JAY KELLY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 3

JAY KELLY is a film with a simple and arguably trite message: those who pursue success at all costs end up not alone but lonely.  Inevitably, when it comes to movie stars, the cost is paid by wives and children.  It’s ground that we have seen trodden from 81/2 to ALL THAT JAZZ and countless films in between.  Trite, but also relatable.  Every parent who has had to take a business meeting or a business trip and missed their kid’s school concert can empathise. Everyone who has reached a certain age and looks back on decisions that seemed like they weren’t even choices at the time, but are bitterly regretted in retrospect, can sympathise. So this is a strange film that seems obvious but somehow hits home.  I laughed a lot, I rolled my eyes on occasion, but in the end the characters, and the central love story, really stuck with me.

George Clooney stars as the eponymous ageing film star whose mid-life crisis is triggered by a trio of guilt-inducing events. First off, his old mentor and movie director (Jim Broadbent) dies - a man that Kelly abandoned when he fell out of fashion.  Second, Kelly runs into an old fellow acting class student, played in youth by The House of Guinness’ Louis Partridge and as an old man by The Morning Show’s Billy Crudup.  That student had a lot of talent but ultimately was too nervous to ace the audition that Kelly ultimately won.  The resentment lingers.  Third, Kelly has to confront his woeful relationship with his two daughters when his youngest leaves for a European vacation.  The eldest (Riley Keough, superb in a cameo) feels her abandonment as a child keenly, and that relationship feels the hardest to fix.  But both young women seem refreshingly grounded.

So we think this is a movie about family, and I guess it is.  And let’s not pretend that Jay is going to fix 35 years of bad choices over a long weekend in Italy.  But the movie wants us to realise that he’s not the only one. Every member of his team, but principally his agent (Adam Sandler) and his publicist (Laura Dean), are putting their lives on hold to minister to his every need and enable his success.  One by one this movie strips him of their comforting support blanket. I am not sure if there is any major character development or revelation.  But a near-final scene of surprising tenderness between Sandler and Clooney shows the real danger of believing that you have chosen a family above your own.  The movie title tragedy is Jay’s but the real tragedy is his agent’s. 

Overall, JAY KELLY is a deceptively slow-moving gentle comedy that hits harder than you might realise on a first watch.  It does not contain the visceral anger of writer-director Noah Baumbach’s MARRIAGE STORY, but in working with debut feature writer Emily Mortimer, Baumbach has created something more melancholy and wistful, despite the brilliant cheesecake gags.

JAY KELLY is rated R and has a running time of 132 minutes. It played Venice, San Sebastian, Telluride and now London. It opens on November 14th in cinemas and on December 5th on Netflix.

THE PARTY - Day 9 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

THE PARTY is a brilliantly observed, nastily witty laugh-out loud dark comedy from writer director Sally Potter.  Filmed almost as a chamber comedy in one apartment, the entire 70 minute movie takes places over an aborted dinner party. It has been convened to celebrate the fact that Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just become Shadow Health Minister, much to the delight of her scabrously rational realist best friend April (Patricia Clarkson).  But, rather bizarrely, her husband (Timothy Spall) is apparently depressed if not borderline potty.  This is somewhat overshadowed in the early scenes by the totally bizarre behaviour of the strung out city banker Tom (Cillian Murphy).  The remainder of the guests are April's new age hippie boyfriend Gottfired (Bruno Ganz), brilliantly mocked by April - as well as a lesbian couple expecting triplets, Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer).

It would be unfair to reveal the plot twists and dramatic turns that propel this short film toward its dramatic conclusion. I was utterly surprised by all of them - particularly the last.  But it felt to me that this film had it all - properly funny, but also with moments of real relationship trauma and deeply felt distress. In particular, the reaction of Martha to learning she's co-parenting triplets felt very raw and credible.  The acting is also universally good, with Patricia Clarkson stealing the show with her nasty put-downs.  I also loved Aleksei Rodionov's cinematography - effectively using lighting to create stark black and white contrast, and with a mobility and fluidity that kept this one-room drama feeling exciting and pacy. The music choices are also used to great effect - in one scene of near-death, the use of Dido's Lament had me corpsing too.

In the words of Meester Phil, this is a frankly delightful film. It's an unhinged expose of the middle class English suburban family and purported intellectuals. 

THE PARTY has a running time of 71 minutes. The movie played Berlin, Seoul, Sydney, New Zealand, Melbourne and London 2017.  It was released earlier this year in Germany and France. 

HUGO

HUGO is a movie about the wonder and beauty of cinema - an elegy to the age of celluloid and hand-made special effects - a plea to preserve the fragile, crumbling history of this fantastic art form.  In this aim, HUGO is a wondrous, magical success.

But, far from being, conservative and nostalgic, legendary film-maker Martin Scorsese has shown us not just the past but the future of cinema.  The nostalgia is matched by an equal wonder at the new technology of 3D - not piss-poor retro-fitted 3D - but delicately aligned, beautifully designed 3D designed to give us that same immersive, spectacular thrill as when those first cinema-goers gasped at the Lumiere Brothers' train arriving at the station.  In this aim - in showing us both the past and future power of cinema, HUGO is a technical achievement that surpasses AVATAR and redefines what we thought was possible with 3D. HUGO is, if ever there was one, a movie that demands to be seen in 3D and on the biggest screen you can find.

HUGO is also meant to be a children's adventure - a physical comedy - a plea not to give up on love, or yourself. In that aim, HUGO is a tedious bore.  

So let's tackle these elements in reverse order. Hugo is the story about a young orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who lives in a train station in a 1931 Paris heightened by fantasy and stunning production design.  Hugo is a tinkerer - he loves to fix things - in particular the beautiful automaton his father left him.  His love of mechanics lies in his loneliness and his need to find his own place in the world.  Together with a plucky little bookworm called Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), Hugo scampers through the station, stealing little mechanical parts to finish his work, and desperately trying to avoid the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his hound-dog.  These chase scenes through the hidden passages and platforms of the station make up much of the tedious first hour of the film.  The dialogue is minimal, as are the genuine belly laughs. Poor Sacha Baron Cohen does his best, but I get the feeling that Martin Scorsese just cannot direct physical comedy.  Moreover, too many of his chase scenes through the train station are there to showcase the 3D and the spectacular production design but nothing else. They become repetitive.  They don't advance the plot.  The first hour of this two hour film could easily lose forty minutes. 

Then again, let's talk about that 3D and the production design.  Dante Ferretti (SHUTTER ISLAND, SWEENEY TODD) has created a beautifully detailed, rich set that evokes a kind of super-Paris - a Paris as we would all imagine it to be in our wildest romantic moments. Always snowing - couples dancing - accordion music - little plucky girls in berets - steaming croissants -  book shops that groan under the weight of beautifully engraved volumes - the Eiffel Tower always in the background.  All this forms the environment for a kind of 3D cinematography that combines achingly superb attention to detail with Scorsese's trademark breath-taking tracking shots.  The opening scene of this film, where we swoop through Paris, itself a giant automaton, then into the station, along the track, weaving through the crowd until we reach Hugo hiding behind the face of a clock - is a tour de force to match the Copacabana tracking shot in GOODFELLAS.  Martin Scorsese and longtime DP Robert Richardson - both new to 3D - deserve credit for such an achievement - not just in creating a particular look for their own film - but in echoing and recreating some of the seminal scenes of early cinema.

And so to the history of cinema. The second hour of the film, where the children are led through the history of cinema, first from Professor Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) and then through Melies himself (Ben Kingsley) is just an absolute pure joy for any lover of the artform.  I already mentioned the recreation of the Lumiere Brothers' train scene, but the pivotal recreation is of Melies film, "A Trip To The Moon" - see the Youtube clip below. The movie shows us the joy and wit of those early special effects and spectaculars, and the final montage is a thing of awe and beauty. I defy any film-lover not to start crying at the skilful direction of a scene that is at once a culmination of the technical achievement of the film, and its emotional high-point.

The resulting movie is one that is, as I have said, not without its flaws. The first hour drags, and I do wonder whether children will engage with it.  But for cinema-lovers, the second hour is pure joy and an experience I would happily repeat at the cinema, because this is a movie that assures us that despite the fashion for watching movies on mobile devices - sometimes magic demands a communal experience and a big screen.

HUGO was released last weekend in the USA and Canada. It was released this weekend in the UK and Turkey. It opens on December 14th in France; on December 21st in Belgium; on December 23rd in India; on December 30th in Mexico; on January 5th in Russia; on January 12th in Australia and New Zealand; on January 26th in Israel and Spain; on February 3rd in the Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland; on February 9th in Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal' on February 16th in Hong Kong and Brazil; on February 27th in Finland; on March 15th in Denmark, Singapore, Norway and Sweden; and on April 27th in Lithuania.

SHUTTER ISLAND - the auteur's B-movie

SHUTTER ISLAND is a psychological horror film directed by Martin Scorsese and based on the popular 2003 novel by Denis Lehane. This faithful adaptation is a self-consciously old-fashioned sort of an enterprise, set in a maximum security prison for the criminally insane, in 1950s America. It deals very deeply in notions of personal and national guilt – denial and repression. The protagonist is a veteran soldier turned Federal Marshall called Teddy Daniels (Leonardo di Caprio). He has been three two traumas – being present at the liberation of Dachau, and having his wife die in an arson attack on their apartment. Nominally, he has come to Shutter Island to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a female patient/prisoner called Rachel Salondo. His real agenda is to investigate the whereabouts of the man who killed his wife though - he protests – not to take revenge – and to investigate what really happens in Ward C. The central puzzle of the film is what is the agenda of the employees of Shutter Island, not least the lead psychologists (the superbly sinister Sir Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow.)

SHUTTER ISLAND is a profoundly odd film. Just as with THE SHINING it sees an A-list auteur apply his talent to a B-movie genre – the brooding psychological thriller. All the way through the movie, I found myself being brought out of the film by the sheer quality of Martin Scorsese’s framing or Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing. I was also deeply impressed by the sophistication of the intellectual material – the conflation of personal and political guilt. But somehow, the sheer quality of the thematic material and its production mitigated against the hyper-real construction of a sinister atmosphere, through Robbie Robertson’s careful use of Mahler and the fictively sombre grey clouds hanging over the eponymous prison island with its gothic central house and proto-fascist civil war prison fort. It also mitigated against my emotional involvement with the film. Thus scenes that should be downright petrifying or deeply emotionally moving were neutered by their subvention to the tricky plot.

The movie is thus, at times, deliberately bad – especially in its opening sequences – with its self-consciously over-the-top weather effects and ludicrously over-bearing score. It is also at times extremely good – so good that it breaks the B-movie veneer. In particular, I would cite the flashback scenes to Dachau, especially the mass execution, which plays like a sort of demented ballet. At other times, Scorsese seems to be reaching for something darker and more twisted than I have seen him wrestle with before, but basically fail in that task. The way in which he treats the hallucinations and warped memories of his protagonist is beautiful and bizarre. But it brings to mind comparison with BUG and David Lynch’s recent work – not least MULHOLLAND DRIVE. I couldn’t help but wonder what a less faithful and more free-wheeling treatment of the material might have looked like in the hands of someone like Lynch.

And this brings me to my final thought on SHUTTER ISLAND: it is, after all, a beautifully made but rather conventional treatment of the subject matter. Scorsese’s art is well-honed but he is somehow a prisoner of it. He hasn’t allowed himself to truly break free and show us something so unhinged as to utterly disturb us. Neither has he subverted the B-movie horror film in the way that a Quentin Tarantino did with World War Two films in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (a film which, by the way, looks better with each passing day).

SHUTTER ISLAND premiered at Berlin 2010. It was released last weekend in the US, Argentina, Argentina, Denmark, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Russia, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, Lithuania, Norway, Spain and Sweden. It is released this weekend in Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Israel, New Zealand, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Estonia, Iceland, Taiwan and Venezuela. It opens on March 5th in Switzerland, Hungary, Brazil and Italy. It opens on March 12th in the UK, Egypt, Mexico and Turkey. It opens on March 18th in South Korea and on March 26th in Poland. It opens in April 9th in Japan and on April 15th in Singapore.

HARRY BROWN - the only permissable bigotry

These days you can't hate people on the grounds of their race, sexual orientation, religion or political views. The only permissable form of bigotry in the UK is the hatred of the white working class, and in particular, white working class kids. The right-wing middle-class media make a living from depicting chav kids as feral, dope-addled, knife-wielding granny botherers and social menaces. English society is in decay! Suburbia is lawless! And it's all because a bunch of uneducated kids have taken to drinking cans of Super-tenants outside Burger King at 11 at night while wearing fake Burberry caps, and driving modified Novas. It says a lot about how insecure post-modern, recession-bound Britain is that the only new cinema we seem to be capable of producing is either lauding the "glory" days of 1980s soccer hooliganism (punching people IS our proud heritage) or decrying working class violence. Whether the films are glorifying or condemning chav-violence, they are still making the lethal assumption that this is the way life is. And you think to yourself, does Mike Leigh work in vain?

HARRY BROWN is a good film. It's technically well-made, visually impressive, suspenseful, and features a great central performance from Michael Caine as a pensioner who turns violent on the teenage drug-pushers terrorising his estate. There's a satisfyingly slow-build to a pretty convincing revenge thriller. Caine has some nice Tarantino-style one-liners while dispatching a dope-peddler. There's even some astute critiquing of how the police are riven by spin and politicking. Emily Mortimer gives a nuanced performance and Iain Glenn is absolutely menacing. There's no denying it - this is a good film. I would have really loved it had I not been continually wary of the fact that I was watching a sort of middle-class angst-porn, designed to push all my buttons as a tax-paying constructive member of society meant to be living in fear of being knifed on the Central Line.

I don't buy the Daily Mail and I'm not buying this. I don't care how nice the packaging and how gritty the performances.

HARRY BROWN played Toronto 2009 and is on release in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands on February 25th 2010.

THE PINK PANTHER 2 - Cinema Hate-Crime

Peter Sellers made five great comedies playing the incapable but serendipitous French cop, Inspector Clouseau. Herbert Lom seethed with anger as his boss. Burt Kwouk exemplified physical comedy genius as his side-kick Cato. Those movies are Cinema Gold. That Steve Martin fool-headedly decided to remake the Clouseau movies, churning out the piss-poor 2006 film, was bad enough. That he lacked humility enough to try it again is unforgivable. The resulting cinema dreck troubled the multiplexes only briefly, and rolled onto DVD with a mere USD70million gross. Here's hoping that's the end of this humiliating little experiment.

As to the particulars, the plot sees The Tornado stealing priceless world historical arefacts as well as the eponymous French diamond. An international dream team of cops is brought together to track them down. Clouseau embarasses them all, almost loses his sweet-heart Nicole, but finally foils the thief. The movie is set in a stylised picture-postcard Europe, and peopled with characters in stylised costumes and deliberately hammy accents. One can only assume that the likes of Jeremy Irons, Lily Tomlin, Alfred Molina, Jean Reno and Andy Garcia were doing it for the phat cash alone. The exception is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who presumably also did it to raise her profile in Western cinema, and whose uneven Anglo-Brit accent is presumably not deliberate. The physical comedy is predictable and worst of all, leans heavily on CGI. The direction is competent at best. The plot is utterly predictable. The only surprising thing about the film is that it us written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber who also wrote 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.

THE PINK PANTHER was released in spring 2009 and is available on DVD.

Overlooked movie of the month part two - TRANSSIBERIAN

After the freakish psychological horror of THE MACHINIST, Brad Anderson, made a more quiet, more realistic but equally unnerving thriller called TRANSSIBERIAN. Set aboard the infamous Russian train, the movie sees an apparently squeaky clean couple returning from missionary work, caught up in an international drugs heist. The tension builds slowly in classic Hitchcock style - the "otherness" of foreigners who don't speak your language is used to great effect. Woody Harrelson is convincing as the warm-hearted, naive Yank, clutching his Baedeker, but it's Emily Mortimer who steals the film as the seemingly fragile wife who is transformed by her entanglement with a mysterious Spanish lotharia and a laconic Russian copper (Ben Kingsley). TRANSSIBERIAN is a rare film that has something to say about modern Russia and a thriller that is genuinely tense and unnerving. My only criticism is that, in contrast with THE MACHINIST, the ending is a little too neat and the shooting style a little too Hollywood-conventional.

TRANSSIBERIAN played Sundance and Berlin 2008 and was released in the USA, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Germany and Turkey in 2008. It opened in Hungary, the Netherlands and Israel earlier this year. It is now available on DVD.

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.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL - Don Quixote in Minnesota

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is an improbably wonderful drama from the director of the piss-poor Billy Bob Thornton vehicle MR WOODCOCK. It's about a young man (Ryan Gosling) who deals with stress by inventing an imaginary girlfriend in the guise of a blow-up doll. The movie challenges us not to laugh but to empathise, and even to enjoy role-playing ourselves. The small-town community in which Lars lives is a proxy for the audience. We might start off like his elder brother (Paul Schneider) - thinking it ridiculous and hoping for a quick fix. Or maybe we start off like his sweet sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer), playing along, hoping he'll work it out. But pretty soon, we're like the old women at church, the work colleagues and the friends at the mall. It's fun to play dress up with a real life doll - to cut her hair - invent social outings: the whole town falls in love with "Bianca".

With LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, Craig Gillespie has done that rare thing: he's made a romantic comedy with substance; furthermore a film that feels as credible as it does incredible. He hints at how common delusion is with his reference to Dulcinea, but more widely he shows how far the whole community enjoys Lars' delusion. Ultimately this is a profoundly uplifting film - and not in the easy, saccharine manner of films like THE BUCKET LIST. It's a film about a bunch of people doing something a little bit silly because they love someone, and believe he'll work it out. And in a cynical, busy, impersonal world, that's a wonderful thought.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL played Toronto 2007 and was released in the USA and Singapore last year. It opened in Hungary, Italy, Israel, Greece, Belgium, Norway and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in South Korea, Iceland, the UK and the Netherlands. It opens in Australia and Spain in April and in Japan in June.

YOUNG ADAM - irredeemably bleak and alienating

YOUNG ADAM is an earlier film by the writer-director of HALLAM FOE, David Mackenzie. The film attracted some controversy upon its initial release in 2003 because of the graphic sex scenes and a full frontal shot of Ewan Macgregor that brought down the wrath of the US censors. Apparently the US censors also have a problem with a man orally pleasuring a woman.

Behind all the hoopla we have a brutal drama about an enigmatic but slightly sinister young man called Joe whose past relationship with a woman called Cathie is called into question when her body is found in the canal where he is now working on a barge and sleeping with the barge-master's wife.

The subject-matter of the piece is similar to HALLAM FOE, insofar as it deals with a young man who feels he has no real place in society and examines his sexual relations with a number of different women with uncompromising honesty. YOUNG ADAM also shares the admirable unwillingness to explain too much, as well as rather grim production design and cinematography. David Mackenzie also elicits a captivating performance from Ewan Macgregor just as he did from Jamie Bell. But YOUNG ADAM also shares the same problems as HALLAM FOE. Some of the dialogue and sexual encounters seemed plained bizarre and I didn't always feel confident that the writer knew where he was taking his characters.

The peculiar strength and failure of YOUNG ADAM is its willingness to put a fundamentally cold, inscrutable and unsympathetic character and the heart of the story. It's a bold move. But as the movie unfolded I just felt alienated.

YOUNG ADAM played Cannes and Toronto 2003 and opened around the world that year, although in a heavily censored version in the US. It is now available on DVD.

RABBIT FEVER - weak British mockumentary

RABBIT FEVER is a one-joke comedy sketch stretched thin over ninety minutes. The British mockumentary posits a world in which an amazingly good vibrator called "the rabbit" has women addicted, attending "RA" meetings, wrecks marriages and provoking outrage in parliament. The fake doc follows a bunch of middle-class English women in their quest to stay clean and re-build healthy relationships. It is interspersed with talking heads. The movie fails because the dead-pan comedy from the recovering rabbit-holics is very hit and miss. I barely laughed once, in fact. A more damning indictment is that the talking heads mostly consist of well-known British character acters - from Tom Conti to Tom Hollander - so that brings you out of the conceit straight away. The marketing for a certain airline is also a bit annoying. In fact, looking back on it, the only really worthwhile part of this movie is the cameo from Germaine Greer who is totally convincing in her parody of a feminist academic theorising on the role of the rabbit in women's lib.

RABBIT FEVER was released in the UK in September 2006 and is available on DVD.

DVD round-up 4: DEAR FRANKIE****

Talented British actress Emily Mortimer shows her full range in the challenging role of Lizzie, a single mother who tries to protect her son Frankie from the grim horror of an abusive father. She does this by telling him that his dad's actually a gallant merchant seaman. When Frankie works out that his dad's ship is about to dock in his home town, Frankie naturally expects a visit. In desperation, Lizzie hires a stranger, played by Gerard "This is Sparta" Butler, to pretend to be the kid's dad for the weekend.

It's an unreal premise, but the wonder of Andrea Gibb's intelligent and sensitive script is that it throws up all sorts of real emotional problems. Lizzie and the stranger are attracted to each other, but this is threatening to a woman so used to protecting her son and herself from any new powerful influence. It is also testament to director/DP Shona Auerbach that she manages to coax such powerful performances from her cast.

DEAR FRANKIE played Cannes, Edinburgh and Toronto 2004 and went on global release in 2005. It is available on DVD.

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE - breath-taking beauty

I love Howl's Moving Castle. This is not a surprise as I have loved every other movie by director or Hiyao Miyazaki and all the basic elements of those films are present in this incarnation. HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE is an animated movie of such breath-taking originality, beauty and wit that in ways, for those with acute appreciation of the visual arts, nothing more is necessary. Added to the lush hand-inked animation we have an evocative, "old-fashioned" orchestral score by Joe Hisaishi and Yuomi Kimura, which adds to the sense of mystery and wonder. Because let me be very clear about this, HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE is no ordinary fairy tale. As with any other Miyazaki story, there are no goalposts, simply anything can happen, and there is always a very dark and nasty side to the story.

This disturbing mixture of fairy-tale and sinister politics stems from the fact that the movie is set in a place that looks a little like the Central Europe of Grimms' Fairy Tales crossed with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Soldiers wear old fashioned uniforms with epaulettes and handle-bar moustaches, and poor unloved little girls work in hat-shops. But at the same time, there is a vicious war being carried out against an unspecified enemy. It is fought in futuristic looking bomber planes that raze whole cities. No-one really understands why there is a war and no-one really knows when it will end. Towns are bombed indiscriminately - maybe by our side, maybe by theirs. Mixed into this weird backdrop, the monarch enlists the help of witches and wizards to win the battles.

In such an uncertain world, our heroine, Sophie, perfectly voiced in the English version by Emily Mortimer, is subject to a random act of violence. She is cursed by the Wicked Witch of the Waste - and changes from a confused, insecure teenager to a haggard old woman. She goes to work for the beautiful young wizard, Howl, in his moving castle. Underneath the beautiful blonde exterior, Howl is just a scared, petulant teenager who has no heart. He is so frightened of the summons by the king that he sends Sophie in his place, and when his blonde hair is accidentally dyed black he really throws his toys out of the pram and announces that "there is no point in living if I cannot be beautiful". By contrast, Sophie, now transformed into an old woman, is strangely relieved to be free of the burden of looking "pretty". In many ways, the journey taken by Howl and Sophie in this movie is one of self-acceptance, self-knowledge and self-acceptance. When this movie first came out at the cinema, I took my eleven year old cousin to see it. The sinister politics washed over her, but she got a lot out of this story of insecure self-image and the pressures of being a kid. She also really liked the character of Howl's best buddy, the fire demon, Calcifer. Calcifer is voiced by Billy Crystal in the English language version of the film, and his wise-cracking New-York accent clearly had the kids rolling in the aisles. However, his voice was the one false note in the film for me. His heavy accent is conspicuous and seems somewhat at odds with the Central European surroundings and the rest of the voice cast. This may sound like an odd criticism in a movie in which literally anuything can happen, but Crystal's voice broke the spell cast by the wondrous animation every time I heard it.

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE premiered at Venice 2004 and is now available on DVD.

THE PINK PANTHER - Probably not the worst movie of 2006

Look. This movie is not the worst movie ever made. It has the odd laugh. It's just not brilliant. And it's even more obviously not brilliant when you compare it to the original Peter Sellers' Pink Panther movies. But you know what? Let's cut it some slack. The original Panther flicks were Pure Class. Saying these remakes are not as good is like saying that Tsotsi is a worse film than Kung Fu Hustle. It's a meaningless statement beacuse every movie is worse than Kung Fu Hustle.

What we have here is Steve Martin as bumbling French idiot, Inspector Clousseau, playing the Sellars part with an Allo Allo accent and happily tripping over furniture and into women with gay abandon. He is commissioned by the Chief of Police, Kevin Kline in the Herbert Lom part, to catch an infamous thief. As his right-hand man, he has "Ponton" - a new character played by Jean Reno. The eye-candy is Beyonce and no, dear reader, there is no Burt Kwouk replacement. NO KATO. I was sad to realise that Jackie Chan had not finally taken up the role. I love KATO. I used to go to restaurents in Chinatown just because Burt Kwouk had recommended them in TIME OUT. Burt Kwouk was the only reason I used to tune in to Harry Hill. But you know, upon reconsideration, I am pleased that the memory of Kato is unsullied.

You get a lot of slapstick comedy, some of which works, most of which doesn't. You get some jingoistic comedy at the expense of the French. We Brits have been doing this for centuries, and believe me, we can come up with better stuff. Clearly all these actors are far better than the material they have been given, although I have to say that after the crimes against cinema that were Cheaper by the Dozen and Shopgirl, I am starting to have my doubts about Steve Martin. Alls I hope is that they were paid a whole lot and can now "afford" to do some nice low-budget indie films as atonement. As I said, this is a harmless movie. But if you have one ounce of respect for Peter Sellars you'll put your money back in your pocket and rent A SHOT IN THE DARK instead.

THE PINK PANTHER opens in the UK on Friday 17th March 2006 and is already release in much of continental Europe and in the US.

MATCH POINT - a return to form for Woody Allen

I love Woody Allen films, but let's be clear about what we mean by that. I reckon that, crudely speaking, there are 3 types of Allen movie. First, we have the early slapstick movies such as Bananas, and Take the Money and Run. They're hsyterical. Second, we have the terse relationship comedies. By and large, these are the ones that won the Oscars and made his name - movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan. Finally, we have Woody Allen's dark moral investigations - self-absorbed people doing horrible, unforgiveable things. These, I feel are his best movies. So when you decide whether to see MATCH POINT, you have to be clear on what you are getting. This is not a cute 1970s romantic comedy. It is a dark, nasty little film - a film far more in the tradition of searing emotional dramas like Hannah and her Sisters, Husbands and Wives and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Indeed some people have gone so far as to say that it is even better than C&D which is, in my opinion, going too far. (C&D is in my movie pantheon.) Nonetheless, I think that this is a fantastic movie.

MATCH POINT is the first of the three Woody Allen movies set in London. It tells the tale of a poor tennis coach who becomes intimate with an upper-class family, eventually marrying the daughter while bedding the son's actress girlfriend. It tells of his struggle to reconcile his comfortable married life with his passion for the actress. Finally it is a discussion about how justice is or is not afforded to us in real life.

The movie is a complete success in terms of character and plot. So often we hear of movies marketed on the strength of their "surprise ending". Well, here is a final twist that doesn't feel false and makes for compelling viewing. The acting is superlative. The soundtrack is also worthy of note. For once, Woody has moved away from using jazz standards to excerpts from Verdi and Bizet with great effect.

Some critics have complained that Woody presents us with a picture-postcard view of London - all red buses, Houses of Parliament and champagne at the tennis club. I would argue that far from falling into Notting Hill and Love, Actually-style cliche, Woody Allen is deliberately making a contrast between the enviable, almost picture-perfect, lifestyle of the upper class family and the sordid, petty reality. This is exactly what he did in Manhattan. We had Gordon Wills stunning black and white photography of New York, with Gershwin's beautiful score, and in counter-point, lots of neurotic, self-absorbed characters being pathetic.

Should you go see MATCH POINT? Yes. But remember, this is not a quirky date movie. If you just want to see Scarlett Johansen get her kit off, you can rent The Island instead.

Alternatively, for a negative review of this flick, replete with plot spoilers, check out my mate, Nik's review.

MATCH POINT went on release in France in October. It goes on limited release in the US and on general release in Germany and Austria on the 29th December . It goes on general release in the UK on the 6th January and in the US on the 20th January 2006.