JUROR #2****

I am not exactly sure why JUROR #2 slipped from view and made poor returns but it is a good old-fashioned, handsomely made, twisty courtroom drama. 

Nicholas Hoult (NOSFERATU) stars as Justin - a recovering alcoholic with a heavily pregnant wife.  Early into a criminal trial for murder Justin realises that the man on the stand is innocent of brutally bludgeoning his partner because it was actually Justin who was returning from a bar, having nearly relapsed, and thought he had hit a deer. He did get out of the car to investigate, but not finding anything, drove off.

So what should he do? Should he confess, knowing his history of DUIs will make his testimony unreliable? Should he agitate in the jury room for a mistrial?  And what of the prosecutor (Toni Colette), who needs a conviction for her re-election campaign?

The film works as a backward-induced whodunnit. Is the jury going to figure out what really happened?  It also works as case study of moral code, much as SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE will. How far has Justin truly reformed? 

As I said, there's nothing particularly new or inventive here, but the script was clever and tight, the performances solid, and I was thoroughly engaged throughout. It's kind of amazing that nonagenarian Clint Eastwood can still churn these things out.  It feels like a film that we used to make in the 80s - intelligent smart thrillers for adults. Maybe that's why it couldn't find its place at the Box Office.

JUROR #2 is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 114 minutes. It was released last month.

ANATOMY OF A FALL****

Writer-director Justine Triet's Palme D'Or winning ANATOMY OF A FALL struck me less as a masterpiece of direction than a well-acted murder mystery.  

In my more mischievous moments I thought of it as BASIC INSTINCT as channelled through Agatha Christie.  Think about it:  Sandra Hueller (THE ZONE OF INTEREST) stars as an unapologetically successful, bisexual, author who is accused of killing her husband, of even referring to his future murder in her work, and has a somewhat flirtatious relationship with both the young journalist who interviews her at the start of the film, and with her attorney later on. In both films, we discuss gender roles, including toxic masculinity being undermined by a strong woman. In this case, the accused refuses to pander to her husband's need for more parental help and time to focus on his work. Bluntly, she tells him and the court to stop blaming her for his inability to finish his work, and his jealousy of her success. As the film progresses it becomes clear that her husband has been emasculated not only by her success but by her having an affair with a woman.  Both films also talk about consent. In BASIC INSTINCT it's sexual consent: in ANATOMY OF A FALL it's whether the husband recording his interactions with his wife was done with consent. 

Of course, this is a differently serious endeavour, and the genre it ploughs is that of courtroom drama.  The twist in the tale, or should I say tail, is that the key witness is the couple's son.  He has the cruel experience of hearing the state's prosecution of his mother, and has to parse his own memories of the fall, and prior conversations with his father, to work out what he heard, and what it meant. Milo Machado Graner is superb in this role.

I really liked how Triet raised questions about gender roles in marriage and how far a single argument or episode can be taken as indicative of a relationship as a whole. It's great to see Sandra as a well-drawn, nuanced strong female character who is allowed at times to be "unlikeable". And I love the moral ambiguity that is not entirely resolved, even when we do know whodunnit. Is this a Palme D'or winning film for me? No. But it's a very fine, grown-up, character-led drama of the type I am pleased is still getting made. 

ANATOMY OF A FALL has a running time of 152 minutes and is rated R. It played Cannes 2023 where it won not just the Palme D'Or but also the Palme Dog! It went on limited release in the USA this weekend and opens in the UK on November 10th.

BANK OF DAVE**

BANK OF DAVE is a harmless and likeable bit of rom-com slash socialist agitation. Naturally, its ham-fisted politics aren't entirely sympathetic to those of us at the Blog formerly known as Movie Reviews for Greedy Capitalist Bastards. But the film managed to tap into my nostalgia for Def Leppard so it's all good.  The two stars here are for each of the hit songs I found myself joyously singing along to at the end of the film.

Roy Kinnear plays Dave - a real-life successful Northern businessman who decides to step in and make small loans to his local community with the Global Financial Crisis sees credit tighten up.  He's such a good egg that he donates all the profits to charity.  The endeavour is so successful at boosting his local community that he decides to become a proper bank - the Bank of Dave - and hires a young lawyer (Joel Fry) to help him make the application.  But here's where it gets pantomime-y - because every folk hero needs a big bad nasty evil overlord. Think Robin of Sherwood and King John.

So we have Hugh Bonneville and various others play heartless profit-hungry oligarchs trying to keep humble Dave out of the banking industry by trumping up charges of loan sharking against him and then demanding an outsized cash deposit before he can go into business. Which is where the inevitable BLUES BROTHERS- style  final concert comes in featuring our favourite Northern metal band. There's also an entirely tacked on and inevitable romance between the lawyer and Bridgerton's Phoebe Dynever.

The dialogue is painful, the characters drawn with a blunt pencil, the story is hokey and this is really just pisspoor except for the fact that I did rather enjoy the courtroom scene and of course, the aforementioned Leppard reunion.  So fair play.  

BANK OF DAVE is streaming on Netflix and has a running time of 107 minutes.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING**

Director Olivia Newman has turned Delia Owens best-selling southern gothic thriller into a frustratingly dull, bloodless that fails to truly interrogate southern poverty, prejudice or sexual tension. 

The heroine, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is abandoned by her mother and siblings and left with her abusive father living in rural poverty in the North Carolina marshes. The book makes us feel the indignity of her poverty and the cruelty of the townsfolk that forces Kya to live as a hermit. But in this film the rough edges are smoothed over and her shack is expansive, sun-dappled and picturesque even before the make-over she can afford when her nature book is finally published. We never feel her hunger or otherness. 

The same goes for her interactions with the two men in her life.  Tate (Taylor John Smith) is the kind-hearted kid who teaches her to read and develop her interest in wildlife before leaving her for university - yet another betrayal in a life where everyone leaves her. Chase (TRIANGLE OF SADNESS' Harris Dickinson) is the local jock who uses Kya for sex and ends up dead with Kya defending herself in the courtroom drama framing device. In neither relationship is there any hint of sexual chemistry or emotional depth. It's all so.... plastic. 

As for the rest of the film it's so cliched it borders on offensive. We have David Strathairn phoning it in, in a pastiche of the earnest southern lawyer made iconic in To Kill A Mockingbird. And a lot has already been written about Delia Owens' treatment of the two thinly-written and earnest black shopkeepers who take Kya under their wing. It's a shame that screenwriter Lucy Alibar didn't give Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr more to do in these paper-thin roles.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING has a rating of PG-13 and a running time of 125 minutes. It is now available to rent and own.

TILL - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 11

TILL is a handsome and earnest film that is beautifully produced, acted and lensed, but that feels so freighted by grief that it becomes almost hermetically sealed and strains at its two hour, ten minutes running time.  This is perhaps because we never know a time before grief. Even in the early scenes where Emmett Till (Jalyn Hill) and his mother (Danielle Deadwyler) are happily living in middle-class Chicago, she is on the verge of tears and paranoia that something is going to happen to her teenage son when he goes to Mississippi to visit his cousins.  The foreboding is so heavy and persistent it never lets daylight in on the family, and makes us wonder why on earth she sent him if she was that convinced her happy-go-lucky charming child was going to be met with racial violence. I am in no way blaming the character, to be clear, I am just saying that this is a film about grief from minute one. Maybe that's an accurate depiction of the black experience in 1955, or today for that matter, but it makes for a film that doesn't seem to progress. It's trapped in amber for its entire running time, and its characters are trapped with it, never evolving or progressing. Mamie Till-Mobley is a strong, weeping mother for the entire film.  Her family are supportive.  The activists and community who rally round her are fully formed and ready to spring into action.  They are all good, decent people. This is a film where the good are good and unchanging. The bad are bad and unchanging. Racism is unchanging.

So the conclusion I have come to is that this is not a feature film in the conventional sense that is dealing in the currency of plot and character development. Rather this is an event to which we bear witness. It is the literal open-casket viewing at a funeral. It must be viewed and judged in those terms, rather than as a conventional film, because it is so freighted in history that it rejects those terms.

We bear witness to the affluence of the post-war middle class black America of the northern cities.  We bear witness to the still insidious but more muted racism that pierces the affluence. We bear witness to black Americans moving out of the first class train carriages as they cross into the South. We bear witness to southern black America still picking cotton in the fields. We bear witness to Emmett Till's disfigured, mutilated body. We bear witness to a southern courtroom packed with white men in white shirts. We bear witness to the casual way in which the prosecution team dismisses Emmett Till's mum.

Bearing witness is of value, if a depressing reminder of the ages long struggle for civil rights, and this film provides a sombre historical lesson told with care and skill. 

TILL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It was released in the USA this weekend and will be released in the UK on January 23rd.

THE MAURITANIAN

THE MAURITANIAN is the true story of a North African Muslim man called Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was detained, interrogated and tortured for 14 years in Guantanamo without ever actually being charged with anything. As such, his case serves as an exemplar of the horror story that acts as a sore on the American legal justice system. As the film so eloquently puts it, Guantanemo doesn't exist offshore so that the prisoners have no legal rights, but so that they cannot be legal witnesses to the crimes committed by their jailors. The film is also at pains to point out that his detention continued through both Republican and Democratic presidencies. Those lionising Obama and Biden would do well to ask why.

The film is directed by Kevin Macdonald - a film-maker whose career straddles both documentary and fiction, and who has tackled political subjects such as the life of Bob Marley and Idi Amin. He brings all of that skill and experience to bear in this film, a biopic that plays like a fairly straightforward courtroom drama but is interrupted by increasingly surreal flashbacks.  These are filmed by DP Alwin H Kuchler, who worked on Macdonald's Marley, in sepia-tinted square-framed, vignettes - like grainy super-16 memories from old cine-films. This works well for Slahi's childhood and experiences as a student in Germany and then fighting for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.  Where they get surreal and truly impressive is when Macdonald and Kuchler are depicting the torture that Slahi underwent and how this distorted his psychological state as well as his body. Those scenes are a rightly tough watch but are also incredibly well put together. 

The cinematographic shifts are just one part of this production that tries to clearly articulate the Kafka-esque nightmare that is being a detainee at Gitmo. I loved the production design that saw lawyers on both send descend into a hellish claustrophobic series of concrete lined airless room to look at banal boxes of largely redacted documents. Everything about this case speaks to obfuscation and corruption of the very concept of justice.

The first hour is a slow-build and might test some viewers' patience. Perhaps this is the correct way to depict the slow build of frustration at a case that took 14 years to complete. But the second hour is transfixing. Jodie Foster's righteous outrage as the real life defense attorney Nancy Hollander is iconic. And as ever, Tahar Rahim really impresses, moving across time periods and emotions - from youthful exuberance - to naive trust of the American legal system - or his wary cynicism when Hollander first turns up to help.  His final speech in his own defense moved me to tears. And his experience when the verdict comes through - sharply cut off in his celebration by Macdonald - is such a strong ending to this film.

Elsewhere Benedict Cumberbatch is good as the prosecuting military attorney Stuart Couch but his role is thankless.  He comes across as wilfully naive if he doesn't realise before this case that confessions have been extracted using torture. For me the far more interesting characters are the torturers - what are their motivations and justifications? Are they just sadists, carefully selected? Or do they also have a conscience?  I am particularly fascinated by the female interrogator who raped the prisoner. Sadly this film does not extend to examining their motivations, but I guess that's only to be expected since it's based on the memoirs of Slahi.

THE MAURITANIAN has a running time of 129 minutes and is rated R. It is currently available on streaming services in the USA and will become available in the UK on April 1st. 

REBECCA

Daphne Du Maurier's nasty little thriller, Rebecca, is both iconic as a short story and as its film adaptation by Hitchcock. It's a grim tale about a banal simpering middle class spinster who falls for an unattainable rich aristocratic widower.  Which is not to say she doesn't attain him. For reasons that are still murky to me, he marries her, maybe to protect himself from the ghosts of his first and titular wife.  But the new, unnamed wife will never really possess her husband because he remains obsessed by the cynical and manipulative Rebecca - a woman beloved by all including her obsessive and diabolical housekeeper Mrs Danvers.  At the end of the novel, there is no happy ending. The couple are trapped overseas in a loveless and frigid marriage. The only triumph is that the second Mrs De Winter realises her husband never loved his first wife. At the end of the Hitchcock version we get a slightly soupier Hollywood ending. Joan Fontaine's second wife has gathered some courage and supported Laurence Olivier through his trial. He clings to her like a parasite. But it's no marriage of equals. Nonetheless, both original novel and film are of a tone - sinister, nasty, dark, cynical, blighted, thwarted and corrupt. It is Rebecca who sets the tone.

In this new adaptation by a director I very much admire, Ben Wheatley, the tone is altogether different. The south of France is lush and sunlit and Mr De Winter and his second wife (Armie Hammer and Lily James) seem young, healthy, vibrant and jarringly contemporary despite the period setting.  He takes her home to a lavish mansion but instead of the gothic gloom of the original we have Kristen Scott Thomas chomping through the scenery in a high camp version of Mrs Danvers that made me laugh at it rather than shudder from it. I had to question whether I was watching a Ryan Murphy film. And so it goes on, bad casting and bad direction. Sam Riley is utterly toothless as Rebecca's nasty cousin. The thriller/drama utterly uninteresting. It winds on to its ending which is about as cynical and Hollywood happy as anything I've ever seen. All is happy and sexy and fruitful. Rebecca has truly been vanquished. Along with any credibility Ben Wheatley ever had.

REBECCA has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released on Netflix on October 21st. 

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Aaron Sorkin follows up his directorial debut MOLLY'S GAME with a movie whose subject is far more in his wheelhouse, and what an energetic, pointed, anger-making film he has created in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7.  Its concerns are those that Sorkin has explored throughout his career:  the liberal fight against injustice, corruption and political repression.  He cast these ideas in a warm-fuzzy light where optimism won in his hit TV show The West Wing. He was angrier and more cynical in The Newsroom.  And in the Trump era, the anger is rightly turned up, and the absurdity of a system wherein the rule of law has been bent out of all recognition fully explored.  

The film opens with a montage that takes us back to the 1960s and the potent combination of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protests. We see RFK beg for calm after the assassination of MLK before himself being assassinated. We then zoom in to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Protestors flooded into the City hoping to protest Vietnam in front of the media outside the convention hotel soon clashed with the police brutally trying to keep them away.  Once Nixon is elected his regime decides to prosecute the so-called ringleaders of the riots for Conspiracy to Incite Riots and other charges, even throwing in iconic Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had no part of it, for good measure.  The charges were clearly trumped up, the judge (Frank Langella) was clearly biased and bogus, the jury was tampered with to ensure a friendly verdict, and the defendants were clearly there just to be made an example of.

Sacha Baron Cohen is absolutely note perfect as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman. He gets all the funniest lines because he is most comfortable with showing the absurdity of proceedings.  But it's Eddie Redmayne that has the more interesting role as Tom Hayden - the apparently more sensible, less showy leader of a student protest movement who hates Hoffman's grandstanding. Much of the intellectual back and forth of the movie comes between them as they throw barbs about how best to serve the movement.  And they are joined in a kind of Sorkin Triumvirate of Repartee by Mark Rylance as progressive attorney William Kunstler. It's so clear that the prosecution is bent (despite an ill-conceived attempt to soften Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosecution attorney) that all the real intellectual fun is to be had in the arguments WITHIN the defense.  

The result is a courtroom drama that is thrilling and rightly anger-making, and a movie where Sorkin's trademark razor-sharp combative dialogue is absolutely right for the job.  But he has also come on leaps and bounds as a director of action. The way in which he reconstructs the riot as he interrogates the version of events that Tom Hayden is telling himself is a visual and editorial tour-de-force.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 has been released on Netflix due to Covid. It has a running time of 127 minutes and is rated R.

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE

Zac Efron is absolutely perfect as US serial killer Ted Bundy - a man who appeared kinda ordinary looking on photos but whom so many women described as charismatic and handsome. That charisma and handsomeness lured them into a false sense of comfort, and at least 30, to death and dismemberment.  Not that we see much of that in a film that is superb in its period detail and at showing the charming side of Bundy, but shies away from showing what the judge in this case calls his utter lack of humanity. The result is a lopsided film that does a disservice to his victims and (of course, this matters far far far less) to the audience.  Yes, we DO need to see his charm, but we also need to see the horror. Perhaps the problem is that the film is based on the memoirs of his fiancée, so she wouldn't have known that stuff, but my goodness, the director Joe Berlinger sure does having directed the multi-part Netflix doc on Bundy. So why not work with Michael Werwie, the adaptor of those memoirs, to show the parallel story of Bundy's interiority.  Otherwise, the movie as it stands, feels odd, and the final scene confrontation between Bundy and his long-time fiancee feels unearned and fake. Similarly, director Berlinger could easily have contrasted the sunny, warm-toned courtroom scenes, presided over by an avuncular and wry John Malkovich with a more gritty, nasty reality - a reality that contrasts with and interrogates Bundy's psychopathic charm.  Sadly, all we're left with are some good performances in a misguided film.

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. It is on release in Netflix worldwide except the UK where it is available on Sky Cinema On Demand and in cinemas.  It played Sundance and Tribeca 2019. 

ON THE BASIS OF SEX

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become something of a cult figure among today's "woke" youth. She is often portrayed as The Notorious RBG on t-shirts and memes.  Seen as a champion of progressive values, and most particularly women's rights, her newfound fans are putting faith in her longevity to prevent a conservative takeover of the court.  Her legacy, marriage and mind were all celebrated in the recent, superb, RBG (reviewed here) which featured many interviews with her family. At the time, I commented how refreshing and perhaps surprising it was to see RBG as a young woman, in contrast to her current familiar image. 

This new film, written by RBG's nephew, focuses on that young smart woman and how she established herself as one of the pre-eminent sexual discrimination lawyers.  It opens with Ruth as one of a handful of female students attending Harvard Law School, sees her forced to switch to Columbia to support her husband's career, rejected by all the major law firms, and almost as a second choice, become an academic.  Her lack of appellant experience becomes alarmingly clear when she takes on a landmark legal case that the ACLU hasn't the time for - defending a MAN who has suffered from discriminatory legislation.  She works in partnership with her tax lawyer husband Marty, preparing a brief and then arguing in front of the appeals court, leading to a classic final act stirring speech that wins the day. In a final, rather deliberately emotional scene, we see a young RBG climb the steps to of the Supreme Court to argue another landmark case, transitioning to the present day Justice.

As directed by veteran Mimi Leder, this movie has a charming and handsomely old fashioned feel of telling a character driven story patiently and building toward a set-piece finale. The script is just fine - and perhaps best in using Ruth's daughter as a provocation toward more strident and direct action. By contrast, the motivations of the dean of Harvard Law School who at once lobbied to admit women but then is seen as so sexist remain frustratingly opaque. Felicity Jones makes only a cursory attempt at RBG's accent and neither she nor Armie Hammer as Marty seem to age much, even as they acquire a teenage daughter.

And yet for all these faults, I still found this a fascinating and satisfying film, with enough provocative angry-making insults to our heroine, and a sense of purpose and triumph at the end.  It makes a nice pair with the aforementioned documentary - although if you only have time for one, I would still go for the doc, for its wider scope and greater insight.

ON THE BASIS OF SEX has a running time of 120 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film is on global release.

ROMAN J ISRAEL ESQ

Denzel Washington gives an impressive performance as the schlubby, socially awkward, but earnest and gifted lawyer in this social drama.  As the film opens, Roman's long-time legal partner has fallen into a coma, forcing Roman to confront the morally messy reality of the law-firm he has spent his life in, and to accept a job with the slick corporate lawyer George Pierce (Colin Farrell). One expects the plot to revolve around the moral tension between the two men. Roman is a veteran civil rights lawyer who wants to file a class action lawsuit to end plea bargains that compromise his clients' civil rights, landing them in prison to apparently save on legal costs. Pierce wants him to do paying work and make money. But actually it's really about the inner fight within Roman - between his old idealism, and the reality that he now has to confront, and whether he will give into that new cynicism.

What I love about this film is its lack of flash.  Even the Colin Farrell character, while slick, isn't a caricature Wall Street style guy - he does actually want to do what's right without going bankrupt.  And the way in which writer-director Dan Gilroy (NIGHTCRAWLER) and his DP film the LA law offices shows them to be messy, cramped, with a camera that sneaks up behind people and lingers over their shoulders. Moreover, it's a courtroom drama without a courtroom scene - which I guess is kind of Roman's point - that the general way in which American law operates, people DON'T get their day in court.

I also love the way the film so delicately walks the line of creating a quirky, eccentric character, but not allowing him to become a collection of ticks.  Roman is genuinely believable, if exaggerated in his look and feel. Moreover, the script allows Roman to be far more morally complex than a mere earnest self-described chivalrous man of old. There's a point at which he makes a decision that is legally and ethically complex and its consequences drive the final act of the film. The result is a drama that is far more adult, nuanced, and perhaps less simply satisfying than the typical fare. 

ROMAN J ISRAEL ESQ has a running time of 122 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK for infrequent strong language and moderate violence. The movie played Toronto 2017 and opened last year in the USA and Canada. It opened earlier this month in Malaysia, Estonia and Poland. It opens in the UK and Ireland on February 2nd, in Spain on February 9th, in Argentina on March 1st and in Germany on April 19th.

MOLLY'S GAME

Molly Bloom is a real life criminal who ran an illegal high stakes poker game in Hollywood and then New York. She raked the game, laundered money for the Russian mob, and if not illegally then unethically, exploited men with a gambling addiction to enrich herself. Eventually she was caught up in a Federal investigation into the mob and without spoiling the ending, this film sees her battling those charges while recounting her history.  

Bloom is played by a characteristically high class Jessica Chastain, more or less reprising her role in the superb MISS SLOANE. Her Bloom is smart, no-nonsense, and unsympathetic - a woman whose profession is clearly both illegal and unethical - and the game is to guess whether underneath all that selfishness they're a moral compass. Bloom's lawyer, played by Idris Elba, and the director/writer Aaron Sorkin, are convinced.  They give us a film in which Bloom is portrayed as a heroine who refused to sell out her players and ruin their lives by giving the Feds her records. This might be more convincing if played with some nuance - if we didn't have bombastic TWELVE ANGRY MEN speeches from Elba - and if it didn't contradict everything we see of Molly in the film. Yes, she might offer to get a player help with his addiction, but only after she's soaked him for days on end.  Sorkin shows us someone who is a predator on the weak - but he tells us that after all, she really cares about their families. We're also asked to believe that Bloom, as smart as she is, as rapier-fast and witty as her Sorkin dialogue is, didn't realise that when Russian mafiosi turned up with cash in satchels that they weren't money laundering - that she wasn't aiding and abetting pretty nasty crimes from happening. Sorry I'm just not buying it.  The other thing that jarred was Sorkin's trademark mansplaining. We get both the lawyer character and Bloom's father (Kevin Costner) try to explain to her and us why she did what she did. There Sorkin goes again - setting up a smart female character only to cut her off at the knees.

Thus, for all the brilliant acting and snappy dialogue, I just couldn't get into a film whose central character premise I didn't buy in to. I just didn't believe in Sorkin's version of Molly.  And that made the film a long - too long - dull slog through the legal machinations, and an ending that felt unearned. If you want to see Chastain playing a strong female character who actually owns her fate, doesn't need men to explain it to her, in a tightly paced, beautifully photographed movie, check out MISS SLOANE instead. 

MOLLY'S GAME has a running time of 140 minutes and is rated R. In the UK it is rated 15 for strong language, drug misuse and brief violence.

The film played Toronto 2016 and was released last year in Croatia, the Netherlands and the USA. It opened earlier this year in the UK, Ireland, France, Argentina, Greece, Hungary, Kuwait, Portugal, Singapore, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the USA. It opens on January 11th in Russia, on Jan 19th in Sweden, on Jan 25th in Australia, on Jan 26th in Finland, on Jan 27th in Mexico, on Feb 2nd in Taiwan, on Feb 22nd in Brazil, Denmark, Thailand and Norway, on March 1st in Hong Kong and on March 8th in Germany.

CROWN HEIGHTS

CROWN HEIGHTS is an earnest, plodding and ultimately redundant film adaptation of the true story of a miscarriage of justice.  In 1980, West Indian American immigrant  called Colin Warner was wrongfully arrested and convicted for murdering a man in Brooklyn, New York.   The evidence was scant, and his conviction apparently rested on the testimony of a young teenager who contradicted himself on the stand.  Although sentenced to 15 years to life, Colin served over 20 years because every time he went up for parole, he refused to admit that he'd committed a crime.  He showed no remorse, and was therefore refused parole. Luckily for him, his friend Carl King campaigned for his release, raising money for lawyers and gathering much of the testimony himself, at the expense of his marriage and job.  This resulted in Colin finally being released and receiving a justifiably handsome payout.  This story was the focus of a WBEZ podcast as part of the This American Life series (you can listen here) and benefits from the voices of the protagonists - their personalities, and the tension of how the story unfolds.   Within its hour running time we can a real sense of their character, relationship and the sheer effort it took to get Colin released.  It was listening to this podcast that inspired writer director Mark Ruskin (BOOSTER) to create this fictional treatment of the same story.

WOMAN IN GOLD

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here.

The Bloch-Bauers were a successful cosmopolitan Viennese family whose house formed a salon where one might meet Dr Freud or Arnold Schoenberg.  Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Adele, the celebrated Woman In Gold, but this was confiscated by the Nazis along with many other works of art.  After the war the painting hung for decades in the Belvedere Gallery until Adele's niece Maria sued the Austrian government for its return.  Dispute instituting a restitution committee, the government was understandably reluctant to give up paintings which had, by then, become synonymous with Austrian culture.  The process was thus one that was obdurate and highly contested. 

INDIA'S DAUGHTER (TV doc)

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

In December 2012 a young female medical student was brutally gang raped and left for dead. She has been walking home from the cinema at 8pm in Delhi, India, and took a ride on what she thought was a bus service.  The case provoked mass protests from women who felt it symbolised their lack of security and equality in modern India.  It went to the heart of how women are perceived.  Do men have the right to punish them for so-called transgressions of traditional values?  Is it fair that a rape victim is made to feel shame and culpability for the act rather than the man?

THE JUDGE

So I suppose when you earn shedloads of cash for a major studio as Iron Man, you get to create whichever vanity project you like.  And for Robert Downey Junior, it's this polished but ultimately overlong and unexciting thriller, THE JUDGE.  The self-consciously quality product start RDJ as a flash lawyer in a mid-life crisis who returns to his home town, where his cranky dad, the titular judge, is suspected for a hit-and-run murder. Naturally, the super-smart son, John Grisham-like in his smarmy brilliance, reconnects with his estranged father through the medium of sun-dappled flashbacks with trite piano music. There are two points when I thought the movie would pick up its pace and intensity. The first is when Grace Zabriskie, famous to Lynch fans as the hysterical mother of Laura Palmer, turns up as the enraged mother of the victim. At the point, the movie had the chance to do something new and off the charts, but no. The second point was when Billy Bob Thornton turned up as the prosecutor.  But not this was just high polish high profile stunt casting, and BBT just phoned his performance in.  So here's where the movie jumps the shark. About an hour in, the mid-life crisis lawyer meets his old flame, the wonderful Vera Farming, and she turns out to be the mum of the teenage waitress (Leighton Meester) he just banged.  It's not just that this is a cheesy and skeezy plot line but that it shows a complete lack of directorial judgment on the part of David Dobkin (THE WEDDING CRASHERS). Why try so hard to make a sleek, serious courtroom drama and then just kill its tone with a cheap and awkward gag?  The only ONLY time I've ever seen a successful and funny courtroom drama was MY COUSIN VINNY and this ain't that.

THE JUDGE has a running time of 141 minutes and is rated R.  The film is on global release.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 2 - FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS might seem like a cumbersome title but it rings with truth and historical significance to all those who continue to be inspired by her fight for political and racial justice. As a woman of colour living in a city that is far from repressive, I am always aware that I benefit from the struggles of the civil rights movement, and of the urgent need for the younger generations to be reminded of, and inspired by, the victories of the 1960s and 1970s. 

This exceptionally well made documentary, by writer-director, Shola Lynch, goes a long way to answering that need for a definitive record of Angela Davis' central political struggle: her rise to notoriety when the Regents of UCLA sacked her for being a Communist, and her trial for murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, when guns she had bought in self defence were used by others in an attempted kidnapping of a judge. The charges were, of course, ludicrous. Why would a woman of profound intelligence - an Assistant Professor of Continental Philosophy be so dumb as to use guns bought in her own name in a kidnapping. And as Davis pointed out in her own opening statement in her defense, there is a deep vein of male chauvinism in the idea that an hysterical woman would commit a crime of passion to free the man she loved - as if woman are irrational objects unable to govern their emotions.

The documentary benefits from complete access to all the prominent people in the trial, not least Angela and her equally impressive sister. There is something still resonant and powerful in hearing two such eloquent women arguing intelligently for civil rights. Shola Lynch also makes good use of the extensive archive footage of Angela's UCLA case, and reporting of the trial, as well as the subtle use of recreation to give us an idea of certain key emotional scenes when Angela was on the run, and then incarcerated. The most surprising thing for me was that two heroes emerged from this whole era of repression in the most surprising places. The first is the white farmer from a conservative town in California, who put his farm up as bond for her bail on the grounds that freedom of speech is part of the American way of life and must always be defended. The second is the white judge who casually describes his act of courage in deflecting all the political pressure to use this chance to essentially rig the trial at a time when the three charges Angela was facing all carried the death penalty.

FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS is an important and complete record of a key event in the civil rights struggle. One can only hope that it gets the audience it deserves. 

FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS played Toronto and London 2012.

London Film Fest 2012 - Top Picks - WEST OF MEMPHIS

The next of our top picks for the London Film Festival also carries the theme of children abused and communities bearing down on outsiders. It's the documentary WEST OF MEMPHIS, and tickets are still available from the BFI for both the October 13th and October 14th screenings. 

In 1993, three young boys were hogtied and murdered, and their bodies thrown into a watery ditch. Three teenagers were tried for those murders, even though there was precious little physical evidence and no motive, unless you believed that they were in a Satanic cult, and the confession obtained under duress from one of the accused.  Decades later, and the verdicts still stood, despite the recantations of key witnesses; experts pointing out that supposedly Satanic genital mutilation was probably carried out post mortem by turtles; and what can only be called deliberate manipulation or withholding of evidence by the pathologist and prosecutor.  This was a travesty of justice so obvious to everybody but the State of Arkansas, that celebrities wrote songs and raised money to overturn the verdict, and HBO produced three documentaries on the case - the PARADISE LOST trilogy by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.  

Among those celebrities drawn to the case were the couple behind the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh.  And thanks to them, we know have this new documentary, directed by Amy Berg (BHUTTO).  This film redresses some of the information that was current at the time of PARADISE LOST but which later investigations proved to be incorrect, and brings us right up to date. It does so in a sober and calm style which befits the material, in a tech package that is absolutely top-notch.

The first hour of the film recounts the original murders and trial, and makes the case for the innocence of the "West Memphis Three". It leaves us with a profound sense of injustice and disgust at just how shamefaced some of the prosecution's tactics were.  The only reprieve is a brief moment of cathartic shock when we see an animal handler prove what a turtle bit looks like.  I found this hour to be utterly compelling - interweaving vintage footage of the trial - commentary by Peter Jackson and other celebrities who got involved in the cause - and most emotionally, footage of the incarcerated Damien Echols and his wife and campaigner Lorri Davis.  

The second hour of the documentary then provides us with an alternate murderer - the stepfather of one of the murdered kids, Thomas Hobbs.  I found this hour to be highly disturbing. To be sure, it seems like there's a lot of evidence against Hobbs. He had an apparent history of violence against his lovers and children - his daughter is severely disturbed and wonders if she was sexually abused by him - and the documentary paints a convincing picture of a man who was jealous of the attention his wife paid to her son, and spontaneously murdered him and his two friends.  What I found disturbing was that, in a sense, this documentary was condemning this man in the court of public opinion rather than in a court of law. And when the documentary is telling us that previous documentaries did the same thing to another of the stepfathers in this case, but got it wrong, and caused him much suffering, I think that should give us pause.

I guess the real tragedy here, and one that the final half hour of the documentary shows, is that because the West Memphis 3 eventually got out of jail on a technicality - so worn down with fighting for justice they accepted a technical guilty plea but assert their innocence - that we'll never have real closure.  They won't have cleared their names truly, and therefore, Thomas Hobbs can't be tried for a crime that others have already been condemned for.  Guilty or innocent, Hobbs deserves a fair trial. So did the West Memphis 3.  

WEST OF MEMPHIS played Sundance and London 2012 and will be released in the USA on December 25th 2012.

Running time: 150 minutes. Rated R.

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.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - BERNIE

“It’s not as bad as people say; he only shot her four times, not five.”

Bernie Tiede was a good, god-fearing man, who went out of his way to please.  His patient, caring manner was an asset as a funeral director, and his willingness to throw himself into small-town life made him beloved by his fellow residents of Carthage, Texas.  So much so, that when it was revealed that Bernie had shot Marjorie Nugent four times in the back, none of the townsfolk believed him guilty. Oh, they knew he shot her dead, for sure.  But they figured that someone as mean-spirited as Marjorie must have incited Bernie to take leave of his senses for a moment.  Tragically for Bernie, prosecuting attorney Danny Buck knew full well that despite a full confession, four bullets in the back, and Bernie’s ample use of Marjorie’s money, he wasn’t going to get a conviction in Carthage. So he got the trial moved a mere 44 miles away to Saint Augustine, where Bernie's charismatic personality wouldn't get in the way of a fair verdict.

The wonderful thing about Richard Linklater’s new fictionalized retelling of Bernie’s true story is that he allows us to fall in love with Carthage, its quirky inhabitants, and with Bernie himself. By the end of the movie, we can’t quite believe that any humane jury would convict Bernie, and sit in fear that those no-good inbred St Augustinians won’t do him right.   Because this movie isn’t so much a character-driven crime drama as a Coen Brothers style love-letter to small-town Southern life.   We luxuriate in the broad accents, marvel at the cast-iron certainty of the town gossips as they declare that Bernie FOR A FACT was or wasn’t this or that, and laugh at their incomprehension of Austin hippies.  It’s hard to think of any recent use of faux-documentary talking heads that is as successful and hilarious as Linklater's use of  the Carthage townsfolk – narrating, commenting on, and judging the story at each twist and turn. 

Because I warmed so much to these people, and started to identify so strongly with them, the movie turned from what could’ve been a real downer into effectively a rather heart-warming experience. On one level this was a movie about really nasty aspects of human nature – a man so wanting to be liked that he wills himself into an emotional prison, and a woman delighting in his pain.  But rather than being brought down by the depiction of a bizarrely, horribly, sado-masochistic relationship (emotionally, not sexually, that is!), I left the cinema positively full of faith in humanity. Because Carthage was a small town where ordinary townsfolk knew just what was what, and a good guy was a good guy, even if blighted by a sudden act of rage.

All of which tells you that native East Texan, Richard Linklater, is pretty much in love with Carthage, and doesn’t really make much attempt to give a balanced view of Bernie. Or maybe he does, but the truth really is that Bernie was a good guy, despite the slightly suspect love of the high life to which Marjorie's money gave him access. By now, I’m so complicit in the “free Bernie” campaign I can’t even tell. All I know is that Linklater somehow managed to capture both the black humour and the tragedy at the core of Bernie’s need to please.  I laughed a lot, I was fascinated, and I won’t soon forget the tale. Massive praise also to all three leads.  Jack Black gives a more modulated performance than is typical in his mainstream films, as the gregarious, needy Bernie. Shirley Maclaine as mean old Marjorie is just an acting masterclass. Look at the scene where she listens to Bernie sing a duet in a theatrical rehearsal, imagining him singing a love song to her. Her face shows a cynical old woman melting.  And finally, you have to hand it to Matthew McConaughey, an actor who is brilliant in inverse proportion to his screentime.  Banality in mediocre rom-coms turns into piquant cameos – first in TROPIC THUNDER, and now as the fame-hungry prosecutor Danny Buckland. 

BERNIE played Los Angeles and London 2011.