THE ROOM NEXT DOOR** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 11

The anticipation of iconic writer-director Almodovar's first ever English language film starring two exceptional talented actresses in Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore was high. I am sad to report that while the film is handsomely produced and surface-glossy, it lacks any real depth. And without any crunchiness in the writing the actresses have little to do but be .... nice.  The result is a rather vanilla, unbrave film that skirts over the profound issue that it is tackling.

The film is based on a Spanish book and I wonder if the source material has more conflict within it.  In Almodovar's version all the big questions have been decided and all debate is shut down.  Tilda Swinton plays a war correspondent called Martha who has incurable cancer and decides to commit suicide.  She procures a tablet on the dark web and asks her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be in the room next door when she dies. That's it. That's the plot. (Although it's padded out with unnecessary flashbacks to her ex-partner's death). 

The decision has been made and Martha will not allow Ingrid to try and persuade her out of it.  And we are not going to see any of the unpleasantness and pain of actually killing yourself in this way. Don't get me wrong - I am in favour of euthanasia - but this film situates it in a beautifully designed house with a beautiful woman in a beautiful outfit lying on a deckchair in a beautiful garden with elegant pink snow failing. I find that rather disingenuous.

The real problem with this highly stylised depiction of the friendship and the decision is that there is no conflict and no depth to the conversations between the two friends, other than maybe a discussion about career vs motherhood that never really convinced me. Compare and contrast with Swinton's own discourse on this subject in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.  People have praised the performance - heck this film won the Golden Lion at Venice - but I really struggled to see what the fuss about.

I would suggest that if you are actually interested in this topic that you watch documentarian Ondi Timoner's desperately moving film LAST FLIGHT HOME.

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR has a running time of 110 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and London 2024. It goes on release in the UK on October 25th and in the USA on December 20th.

MARY & GEORGE (TV)****

MARY & GEORGE is a sumptuously produced costume drama set in the court of King James I of England. Despite being known to most English schoolchildren as the sponsor of a new translation of the Bible, historical sources tell us that he was definitely homosocial and most likely bi- or homosexual.  In this retelling from D.C.Moore, based on a work of history by Benjamin Woolley, any ambiguity is eradicated. James was most definitely homosexual - able to sire children with his Danish Queen - but taking pleasure in a series of young beautiful men.

This gives our heroine Mary Beaumont her chance at societal advancement, wealth and power. Born a serving woman, by the time we meet her she has already successfully faked an aristocratic lineage and buried her first husband. She marries a country booby in order to maintain her children, and grooms her son George to seduce the King. That they both achieve great power and set up her descendants as those the Dukes of Buckingham is a testament to Mary's intelligence, ruthlessness and strategic brilliance. 

Iconic actress Julianne Moore (MAY DECEMBER) perfectly embodies this complex and ambiguous woman. She is no feminist - happily sacrificing a rich heiress to her mentally ill and violent younger son. But one cannot help but admire her resilience and resourcefulness in a world where she had no lineage and few legal rights. It is testament to Nicholas Galitzine (RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE) that he matches her beat for beat. When we first meet his George he is young, fragile and drifting. By the end he is out-strategising both his mother and the King. He remains compelling throughout. In smaller roles, I admired Tony Curran's ability to make James so much more complex and indeed admirable than just a "cockstruck" dilettante. I also very much liked Sean Gilder as Mary's new husband, and Nicola Walker gets all the best lines as the scabrous, independently wealthy Lady Harron.

The production design, costumes, music, and locations are all beautifully done. The show is a joy to watch, and as far as I can tell, the broad historical outlines are close to the real history. My only real criticism of the show is that it cannot maintain the brilliantly funny brutal comedy of its opening episodes and that once the Villiers get closer to power, a dark pall falls over the show.  I felt that somewhere around episode 5 the drama lost its intensity and zest and we drifted toward the inevitable grim ending.  I wanted more of the bawdy language and nakedly open powerplays - notably between Mary and Lady Harron.  The show suffered for the latter's loss.

MARY & GEORGE is available to watch in its entirety in the UK on Sky. It releases next month in the USA on Starz.

MAY DECEMBER** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 4

Todd Haynes' latest film fails to ignite. What's the point of setting up such a grungy nasty little tabloid scandal, complete with melodramatic music and Chekhov's hunting rifle, if you aren't going to truly mine the emotional gore?  Instead, we get a limp, anaemic relationship drama, enlivened only by the occasional caustic barb from the matriarch (SALTBURN vibes, anyone?) but one that ultimately wastes great performances from its twin leads of Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

Moore stars as the deeply delusional and manipulative Gracie, now 60. She lives with her husband and three nearly grown kids. The twist is that Gracie, when 36, seduced aforementioned husband when he was ijust 13 (although British audiences may fail to grasp just how young a seventh grader is for most of the running time.)  Over twenty years later there is no sign that Gracie realises that she has done anything wrong, and her husband seems to be living in a state of arrested development, more elder child than partner.  So much so that I spent much of the film trying to figure out if Charles Melton was a bad actor or just directed to look simple.

The family's fake-we're-fine lives are upturned when Natalie Portman's TV actress comes to town to research an upcoming movie.  In her own way, Portman's Elizabeth is just as fake and manipulative as Gracie, except she is more self-aware of why she is behaving the way she does.  It's a great role for Portman who gets to show us her subtle manipulations.  Portman also has a fantastic monologue straight to camera that is as good as anything she has done since BLACK SWAN.

I just felt that all of this was wasted in a script by Samy Burch that fails to really go as nasty and melodramatic as it could've done. I wanted more about how a young abused child comes to realise he was taken advantage of, his life thwarted. I wanted more of the kids' reactions to being raised in this weird set-up. I wanted twisted queer frissons between Gracie applying lipstick to Elizabeth.  I was waiting for something, anything to happen, and all I got was a tease. Chekhov's rifle failed to fire. 

MAY DECEMBER is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Cannes and London 2023.

SHARPER**

A millennial trendy antiquarian bookdealer meets cute a pretty young girl and starts a love affair unreasonably quickly.  So begins a tricksy, slippery, addictive, knowingly post-modern thriller. 

Sadly, reader, I'm not here to tell you about Netflix' smash hit TV serial killer show You.  Rather, I am here to tell you about Benjamin Caron's distinctly mediocre crime "thriller", SHARPER.

The bookseller is an earnest trust fund kid called Tom (Justice Smith) and the girl is Sandy (Briana Middleton).  She needs a bunch of money to get rid of a personal entanglement, he hands it over, she leaves, he falls into a broken-hearted depression.  So ends the first act of this film. We then move back to Sandy's story, and this is a film about con artists so you get the play here. She is being groomed to the con by Sebastian Stan's charming psychopath Max, and he's apparently into another, bigger con, as his mother (Julianne Moore) is handily dating a billionaire (John Lithgow).

It's hard to say much about how and why this film doesn't work without ruining the plot. That said, if you watch a lot of thrillers or read a lot of detective fiction, you'll probably figure it out half way through as I did. Once that happens, it's just tab A into slot B to the end.

My issue with the film is that it doesn't have the ambition to do anything visually interesting or to make any social commentary or to interrogate the concept of the con. This is a very basic film once you get beyond the four part character-led structure. With all that plutocratic wealth on show, and all the sheen, one might expect more satire, or more wit. But no. This is rather basic. And the sum is less than its parts. 

SHARPER is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It is available to stream on Apple TV.

GLORIA BELL

I absolutely loved everything about Sebastian Leilo's remake of his Chilean female-led drama, GLORIA. Julianne Moore give a characteristically strong, charismatic, nuanced performance in the titular role - playing a character rarely seen on screen - a middle-aged woman who is sex positive and living every inch of her life to its fullest. I applaud the messages of this film - that you can be a strong woman with a full life, who doesn't need but is open to a sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship - and that it's better to walk away from something that is second best. And I am in admiration of both Moore and her lover, played by John Turturro, for being vulnerable enough to show what sex is actually like in one's middle-age, and the complications of relationships with grown children.  The talent behind the lens is just as impressive. Sebastian Leilo has a sure measure of pace, balancing lighter moments of expressive freedom with darker more intimate moments of sadness and self-doubt. The score, by Matthew Herbert, is stunning, combing traditionally orchestrated music with phenomenal electronic almost 80s sci-fi synth moments, let alone the wonderful disco music that Gloria loses herself too.  Finally, the cinematography from Natasha Braier is marvellous in capturing both with its use of colour, light and framing, the different moods that Gloria goes through - whether strong, suffering, free or constrained. This really is a tour de force and deserves to be seen as widely as possible. 

GLORIA BELL is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes. The film played Toronto 2018 and was released earlier this year in the USA. It's just about still on release in the UK in cinemas and is available on streaming services. 

SUBURBICON

SUBURBICON is a much-maligned film - so much so that I put off watching it for quite some time. I see the issue with it. Despite his earnest liberal pose, George Clooney has created a film in which the story of a black family victimised by racists in 1950s America is treated as a counter-point to the main story of a white family torn apart by lust and murder. He doesn't condescend to give his black characters names, personalities, an inner life, agency.  They are cookie-cutter martyrs.  In fact, Clooney doesn't even look that interested in what they're going through, other than that a climactic race riot can provide an opportunity for his actual protagonist to mask a murder.  One has to ask oneself how a director who is also an activist could be so tone deaf to his own implicit racism.  Maybe it's just another example of the inability of rich white old men to "get it".  

The problem is that if we write off all of SUBURBICON because of Clooney's racist mis-step, we ignore the evident artistry of its main  plot. In fact, one could imagine someone putting the film through FinalCutPro, taking out the black neighbour side-plot, and coming up with a very finely produced, nasty, subversive, little suburban thriller.  The tragedy of SUBURBICON is, then, not that it's a bad film, but that it's a good film with a side-order of tone-deaf sub-plot. 

So let's get to the main film. It's a Clooney directorial effort based on a 1980s script by the Coen Brothers, whose sensibilities he has absorbed over many years of working for them as an actor. He has reworked the script with producing partner Grant Heslov to create a dark tale of lust and greed. As the film opens, its protagonist Gardner (Matt Damon) is living with his wife and son Nicky as well as his sister-in-law (both sisters played by Julianne Moore).  In an early and tense scene of home invasion, the wife is killed, after which Gardner takes up with the sister, who creepily dies her hair to look like the dead sibling.  This - and other "red flags" raise the suspicions of an oppressively charming insurance fraud investigator played by Oscar Isaac, and we realise that Gardner is in cahoots with two mobsters.

This kind of complex caper, with crosses and double-crosses, small-time crooks and venal men, are common in Coen Brothers movies. But this is not one of their dark comedies. Rather, it's a relentlessly vicious film, centring as it does on a small kid who sees and is victimised by violence and coercion. To that end, I thought Clooney handled the tension and the violence very well - walking just the right balance of holding our gaze vs exploitation.

I also loved Clooney's visual style in this film, his scrupulous use of vintage design - not just clothes and the way the houses are dressed - but the logos on the beauty parlour window and the brochure for a military school - the deep dark oppressive browns of Gardner's office. Everything is just right.  He also knows how to frame a shot.  Matt Damon, broken nose and glasses, trying to intimidate his son, with an absurdly lit fish-tank behind him. In many ways, I think this is Clooney at his most deliberate and controlled and I loved it. And of course Julianne Moore is superb. In other words, there's a lot that's really superb in this film if - and it's a big if - you can overlook the serious political mis-step. 

SUBURBICON has a running time of 105 minutes and is rated R. It is available to rent and own.

WONDERSTRUCK - Day 2 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

I read Brian Selznick's WONDERSTRUCK upon hearing that his screen adaptation would be playing the BFI London Film Festival and immediately fell in love with it.  So many of its themes resonated with me - from the fear of having no place to fit in in society; to the love of collecting and old books; to the delight in architecture and models; and most importantly of all, a captivation with the history of cinema itself.  And that's all before one realised that this was going to be a profoundly beautiful treatment of the challenges and triumphs of growing up deaf.  Added to its thematic richness, Selznick's book was truly beautiful, unique and imaginative. He intertwines two stories of two kids from different eras - a girl called Rose living in 1920s New Jersey, and a boy called Ben living in 1970s Minnesota. Rose's story is told in beautiful black and white pencil drawings and depict a world of silent movie stars and the golden age of New York. Meanwhile Ben's story is told in text, but text that is beautifully and deliberately typeset. As the stories later meet and mingle, so to do the formats. The result is a visually stunning book.

Acclaimed auteur Todd Haynes admitted in his introduction to this film that he wasn't the obvious director for such a book at first glance - this is his first film aimed at a younger audience.  But when one considers its fascination with cinema history, who better than a director who has reinterpreted Sirkian melodrama for modern audiences? WONDERSTRUCK demands a director who is comfortable in different eras and styles, and who can harness the powers of pure cinema - visual, sound design, music - to convey emotional journeys and suspense. And this is what we get in this film.  In Rose's story, huge attention has been paid to texture - her hair, the patterns on her clothes, the thick ribbing on her tights, visually echoing the cross-grain drawings in the original book. And there's a delight and wonder at the stunning architecture of New York - we see it afresh in her eyes.  Millicent Simmonds - a talented deaf actress in her screen debut - is captivating in the part.  In Ben's story I feel Haynes really added to Selznick's world, showing a grittiness and griminess to pre-Giuliani New York and using music cues to great effect. In fact, Carter Burwell's score is one of the most impressive thing about this film, and holds the disparate themes together.

I can see why some people have been less than impressed by WONDERSTRUCK. It is patient and deliberate in how it unravels its story - the plot reveals depend on "big" events happening that may feel too many or too obvious - and its essentially a rather melancholy story about loss.  But I also feel that it's a deeply moving story about finding one's place in the world, triumphing over loneliness, and forging one's own path.  And I must admit that the final half hour had me in tears. Fans of the book will not be disappointed, and I feel that in the technical brilliance of the film, neither will Haynes fans if they open themselves up to the young adult material. After all, aren't so many of his films about misfits struggling to find a place in oppressive bourgeois conventional society?

WONDERSTRUCK has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie played Cannes, San Sebastian, London and New York 2017. It opens in the USA on Oct 20th, in Hong Kong on Oct 26th, in France on Nov 15th, in the Netherlands on Dec 7th and in Belgium on Dec 20th.

MAGGIE'S PLAN

MAGGIE'S PLAN is a delightful film that where's it's profundity lightly.  Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, based on an unpublished story by Karen Rinaldi, it's basically a film that what happens after you marry the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.  That's the whimsical, pretty young woman that exists in many modern romantic comedies to allow the sad, depressed, trapped male hero to escape into a better happier world once the credits rolls.  These poor girls - often played by through the ages by actresses like Audrey Hepburn, Jennifer Aniston, Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Portman or Cara Delevigne - don't really have an interior life of their own, or any kind of aims for their own life beyond rescuing their beloved men.  This has been somewhat grating for female viewers, and presumably for the actresses themselves.

And so we get the wonderful Greta Gerwig - who has played plenty of these supremely capable fixers of broken men and women  in her time - as the lead character in this amazing film.  She plays Maggie - a loving and lovely woman who decides she wants to have a baby despite not having a boyfriend.  She gets an old college friend called Guy (Travis Fimmel) to be a sperm donor, but on the night she's going to do the deed ends up shagging a married college professor called John (Ethan Hawke) instead.  Long story short, she decides to rescue him from his apparently horrendous high-maintenatnce super-successful wife (Julianne Moore), and they have a kid together.  At this point the conventional rom-com ends.

FREEHELD

FREEHELD is a well-meaning and earnest film based on the true story of New Jersey cop Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore). She was a very carefully equivocal lesbian until she met her younger partner Stacie Andree (Ellen Page) who was openly out. They fell in love, moved in together, and Laurel came out to her partner of many years, Dane Wells (Michael Shannon). And then Laurel was diagnosed with stage four cancer and realised that her partner would not be eligible for her pension because they couldn't be married, and so Stacie would not be able to afford to stay in their home after her death.  Laurel and Stacie's case sat before the Freeholders of Ocean County, New Jersey - five men who were worried about their re-election prospects in a conservative county had they used the latitude accorded to them by state law in allowing Laurel to assign her rights to Stacie.  But not to fear.  Steven Goldstein (Steve Carrell) a politically savvy campaigner who clearly but openly wanted to use this case to promote his agenda for marriage equality, drummed up enough publicity to shame the Freeholders into giving in.  

It's a simple story, but an important victory on the road to equality.  Not sure it's entirely enough meat on the bone to be a feature length movie shown in cinemas. It sounds like more of an hour long TV drama and sadly that's what this film basically is, despite an all star cast.  It's just a big enough, conflicted enough story.  The characters don't grow. The lesbian couple are perfect and in love. The conflicted counsellor was always a good guy. The conservative counsellors aren't one over by argument or humanity but are rail-roaded by publicity.  And so it all feels a little thin and static and inconsequential which is a terrible shame for such an awful story of basic inhumanity.

FREEHELD has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie played Toronto 2015 and was released last year in the USA, Canada, Italy, Israel and Hong Kong. It is currently on release in France, the UK, Ireland and Taiwan. It opens on March 24th in Portugal, April 7th in Germany, May 6th in Spain, May 12th in Chile, May 19th in the Netherlands, and July 22nd in Sweden.

STILL ALICE

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

STILL ALICE starts Julianne Moore in as Oscar-winning turn as Alice Howland - a successful College professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.  The first half hour of the film sees Alice suspect that something serious is behind her sudden memory loss and come to a diagnosis. The second half hour sees the family come to terms with her rapidly deteriorating condition - their bickering, frustration, love but lack of understanding.  The final third of the film focuses on Alice's relationship with her youngest daughter, played by Kristen Stewart - a relationship that was fraught when Alice was well, but finds a new sympathy in her illness.  Alice herself is alienated from herself and much of the rest of her family. This is the true cruelty of Alzheimer's Disease and in that sense the title of the film is ironic. When you take away a woman's intellect, her memory, her job, her sense of self, what is left?

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 1

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman as show producer Plutarch Heavensbee
and Julianne Moore as rebel President Coin.

MOCKINGJAY is a dirge of a film. Two hours of hackneyed dialogue, J-Law stumbling around debris with PTSD interspersed with the occasional attempt at a rousing speech for rebellion.  The movie has no pace, no flow, no excitement, largely because it's basically pre-amble to the final showdown between the oppressed masses and the ruthless President of this dystopian future dictatorship.  I'm not sure how the young fans of Suzanne Collins' wildly successful books will react to the style and content of this film but I found the shift in tone from the gladiatorial action of the first two films to the attempt at earnest commentary on war jarring.  Which isn't to say it isn't an honourable attempt at engaging with contemporary politics, but my god it isn't entertaining either.  

As the movie opens, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has been rescued from the Hunger Games and wakes up traumatised in District 13 - an austere military bunker run by the sinister President Coin  (a typically steely Julianne Moore).  Coin decides to pimp Katniss out in much the same way as her nemesis President Snow (a 2-D villain played with mustache-twirling glee by Donald Sutherland) did.  Instead of schmaltzy TV interviews for the state, Katniss now does supposedly impromptu Churchillian speeches urging the rebels to rise up - all of which have been expertly stage managed by Coin and her on-the-ground director Cressida (Natalie Dormer).  The movie cruises toward the inevitable showdown contrasting the "propos" with the terrorist/freedom fighter acts in various districts. And all the time, in the background, there's Katniss' demand that Peeta be rescued, culminating in an extraction that is clearly inspired by the Navy SEALS raid on Abbotabad.  All of this is fine, except that it gets undercut by the hokey dialogue and plot turns.  Of COURSE, when Katniss rescues her sister's cat we just now there's going to be some perilous plot moment when rescuing the cat places Katniss in jeopardy.  And the scenes near the end when President Coin commands her troops against a state bombing campaign reeks on the final scenes in STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE.

Overall, I'm not sure whether they really needed to cut the final book into two films. This first part could easily have been much shorter - just one propo - just one montage of the people rising up - because what we want to get to is the final fifteen minutes of Part 1 and then all of Part 2.  I applaud the good intentions to get gritty and real but once again, I'm just not sure how this constitutes any kind of credible storytelling in a world of such outlandish fantasy costumes and hokey dialogue and cartoon villains. 

MOCKINGJAY has a running time of 123 minutes, is rated PG and is on global release.

DON JON - LFF 2013 - Day Nine

Joseph Gordon Levitt's directorial debut is a whole lot of fun, and beyond that a brave and nicely observed tale of a young man who manages to move beyond his porn addiction to a place where he can have a meaningful relationship.

The fun comes from his situating the story in a kind of Jersey Shore heightened reality neighbourhood where men where wife beaters, women where massive earrings and chew gum, and you can be out banging chicks on a Saturday night, and confess in Church on  a Sunday morning.  It was wonderful to see Tony Danza back on screen as the father of the protagonist, the Don Jon of the title,  all football and swearing and lech'ing over his son's hot new girlfriend, Barbara.  I love how Scarlett Johansen perfectly captures that broad Jersey accent, and the sly manipulations of the gorgeous girlfriend who holds out.

But really this is Joseph Gordon Levitt's show.  He's utterly compelling and charismatic and convincing as Don Jon, both in his schmucky porn using phase, and in his exploration of actual emotion phase. And believe me, when the movie takes that right turn into that emotional awakening, it's genuinely moving, and it's quite a feat for the movie to be able to move from the heightened comedy of the first half to the depth of the second half.

Is the movie perfect? No.  I didn't like how derivative the character of Don Jon's sister (Brie Larson) was.  She was basically a comically silent chick all the way through the movie, always texting people on her phone. Then, in the final reel, she puts down the phone and dispenses some dope wisdom much to everybody's surprise.  Everybody, that is, who hasn't seen Kevin Smith's Silent Bob character.

But aside from that, Don Jon is a really brave and funny story that made me laugh and made me think.  Can't wait to see what Joseph Gordon Levitt does next!

DON JON has a running time of 90 minutes and has been rated R in the USA.

DON JON played Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, Toronto and London 2013.  It was released earlier this year in Russia, Hong Kong, Canada, Estonia, Taiwan, the USA, Israel, Lithuania, Romania, Portugal and Turkey.  It opens this weekend in Mexico and next weekend in Greece, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. It opens on October 31st in Norway, on November 1st in Finland, on November 7th in Denmark, Singapore and Brazil, on November 14th in Argentina, Germnay, Ireland, Poland and the UK, on November 20th in Belgium, on November 28th in Chile and on December 25th in France. 

WHAT MAISIE KNEW

Loosely based on the Henry James novel, directors Scott McGehee & David Siegel (UNCERTAINTY) have created a contemporary tale of the impact of divorce on a small girl in contemporary one-percent New York.  The mother, Susanna (Julianne Moore) is a narcissistic, jealous manipulative fading rock star and the father Beale (Steve Coogan) is a neglectful self-involved businessman. The wonder of the movie is that that the performances are nuanced enough that we do understand that they both love their daughter, even as they literally abandon her.  There's a particularly wonderful scene between Beale and Maisie, where he briefly entertains the idea of taking her with him to England, but Steve Coogan beautifully essays the brief excitement, then practical deflation of that dream. Similarly, there's a stunningly heartfelt scene between Maisie and her mother, where Julianne Moore has to momentarily break through Susanna's possessiveness for a brief epiphany: Susanna has the choice to mess up her daughter's life as she was once screwed over, or to make a better choice.

Where the movie ultimately fails is in its rather fairytale final act.  I believed in the individual characters of Maisie's naive but loving nanny Margo (Joanna Vanderham) and her almost childlike new stepfather Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard).  I also believed that Maisie's parents would be self-serving enough to marry merely to secure childcare  - a move implicit in Beale's decision to remarry and arguably absolutely explicit in Susanna's.  But where the movie lost me was in Lincoln and Margo's relationship and choices - which seemed trite and convenient where so much else in the movie seemed scarily real, and particular.  

Still, kudos to the directors for focussing the film firmly on Maisie - showing these adults merely as conversations, fights and accusations that she overhears or is woken up with.  This serves to give us some sense of the technical masterpiece that is Henry James' short story.  Also, great praise for  the delightful Onata Aprile, who plays Maisie.  There is one place in the film where the tone briefly flirts with deep darkness, and it is here that Onata Aprile proves that she has captivated us.  We feel her peril.  It is a shame that the directors couldn't have stuck to that briefly shown single tear rather than jumping into fantasy schmaltz at the end.  

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

WHAT MAISIE KNEW has a running time of 98 minutes as is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. The movie played Toronto 2012 and it opened earlier this year in the USA, Taiwan, Germany, Finland and Denmark. It opened this weekend in the UK, Ireland, Greece, the Netherlands and Australia. It is available to view on demand in the UK.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

By the time I got round to watching THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT on iTunes, it had been well-reviewed by Ebert and The Guardian, and garnered a stack of award-season acclaim. And the film certainly had pedigree. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are capable of both opening a movie AND portraying characters of emotional depth and nuance (see BEING JULIA and SAFE). Mark Ruffalo has impressed me ever since his turn as a bent cop in Jane Campion's IN THE CUT. And if we look at the younger members of the cast, Mia Wasikowska showed balls as well as ethereal beauty in Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and Josh Hutcherson's performance in BRIDGE FROM TERABITHIA contributed to the emotional punch packed by the film. Most of all, I loved writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's spiky, emotionally skewering drama LAUREL CANYON, and was eager to see how she would bring that wry observational skill to the topic of a gay marriage brought under pressure by the appearance of the childrens' birth father. Put simply, I was ready to believe that the critical and commercial success of THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT was well deserved and looked forward to seeing it myself. 

Imagine then, my disappointment, to discover a drama filled with characters drawn in two-dimensions, behaving in ways that seemed at odds with their temperament. I neither understood their actions nor cared about the consequences. A drama that should have been nuanced and sophisticated thus seemed as trite and crass as romantic-comedies dealing with more conventional relationships. I can, then, only, conclude, that the praise heaped upon this film reflects our collective relief that one can now make a movie about a gay marriage and treat it as a matter of fact rather than as a cause. But, then, again, doesn't the heaping on of accolades suggest that we aren't quite there yet? 

At any rate, here's how the film works. Nic (Annette Bening) is married to Jules (Julianne Moore) and they have two kids, 18 year old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and 15 year old Laser (Josh Hutcherson). The characters are drawn in broad strokes. Nic is the professionally successful control freak - Jules is the stay at home mum turned landscape gardener - a wannabe hippie with low self esteem. The kids are similarly broadly drawn - Joni is the swot and Laser is the jock. Basically, they are happy enough until the kids get in touch with their birth father, an immature but charming restaurateur called Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Nic is immediately suspicious of his destabilising influence, but Jules connects with his laissez-faire non-judgmental attitude. 

Some of what follows is deeply predictable. Joni starts acting out in teen rebellion, spurred on by her motorcycle driving dad. Laser actually wisens up when his cool dad points out that his cool friend is actually an arsehole. But the real shock - the real crass and incredible (as in I literally don't believe it) - is that Jules has an affair with Paul. What kind of loving mother would really give up her family for a drifter like Paul?  (Unlike many message-boarders I don't have a problem with the fact that she has an affair with a man rather than a woman - I can buy that she's maybe bisexual rather than a lesbian.) Just because she felt her wife wasn't giving her enough support at home? I mean, maybe I could buy it in a movie that took her emotional state before the affair more seriously, but in this sunshine rom-com, I just didn't get it at all. As a result, when Nic reacts with understandable rage and distress, Annette Bening's performance seems to be coming from a different place entirely. It's worthy and heartfelt but entirely out of keeping with the rest of the film. Worst still, it makes Julianne Moore's performance as Jules during the repentance scene look utterly shallow by comparison.

What I was left with was a film that was trying to be very right-on and deserved credit for trying to treat gay marriage like any other marriage - worthy of cinematic exploration.  But I was also left with a film full of characters that acted in ways that I didn't buy into because they weren't sufficiently well-drawn. Poor Annette Bening tried to take the  material to a more profound level, but was, frankly, running on her own. This isn't, then, a bad film, but it isn't a great one either. Too uneven in tone - too uneven in its performances - too unfair to its male lead character - too easy on its female lead character - and just too thin altogether.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT played Sundance, Berlin, London and Toronto 2010 and opened last year in the US, Iceland, Israel, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Argentina, France, Greece, Ireland, the UK, Brazil, Uruguay, Germany, Portugal, Austria, Chile and the Netherlands. It opened earlier this year in Belgium, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore, Poland, Spain and Hong Kong. It is currently on release in Estonia, Italy, Mexico and Turkey. It opens on April 7th in Hungary and on April 29th 2011. It is available to rent and own. THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT was nominated for BEst Film, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay at the 2011 Oscars. It won the Berlin Teddy for Best Feature Film. It won the Golden Globe for Best Film and Actress - Musical or Comedy.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is a movie that is utterly, wretchedly disappointing. Despite an all-star cast, and handsome production values, the resulting film is uneven in tone, superficial where it wants to be profound, and undeserving of the big emotional punches it tries to pull.

The film was written and directed by Rebecca Miller(THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE), based on her own play. It features the eponymous Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) as a middle-aged woman, questioning her life choices through a series of flashbacks. Despite her picture perfect middle-aged existence, we learn that, as a young girl, Pippa was damaged by her exposure to her mother's addiction to speed and resulting psychological problems. The young Pippa (Blake Lively) thus high-tails it to New York where she almost falls into become a soft-porn model for her aunt's girlfriend (Julianne Moore) out of sheer boredom, develops a drug habit of her own, but then is rescued by an older man (Alan Arkin.) Fast forward to her present day crisis, and Pippa is living with her aged husband in a retirement community. She is insulted by his affair with a damaged even younger woman (Winona Ryder) and so trips into an affair of her own with an equally damaged young man (Keanu Reeves).

As I said, this is a well-cast film, and handsomely photographed. I have no doubt that Miller is trying to earnestly explore middle-aged feminine angst and to say something profound about self-esteem and addiction. The problem is that none of it seems real. It all seems like a very stage-y very contrived set of scenes, clumsily shuffled into a movie. At times it almost seems like a caricature of one of those Woody Allen films, except without the wry humour, where old men seem to be able to attract ever younger more attractive women and everyone spends the whole time discussing their neuroses and committing suicide.

Enough already.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE was released last autumn and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

London FIlm Fest Day 9 - CHLOE

Atom Egoyan's latest film, CHLOE, treads familiar territory - sexual jealousy, paranoia and the transgressive desires that rock mainstream marriages. Julianne Moore plays a successful gynecologist (of course!) who suspects her flirtatious husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating. As in the laughably dissimilar EXTRACT, she tests him by setting him with a beautiful young prostitute (Amanda Seyfried evidently trying to shake off that MAMMA MIA! wholesomeness). In contrast to the more simplistic French source film, NATALIE, Egoyan and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (SECRETARY) keep us guessing as to whether the husband is really cheating, or whether he is the victim of his wife's insecurity. We also have a classic Egoyan relationship between the wife and the prostitute: is the wife really falling for the hooker, or is she just trying to get close to her husband in a really fracked up way? And is the hooker really falling for the wife, or is she just being emotionally or indeed financially manipulative?

I really loved this film. Moore gives a strong central performance as a woman d'un certain age in a crisis, and Seyfried is convincing both as seductress and vulnerable young girl. They sell their relationship, and that makes the film. I also love the very particular production design from Phillip Barker, and the locations chosen - in particular the marital home. The wife is, by virtue of architecture mirroring her psyche, a voyeur, condemned to look through picture windows and listen at doors and stare at reflections. It works wonderfully.

CHLOE played Toronto 2009 and will be released in France in March 2010.

London Film Fest Day 3 - A SINGLE MAN

A SINGLE MAN is a wonderful film. It is what film should be - brave in subject matter and style, even if not every bold choice succeeds.

Tom Ford, of Gucci and Tom Ford Menswear fame, makes an assured and impressive directorial debut with his adaptation of Christoper Isherwood's novel about a middle-aged man mourning the loss of his long-time lover. The movie opens as George wakes up, and confronts the pain of getting through the day. Then, like THE HOURS, the movie follows him as he dresses impeccably, teaches a literature class to bored college students, cleans out his desk, cleans out his bank account, and prepares to die. These morbid actions are inter-cut with flashbacks to his life with his younger lover Jim

- how he heard the news of Jim's death; intimate moments together; how they met. As the night draws on, the tension builds. George is distracted by dinner with his wonderfully washed up best friend Charley, and then an encounter with an enigmatic young student called Kenny. The question remains: can George find the strength to continue.

A SINGLE MAN is one of the few films to give an intimate, credible portrayal of a long-term homosexual relationship - free of politics or prurience. It's also one of the few films to deal credibly, un-melodramatically, with grief. The relationship between George and Charley - a woman with whom he had a brief fling in her younger days, and who evidently still holds a torch for him - is also utterly believable and heart-breaking. All of this is portrayed sensitively but not earnestly: A SINGLE MAN can be funny and touching and ridiculous all at once.

The success of the film is at all levels of the production. In front of the camera, Colin Firth gives a career-best performance as George - depicting grief, fascination, lust, doubt - and often in extreme close-up. It's an incredibly empathetic performance and deservedly won a prize at Venice. In supporting roles, Julianne Moore is very good as Charley, with young Ryan Simpkins stealing scenes in support. (Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult have much smaller roles.) Aside from the acting, I loved Dan Bishop's luxurious production design and DP Eduard Grau's honey-tinged visuals. But most of all, you have to credit director Tom Ford and editor Joan Sobel with their daring non-linear story-telling and the clever inter-cutting of shots in each scene. The film has a dreamy, high-sensory-perception feel, which reminded me a little of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. The only visual tick I found a little annoying and forced was the fact that whenever George looked at something he connected with, the screen warmed up several shades of orange.

A SINGLE MAN played Venice, where Colin Firth won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Toronto and London 2009. It will be released in the USA on December 11th; in Italy on January 22nd; in Australia and New Zealand in February.

Eventual tags: drama, tom ford, christopher isherwood, david scearce, colin firth, julianne moore, matthew goode, ginnifer goodwin, nicholas hoult, ryan simpkins, paulette lamori, lee pace,

BLINDNESS - doesn't earn the right to include such graphic footage

BLINDNESS is an elongated metaphor for the loneliness people feel in modern society. It shows us a world, very much like our own, where people are essentially self-interested and "blind" to the feelings of others. This manifests itself in a strange plague that turns everyone blind, except for a Doctor's wife (Julianne Moore). The blind are herded into prisons, where savagery takes over. Gael Garcia Bernal's character establishes himself as a tyrant. Woman are forced to submit to rape in order to survive.

The rape scenes are, as they should be, hard to watch. I have no truck with this in principle. One of the best movies I've ever scene is Gaspar Noe's IRREVERSIBLE, which features one of the most graphic and unendurable rape scenes in film. The difference is that IRREVERSIBLE earned the right to show that scene by placing it in context and showing how it affected all concerned. It was a crucial part of a brilliant film. By contrast, BLINDNESS never really works as a film.  I didn;t engage with characters - there was no real plot - or at least, I didn't understand why characters took the decisions they did, so that the plot seemed implausible - and worst of all, the "big idea" is rather obvious.  That the director, Fernando Mireilles feels it necessary to hit us over the head with it us is simply unfortunate. It's simply a rather patronising, obvious, pedagogical exercise. 

BLINDNESS played Cannes and Toronto 2008 and was released earlier this year in Brazil, the US, Belgium, France, Greece, Mexico, Chile, Germany, Peru, Singapore, Panama, Argentina, Israel, Portugal, South Korea, Finland, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK and Japan. It opens in Venezuela on December 19th and in Italy on March 6th.

EAGLE EYE - slick vacuous paranoid thriller

EAGLE EYE is a very slick, not undiverting action movie with a plot to so ludicrous* you could stick a cherry on top and call it Sarah Palin. Two normal people, played by Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, are plucked out of obscurity by a sinister female voice on the end of a cellphone who seems to be able to control any IT system in America. Naturally, the fuzz, in the form of Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson, are also chasing after our heros, in a movie that splices by NORTH BY NORTHWEST with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and ends up some way south of both of them. There are some flashy stunts and car chases and a suitably paranoid thriller element in which the very systems designed to keep us safe turn against it. As a basic guide, if you enjoyed WANTED or HITMAN you'll probably enjoy EAGLE EYE, but don't expect something of the same quality as DISTURBIA.

EAGLE EYE is on release in the US, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Hong Kong, Peru, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Venezuela, Belgium, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, Austria, Estonia, Spain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, India, the UK and Japan. It opens next weekend in Iceland and Norway. It opens on December 24th in France and on January 2nd in Japan.

*Seriously. *SPOILER* Would an artificial intelligence so powerful it could control every network need to coerce two dumbass civilians anyways?

Todd Haynes retrospective - SAFE

Todd Haynes' 1995 movie SAFE is one of the creepiest, most subversive films I have seen. It opens in perfectly manicured American suburbia - the home of the shag-pile carpet and the hostess trolley. Everything is perfect - almost too perfect. Sterile surfaces are photographed in perfectly symmetrical tableaux - coloured in bland pastel. Our protagonist is a housewife called Carol White. Julianne Moore plays her as a fragile woman, uneasy in her own skin. Her life is defined by her house and its furnishings and she exists to service the needs of her family.

Moments of black humour, satirising materialism, are flecked throughout this otherwise sinister and intense film. Just watch Carol's reaction when she realises her decorators have delivered the wrong coloured sofa! But for the most part this is a terrifying film. Carol develops non-specific illnesses. Is she really physically ill or are her allergic reactions a manifestation of a nervous disorder? Will her doctors and her family help her? Will she put herself forward for help? In the end, Carol scorns conventional therapy for a new-age centre for people sickened by the modern environment. In this final section, the movie shifts from a critique of bourgeois materialism and neuroses to a satire of new-age cults that cater to the whims of those willing to pay.

Haynes' film is notable for three reasons. First, as social critique it was remarkably prescient on the issues of environmental degradation and the rising tide of nameless fear whipped up by politicians and the media. In addition, one might read the movie as a parable about the irrational reaction to the rise of AIDS in the 1980s. The second reason why the film is notable is that it gave us a glimpse of Haynes' technical accomplishment - a facility that was to be expressed most fully in his homage to Douglas Sirk, FAR FROM HEAVEN. Finally, the film was a break-out role for Julianne Moore and foreshadows many of the roles she was later to become famous for. In her icy detachment and her self-imprisonment, Carol White is the precursor for Linda Patridge in MAGNOLIA and more particularly, of Laura Whitaker in FAR FROM HEAVEN and Laura Brown in THE HOURS. For all these reasons, and the sheer horror of this chilling thriller, SAFE remains a must-see movie.

SAFE opened in 1995 and is available on DVD.