madness to his portrayal of the almost superstitiously religious man who has a bizarrely close tortuous relationship with his slaves that culminates in one of the most horrendous scenes of the film. Goaded by his wife, he cannot bring himself to whip Patsey so he forces Solomon to do it instead. This is psychosexual terror at its most devastating. As Patsey, Lupita Nyong'o is more than a match for Fassbender, bringing layers of pride and then terrorised desperation to her character.  It's a fine performance.

Behind the camera, Steve McQueen's usual austere framing is somewhat diluted here, in what is undoubtedly his most mainstream movie. The exception are two pivotal scenes of great power. The first is one when Tibeats has Solomon strung up, and the overseer leaves him there.  The camera stays on him in his suffering then pulls back showing us slaves, so fearful, that they have to continue their work around him. Then we pan round to show how close this hanging is to the main house, and to see the mistress of the house looking on almost lackadaisically.  It's a beautifully pointed scene.  The second is the forced whipping of Patsey that I referred to before, and then Epps taking the whip himself.  The detail is rightfully brutal.

So what stops this from being a great film?  Too long spent in the banality of Ford's plantation.  Too long spent away from Fassbender in general.  The rather absurdly drawn character of Bass, the liberal Canadian played almost like a salvation Jesus by Brad Pitt.  And the ending.  McQueen could have ended this film on the scene where Solomon leaves the Epps plantation - a close-up on his half-unbelieving, relieved and yet guilt-ridden face, as Patsey faints in the background. That would have perfectly summed up the conflict at the heart of this story of personal liberation.  Instead, he tacks on the standard schmaltzy scene of catharsis, where Solomon is reunited with his family - martyred apologies and group hugs all round. Conventional, unnecessary, sugary and ruinous. 

12 YEARS A SLAVE has a running time of 133 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

12 YEARS A SLAVE played Telluride, London and Toronto where Steve McQueen won the People's Choice Award.  The movie will be released in the USA on October 18th, in Germany and Spain on October 31st, in Greece on December 12th, in Singapore and Sweden on December 20th, in New Zealand on December 26th, in France, Finland and the UK on January 24th, in Norway on January 31st, in the Netherlands on February 20th and in Denmark on February 27th. 

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 2 - TOUCHY FEELY

Lynn Shelton's TOUCHY FEELY is a patient quiet film about deeply felt or resisted emotions.  I suffered through the slow-paced first hour of its slight run time, but came to love that aspect in retrospect as it paid off with a wonderfully cathartic crescendo in its final 20 minutes.  

At first glance, the story seems simple - even trite.  A family - brother, sister, the brother's daughter - quietly suffer their emotional crises in isolation.  The brother and sister take ecstasy,  while the daughter listens to a heartfelt, and suddenly, we have emotional breakthrough.  

What gives the movie a depth that belies this premise are the strong performances from all the major characters, and a particularly well crafted denouement.  Josh Pais is particularly impressive as the brother, Paul, a middle aged dentist afflicted with desperate awkwardness and rigidity.  A chance occurrence leads him to question his ability to heal, and opens him up to Allison Janney's character, and some of the most wonderful quiet humour comes from seeing this deeply unconventional man thrown into the world of the unconventional.  There's a short tour de force scene where Paul contemplates taking the pill.  There's no dialogue: you get everything you need from Josh Pais' physicality. It's wonderful to watch.

I also particularly liked Ellen Page's performance as the daughter, Jenny.  The character of the caring girl to guilt ridden to admit she wants to go to college, suffering too from unrequited love, goes against type for Page, who has previously only played feisty, witty girls.  Here she is so repressed and bashful as to be literally pathetic and its her catharsis that anchors the superb final twenty.

Which brings me to Shelton and her collaborators.  There's something quietly wonderful about the delicacy with which they weave together Tomo Nakayama's songs, the intimate visuals, and the final scenes to relate the emotional opening up of the characters at the end.   If only there had been a little greater urgency or economy on the opening sections, this could have been a truly great film.

TOUCHY FEELY has a running time of 88 minutes. The movie played Sundance 2013 and will be released in the USA on September 6th.

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 9 - ARGO

This time last year I called THE ARTIST for Best Oscar solely based on the grounds that Harvey Weinstein had personally introduced it at the London Film Festival, indicating that the Karl Rove of Academy campaigns was putting his not inconsiderable weight behind it.  It didn't, of course, hurt that the movie did the two things that Hollywood absolutely loves: a) cast a nostalgic eye back to its own history and b) make us laugh, make us cry but with a outer casing of Profundity to make us feel less superficial while we get our kicks.

This year, on the same logic, I'm calling ARGO for Best Film.  Harvey isn't involved this time, but they flew out EVERYBODY for the red carpet PR fest last night, not to mention the fact that The Hollywood Reporter is already running front cover articles on Ben Affleck's comeback.   And, per my second rule, this movie is an exceptionally well-made crowd-pleasing thriller.  But because it's based on real events in Iran, it makes us feel like we learned something too.  

In short, ARGO is not a film we're going to remember in ten year's time - it's not a movie that remakes the boundaries of the cinema.  But that's okay, we here at MOVIE REVIEWS FOR GREEDY CAPITALIST BASTARDS are all about genre movies that aren't ashamed of what they are, do the job well, and make piles of phat cash in the process.

The basic history is that in 1979, the US embassy in Iran was stormed by pissed-off Iranian revolutionaries and the staff taken hostage.  The Khomeini revolutionaries wanted the despotic Shah of Iran returned from his asylum in the USA to face charges, which evidently wasn't going to happen.  Meanwhile, 6 embassy staff had managed to sneak out and were hiding out in the Canadian embassy. The CIA's specialist "exfiltrator" Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) created a cockamamie plan to get them out: create a real life Hollywood production company with a real life script and pretend the embassy staff were the film crew were scouting locations in Iran.  He flies in alone, gives them their cover stories, and flies out with them through an airport crawling with revolutionary guards.

The genius of a movie like ARGO is that, if done well, even though we know the ending, every time our band of civil servants goes up against a checkpoint, we are completely nervous about whether they're going to make it. This kind of tension relies upon perfect pacing and editing, and performances good enough that we like and care for the characters.   Moreover, with a movie like this, where the stakes are so high but the cover story so ludicrous, it takes a special kind of director who can keep the balance between laughs and tension.  

In this film, the ensemble cast is superb - with small parts for the likes of John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Bryan Cranston to name but a few.  It's a movie in which no-one carries the film, although I'd like to give special props to Scoot McNairy (KILLING THEM SOFTLY) who surprises his fictional colleagues and us with a last minute character turnaround that has us whooping with joy on the inside.   But really, the success of this movie is down to Ben Affleck's direction - his choices, his ability to handle the tonal shifts and intercut scenes of madcap Hollywood with absolutely grave images of hostages, his ability to make us care and have us on the edge of our seats.  The proof of that - if proof I needed - was when the plane took of Tehran airport and left Iranian airspace and the audience watching the movie burst into spontaneous applause.  That really is proof of how good this movie is.

Like I said, ARGO is "just" a factually based thriller.  But it's about as good of a thriller as you are likely to see. It shows the hidden courage and patriotic service of a handful of Hollywood insiders and CIA men, and the public courage of a handful of Canadians.  It makes us feel good about ourselves, and doesn't hide the contemporary relevance and grey shading as to why the Iranian revolutionaries were so angry at the Americans.  Kudos to all involved.

John Goodman, Ben Affleck and Bryan Cranston.

ARGO played Telluride, Toronto and London 2012 and is currently on release in the Ukraine, Canada, Colombia, the USA, Argentina, Serbia, Australia, New Zealnd, Russia, Singapore, Japan and Spain. It opens on November 2nd in Finland, on November 7th in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Ireland, Norway and the UK. It opens on November 15th in Hong Kong and Slovenia and on November 23rd in Sweden.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is an unrelentingly bleak and cynical examination of mid-level criminals in a bad economy.  It chronicles an America bloated and decayed, with a soft belly and a smack addiction, where "hope you can believe in" is just a pathetic fairytale.  America is a business not a democracy, and this movie is about getting paid.  To that end, it is fitting that nothing that happens in this film is a surprise.  The wheels of capitalism, whether on Wall Street or trashy motels, grind on regardless.

The first act sees ex-con idiots Frankie (Scoot McNairy - IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn - ANIMAL KINGDOM) hired by The Squirrel (Vincent Curatola - THE SOPRANOS) to knock off a card game.  The twist is that because the host of the game, Markie Trattman, (Ray Liotta) is known to have held up his own card game once before, the suspicion will fall on him and they'll get away scott free.  The second act sees a dull bureaucrat (Richard Jenkins) hiring muscle to kill not just the guilty trio but also Trattman.  For confidence to be restored to the "market", justice must be seen to be done, even if the underworld have gotten the wrong end of the stick. The bureaucrat hires Brad Pitt's hitman, Jackie Cogan, who in turn brings in James Gandolfini's Mickey, only to realise that Mickey is not fit for purpose. The final act sees Cogan resigned to the task at hand.

There is a grim inevitability to the crime and punishment narrative. But that doesn't mean that the film has no dramatic tension.  The initial heist is painfully, terrifyingly drawn out.  And the final execution is expected but unbearably tense.  I've never seen a punishment beating look so visceral as when Trattman is beaten by two goons.  I've never seen an execution look simultaneously so beautiful and so desperately anonymous as when Trattman is off'ed. I've never seen a smack addict getting high so imaginatively depicted than when DP Greig Fraser (SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) photographs the perceptions of Russell.

But we all know that director Andrew Dominik is the master of the technically brilliant set-up - the unbearable tense pregnant pause.  That's partly what made THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD an instant pantheon movie - and probably the best film I've ever seen at the London Film Festival.   That film coupled stunning visuals and a foreboding mood with a sickening, fascinating obsessive love story.  It had heart  - a twisted heart, admittedly - but an emotional centre for us to hold on to.  Similarly, Dominik's first film CHOPPER had audacious visuals and superlative editing, but it's success hinged on the charisma and horror of the central character.

The problem with KILLING THEM SOFTLY is that it works at an intellectual but not an emotional level. This is quite deliberate.  Dominik is making an intellectual point - about the decadence and squalor of the USA  - the bad economy - falling wages, rising bureaucracy - that it's just about getting paid, and getting paid is getting harder.  I didn't find the political analogy over-bearing as I know some critics have. I found it not just valid, but urgent.  The problem is that the cynicism of the film is alienating - almost unbearably so.  Dominik just doesn't give us anything to hold on to. And as a result, his latest film is less than the sum of  its parts.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY played Cannes 2012 and opened this weekend in Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens next weekend in Slovenia. It opens on October 11th in Australia, Hong Kong, Italy and Argentina; on October 18th in Argentina, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania; on October 25th in Greece; on November 1st in Portugal and Norway; on November 9th in Mexico; on November 16th in Poland; on November 23rd in Bulgaria; on November 29th in Germany and the USA; and on December 5th in Belgium, France and Denmark. 

MONSTERS - ceci n'est pas un horror flick

MONSTERS is a movie that has been much-hyped as a totem for how movie-making has become democratised by cheap digital cameras and editing packages. The young British director Gareth Edwards has proved that a talented visual effects artist can create a horror movie that looks every bit as slick and full of special effects as the largest Hollywood studio with a few digital cameras and an editing package on a laptop. I'm not sure what all this fuss about laptops is. I mean, if you have a team of CGI animators and visual effects artists in LA or Soho they're basically just using a bunch of computers. The idea of a "laptop" as somehow impoverished and amateur is nonsense. And I say that typing this on an Alienware M17x with a terrabyte of internal storage and enough speed and power to conquer mainland China. However, in fairness to Gareth Edwards, he's made this point on many a TV and radio show. Indeed, he has also admitted that the budget for his "miraculously low-budget but hi-fi looking" movie isn't as low as people think. This is a little disingenuous though - he is modest but then again he's all over the media talking about how gonzo his filming style was. To hear him tell it, he basically decided to make a monster movie, got two young actors, a translater and a van, roamed up and down Mexico shooting people and places that caught their interest, improv'ing dialogue around a set of pre-defined scenes. I have this Scooby Doo vision of pesky kids harassing Mexicans for access to their tavernas.

At any rate, this is a rather nastier and long-winded start to a review than I normally cobble together, and actually doesn't reflect on my feelings about Gareth Edwards' work but rather for the sycophantic, near-hysterical reception it has received among the mainstream reviewers. They are so proud of themselves for having discovered a gonzo movie - a movie to stick it in the eye to Avatar - that they are positively falling over themselves to praise it. It's as though everything else in the film must be great because, hey, it was made by a plucky Englishman in his bedroom! So, let's all stand back and take a long hard look at MONSTERS and ask ourselves what we'd think of it if we didn't know how it was made. If someone gave us a tenner and told us to pick a movie and we watched it, what would we think? And the answer to that question is, "yeah, it's okay, but it's not really scary, or original is it?"

Essentially the movie is a two-hander between Scoot McNairy and his real-life girlfriend Whitney Able. He plays a rough and tumble photojournalist, and she plays a rich girl who ran away from her fiancé, and whose father has charged the photojournalist with bringing her back home. And so we get a planes, trains and automobiles story where two young good-looking kids discover that, basically, they really really like each other, and that while they both want to get home, they want to get home for each other. This, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing new in cinema. Moreover, it's so obvious, the dialogue so clichéd that it's about as annoying as the heroine's oh so edgy, hipster haircut.

Now, the backdrop for this lo-fi road movie romance is the Mexican-American border. Back in the day, nasty evil alien squid things landed in Mexico and were cordoned off in an "infected zone". When this story begins, aliens are just a fact of life, an ever-present threat against whom the humans lash out, descending to practises that violate basic principles of humanity. DISTRICT 9 anyone? Except MONSTERS wishes it were DISTRICT 9. It creates a walled border between Mexico and America, with aliens kept "outside" and people with passports finding it easier and cheaper to get across. The movie deliberately raises the analogy of present-day immigration politics and then doesn't do anything subtle or sophisticated with it. Where DISTRICT 9 was closely observed, satirical and scabrous, MONSTERS is ham-fisted, amateur and superficial. Essentially, there is no substitute for a script. And, as for the praise heaped upon a lo-fi film for looking good, yes, to be sure, the cinematography is superb. There are scenes of a sunrise on the water that are just breath-taking. And the use of CGI to replace real bill-boards and signs with Monster related iconography is very well done. But the monsters themselves are lolloping giant squid and look about as scary as a Pepe the Prawn.

So, in the final analysis, MONSTERS is beautifully shot and throws up some interesting ideas. But as romance, it's hackneyed, and as horror movie, it isn't scary, and as political allegory, it doesn't even try to get beyond the interest of its initial concept.

MONSTERS played the festival circuit and opened in the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada and Australia earlier this year. It is currently on release in France, Indonesia and the UK. It opens on December 9th in Germany and on January 20th in 2011.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS - one of my favourite films of the year

Writer-director Alex Holdridge's debut feature, IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS, is a wonderfully funny film about modern courtship. It's remarkably frank, the characters and situations feel real, and the whole thing makes you feel good about life without being manipulative or obvious.

The opening scenes of the film reminded me of Woody Allen's brilliant MANHATTAN - except this time the black and white lensing captures contemporary Los Angeles. But as the movie progressed it reminded me a lot more of the Doug Liman flick, SWINGERS, with it's micro-humour milked from the lives of failed actors, cruising LA for love. Instead of Vince Vuaghan's cocky motor-mouth Trent, we have Brian McGuire's Jacob - deeply funny, bracingly honest, the ultimate cool best friend. Instead of Jon Favreau's broken-hearted Mike, we have Scoot McNairy's broken-hearted Wilson. Wilson misses his ex-girlfriend and, having been exposed jerking off to a photoshopped picture of his best-friend's girl, is shamed into joining Craigslist to find a date for New Years Eve. As with Mike, Wilson is clueless when it comes to modern dating, but in his favour, he's genuinely likeable and the audience cares that he has a good time and rebuilds his confidence. His date, Vivian, is beautifully written and beuatifully played by Sara Simmonds. She starts off as bitter and caustic, melts into a giggling schoolgirl and ends as a damaged woman. It's rare to see such a well-rounded female character on screen.

I love the way the film avoids clear-cut happy endings and neat characters. This isn't a conventional Hollywood fairy tale. I also love the fact that, unlike most rom-coms, IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS made me laugh out loud throughout its run-time, even while it had me genuinely emotionally involved with the key protagonists. You really must go and see this film! (And I say that rarely...)

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS played the festival circuit in 2007. It opened in the UK this weekend and opens in the USA in August.