HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1***

I was surprised to find myself rather enjoying the first instalment of Kevin Costner's Horizon saga.  It came to our screens freighted with controversy.  Costner had apparently bilked out of the wildly popular Yellowstone TV show to make his passion project, enduring a messy divorce in the process.  Much like Frances Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS, early feedback was that HORIZON was a bloated, boring, self-indulgent, intentionally regressive film.

To speak to the latter accusation, this film is indeed wilfully old-fashioned but in a way that I appreciate. It's a good old-fashioned Western where men are men (good or evil) and women are either loving home-makers or hookers with a heart of gold. This film is not interested in character nuance.  But it's not entirely without modern concerns: note that whether men are good or evil comes down to whether they have an accommodative or antagonistic attitude toward Native Americans.  And while there's probably a PHD to be written on how these issues are dealt with in Yellowstone and Horizon, I think Costner has probably benefited from exposure to the former. 

The problem with the film isn't so much its political attitude as its format. This isn't a film with a beginning middle and end so much as a three hour prequel that establishes character. Heck, the real baddie doesn't even show up except in a final montage sequence setting up the second instalment. All of which makes me believe that this multi-film cinema project would have played far better as a TV miniseries where a patient three-episode build-up would have been better tolerated. Instead, what Costner got was a box office failure that has condemned the second film to a streaming roll-out anyway.

And what of this instalment?  I very much liked Sienna Miller as the earnest widowed housewife who begins a romance with Sam Worthington's equally earnest military man.  That's strand one of the film, and the closest set of characters to the newly established town of Horizon. In the film's second strand Kevin Costner is in Montana, hooking up with Abbey Miller implausibly bleach blonde sex worker.  It was nice to see Jena Malone back on screen in this strand. In the final strand, it was also lovely to see Luke Wilson back on screen as the leader of a wagon train, also making its way to Horizon. In all three segments, the cinematography was lovely. I will indeed watch the sequel.There is an honest joy in seeing the landscapes of the Wild West so lovingly portrayed on screen.

HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1 is rated R, has a running time of 181 minutes, and is available to rent and own.

BFI LFF 2018 - Closing Night Gala - STAN & OLLIE

STAN & OLLIE is a rather limp attempt to depict the declining years of what was once the most famous comedy double-act in the world - Laurel and Hardy.  

The movie opens with them at the height of their fame, but notoriously in a contract dispute with studio boss Hal Roach.  Laurel - the more financially astute of the pair - wants to leave Roach and take the risk of producing their own movies, and so make the phat cash that Chaplin is amassing.  But Hardy - a gambling addict who needs the steady income - is nervous. We then skip forward 15-odd years and the fashion for Vaudevillian slapstick has waned, and while Chaplin sits in tax exile in Switzerland, Laurel and Hardy are back in England, scratching out a tour in humiliating circumstances, trying to finance their final film. A slew of PR stunts has them reverse their commercial failure only to see old resentments and health concerns threaten to derail them again.  

Writer Jeff Pope (PHILOMENA) very much wants to depict this emotional conflict as that of a marriage brought down by betrayal - the duo love each other but Hardy working with another comic was like an act of adultery and betrayal than broke Laurel's heart.  This theme is hammered on again and again in this film and is ultimately asked to carry too much weight. It's also not born out by the historical record.  When Laurel was ill he suggested Hardy work with others! 

WONDER WOMAN

Beating an admittedly low bar, WONDER WOMAN is unquestionably the best movie in the DC franchise. It has some of the darkness of BATMAN VS SUPERMAN but never feels pretentious or portentous; and in the place of SUICIDE SQUADS' maddeningly shifting tone and offensive objectification of Harley Quinn we have a movie with a straightforward compelling story and a courageous and often subtle take on modern sexual and racial politics.  The result is a film that's both highly enjoyable and yet deeply meaningful  - a long overdue strong heroine in a universe full of macho posturers. 

The movie opens in contemporary France with Batman reaching out to Diana/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), but it's essentially a long flashback and origins story, told in live action and with beautifully designed animation and the most seamless use of CGI.  We see the young child growing up on an island of Amazonian woman - fierce warriors created by Zeus to protect humanity from the corrupting influence of his son Aries, the god of war.  Diana herself is moulded from clay by her mother Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen - GLADIATOR), and made live by Zeus himself. Accordingly, she is herself a god, sister to Aries, although this fact seems to escape her logical notice.  The Amazons have been holed up on a magical island while World War One is raging around them, until US spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine - STAR TREK reboot) crash lands in their midst.  A brave Diana then returns with him to wartime Europe, supposedly to bring an end to war by killing Aries, whom she believes is German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston.)

BIG EYES

BIG EYES is a well-acted biopic starring Amy Adams as Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) passed off her phenomenally popular if schmaltzy portraits of big-eyed kids as his own  throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  Finally she struck up the courage to leave him and then to sue him, proving beyond doubt she was the artist when the judge asked them both to create one  of the iconic pictures. This story is retold by Tim Burton in one of his least Burton-esque pictures. It doesn't star his typical actors and doesn't have his typical trademark gothic style.  That's actually a good thing, because this is a great and claustrophobic story about a woman suckered into a lie by a good liar, and suffocated by the consequences. All you need to do is cast two good actors, stand back, and let them do their thing. And this is exactly what happens.  Christoph Waltz is perfectly cast as Walter. He's charming and his energy wraps you up and makes it convincing that a good, if shy woman could be carried along on the crest of a wave and not realise she had imprisoned herself before it was too late.  And Amy Adams has that amazing mix of vulnerability of strength so that both her complicity and then her escape feel authentic. In a sense,this is a story of a abusive marriage.  There's no beating or drinking but that tell-tale symptom - a loss of self, vanishing into oneself - is there. Apart from the beautifully enacted drama, what else is there? One trademark flash of Burtonism - a spooky gothic nightmare in which everyone Margaret meets has her big eyes - and pointed cameos from Terence Stamp as an unimpressed art critic and Jason Schwartzman as a jealous gallery owner.

BIG EYES has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13.  BIG EYES is on release in the USA, Spain, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Taiwan, Greece, Italy, Poland, Hong Kong, India and Latvia. It opens on January 15th in Israel, Malaysia, Russia, Estonia and Romania; on January 23rd in Japan; on Japan 29th in Brazil, Singapore and Iceland; on February 5th in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Lithuania; on February 12th in Iraq and Kuwait; on February 19th in Hungary; on February 25th in Philippines, Portugal and Croatia; on March 5th in Denmark, Mexico, Sweden and Turkey; on March 12th in Chile, Peru and Finland; on March 18th in Belgium and France; on March 27th in Norway; on April 16th in Argentina; on April 23rd in Germany and on July 24th in Venezuela. 

THE CONGRESS - LFF 2013 - Day Four

In the not too distant future, an oleaginous Hollywood exec decides he can dispense with the "difficult" Hollywood acting talent, by using you her looking versions of digitised actors. He'll pay them to stay in IRL retirement and sVe them from their own bad choices.  Twenty years later, he now has proof of concept, and can dispense even with the digitisers and animators.  Consumers will now hallucinate the fantasy movie character and life they want to leave. Is this the total consumer right to choose?  Or has the studio gone from manipulating actors to manipulating everyone?  

Director Ari Folman's mind-blowing movie THE CONGRESS, based on the Stanislaw Lem novel explores these issues and so many more.  It's a bitter satire on rapacious Hollywood execs and the cult of youth; an exploration of the concepts of personal identity and free choice in a digitised world; and at its most scabrous, a personal attack on Tom Cruise. At the same time, it's a love story: the story of a mother trying to hold on to reality so that she can care for her ill son.  

The star in question is a virtual reality version of Robin Wright, and in the first hour of the film we see her in live action, struggling with irrelevance in contemporary Hollywood.  She loves with her bright daughter Sarah, who embraces the concept of digitisation and her wonderfully imaginative son, who we learn has a degenerative illness.  But berated and harangued and manipulated by her agent (Harvey Keitel) and her studio boss (Jack Huston), "Robin Wright" takes the contract.  In the second hour of film we fast forward twenty and then forty years as the actress, now released from her initial contract, attends the Futurologist's Congress of the title, and sees the newly hallucinogenic, animated world where anyone can pop an ampoule and become Marilyn Monroe, or indeed, the newly successful franchise-heroine Rebel Robin Wright.

I loved the satire on Hollywood and the sheer technical feat and imagination involved in putting this film together.  But I couldn't help but think that a lot of the ideas on show were derivative of THE MATRIX and THE PLAYER and WAG THE DOG and AI and...... And as for the storytelling, it needed serious pruning. We coulda cut thirty minutes from the opening love action here and about twenty minutes from the animated interlude.   Worst of all, although Ari Folman tried to give the movie some heart by giving Robin Wright a mission to get back to her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) I just couldn't get invested in that story at all.


So, all in all, a rather derivative film lacking in heart underneath all that technical wizardry. 

THE CONGRESS has a running time of 122 minutes.

THE CONGRESS played Cannes and London 2013. It opened earlier this year in France, Belgium, Germany and Poland. It opens in the Netherlands on January 9th 2014. 

iPad Round-Up 2 - THE CONSIPIRATOR

Yet another thumpingly pedestrian issues-film from Robert Redford.  The movie takes the form of an historic court-room drama, with James McAvoy playing the lawyer defending Robin Wright's Mary Surrat of conspiracy to murder President Lincoln (she was Booth's landlady and her son has mysteriously fled.)  This being a Redford film, the politics are naively simple and oppositional: McAvoy's lawyer is the champion of all things good - liberty, the constitution and the right to a fair trial even in the wake of an appalling political crime.  Kevin Kline's war minister represents the forces of evil:  putting ends before means, willing to sacrifice right to expediency, with a contemporary relevance in that Surrat was denied a civilian trial before her peers, and tried under military law. 

The issues are fascinating, the casting top notch, Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography is superb, and the dilemmas at the movie's heart are clearly highly relevant today.  The problem is that it feels like a college debate rather than a movie.  Movies must entertain. If they educate and provoke as well, then all to the good. But no-one ever learned anything while their eyes were rolling to the back of their head in boredom.  Castigat ridendo mores. Moliere knew this. Redford apparently does not  He needs to treat his subject matter with a little less respect and his audiences with a little more.  

THE CONSPIRATOR played Toronto 2010 and opened in summer 2011 in the USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Australia, Turkey, Kuwait and Germany. It opened last month in Singapore. It goes on release in Belgium on November 16th and in Spain on December 2nd. It is available to rent and own.

Preview - BOOGIE WOOGIE

BOOGIE WOOGIE is a highly enjoyable, acerbic satire on the contemporary art world, directed by debutant Duncan Ward and based on the novel by Danny Moynihan. Both are art-world insiders and the film has the feel of authentic anecdotes on speed.

The film has a large cast and many sub-plots, but these all coalesce around the gallery of Art Linson - a Jay Jopling like art-dealer who stands at the centre of the London art scene. Art is played in trademark oleaginous, sinister mode by Danny Huston, who needs to seriously worry about typecasting. Three main stories whir around Art. First, his main clients - art collectors Jean and Maclestone (Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgard) are fucking a young artist and a gallery assistant (Amanda Seyfried) respectively, and are engaged in a bitter battle over who gets the art. Second, naive Dewey (Alan Cumming) is trying to promote his best friend, video artist Elaine (Jaime Winston) who ditches him for Art's assistant Beth (Heather Graham). Finally, ageing collector Alfred Rhinegold (Christopher Lee) is being manipulated by his wife (Joanna Lumley) and her butler (the ever brilliant Simon McBurney) to sell a valuable painting, at a price manipulated by art dealer Art Linson.

In short, the majority of characters are self-involved, sexually promiscuous, and care more about jockeying for money and fame than about art itself. Only a few - Alfred Rhinegold and Dewey - have a genuine passion for the work - and they basically get screwed over for their pains. It's not that the art world is indifferent to their pain, but that characters like Beth and Elaine will actually exploit it. After all, in the era of reality TV and constant self-exposure, pain is just another means to create a sensation.

The movie moves quickly; finely balances humour and disgust; assuredly handles its large cast; and is sharply photographed by John Mathieson (HANNIBAL, GLADIATOR). Art aficionados will appreciate the fact that the art was curated by Damien Hurst. I presume that when this finally gets released, it will be very limited. But this flick is definitely worth seeking out.

Additional tags: Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Alan Cumming, Duncan Ward, Danny Moynihan.

BOOGIE WOOGIE played Edinburgh 2009 and will be released in the UK and US in April 2010. It is, rather improbably, currently being shown on British Airways long-haul flights.

EDGE OF DARKNESS - Curiously flat

EDGE OF DARKNESS is a curiously anemic political thriller starring Mel Gibson as a straightlaced cop whose daughter is assassinated by her employer - a shadowy military defense contractor. While the police are distracted with the idea that the killer was really after the cop, the father begins his own investigation that takes him into the upper reaches of government and business. The marketing campaign for this film led me to believe that the film would be akin to the recent Liam Neeson vehicle TAKEN - in which a vengeful father murdered and tortured his way through Paris. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that EDGE OF DARKNESS is a far quieter, more talkative film. Indeed, barring one or two scenes, it is hardly an action movie at all. Rather, the movie takes the form of a series of conversations. Mel Gibson is actually rather sympathetic and credible as the grieving father and his scenes opposite Ray Winstone, who plays a government fixer, are marvelous to watch. Winstone is more modulated than is typical, and keeps us guessing as to his true motives. But I was rather disappointed to see Danny Huston roll out the same oleaginous sinister performance as the corporate boss. I was also disappointed by the technical quality of the film, despite being shot by the team behind CASINO ROYALE, and by the complete lack of tension. Indeed, the film was so baggy that after an hour I was tempted to leave. The mechanics of the plot - the secret everyone is trying to hide - is very mono-dimensional and obvious. There is no real attempt to work out the ramifications of the secret either politically or in the media. Indeed, despite a rather impressive corporate HQ, the movie has a rather parochial air (all the more because only Gibson attempts a Boston accent.) This extends to one of the most flat and brushed aside endings to a thriller I've seen in a while. So, all in all, despite a rather sympathetic performance from Gibson, this is ultimately a rather frustrating film.

EDGE OF DARKNESS is on release in the UK, the US, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil and Canada. It opens next weekend in Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Finland and Sweden. It opens later in February in Belgium, Slovenia, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, Romania and South Korea. It opens on March 4th in Argentina and Germany; on March 12th in Taiwan and on April 2nd in Estonia.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE - works, but not as intended

Gavin Hood's addition to the fantastically popular and lucrative X-MEN franchise has attracted mixed reviews. Fans of the original Marvel comics have complained about the cavalier attitude of screen-writer, David Benioff (25th HOUR), to the source material, in particular, the transformation of mutant Logan (Hugh Jackman) into adamantium-enhanced Wolverine in the lab run by General William Stryker (Danny Huston). Logan's relationship with his some-time partner Victor Creed/Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) has also been changed. Other complaints include the fact that we never see Wolverine go berserker and that too many classic comic book characters are introduced and then given not much to do. Perhaps the most damning criticism is that the content of this movie adds precious little to the narrative arc of the original three X-MEN movies. It is, when all is said and done, a $150million irrelevance.

I can't really defend the film against these charges. Nonetheless, I did enjoy watching it. I liked the action set pieces. I liked the sarcastic humour of Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, even if he was only on screen for 10 minutes. I liked the gallery of mutants. I was genuinely surprised by the plot twists and double-crosses. And most of all, I bought into the love affair between Logan and Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Hugh Jackman may look ludicrously buff as Logan, but he can also look vulnerable. He sells the love story.

The upshot is that I didn't so much enjoy WOLVERINE as a standard summer blockbuster but as a thriller with some emotional heft, enlivened by the occasional technically brilliant action set-piece. And I think that if you take the movie on those terms, it works perfectly well.

WOLVERINE is on release pretty much everywhere except Japan, where it opens on August 22nd.

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.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT - not so scary but suitably moody

30 DAYS OF NIGHT is an underwheming vampire flick based on the Niles/Templesmith graphic novels and directed by David Slade of HARD CANDY infamy. It's set in an Alaskan town so far north that every winter the town plunges into unbroken darkness for thirty days. This allows Slade to conjure up some arresting visuals, in which vampires are sillhouetted against dark grey skies, and blood spatters on snow-covered roads. It's a gloomy, sinister world. The vampires are somewhat less impressive. Their leader, played by Danny Huston in a buzz-cut, white shirt and dark black coat, looks uncannily like Neil Tennant. And in general, there's none of the sexual sub-text that we expect from our vampire flicks. In fact, this is an altogether subdued picture. For the first forty minutes or so, we see rather little of the vampires and the violence is rather discreet. Things do amp up toward the nicely off-centre ending, but it's never jump-out-of-your-seat scary. Josh Hartnett leads a cast of valiant townsfolk trying to hide until sunlight comes and he doesn't do a bad job. But the stand-out character is Ben Foster's psychotic human who wants to be a vampire. He spits out prophesies of death in a Southern accent and is infinitely more creepy than any of the actual beasties. Still, Foster's agent should warn him that he's in danger of becoming typecast after similarly brilliant but similarly, well, similar, performances in ALPHA DOG and 3:10 TO YUMA.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT is on release in the US, UK, Canada, the Philippines, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. It opens in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Iceland next weekend. It opens later in November in Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Estonia, Egypt, Finland and Taiwan. It opens in December in Norway and Singapore and in January in New Zealand and Argentina.

THE KINGDOM - super-slick, astoundingly subversive

THE KINGDOM is, for the most part, a super-slick CSI Riyadh police procedural. Against bureaucratic opposition, Jamie Foxx leads a team of FBI investigators into a US compound in Saudi Arabia to investigate a terrorist attack perpertrated by Abu Hamza. There is much sifting of debris and extraction of nails from corpses: Jamie Foxx looks pissed off, Jeremy Piven is oleaginous and Jason Bateman wise-cracks. The production is pure quality, as only Hollywood studios know how. It's compelling in the way that CSI used to be compelling, but also totally forgettable. And then, just when you think Jamie and his crew have gone all hearts-and-minds there is a completely subversive final scene which basically says that the American "good guys" that we have been rooting for and the nasty terrorists are just as bad as each other! That it's all about bloody, animalistic, inhumane revenge. I never thought I'd live to say anything that cynical and balls-out subversive in a studio film!

THE KINGDOM is on release in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, Estonia, the Netherlands and Japan. It is released in the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Slovakia, Iceland, Norway and Sweden next week. It is released in Egypt, Bulgaria, Mexico, Belgium and France later in October. It goes on release in Greece, Russia, South Korea, Denmark, Slovenia, Turkey, Singapore, Finland, Spain and Italy in November. It is released in Argentina on December 13th.

Oh, how I tried to like THE NUMBER 23

While I always try to be fair-minded as a critic, I really made that extra effort to like THE NUMBER 23. Whenever I've seen Jim Carrey in a role that isn't his usual straight comedy, I've been highly impressed by him. In particular, I think his performance in MAN IN THE MOON deserved the Best Actor Oscar. I also like Virginia Madsen and Danny Huston as actors and believe that they aren't as well know as they perhaps deserve to be. As for director Joel Schumacher - the man who will always be blamed for killing off the Tim Burton BATMAN franchise - he has made some of my favourite films. I cite FALLING DOWN, THE LOST BOYS, FLAWLESS and TIGERLAND in his defence.

But let's get right to it: THE NUMBER 23 bored me rigid. But it's not like it's badly filmed or acted. Indeed, I rather liked the director's visual stylings and the photography of Matthew Libatique. I even like the concept of the film. It's a psychological thriller in which a happily married guy called Sparrow (played by Carrey) starts to believe that the central character in the novel he's reading is a mirror of himself. The character in the novel is a homicide detective called Fingerling (also played by Carrey). He meets a woman who is driven to suicide by a paranoid conspiracy theory about the number 23. The detective believes that the curse has been passed to him and is soon having nightmares in which he murders his sexually provocative girlfriend. Back in the real world, Sparrow also starts to believe that he is in the centre of a 23 conspiracy and starts to lose control over his life.

That the movie fails is down, I think, to a shockingly bad script. The structure is all over the place. The movie takes too long to get started, uses too much voice-over, and never feels as though it is in control of the inter-twining plot strands. Little details in how the conspiracy theory are fleshed out are infantile and stretch credulity just that little bit too far. For instance, the author of the novel is called Topsy Krett. Top Secret. Geddit?!

So, it is with heavy heart that I report that a movie with a bold concept and bold casting is just an uninvolving mess. Not a disaster, by any means, but no reason to hand over ten quid at the multiplex either.

THE NUMBER 23 in the UK, US, Iceland and the Philippines. It opens in Belgium and France next week and in France, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Germany, Singapore, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Italy in March. It opens in Portugal in April and in Russia in May.

MARIE ANTOINETTE - Versailles goes Top Shop

Many reviewers of MARIE-ANTOINETTE have criticised writer-director Sofia Coppola for two things: first, her avoidance of actual history and second, her use of young American actors and a 1980s New Romantic sound-track. To deal with the second first, I have no problem with the cast. I think they all do a manful job. It is nice to see young people play even younger characters. One of the key points about Versailles during this period is that is changes from a court of a grand-father to one of three young couples. It would be a-historic not to see them drinking champagne, gambling and living it up with fine clothes. I don't even mind the accents. The acting transcends these. Kirsten Dunst is a delight as Marie-Antoinette - capturing her graceful nature, love of children, hopeless position and short attention span. Similarly, Jason Schwartzman ably captures Louis XVI's shyness and ungainliness. I would have liked to see more of him and his motives for not consumating the marriage.

As to the 1980s sound-track - in fact, these songs are used far less than you might expect on the sound-track and I think work rather well. I also love the costume design and the way in which Coppola has captured the beauty and the oppressiveness of Versailles. The scenes filmed with Kirsten Dunst and her young daughter at le Petit Trianon are also beautiful and touching.

But, as much as I loved the first forty-five minutes or so of this film, I came away feeling bored and frustrated. And this stems from the way in which Coppola has chosen to tackle history. Of course, I do not side with critics who argue she has a *duty* to show the facts and stick to them. It is an artist's prerogative to do as she likes. But Coppola's approach has two ramifications both of which damage the film.

First, this rendering of Marie-Antoinette's life skims over the surface, quoting heavily from the celebrated biography by Lady Antonia Fraser, but never really grasping its essence. For instance, we see two twittering aunts (one of which is played by the brilliant Shirley Henderson poisoning Marie-Antoinette against Louis XVth's (Rip Torn's) mistress, Madame du Barry (the fabulous Asia Argento). We see Marie-Antoinette snub her but we do not feel the deep consequences of this. Similarly, we understand that Empress Maria-Theresa of Austria and the Emperor Joseph of Austria (Danny Huston) write or visit Marie-Antoinette, but never feel the harsh pressure they put her under to act in Austria's interests. Again and again, where events are shown their meaning is skated over. But more often than not they are not shown at all. We have no affair of the necklace, no crying over the vicious lies of the libelistes. I understand that Coppola wants to show us that Marie-Antoinette is just a young girl out of her depth at court - but to disembody Marie-Antoinette's story from the political machinations is to neuter it. It loses half its punch and half its poignancy.

Second, there simply is not enough narrative meat to this film to sustain its 130 minute run time. To put this in context. Coppola takes 100 minutes to get us to a point where she has not yet given birth to a son. This equates to roughly 200 pages of Antonia Fraser 570 page book. We have yet to have the affair of the necklace, the imprisonment and "punishment". Very little of this is dealt with in the film and what there is looks like a cod-pastiche of EVITA - itself hardly an example of artistic brilliance.

So, MARIE-ANTOINETTE does what it wants to do well - it shows the fast set at court living it up and isolated from the wider world. It does this with style, imagination and conviction. But the movie's ambitions are slight and all too slight to maintain the run-time. This film is no fiasco - it did not deserve the booes it received at Cannes - but neither is it worth seeing.

MARIE ANTOINETTE has already opened in Belgium, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the US, Portugal and the UK. It opens in Germany, Finland, Italy, Denmark and Sweden in November and in Australia and Israel in December. It opens in Russia, Mexico, Spain, Japan and Brazil in January 2007 and in Estonia in February.

CHILDREN OF MEN - dystopia is now

There's a road about five minutes walk from where I live in Central London. I worked there for around four years and I still walk down it most days. In the opening scene of CHILDREN OF MEN, a crumpled, aggrieved Clive Owen walks out onto that street with a cup of coffee in his hand. A bomb goes off shattering the shop front. Clive Owen ducks for cover and then continues on his journey, haltingly. Because in the London of 2027 our fears (and memories, those of us who remember the IRA) are realised: terrorist attacks are commonplace. It is a world where humans have become infertile and the youngest person alive is eighteen. Civil order has broken down around the world and Britain is the last nation still standing. Or rather crouching with its hands over its face as a fascist policeman brings down the boot.

It's amazing just how easy it is to make contemporary London on a wet November afternoon look like P.D. James dystopian future. The crumbling Victorian infrastructure, the half-light and perpetual drizzle, the uncollected rubbish and weary indifference to increasing numbers of armed rozzers. The genius of this movie is not to over-do the differences but insist on the similarities. The incidental cultural references are the same as now - the 2012 Olympics is an icon of the past not the future, but the music, dress and language are the same. When the world's youngest boy is killed, people still have lunatic outpouring of grief, Diana-stylee, and the English sense of humour is still alive and kicking. In fact, this movie, while intelligent and frightening, is also really rather funny. Reassuringly, "Britishly" funny. Now and then though, we are caught off guard by an image that is horrifying because it comes straight from our tele-visual memory. From news footage and documentaries of the Holocaust or the Bosnian war.

In a movie like CHILDREN OF MEN the key task for the film-maker is to create a world which is at once alien and believable. Director, Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki succeed by a long chalk. But the movie really works because it creates a series of memorable and believable characters thanks to some brilliant writing and top-notch performances from all the cast. The plot hinges on Clive Owen's character - Theo. He is kidnapped by his ex-wife, Julian, played by Julianne Moore, and asked to help take a miraculously pregnant woman (Claire Hope-Ashitey) out of England and to safety. In this, he is aided by two ageing hippies, played by Michael Caine and Pam Ferris - arguably their best performances on film. The supporting cast is also first class, featuring the ubiquitous Chiwetel Ejiofor as a terrorist and an intense cameo performance from an unrecognisable Charlie Hunnam (that's the blonde teen from QUEER AS FOLK to you and me.) Danny Huston is absolutely chilling as the pragmatic aesthete who sits among his art drinking fine wine while England burns. Among such an accomplished cast it is hard to single out the scene stealer, but it is probably Peter Mullan who takes the biscuit with his darkly comic portrayal of the weed-dealing bent copper, Syd.

I could go on about how superb I think this film is - visually, intellectually, comedically (of all things!) Of course, there are some quibbles. The religious imagery is laid on sporadically thick - especially with the naming of characters and one rather cloying scene near the end. But I think this is a small price to pay for a rare piece of film-making that gets the brain whirring and the pulse racing.

CHILDREN OF MEN is on release in Ireland and the UK. It opens in Japan, Belgium, France, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland in October. It opens in Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Brazil, Estonia, Chile, Croatia, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Singapore and Mexico in November. It finally rolls into Sweden and the US in December.

THE PROPOSITION - awesome Australian western

THE PROPOSITION is set in the Australian outback, circa 1880. A hard-as-nails British officer is attempting to bring law to the wild frontier. To do so, he must stamp out an almost mythical outlaw and murderer, named Arthur Burns. Burns has two younger brothers, and the rozzers want the middle brother, Charlie, to kill Arthur. If he doesn't, the youngest brother gets strung up on Christmas Day.

The actors are all brilliantly cast and give wonderful performances. Ray Winstone is characteristically teetering on the brink of psychosis in his portrayal of the British army officer who cooks up the scheme. Arthur Burns is played by one of my favourite actors - Danny Huston - who dazzled me in Ivans XTC and has not been given the opportunity to shine again until this flick. He conjures up a truly three-dimenstional character, combining wisdom, charisma, filial love and murderous charm. Guy Pierce, of Memento fame, plays Charlie, and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Hillary and Jackie) plays Winstone's missus.

In addition, the flick is written by the multi-talented Nick Cave and has all the grizzly, bizarre-O authenticity that one might expect from his music. The movie is also photographed by the superb DP Benoit Delhomme, who also shot The Merchant of Venice and assisted on Manon des Sources and Jean de Florette. What more can I say but that, whether or not you normally go in for Westerns, you should check this film out.

THE PROPOSITION was first shown at Cannes 2005 and was part of the London Film Fest. It opened in Australia in October 2005 and opens in the UK on the 10th March 2006 and in the US on the 5th May.

THE CONSTANT GARDENER - Above average political thriller

QUICK REVIEW: Intelligent thriller about a British diplomat who, in investigating the death of his wife, stumbles on a conspiracy by big-pharma to test dangerous drugs on poor Africans.

LONG REVIEW: I should first lay out my stall. I love John le Carre. He is, to my mind, one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century and has extended his analysis of the miserable, unglamorous, morally cloudy, world of Cold War intelligence to the similarly dark underbelly of multi-national corporations. His novel The Constant Gardener, tells the story of a radical young woman called Tessa who marries a low-level diplomat called Justin, based in Nairobi, Kenya. The first scenes show her husband react to the news of her murder. The story then tells, in a combination of flashback and normal narrative, how in investigating her murder he comes to understand his wife and truly fall in love with her.

Rachel Weisz (most famous as the chick from “The Mummy” and one of Hugh Grant’s many squeezes in “About a Boy”) plays Tessa with just the right mixture of good intentions and a slightly annoying gung-ho, selfish attitude. Her character is not meant to be a paragon but a real woman who means well and tries to do right even if using odd tactics. It is refreshing to see such a multi-dimensional portrait brought to the screen. Her husband is played by Ralph Fiennes, who I think is immensely good. His character is a nice, slightly unsure diplomat, unwilling to rock the boat, but fundamentally decent. When faced by matters of global import he does not turn into James Bond, but his integrity carries him through. The penultimate scene of the movie, where he fully comes to terms with his predicament and what his wife’s life was, is outstanding.

The movie also has a decent cast of supporting actors although it is slightly irksome to see the Brit, Pete Postlethwaite, play a South African with an appallingly bad attempt at the accent. Moreover, Danny Huston, a Yank who went to school in the UK, somewhat fumbles his attempt at a Brit accent for the role of the ambassador. However, all this is offset by the scene-stealing performance by Bill Nighy (“Love, Actually”) as the man from Whitehall. His casual cruelty is unnerving precisely because he is so charming. A true villain for the age of bureaucracy.

The movie is directed by Fernando Meirelles, who had such success with “City of God” and is shot with the same saturated colours and crazy hand—held camera-work. I find it a little over-done in this context, and it is worth contrasting his hyper-active video-game style with Michael Haneke’s still, long takes in the more successful thriller, Hidden. But there is no doubt that Meirelles makes Kenya’s northern regions look stunningly beautiful. For that reason, it is worth trying to see this in the big screen rather than on DVD. Overall, while there may be one or two slightly better movies out there – notably Hidden and “A History of Violence”, this movie stands head and shoulders above most of the dross currently showing. I think the rumours of Oscars are over-done, but you could do a lot worse.

THE CONSTANT GARDENER was released in August in the US. It goes on release in the UK on the 11th November, in France on the 28th December, and in Germany on the 12th January 2006.