WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Opening Night Gala

Rian Johnson has done it again with another fantastically fun and wickedly tricksy murder mystery - the third in his Knives Out franchise. WAKE UP DEAD MAN follows his satire on narcissistic billionaire tech bros (GLASS ONION) with an on-the-nose dissection of contemporary MAGA Christianity’s nasty judgmental power-hungry malevolent brand of religion. 

An absolutely superb Josh O’Connor (also starring in MASTERMIND in this year’s LFF stars as a young kind and earnest priest called Father Judd. He’s sent to a cultish rural church in upstate New York, presided over by Josh Brolin’s wicked fire-and-brimstone preacher Monsignor Wick. Wick is aided and abetted by a Mrs Danvers-like spooky woman-of-all-work Martha (Glenn Close) and her faithful lapdog Samson (Thomas Haden-Church). The parishioners are all seemingly within Wick’s grasp when he’s stabbed in the back in an apparent locked room mystery. We are thirty minutes into the film - so enter Daniel Craig’s deliciously camp Southern detective Benoit Blanc to save our young compassionate priest and reveal who the real murderer is! 

The first thing to say is that this film works brilliantly as a murder mystery, and I say this as someone who just reread and podcasted about every single one of Agatha Christie’s crime novels. The mystery is satisfyingly tricky and intricate and solvable - though I doubt many will. It works in the best tradition of debunking apparently supernatural crimes and a good knowledge of Wilkie Collins and Sherlock Holmes will certainly help you. 

The second thing to say is that the film works equally well as a satire on MAGA and unfeeling religion and ruthless politicians. What’s even better is that it balances cynicism with earnest respect for genuine faith, by balancing the viewpoints of self-confessed heretic Benoit Blanc and the young priest Father Judd. There’s a deeply moving scene between Judd and a receptionist called Louise that shows what faith and ministry can do when administered with compassion. 

Finally, the film is just a damn good time. It’s funny. It has jump scares. It drops in hilarious one-liners about contemporary culture - whether substack or Netflix. And we even get a self-referential Star Wars joke. There is quite literally nothing not to like in this wonderful film. Bring on Knives Out 4!

WAKE UP DEAD MAN has a running time of 140 minutes. It played Toronto and opened London and will be on Netflix on December 12th.

TAG

TAG is a superb film - great slapstick and verbal wit - wonderful spoofs of action movies - and a really genuinely warm heart.  It's based on a Wall Street Journal article about a bunch of grown men who have been playing a game of tag together since they were kids. Now grown-ups, every May is hunting season, and while all of them have been tagged one time or another, Jeff (Jeremy Renner) hasn't. So they band together to try and take him out at his wedding, although they aren't complete dickheads, so they don't actually want to ruin his wedding doing it. It's absolutely glorious seeing Ed Helms, Jake Johnson and Jon Hamm take in pratfalls and stunts - they look like they're having the time of their life.  And Jeremy Renner is hilarious spoofing the super-serious inner monologue of an action hero trying to avoid being tagged. The visual humour has flair and the film just works! But what I really loved was the attempt to seriously interrogate where the line is between a fun game and obsessive competition, and what the value of friendship really is.  The ending of this film gives us a clear view on this, and it's deeply moving while never feeling cheap or manipulative.  I also love how the script - which could've just been another HANGOVER style bro comedy - managed to beef up the roles of the women - making them actual protagonists and deeply enmeshed in all of the moral questioning that occurs. Kudos to all involved!

TAG is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. It's available to rent and own. 

ARRIVAL - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 7

ARRIVAL is a handsome, intelligent sci-film with stunning visual and aural design and great performances. It's a little bit lit down by thematic and plot similarities to some other recent sci-fi films, but remains a superb film.

The film stars Amy Adams as a linguist called in by the US government to interact with aliens that have landed 12 spaceships all over Earth.  As the movie opens, each host country is co-operating with the other and sharing research - learning that the Heptapods communicate visually and slowly translating their non-linear speech.   But pressure is on - the Chinese is leading a group of nations who interpret their messages as threatening - withdraw from co-operation and are potentially about to launch a first strike.  This leaves Adams' character in a race against time to have the spirit of scientific co-operation trump that of nationalistic belligerence. 

This straightforward plot is complicated by a thesis about the nature and power of language itself.  In an early scene, Adams' character hypothesises that the specific language that we learn affects not just the way in which we think, but the actual neural wiring of our brains.  And so, by extension, to learn a new language could be to rewire the brain.  Accordingly, we have an intellectual idea being explored here - one that posits that by learning the aliens' non-linear language - one that exists outside of conventional time - that Adams' character might herself learn to think, behave and experience life in a non-linear fashion.

AMERICAN HUSTLE

AMERICAN HUSTLE has swagger and style and enough hairspray to raise the Titanic. It has whizz bang energy and crazy characters high on their own con. There are times when it's outlandish hype slips into self-conscious kitsch - times when the performances are so balls-deep in crazy you wonder if the movie has just become BAD, but it's so fun, so bizarre, so outlandish you can't help but stick with it. 

So what's the skinny?  AMERICAN HUSTLE is a very loose retelling of the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s - an FBI sting operation that spiralled out of control, eventually targeting US senators and congressmen with a fake Arab sheikh offering cash for a passport.  The whole thing was murky as hell.  I mean, the guys took the bribes, but this was entrapment and selection of targets as an artform.   In this version of the story, the original conmen are Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale, and his partner Sydney, played by Amy Adams. They're caught on a small time charge by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who gets so glamoured by their lifestyle that he decides to become part of the con, using them to entrap politicians.  Key among them is a New Jersey mayor, Carmine Polito - a mobbed up man, to be sure, but one who genuinely speaks from the heart when he says he wants to use the fake Sheikh's money to reinvigorate his home town.

Director David O Russell is far less concerned with the technicalities of the plot and the con than with the characters and their conscious and subconscious motivations. This is absolutely right.  And ironic.  In a movie so concerned with surface - the hairstyles, the clothes, the moves - there is no superficiality.  When a character extravagantly combs over his hair, or creates a tight perm, or wears a dress cut to the navel - they're becoming a character and the whole point of the movie is to watch them reimagine themselves as they'd like to be. So when the movie becomes a cheap melodrama, that's maybe because that's how these characters see themselves - as the stars of their own C-list caper movie.

Another delicious irony - the most honest man in the film is the original conman, Irving Rosenfeld.  And when I say honest, what I mean in the context of a film about self-delusion is that Irving is totally self-aware.  He knows he's a schlubby conman.  He knows he's going to be ensnared by his manipulative wife forever. And he knows he can stay safe by staying small, and not letting greed get the better of him. He's even self-aware about his weakness - his need to disguise his baldness.  This gives Irving a kind of wisdom and humanity that's lacking in the other, almost universally more narcissistic characters.  He's fully aware that Carmine Polito is a good man dirtying his hands to do good works, and is the only character who shows any kind of moral courage in warning him off.  There's a kind of brilliance in Bale's understated performance - the flash of knowledge that passes across his face as he acknowledges that DiMaso is out of control and makes the call to effectively switch sides.  And, yes, I see the added irony of calling Bale's performance subtle. But it is. Under the weight gain, and the combover, and the velvet wide-lapel suits, it's a great subtle performance. 

By contrast, we have Brad Cooper in appropriately manic mode as Richie DiMaso, the henpecked mama's boy who sees the glamorous "Lady Edith" (Sydney's con character) as his ticket to reinvention as a kind of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, super-cool, super-macho, big-time PLAYA. He over-reaches in a way that Irving never would - to Lady Edith - to Senators - and his tragedy is that unlike Irving he really can't handle reality. 

Irving's wife Rosalyn is as deluded as Richie but to gloriously comic effect. She's a young single mother so fortunate as to have Irving provide and adopt her son.  But in her mind, she's always in the right, always responsible for the good things, never responsible for the bad, and a star in her own universe.  Jennifer Lawrence is so unbelievably hilarious and captivating in her few scenes that she threatens to unbalance the movie just as she unhinges the con, and if her Oscar nomination last year was generous, this year it will be thoroughly deserved. 

Sadly, Lawrence's incadescent Rosalyn put Amy Adams "Lady Edith" in the shade.  Adams, cast against time as the vamp, just can't carry off the super sexy outfits and in the inevitable final act confrontation between Irving's lover and his wife, it's Rosalyn/Lawrence who comes out triumphantly on top.  In fact, they seem to be in different films - and maybe that's the point.  Adams/Edith is playing in a romantic tragedy whereas Lawrence/Rosalyn is in a lurid supersexy melodrama. Adams has the  emotional crisis, but Lawrence has all the fun. 

All the way through watching AMERICAN HUSTLE I felt like I was right on the edge where so bad it's good becomes just bad.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that's the point. These characters are all, more or less, actors, hustlers, putting a con on themselves and us. Some do it better than others.  And David O Russell has made a movie that isn't so much his take on the Abscam scandal, as a patchwork of all these hustlers own perceptions of their con.   Maybe I'm being generous. And if I'm wrong, there are times when the performances and the direction in this film are so broad and pastichey and kitschy they are bad.  But if I'm right, then this is a film working on a meta levels of brilliance while all the time being entertaining in the most basic of ways. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE has a running time of 138 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 12A in the UK.

AMERICAN HUSTLE is on limited release in the USA and Australia. It opens on December 20th wide in the USA and in the UK. It opens on December 26th in Israel, Singapore and Vietnam; on December 31st in Taiwan; on January 1st in the UK and Italy; on January 2nd in Lebanon; on January 9th in Greece; on January 17th in Romania; on January 23rd in Argentina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Serbia and Turkey; on January 31st in Japan; on February 5th in France; on February 7th in Brazil and India; on February 12th in Belgium and Germany; on February 21st in Finland and Sweden and on March 20th in the Netherlands. 

THE BOURNE LEGACY

THE BOURNE LEGACY is very much the B-team continuing a critically acclaimed and commercially successful action franchise. Instead of director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon, we have Tony and Dan Gilroy and director and writer, and star Jeremy Renner (THE HURT LOCKER).  The only sensible move the writers make is to avoid Renner just inhabiting the character of Bourne.  Rather he is another member of the elite programme that created Bourne, who is still at large. The US intelligence service, scared that the programme of genetic enhancement will go public, decides to shut it out, which basically involves a manhunt of all the "mutants" and the scientists who did the work.  Cue a partnership between Renner's agent and Rachel Weisz' scientist as they travel the world looking for the drug that will "lock in" Renner's enhancements.  

THE BOURNE LEGACY is a good enough "tab A into slot B" movie with solid performances from the lead actors and a good enough script and plot premise.  I remain sceptical about whether Renner is really a leading man - whether he has sufficient charisma and screen heft. I wanted more of the danger that lurked just below the surface in THE TOWN - more of the raw edginess. I also remain sceptical about Tony Gilroy as a director as opposed to a screenwriter: too many of the chase scenes felt baggy and boring. There's none of the subtlety, style and confidence that he displayed in MICHAEL CLAYTON.

Overall this film is not as bad as many had feared, but it isn't really in the same league as the original trilogy.

THE BOURNE LEGACY is currently on release in the Philippines, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, India, Paraguay, the USA, Vietnam, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Australia, Denmark and New Zealand. It opens on August 23rd in Argentina, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia and Mexico; on August 29th in Indonesia, Sweden, Bahrain, Kuwait, Peru, Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Colombia, El Salvador, Estonia, Latvia and Turkey.  It opens on September 6th in Hungary, the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, Lithuania, Norway and Pakistan; on September 12th in Belgium, Germany and Israel; on September 19th in France, Finland and South Africa; on September 28th in Japan; on October 4th in Greece; on October 25th in Chile and China and on November 23rd in Venezuela.

THE BOURNE LEGACY is rated PG 13 in the USA and has a running time of 135 minutes. 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE - that ole Whedon magic!

Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble is about as good as it gets for a superhero blockbuster movie.  The action set pieces are thrilling; the emotional stakes are high; and in Robert Downey Junior, Whedon has found the perfect avatar for his trademark pop-culture savvy wit.  The movie itself is the logical culmination of all those marvel adaptations we've seen in recent years, from the less successful (Hulks inter alia) to the commercially successful (Jon Favreau's Iron Man) to the hammy (Thor) to the more emotionally satisfying (Captain America.) 

In this flick, the MacGuffin is the tesseract: a blue cube that apparently unleashes untold energy that can be used for good or ill.  When Thor's resentful brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) comes to earth, wanting to use the tesseract to bring in an alien army, it's up to Samuel L Jackson's slippery government agent to unite the superheroes and save the world.   

Whedon does a masterful job of handling a wide cast of characters, of whom the audiences have different levels of familiarity.  He uses a prologue to set up Loki's theft of the MacGuffin then quickly moves to a couple of scenes that set up the new characters of the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansen)  and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and re-establish Dr Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).  From there we're into the meat of the story:  whether the Avengers can put aside their personality differences and learn to work together. This take us through spectacular action set pieces in a flying aircraft carrier/ supherhero lair and an alien obliteration of midtown Manhattan. 

For me, the brilliance of Whedon isn't just the witty dialogue, although that sure goes a long way to lighten up a movie that's basically about macho blokes beating each other up.  His genius is that he can crack jokes while simultaneously giving characters emotional doth and complexity in a few short scenes.  This is particularly true of the way in which he depicts Bruce Banner as a deeply sympathetic, borderline suicidal genius struggling with "the other man".  What's amazing is that Whedon/Ruffalo's Banner is simultaneously the most emotionally interesting and realistic character but also the one that generates the biggest belly laughs. His scenes in the final battle where he thumps Thor and throws Loki around like so much confetti are absolute crowd-pleasers. 

And that brings me to the final reason why Whedon has made the best summer blockbuster I've seen in a long time: he knows how to direct action!  Too many modern films have action sequences so frenetic that it's hard for the viewer to keep pace with the choreography of what's actually happening.  I'd blame Michael Bay, but I think among the better quality filmmakers, the desire to imitate Paul Greengrass' Bourne films is also to blame.  Whedon gives us all the loud bangs and crashes but never, never, let's us lose sit of the bugger picture. He keeps us engaged at every turn. And that's what makes AVENGERS ASSEMBLE a superhero movie with wit, heart and exhilarating action.  I can't wait for the next installment. 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE AKA THE AVENGERS is on global release. The running time is 143 minutes. The US rating is PG-13 but parents be warned: there's a sneaky quim joke!

THE TOWN

GONE, BABY, GONE was a surprise. Who could have foreseen that washed-up screen actor, Ben Affleck, could’ve directed a movie with such assurance and heft – capturing not only the tension of a crime-drama but also the particularity of a neighbourhood. By contrast, THE TOWN is a disappointment. It’s a solid crime thriller but nothing more than that – and given the acting heavyweights on screen, it should’ve been far better. The plot is straight out of the conventions of the genre. Doug (Ben Affleck) is a bank-robber, based out of Charlestown, Boston. As in all good crime thrillers, Doug is conflicted about what he does, feels bad about terrorizing a hostage, and is doing that “one last job” that we know is going to go horribly wrong. Also true to genre, Doug has a side-kick called Jem (Jeremy Renner) who is a bit of a nutcase (Joe Pesci – anyone?) and takes too many risks. It’s because of Jem’s instability that the robbers end up taking the hostage in the first heist, and cross the line into murdering cops and bystanders. Also by convention, Doug’s loyalty to Jem means that he will go through with that One Last Job despite his better instincts. And, of course, Doug has a girlfriend, from whom he is hiding his true nature. In this case, she is the hostage he was sent to stake out.

The script does a disservice to its minor characters, and the high-powered actors wasted in those roles. Chris Cooper plays Doug’s father in a wasted cameo; Pete Postlethwaite plays the local crime boss in another wasted cameo, and John Hamm shows none of the subtlety that makes Mad Men so great, in his role as the FBI investigator. The worst used is Blake Lively, of Gossip Girl fame, presumably cast to draw in the teen-girl crowd, and given little to do but trigger the final betrayal. At least she makes a stab at an authentic accent though. Jeremy Renner doesn’t bother and Ben Affleck fluctuates in how broad he takes his accent. And this works against what should’ve been Affleck’s greatest strength – his ability to depict the neighbourhood and the society that spawns these robbers. Compare Affleck’s portrayal of Charlestown with Debra Granik’s portrayal of the Ozarks in WINTER'S BONE, and you’ll see just how far short he has fallen.

THE TOWN played Venice and Toronto 2010 and is currently on release in the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, the UK, Belgium and Malaysia. It opens later this month in Australia, Portugal, India, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil and Iceland. It opens in December in Russia, Finland and Poland.

Additional tags: Peter Craig, Aaron Stockard, John Hamm, Blake Lively, David Buckley, Harry Gregson-Williams

THE HURT LOCKER - The horror

Hollywood loves a good war - the heroism, the pagentry, the tragedy, the acres of gleaming hardware, the loud explosions. This is the stuff of box office dreams. Never mind that many in Hollywood would consider themselves part of the liberal elite. The merchandise is often thinly veiled PR for the Armed Forces who lend out the armoured cars and planes to any movie with the right credentials. It has always struck me as ironic that an institution so intent on discriminating against homosexuals should have helped spawn movies that are so ra-ra pro-war that they trip into self-parody and camp. From TOP GUN to PEARL HARBOR, we all know that the girls are secondary to the guys and guns.

Of course, in Hollywood's soul, she is the last bastion of the liberal elite. There is, apparently, no contradiction in Clooney, Damon, diCaprio et al jetting round the world, belching out burnt jet fuel, to promote films persuading us to save the planet. And alongside the war-epics in which the US wins World War Two single-handedly (Enigma, anyone? Stalingrad?) there is another type of war film, typically made by independent film-makers or documentary-makers. These films look at micro-impact of war on the individual human being. The savagery of large-scale destruction is made understandable by seeing the degradation of an individual. Prime examples are CATCH-22, THE THIN RED LINE or, in a movie that brilliantly combined both big explosions AND a soul, APOCALYPSE NOW.

The Second Gulf War has been about as confused for Hollywood as it's been for the policymakers. No-one knows why we're at war in Iraq when the Taliban was sponsored by the Afghani government. No-one knows whether anyone actually ever thought there were Weapons of Mass Destruction. We know we won, four years ago, but it doesn't feel like victory. It's a war without clear-cut dates, campaigns and larger-than-life generals. It's not an epic invasion but a dog-fight from street to street, where insurgents blow up soldiers with Improvised Explosive Devices and our Heroic Boys in the Field are actually paid mercenaries accountable to no-one we vote for.

Clearly, the epic approach wasn't going to cut it. But what of Indie soul-searching? We've had some decent small films come out, each with a different take: GRACE IS GONE (grief); WAR INC (satire); IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (police procedural); REDACTED (fictional recreation). None of them have taken any money although garnering decent enough reviews. And now comes the feted THE HURT LOCKER, and the buzz has begun: is this a war film that WILL FINALLY TAKE SOME MONEY? Of course, no-one can actually say that (or maybe they can in Variety).

Before watching the film I thought it's chances of pulling off both good reviews and receipts were high. The writer is Mark Boal, and you don't get more credible than having been an embedded journalist in Iraq. The director, however, is no bleeding heart liberal but a woman who knows how to direct tense thrillers, Kathryn Bigelow of K-19 WIDOWMAKER fame. Could this be the perfect balance between action and intellect? I also liked the idea of telling the story of Iraq by focusing on a bomb-denotation squad, and showing the politics only incidentally, through the impact of the campaign on the three common soldiers at the heart of the film. The film didn't disappoint. It's tense, compelling and a rare case where flashy camerawork (four hand-held cameras working simulatenously) helped rather than distracted from the subject-matter. In watching Bigelow's movie you get an idea of the futility of the campaign, the danger the soldiers have to live with, and the inhospitable terrain. Not only is it technically well-made and genuinely tense - the movie is also very well acted by three relatively unknown character actors: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. It's worth watching, without a doubt. That's not to say it's one of the greatest war films, or even the best on the Second Gulf War. To my mind, nothing to date beats the visceral intensity and Gonzo brilliance of REDACTED. I also athought the marquee name cameos were distracting and that some of the dialogue was hackneyed. Still, overall, Bigelow and Boal have created a war film that shows, rather than tells, of the horror of war and the impossibility of going back. Kudos.

THE HURT LOCKER played Venice (where it was beaten in competition by THE WRESTLER) and Toronto 2008 and was released in Italy last year. It opened earlier this year in the USA, Indonesia and Iceland. It opens this weekend in Germany and Austria and on August 28th in the UK. It opens on September 17th in Portugal, on September 23rd in France and Norway; and on October 23rd in Estonia. It opens on January 8th 2010 in Taiwan.

London Film Fest 5 - In unqualified praise of THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is, alongside 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS, the best film I have seen at London 2007 so far, and one of the best films I have seen all year. And this comes from the reviewer who had read so many bad reviews that she was expecting to walk out after an hour and grab lunch with some friends. But to my surprise, I found myself riveted by this sprawling three hour contemplation of the final days of the infamous outlaw and the nature of his infamy. Every scene is a visual delight; every performance of the hightest quality. Casey Affleck establishes himself as one of the finest young actors in Hollywood; Brad Pitt's every glance spreads fear. And in its final scenes, writer-director Andrew Dominik of CHOPPER fame shows that he has a profound understanding of the nature of celebrity and the kind of mob culture that can turn Princess Diana into an icon.

To start at the beginning, how do you make a new and interesting film about one of the most notorious figures of the Wild West, when his life story has already been analysed and re-analysed, his corpse photographed, lithographed, and his name checked in rock songs, rap songs and more besides? Dominik confronts this head on with the style and structure of the film. For a start, we never see Jesse in his hey-day, robbing trains with his original gang. It is assumed that we are already impressed with his reputation, and Brad Pitt has so much charisma that he pulls this off. Dominik also subtly contrasts the scenes that flesh out the received wisdom with the "real" psychology of the story. We have a narrator and a series of scenes which could have come from a penny-comic or a stub on Wikipedia. These are shot with a convex lens that keeps the centre of the frame in focus but blurs the edges, analagous to a sepia tinted portrait.

But Dominik's biggest innovation is to place Bob Ford centre stage. Bob has that dangerous combination of arrogance and insecurity. He believes he is destined for great things but he's desperate that no-one will give him a chance to show his greatness. Much like Thomas Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, Bob Ford is in love with his hero Jesse James to the point of wanting to BE Jesse James. But Jesse is in no position to return that affection. For a start, Bob Ford's hero-worship is creepy, putting Jesse's wife on edge. Ford is also the butt of everyone's jokes and hardly a serious contender for the role of "side-kick". For another, Jesse James is now at the end of his career and paranoid about being double-crossed. He wouldn't trust anyone, let alone a young pup whose love could easily turn to contempt, hatred and finally murder. Casey Affleck's performance as Bob Ford deserves an Academy Award. It's subtle. Every stifled grimace at humiliation shifts him one step closer to killing the man he loves. Brad Pitt is also good as Jesse James, but has less to do. The performance is one-note but is no less impressive for that. He has to show how a folk-hero can become so dogged by being on the run and mis-trusting his colleagues, that he can choose to lay down his weapons and offer his back to a man he knows will kill him. The supporting cast is more of a revelation. In particular, Paul Schneider and Jeremy Renner are very good as members of the gang.

Other than the performances, the other key reason to watch this movie is the superb cinematography by the Coen Brothers' regular DP, Roger Deakins coupled with the production design by Lynch regular, Patricia Norris. They combine to simulatenously un-do all the things we expect from Westerns. Rather than a classic Western fought in dusty scrubland and grimy saloon-bars, the modern exemplar of which is 3:10 TO YUMA, the majority of this film is shot in snowy fields and clean, stark, well-kept houses. The costumes are clean and spare, as is the crisp early morning light. Combined with the leisurely pace, the movie almost feels like a Terrence Mallick flick.

All in all, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is a triumph of cinema. It's a movie in which I would change not one single thing: a pantheon movie in the making.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD played Venice, Toronto and London 2007. It is already on release in the US, France, Israel and Belgium. It opens in Germany and Spain later in October and in Australia, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and the UK in November. It opens in Singapore on December 27th and in Japan on March 15th 2008.