88 MINUTES - less straight to DVD than straight to Dustbin

88 MINUTES is a "troubled movie", originally scheduled for release in 2005 it was finally pushed out on the crest of the RIGHTEOUS KILL publicity. It shares the same director, genre and star - Al Pacino. It's also shares the same label, "piss-poor". Once again, we have Al Pacino as a schmoove detective (well, forensic psychologist) running around town trying to find a copycat serial killer. The high concept is that the original serial killer, now on death row, is running the copycat, and has threatened that Pacino only has 88 minutes to live.

You can see how this might've looked all sexy and Se7en on paper, but on screen, this is dull as ditchwater. Pacino runs around town, barking orders to his secretary and a friendly copper on his cellphone. Meanwhile, all the audience has to hold its interest is the increasing volume, and ever-shifting colour, of Pacino's perruque.

In fairness, 88 MINUTES is not as unthrilling as RIGHTEOUS KILL - a movie that revealed whodunnit in the first five minutes. I was guessing who the copycat was till the final reel. The problem is that the reason I was guessing is because the script offered no coherent solution. Rather, we had a series of ludicrously shady suspects - all over-acting hideously - and you could've picked any one of them to finish the picture.

Will Alicia Witt ever work again?
Will Pacino fire his agent and/or perruque-maker?
Here's hoping bad thrillers aren't like buses, and we don't get a third on Friday.

88 MINUTES was released in 2007 in Israel, Romania, France and Greece. It was released earlier this year in Japan, the Philippines, Canada, the US, Taiwan, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Turkey, Iceland, Colombia, Venezuela and Kuwait. It is currently on release in the UK and is available on Region 1 DVD.

THE FALL - visually stunning but, more importantly, heart-breaking

THE FALL is a stunningly beautiful, imaginative, heart-rending film that passed in a flash and made me cry. I can't wait to watch it again: I haven't been this excited about a film since PAN'S LABRYNTH. Having said that, I should fairly warn the prospective viewer that THE FALL is an alpha-gamma film. It has attracted the ire of the pragmatic film critics. They have called it indulgent, a vanity project, all style and no substance, and a colossal waste of money. Presumably these people would rather watch tightly scripted genre films that do what they say on the tin, but not a millimetre more.

THE FALL follows in the tradition of films like THE WIZARD OF OZ, PAN'S LABRYNTH or even THE USUAL SUSPECTS - in which a narrator tells a story that is influenced by prosaic details of everyday life. Writer-director Tarsem carefully weaves the two together and the conceit works perfectly. He also ties in a commentary on the nature of film and film-viewing. The little girl at the heart of the story - Alexandria - is always playing with optical illusions - shadow figures and images projected in sunlight. She understands in an intuitive way that cinema, and story-telling, is all smoke and mirrors. She also understands that stories belong to the people who listen to them - and that the good storyteller will bend his story to take into account the audiences' emotions. (To that end, it is ironic that negative reviews have accused Tarsem of doing just the opposite - bludgeoning them with his obscure and superficial vision.)

Anyways, let's get to the heart of the matter. THE FALL is set in a Catholic hospital in 1915 Los Angeles. Roy is a broken-hearted, suicidal stuntman who has shattered his legs in a stunt designed to impress his then-girlfriend. Alexandria is a precocious Romanian girl with a broken arm, who isn't above spinning a tale or too to stay in hospital longer and hear the end of the story that Roy is telling her. Roy and Alexandria immediately hit it off. He is amused by her straightforward, literal response to his story and welcomes her attentions. She is charmed by his tale of bandits, kidnapped princesses and wondrous palaces. (And it is wondrous. Costumes, locations, staging - all staggeringly wonderful and evocative - particularly scenes filmed in Rajasthan.) But Roy is also baiting Alexandra with promises of further installments so that she'll steal the morphine tablets he needs to commit suicide.

What I love about THE FALL is that there is no easy resolution. Roy's soul isn't saved by Alexandria in a flash. In fact, he is capable of being cruel and unsympathetic - killing off characters and forcing his bleak view of human nature onto her. There is a resolution of a sort, but we are under no illusion that Roy is a deeply damaged person. Moreover, Alexandria is not a simple innocent child. She has seen her father killed by thieves who burned down their house. And she is a child-labourer picking oranges for a living. She is capable of conjuring up brutal images herself. The difference is that she still has hope.

THE FALL is a beautiful film but it is more than that. It's an intelligent commentary on what stories and movies do and how they change in the telling. But most of all, and counter to the harsher reviews, it has heart. This is down to some effective writing, but most of all to a pair of great performances from Lee Pace (PUSHING DAISIES) and new-comer Caterina Untaru. They have real chemistry - you completely believe that they are friends - that his heart is broken - and that she would do anything for him, even when he is trying to break her heart.

THE FALL played Toronto 2006 and Berlin 2007. It was released earlier this year in Russia and the USA and is currently on release in Japan, Thailand and the UK. THE FALL is available on Region 1 DVD.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE - amiable enough, but pulls its punches

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE is a conventional romantic comedy in which a hapless bloke overlooks the small-town girl who will make him happy in his quest to shag a Hollywood star until the mandatory final reel emotional epiphany. Simon Pegg plays the bloke - and is amiable enough even when he's being a total arse. After all, which Joe Everyman wouldn't temporarily loose his head when offered VIP status and It-Girls a-go-go? Megan Fox (TRANSFORMERS) has a thankless role as the aforementioned It Girl and Kirsten Dunst also has a thankless role as the "real girl".

In fact, the script feels altogether under-written, and rather pulls its punches. Underneath all the rom-com guff we're meant to have a stinging indictment of the shallow materialism and corrupt back-scratching of the Hollywood media machine. What we get instead are a few pithy lines from Danny Huston and Gillian Anderson as the journalist and PR woman respectively. But the movie seems to have about as much interest in pushing this critique as Jeff Bridges has in his performance as the magazine editor.

So, all in all, this movie slips down easily enough, but it's pretty thin fair.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE played, improbably, Cannes 2008, and opened this weekend in the US, UK and Poland. It opens next weekend in Belgium and Russian and opens on October 16th in South Korea and on October 23rd in Australia. It opens in November in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED - so rudely forced

The following assumes familiarity with the novel and the 1981 TV series, and is replete with spoilers.

What is BRIDESHEAD REVISITED about? From that question follows all choices made by screen-writer Andrew Davies in editing down a novel replete with events, characters, superficial luxuriance and profound political and spiritual discourse. What is necessary? What is secondary? What can be safely altered to satisfy the exigencies of the two-hour film without changing the source-text or, worse still, render the result illogical?

For me, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is an elegy for lost values. The values of discretion, discernment, elegance, friendship, love and faith in a world dominated by economic turbulence, vulgar ambition and the random cruelty of global war. People remember the novel for its depiction of the idyllic lifestyle of the British aristocracy - dreaming spires, champagne and strawberries, coming out balls in Mayfair and Venetian palazzos. But it's also a novel about General Strikes, mortgaged properties being demolished for modern apartment blocks, impending war and skeletal whores. To create a novel about an insular love story is to miss half the point.

The first fault of the film is its lack of elegance or subtlety. Take the early scenes at Oxford. We are introduced to Matthew Goode (a tremendously good performance) as Charles Ryder. He is a gentleman, from a good if not leading (with a capital "L") school. He is meant to be a little dazzled by the glamorous and beautiful Lord Sebastian Flyte, but he should not feel too lowly to be in their company. He cannot compete with Sebastian's eccentricities or Anthony Blanche's outré stories, but it was quite absurd to see Boy Mulcaster ask if he was from Eton, or gods preserve us, Winchester! After all, Evelyn Waugh makes quite a point of telling us that these boys are so well bred that they would not dream of letting on that they had not met Charles before. Andrew Davies confounds this error by allowing Charles to wear flannels to supper at Brideshead when everyone else is in White Tie. At every turn, Davies wants to bludgeon us with the idea that Charles is a lower class arriviste, and, on some level, simply after the house! By contrast, see how subtly Waugh exposes Charles with his sly little comment about Bellini.

The lack of subtlety stretches to the characterisation of each main character. Sebastian is portrayed by Ben Whishaw as a mincing alcoholic. Anthony Blanche looks about forty and is menacing rather than a piercingly observant eccentric. Julia (Hayley Atwell) is a repressed, obedient daughter with none of the independence or complexity of the novel. Lord Marchmain is an old rogue with none of the Byronic aura of Olivier's portrayal. And Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) is a screen villain who speaks glibly about responsibility, destiny and faith.

This brings us to the second major flaw with this film. There is no "creamy English charm". Anthony Blanche had it perfectly, when he said that Sebastian and his family were simply dripping in charm and that they would catch Charles with it, and use him for their own ends. But the scant screen-time at Oxford never lets us see Sebastian seduce Charles with his charming lifestyle. And the portrayal of Lady Marchmain is utterly devoid of charm. She does not flatter one with intimacy and special attention, but commands with authority. It's very important to our continuing empathy with Charles that he doesn't realise that he is betraying Sebastian until after he has been drawn in. It is part of Charles' naivety that he believes that he can be Sebastian's true friend and a friend of the family up to the horrid Christmas as the final break. It is very important that Lady Marchmain should repent of her harsh words to Charles. If she cannot repent, then she is not human, and does not deserve our sympathy. And Emma Thompson's Lady Marchmain never does.

The third flaw is Andrew Davies' treatment of Julia. One of the most elegant symmetries in the novel is that Sebastian is Julia's forerunner - and that Sebastian must fade out of our sight for Charles to realise that he is in love with Julia. In this film, Julia is present throughout, staying at Brideshead during Charles and Sebastian's perfect summer and accompanying them to Venice. Because of this, we never see Charles enchantment with Sebastian and the secret world through the low door in the wall. Moreover, Julia is never an enigmatic, desperately glamorous, almost unattainable woman. Part of the joy of the relationship for Charles is that he has drawn down the moon - both with Julia and Brideshead. But in the film, she is simply the conventional best friend's sister.

In Andrew Davies' adaptation, Charles and Julia realise that they are in love early on - in Venice - in the full gaze of Sebastian and Lord Marchmain. This gives Andrew Davies a convenient hook upon which to hang Sebastian's plunge into alcoholism and flight to Morocco. I quite gasped when I heard the clumsy and anachronistic exit line "You only wanted to sleep with my sister". This motivation is crude and reductive. It also gives Davies a problem. If Julia and Charles know they are in love, why don't they simply marry? Davies "solves" this by making Lady Marchmain a pantomime villain, and Julia subservient. Mummy commands marriage to a Catholic of good family and Julia obeys. At this point, Davies would've been better off conjuring up a Bridey-esque dull Catholic aristo. For why on earth would Lady Marchmain have approved of Rex - a vulgar, Canadian, who, it is later revealed, wasn't even Catholic?

The obedient marriage gives Davies yet another problem. It was plausible that Julia might seriously consider a life "in sin" with Charles when she had already defied her Church in her marriage, and then in the affair which puts her on the Atlantic liner. By contrast, in Andrew Davies' script, I never believed that Julia would go through with it. She is always obedient, apart from a few weeks of passion with Charles. We didn't need Bridey's priggish comments, or the crisis at the fountain, or the arguments over her father's deathbed, to bring Julia back to the Church and away from Charles. We have to believe that Julia has led a life away from "his mercy" for us to benefit from the dramatic turnaround in the denouement and to feel the full force of what has been snatched away from Charles.

In the final scene, we are restored to Brideshead in World War Two and Charles makes no straightforward pronouncement of faith. He refuses to extinguish a candle in the chapel but the reasons for this are ambiguous - it could be out of respect for the memory of Sebastian and Julia rather than out of faith. Accordingly, the film looses the profound emotional charge of the final pages of the novel.

My abiding feeling at the end of the film was that it had been adapted by a screenwriter who didn't particularly like or understand the novel. Yes, one must be concise and lose plot threads, but to alter so profoundly the fundamental meaning of the novel is unforgivable. To answer my original question, BRIDESHEAD is a book about the complexity of friendship, love and faith. It is not about a man who lost a woman because he tried for a grand house but wouldn't convert to get it.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED was released earlier this year in the US, Greece, the Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden and Denmark. It opens this weekend in Australia and the UK. It opens on October 23rd in New Zealand and Portugal and on October 31st in Norway and Spain. It opens in Germany on November 20th and in Belgium on January 9th.

REDBELT - well-acted thriller undone by schmaltzy ending and ludicrous paranoia

David Mamet specialises in this sort of movie: brilliant dialogue, solid casting, plot twists up the wazoo. The problem is that the balance is off-kilter in REDBELT. It's a thriller in which the plot twists and depth of betrayal is so complete and, at times, so seemingly random, as to defy plausibility and empathy.

All of which is a shame, because Chiwetel Ejiofor does a great job in bringing the protagonist, Mike Terry, to life. He perfectly articulates the attraction and absurdity of a man like Terry. On the one hand, this martial arts instructer is laudably honest, loyal and intelligent. He's a stand-up guy. On the other hand, you can see why his wife, Brazilian "princess" Sondra (Alice Braga), would be infuriated by her husband's lack of business sense. Idealists are admirable, but who's gonna keep the business going?

Short of cash, Terry and Sondra get a seemingly lucky break. By chance, Terry saves a Hollywood star (superb against-the-grain cameo by Tim Allen) in a bar-fight and suddenly Terry's going to be a Hollywood producer and his wife is going to be a fashion designer. Problem is, Terry's martial arts training method is ripped off to spice up a pay-per-view martial arts fight. Who's the villain? The Hollywood star? His in-laws? His wife?

Terry runs around trying to keep his head above water. Everyone is sullied by greedy capitalism but Terry. The crude contrast of idealism and greed is ludicrous, as is the schmaltzy denouement straight from THE KARATE KID. I'm not sure what Mamet is trying to say. Worse still, I'm not sure I even care.

REDBELT opened earlier this year in the USA, Brazil, Estonia, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Italy and Germany. It is currently on release in the UK.

RIGHTEOUS KILL - a thriller so devoid of thrills it is actually impossible to spoil the plot

RIGHTEOUS KILL is a lazy, lethargic, deeply dull "thriller" that will only succeed at the Box Office because of the residual respect audiences have for the early work of Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. We are so infatuated with movies like SCARFACE and THE GODFATHER that we refuse to admit the obvious: Pacino and De Niro are working to pay the bills: applying no quality control to the scripts that they accept; and falling into pastiche of their tough-guy foul-mouthed iconic performances.

As for RIGHTEOUS KILL, this is a movie that declares its hand in the first five minutes. Pacino and De Niro are cops investigating a serial killer. De Niro is shown in flashback, confessing to the murders. He's a vigilante that goes after rapists and paedophiles who walked. These are "righteous kills".

Now, the audience is intelligent. We know we're watching a thriller. If a killer is presented to us inside the first ten minutes, we know he's probably innocent. And if Robert De Niro's character is innocent, and there's another heavyweight actor in the cast, it's going to be him. So after fifteen minutes, you know that De Niro's superficially angry cop is innocent; Al Pacino's superficially in-control cop is a vigilante; Carla Gugino as the CSI who likes rough sex is a red herring; and Fifty Cent is a tool.

Game over. Thank you for playing. Please slip into retirement and stop flushing your reputations down the toilet.

RIGHTEOUS KILL is on release in the UK, US, the Philippines, Greece, India, Romania, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, Estonia, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. It opens this weekend in Finland and Spain and next weekend in France, Denmark and Iceland. It opens later in October in Portugal, Belgium and Argentina. It opens on January 8th in the Netherlands.