THE RETURN**

THE RETURN is an earnest but overly attenuated retelling of the closing act of the Greek myth Odysseus. A fully shredded Ralph Fiennes stars as the king who abandoned his people for a decade long siege of Troy and then an epic years-long sea voyage home.  When we meet him he is washed up naked on his home island, hiding his true identity through shame that he returned when so many of his soldiers died.   Meanwhile his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is being harassed to take another husband among the many foreign raiders who are pillaging her lands.

We do not see the spousal reunion until around 45 minutes into the film and it's an acting tour de force.  Odysseus refuses to reveal his identity but Penelope has figured it out and asks searching questions of him - why did he abandon his family? Why did he take so long to come home? War? What Is It Good For? etc.  We then spend an hour derping around the island as their son is on the run from the raiders, before the climactic bow and arrow scene in which Aragorn, sorry Odysseus, reclaims his bride, and goes Full Tonto on his rivals.

That one deeply moving reunion scene aside, this film is desperately slow. Thanks to some pretty pedestrian direction from Uberto Pasolini (STILL LIFE), it feels as though each scene is wading through molasses, and Odysseus stringing his bow seems to take an age.  I feel like there is a really good 60 minute cut of this film that is more engrossing and less repetitive. I mean, how many times do we really need to be told that Penelope is being forced to take a husband? I couldn't shake the feeling that this was all just an excuse for Ralph Fiennes to get buff, naked, and drenched in blood.  Maybe he longs for a role in Vikings?

THE RETURN is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released on Prime Video earlier this month.

WINTER BOY aka LE LYCEEN****

 

Theatre and cinema writer-director Christophe Honore (MA MERE) returns to our screens with a deeply personal, heartfelt and affecting retelling of the loss of his father and the impact this had on him as a young gay man.

The film opens in contemporary rural France with high-school student Lucas speaking not quite to camera as an unreliable narrator of his own story. We later find this is part of a therapy session. He describes his final trip to boarding school with his father, played courageously by Honore himself, who we come to realise probably committed suicide by driving his car into oncoming traffic.  Very quickly, the father is dead, and we see the rest of the film unfold in grief and trauma.

At the start of the film, Lucas is an out gay schoolboy with an active sex life. But when his father dies he decides to close off all feelings and live for physicality and the moment. He goes to Paris with his elder brother Quentin and develops a crush on Quentin's room-mate Lilio. He also flirts with religion, indulges in a random hook-up for the first time (nicely inter-cut!) and flirts with sex work in a kind of twisted act of protection for Lilio.

Clearly he is acting out, and struggling to come to terms with grief and his own sexual power as a near-adult. It's a lot and when the waves finally break the ramifications are severe and sensitively handled. 

There's so much to love in this film. First and foremost, newcomer Paul Kircher's magnetic central performance as Lucas but also Erwan Kapoa Fale's heartbreakingly sensitive turn as Lilio. I love that Honore depicts gay sex beautifully and openly, and also that he depicts the love-hate of siblings so authentically. Vincent Lacoste is fantastic as big brother Quentin. I really felt like I knew this trio and felt invested in their lives. 

But there are things I didn't like in the movie too. I didn't like that the opening therapy scene carried on into voiceover over the immediate reaction to the death. I found it mannered and distracting rather than elucidating. I think Honore means it to be mannered: he's making a point about a disjointed, fragmentary and contradictory narrator. Fine. I just could've done without it.  I also didn't like what felt like a forced focus on the mother (Juliette Binoche) late in the film. It felt as though Honore had to give her one big scene to get her to do the film.

That said, this remains one of the most beautifully told and affecting movies I've seen in a while, and well worth seeking out. I can't wait to see what Paul Kircher does next. 

LE LYCEEN has a running time of 122 minutes. It played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2022 and BFI Flare 2023.

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

An ageing successful actress, Maria (Juliette Binoche) travels to Switzerland to accept an award on behalf of the reclusive playwright, Wilhelm Melchior, who gave her her big break. But matters are complicated when it is discovered that Melchior, loosely based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has died and the acceptance speech has to become a kind of eulogy.   While at the ceremony, Maria is persuaded to star in that two-hander play once again, but this time in the older role of Helena rather than the younger role of the seductive Sigrid.  She practices the role with her loyal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) at the beautiful mountainside home of Wilhelm's widow.  This role reversal, with Maria forced to play her age, and Valentine transformed from PA into sexually powerful Sigrid, throws up all sorts of conflicts and echoes.  This is most mischeviously played out in the character of Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) - a wild child starlet who, in echoes of Kristen Stewart's own life - has slept with her director.  

GODZILLA - 3D IMAX

An excruciating confession for a cinephile: I've never seen the iconic original Godzilla movie nor any of its sequels. I may have watched Roland Emmerich's Matthew Broderick-starring remake but I've blanked it out of my memory. So I come to this new GODZILLA with few expectations and little knowledge.  What did I get? A movie that impressed me with its moody visuals and overwhelming soundtrack & sound design - a movie dripping with first-rate character actors and earnest good intentions.  But, sad to report, it's also a movie that just left me cold  - that landed like the proverbial dead fish on the screen.  And when you start to really pick it apart, you realise that underneath all that gorgeous production design what you have is a pretty hackneyed and muddled script with cardboard cut-out characters and less courage than it might have done.

So here's the story.  An earthquake hits a Japanese nuclear plant (too soon?) and a young kid loses his scientist mother (Juliette Binoche - earnest cameo).  Fast forward twenty odd years and that kid's now an army bomb disposal expert (Aaron Johnson) sceptical of his father's belief that it wasn't an earthquake at all.  He follows his dad (Bryan Cranston with hair!) to the original site, witnesses the monster first hand, and returns to the USA via Hawaii in the wake of its attacks. Caught up in the military response he colludes in a plan to lure the monster with a nuke, off which it apparently feeds. But of course, it's not so simple. Because that monster is itself being hunted by another larger foe- Godzilla himself. 

I love the idea that Godzilla is not the key threat and the twist in the tail that only the Japanese scientist (Ken Watanabe) at first perceives.  I also like the way in which the screenwriters, Max Borenstein and David Callaham (THE EXPENDABLES) try to respect the original timeline of the Godzilla movies and create a kind of continuity.  But I hate pretty much everything else that has to do with story.  The way that each generation of men has to have a picture perfect family with a cute kid. How we know the good guys are good guys because they are good fathers. How the hero's wife (Elizabeth Olsen) has nothing to do but look concerned and cry.  How actors as good as Sally Hawkins get lost in the chaos.  If the movie had had any balls whatsoever, someone in that family nut wouldn't have made it.  There's just a complete lack of relief from good people looking earnest and trying their damnedest to help out. Even the bloody monster isn't exempt.

All of which is a crying shame because the young British director Gareth Edwards (MONSTERS)  has made a quite stunning leap from micro-budget creature-features into the big time with a confident and visually wondrous palette in GODZILLA. I guess it's just a shame that his movie didn't have some of the wit of PACIFIC RIM because it sure as hell has the 2-D characters.

GODZILLA has a running time of 124 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK.

GODZILLA is on release in the USA, Belgium, Switzerland, Egypt, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden,  the UAE, Albania, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, the UK, Georgia, Greece, Hong Kong, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Montenegro, Macedonia, Mexico, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Serbia, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, Thailand, Ukraine, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Estonia, Spain, India, Indonesia, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Panama, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Taiwan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, South Africa, Afghanistan, Fiji, Liechtenstein, Bangladesh, Iran and Trinidad and Tobago. It opens on May 22nd in Cambodia and Pakistan;  and on June 13th in China and on July 25th in Japan.

COSMOPOLIS

COSMOPOLIS is a steaming pile of pretentious wank. This may well be the point. Either way, it's boring as hell. Robert Pattinson plays a young Wall Street "big swinging dick" stuck in a limousine for a day as he tries to cross town for a haircut but is trapped in heinous traffic by a presidential motorcade and anti-capitalist protesters  En route, he meets his wife, lovers, advisors and a doctor. All of these people, and the antihero himself, speak in a bored self-assured monotone. Mostly they speak in nonsensical platitudes. There are no emotions, and little real intellect. They are trapped in a slick process, and smugly content there. When the antihero's wife says "it hurts" she shows no emotion. Her husband responds by telling her "my prostrate is asymmetrical".  It's all basically bollocks, especially the bits where Cronenberg (or maybe source author David Cronenberg) try to construct dialogue that refers to central banks or any actual financial happenings.

Is this how the creative industry views Wall Street? A bunch of humourless, self-deluded, pretentious, vapid cyborgs? Because it's nonsense.  If you want to really know about Wall Street and its ethics you can watch MARGIN CALL.  Because COSMPOLIS is nothing more than beautifully produced but alienating and alienated nonsense. And as for the ending, don't even get me started on just how massively Cronenberg pussies out.

COSMOPOLIS played Cannes 2012 and opened earlier this year in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Hungary, Portugal, Croatia, the Netherlands and Canada. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on June 22nd in Poland, June 28th in Israel, July 20th in Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on August 2nd in Australia, on August 9th in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine and Turkey, on August 16th in Slovenia and the USA,  on August 21st in Finland, on September 7th in Brazil and Sweden; on September 13th in Hong Kong, on September 27th in Greece, on October 11th in Spain and on November 8th in Argentina.

COSMOPOLIS is rated R and has a running time of 109 minutes.  

CERTIFIED COPY - A noble failure

Reknowned Iranian auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, has made his first non-Farsi feature, CERTIFIED COPY. The movie plays as a two-hander between Juliette Binoche, who won an award at Cannes for her performance in the film, and opera-singer William Shimmel, who makes his feature debut. He plays an English author called James Miller, in Italy to promote his book. Its central idea is that copies are as valuable as originals - and indeed, that all originals, in art, are essentially copies of the real-life model anyway. Pulled away from his lecture, Binoche's character leaves a note inviting him to meet the next day. She is a fan - he has to sign many copies of his book for her - but then again, she doesn't seem to agree with his central thesis. The opening half hour sees them argue of the nature of worth and beauty. She is fan - nervous, following his direction - and he seems irritated, spending time with her merely to pass time. The movie is hard to engage with - the conversation is too dry, too stilted - maybe a fault of the translation? The only thing that held my attention was the recognition of familiar Kiarostami tropes - conversations in cars, mobile phones interrupting conversations, the inability to communicate. The movie seems strange, disconcerting, and rather boring - but was this deliberate - the calm before the storm?

Something changes in the movie when the protagonists drive to a Tuscan hill-town and take a coffee. James describes the inspiration for the book - having observed a scene with a mother and son in Florence. He does not finish describing it, but it has a deep emotional impact on Binoche's character. Was she the mother? Why is she crying? Why does he callously get up to take a call regardless of her distress? We will never know - this just isn't that kind of film. The second occurrence in the cafe that shifts the gears of the film is that the proprietress mistakes them to be a married couple. Binoche's character falls in with the mistake, and soon James does too. The tension increases - the disquiet increases. By playing husband and wife without ever discussing why or whether too, they don't just flirt, or have moments of tenderness, but bicker and disagree. Binoche's character resents her husbands long absences and neglect of their teenage son. Using the man in front of her as a proxy - a copy - she vents her frustration and he responds in kind. The intensity of the exchange makes us wonder if they are really acting or if they were acting in the first part of the film - are they really husband and wife?

The film is hard to read - or rather there are many ways in which to read it. But what troubles me is that I can't read its success because even the performances are hard to pin down. Is William Shimmel a wooden actor - outclassed by Binoche? Or is he playing a character that's meant to be wooden, callous, emotionally avoidant? Is Binoche's performance bad because it occasionally veers into hamminess? Or is she playing a woman who is melodramatic, emotionally unstable, needy?

Overall, I found CERTIFIED COPY intellectually interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. I admired it more than enjoying it. It raised interesting questions about proxies and originals, and the difficulty of communication. But it also raised too many questions about the essential quality of the performances - and I suspect the answers would not be forgiving to either actor. So, overall, a noble failure, but far better to fail at something provocative and slipper than mundane.

CERTIFIED COPY played Cannes 2010 and was released in France, Italy and the Netherlands earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK.

SUMMER HOURS / L'HEURE D'ETE - dry philosophical drama

SUMMER HOURS is a hopelessly dry philosophical drama in which narrative drive and emotional veracity are sacrificed for a rather hackneyed discussion of the nature of memory, artistic value and heritage.

The movie opens with a scene of a family celebrating their grandmother's birthday in a French country house. The wonderfully well-preserved Anna Scob plays the matriarch as a refreshingly realistic woman: she has sacrificed her life to preserving the memory of her beloved uncle, a famous artist, but she will not impose the same burden on her own children. They come, enjoy the house, leave her exhausted and abandoned. She knows that there is no room for her in their full lives, and that, with the exception of her eldest son, they have no appreciation of the wonderful works of art nouveau scattered throughout the property.

The film then moves into its second segment. Some time has passed and the matriarch has died. The three children meet at the funeral and decide what to do with the house. The younger son is an ambitious businessman moving to China, with no need of a third-share in a living museum. The daughter is a successful New York-based designer, similarly keen to sell out of the house and, indeed, of France. The elder son is forced to comply as he doesn't have the money to buy them out.

It is at this point that I thought the family drama would break into a fever pitch. But no, everyone is incredibly civilised. Yes, the elder brother, played ably by Charles Berling (RIDICULE), is heart-broken, but he can empathise with his siblings. Indeed the sister (Juliette Binoche) and the younger brother (Jérémie Renier (IN BRUGES)) are also keen not to impose on their brother, and are sorry that the necessary actions must be taken. In addition, there is a sniff of passed scandal, but nothing that is developed or played out.

So, the movie grinds on through the disposals, in an ever more dessicated, academic discussion. Do the objects, removed from the house into the Musee d'Orsay, caged and sterile, lose their real beauty? Or is it better that they should be properly restored and displayed for the nation? Should we sanctify our heritage or play basketball in the artists studios of yesterday? And what constitutes art? The honest appreciation of a cleaner, or the appraisal of a critic?

SUMMER HOURS is a movie, then, that sacrifices emotion to academic discussion. Such a shame, that's it's intellectual debates are so trite and unoriginal.

SUMMER HOURS was released in France and the Netherlands earlier this year. It is currently on release in Taiwan and the UK. It goes on release in Greece on August 14th.

Overlooked DVD of the month - PARIS JE T'AIME

PARIS JE T'AIME is a series of 18 five minute short films inspired by the different arrondisements of Paris. Each director had 2 days to film in their designated area. Sadly, the films don't really work as a coherent whole. It isn't the case that watching one film will give you a cunning insight to another. As such, I'll review them as individual shorts.

The movie opens with MONTMARTRE**, in which director-actor Bruno Podalydès skewers our post-card vision of Paris, and Montmartre in particular, as a city of love. A middle-aged man curses the traffic and his lack of success with women. It's an entirely forgettable segment.

Gurinder Chadha uses her segment, QUAIS DE SEINE*, to comment on European perceptons of Muslim women who wear the hijab. A young girl articulates her choice to wear the veil to a bemused young ethnic European boy. This segment isn't forgettable but for all the wrong reasons. It's a pretty trite exploration of an extremely complicated social issue. Maybe a more profound treatment isn't possible in a five-minute slot? But if that were the case, Chadha should have chosen another story.

In LE MARAIS****, we finally get a fascinating and memorable segment. Gus van Sant shows a young man (Gaspard Ulliel) telling another that he loves him, not realising that the object of his affections can't understand French well enough to understand him. It's an enchanting and tragic little mood piece, but I don't quite understand why we need to have a cameo of Marianne Faithful. It strikes me as redundant cinematic name-dropping.

TUILLERIES**** is another fantastic segment. The Coen Brothers mess with us by filming the entire skit in a metro station. A nervous American tourist (Buscemi) gets roundly beaten up for daring to make eye contact with a kissing couple. So much for the city of love!

Walter Salles sticks to his preoccupations with social divides in LOIN DU 16e**. Cataline Sandino Moreno leaves her own baby to work as a nanny after a perishing commute. Her employer dehumanises her. It's all worthy enough but just like's Chadha's segment, comes across as a bit obvious and trite.

Christopher Doyle's bizarre segment has a salesman (Barbet Schroeder) enter a surreal Chinatown salon in PORTE DE CHOISY*. I was bemused and unimpressed. It's a shame - because it somewhat detracts from Doyle's reputation as an outstanding cinematographer.

In BASTILLE**, Leonor Watling shows a wealthy man trapped in a loveless marriage, but rediscovering his love for his wife (Miranda Richardson) when she falls ill. Much like the first segment, I thought Watling gave us a rather dull story, told with no visual flair.

Nobuhiro Suwa gives us a segment that rather predictably uses Juliette Binoche as a grieving mother. In a Gondry-esque flight of fancy she deludes herself with visions of a cowboy (Willem Defoe) in PLACE DES VICTOIRES**. It's all a bit mawkish and forced.

Sylvain Chaumet shows life in Paris for two mimes in TOUR EIFFEL****. It's sweet and bizarre and rather strange.

Alfonso Cuarón puts together a tricksy single take conversation between Nick Nolte and Ludivigne Sagnier in PARC MONCEAU***. It's clever but hardly substantial or affecting.

Oliver Assayas has Maggie Gyllenhaal procure drugs in the QUARTIER DES ENFANTS ROUGES***. He makes a nice comment about the interaction between the heritage of the district and the current underground scene.

Oliver Schmitz shows a moment of violence and rekindled love at first sight in PLACE DES FETES*****. It's arguably the best segment in the movie. The acting is brilliant - the concept is original - it's tricksy but emotionally engaging all at the same time. Although it's five minutes long you feel you really know the characters and the lives they live. And best of all, you get the kind of social insight that Chadha and Salles were striving for without feeling lectured at.

Richard LaGravenese has Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant act out an argument for a prostitute in PIGALLE***. It's fun but not much more.

The same could be said of Vincenzo Natali's fantasy in LA MADELAINE***. Elijah Wood's hapless traveller chances upon Olga Kurylenko's sexy vampire.

Wes Craven's PERE-LACHAISE***, where Oscar Wilde helps Rufus Sewell win back Emily Mortimer, is also well-acted but insubstantial.

Like a middle-class version of PLACE DES FETES, Tom Tykwer condenses an entire relationship between a blind man and Natalie Portman's acting student into five minutes in FAUBOURG-ST DENIS****. The two leads act beautifully - the story has a great twist - and the use of music and the musicality of speech is outstanding.

In QUARTIER LATIN**, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands have a last drink before separating in a bar run by Gérard Depardieu. Frédéric Auburtin directs. Yawn.

Perhaps most controversial and open to interpretation is Alexander Payne's segment 14e ARRONDISEMENT*/*****. He has a stereotypical American tourist (Margo Martindale) recite in demotic French her love for Paris. I can't make up my mind whether he's being very patronising about American tourists, or whether he's actually satirising European prejudices about Americans. This segment is either offensive or brilliant! You decide!

DAN IN REAL LIFE - Two words: Pig Face

Peter Hedges is a screenwriter who has an uncanny ability to write about real life and real relationships in a way that you can relate to, that touches you, but isn't mawkish. After brilliant adaptations of WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE? and ABOUT A BOY, and a really great indie drama called PIECES OF APRIL, he returns to the screen as writer-director of DAN IN REAL LIFE.

This new movie is a far more conventional, mainstream effort than his previous work. The story is familiar to rom-com fans, not least to those of us who sat through the vastly inferior THE FAMILY STONE. Basically a man falls in love at first sight with the one woman he can't have - his brother's new girlfriend. Watch them squirm through the family weekend! Watch true love win despite the initial anger of the betrayed! In this case we have Steve Carrell playing an earnest, heart-broken widower and father of three called Dan Burns. He's basically just a warm, funny, messed up guy - who wouldn't fall in love with him?! And so he meets-cute with a woman called Marie, played by Juliette Binoche. Marie is basically apparently a 100% Peaches and Cream wonderful women. Problem is, she's dating the younger brother, Mitch, played by Dane Cook.

The script has a few problems. I don't understand why these two seemngly perfect people would be alone in the first place. I also don't really buy into how quickly Dan's parents, kids and brother forgive him in the end. And as for the production, I thought Juliette Binoche was mis-cast. It's not so much that she can't play comedy but that she, Carrell and Cook make such odd pairings. There's simply no chemistry.

Set against all of this, DAN IN REAL LIFE is refreshingly real, occasionally very funny, and features a wonderful cameo from Emily Blunt. Most of all, Steve Carrell really has the sympathetic loser character down pat. He's totally infringing on Greg Kinnear's territory, but he's so winning you just have to forgive him! So, on balance, I guess I'd have to recommend DAN IN REAL LIFE. It's not as good as ABOUT A BOY but if I stumbled upon it on TV I'd find it hard to switch channels.

DAN IN REAL LIFE opened in the US, Iceland, Russia, Greece, Israel, Russia Greece, Israel and Slovenia in 2007. It is currently playing in Singapore and the UK. It opens in Australia next weel and in Norweay amd Spain in February. It opens in Sweden, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy in March and in the Netherlands in April 2008.

London Film Fest Day 5 - FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON/VOYAGE DU BALLON ROUGE

Oh dear. There are some films that you feel that you *ought* to like as a self-respecting cineaste and reader of the New York Review of Books. As you find yourself shifting uncomfortably in your seat, looking at your watch for the third time in five minutes and opening another bottle of mineral water you wonder, "What is wrong with me? Am I not a sensitive soul?" Well, maybe I am a barbarian, but I found FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON as boring as Alistair Darling's first Pre-Budget Report, not to mention as lacking in substance and as dependent on nicking the only good idea in it.

Starting with the good idea, this is the visual motif of the film. Writer-director Hou Hsiao Hsien bases his 2 hour French-language film on a 1950s Oscar winning short-film called THE RED BALLOON by Albert Lamorisse. There's something evocative about a small boy whose only real companion is a large red balloon that follows him through the streets of Paris. Otherwise, the small kid is dragged from pillar to post by his ditzy mother (Juliette Binoche) and new Chinese nanny (Fang Song.) He fantasises about his sister Louise, who now lives in Brussels. He's genuinely like-able but he's tragically just a bit part in his mother's chaotic life.

Apart from this visual conceit we have little else of substance here. Hou Hsiao Hsien cheekily shows us how the floating balloon effect is created by making the Chinese nanny a film student who seeks to emulate the original short. How post-modern! But I think we need a little more than THAT. And as for the chaotic life of the mother, this does provide some comic interludes. Binoche is clearly having a lot of fun in her brash blonde wig, godawful clothes and absurdly OTT puppeteer's voice. But an eccentric character neither adds up to a plot nor to a meta-text. As a result, the movie is simply boring.

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON/VOYAGE DU BALLON ROUGE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2007. It goes on release in France and Belgium in January 2008.

Overlooked DVD of the month - WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1992)

With the London Film Festival at an end, Doctor007 and I indulged in a bit of quality time with a classic romantic movie and dinner date. Watching the new Anthony Minghella flick, BREAKING AND ENTERING I was reminded of how much I admired the actress Juliette Binoche. So, I opted for an obscure remake of WUTHERING HEIGHTS from her back-catalogue. I was in the mood for a girly costume drama - a little bit of self-indulgence - but for the sake of Doctor007 opted for something with a little bit more fire and a bit less simpering. On paper, Emily Bronte's novel fulfils this criteria. It is framed with a chilling ghost story - with images of broken glass and blood - in a grim manor house on the moors. Instead of elegant courtship, we have a headstrong passionate girl called Cathy who is in love with a stubborn, violent young gypsy boy called Heathcliff. Heathcliff is abused by Cathy's elder brother to the point where she is tempted to marry a more genteel neighbour with better social standing - an act which becomes inevitable when Heathcliff leaves in a fit of pique to make his fortune. He returns to find Cathy married and pregnant and takes a slow revenge on successive generations of her family.

This movie version of the book is admirably condensed to under two hours by a screenwriter called Anne Devlin who seems to have done little else - a shame as she manages to capture the essence of the novel and leave little out. The only notable change is to make a notional character called Emily Bronte narrate rather than Ellen. This clarifies a notoriously complex structure and thankfully, Devlin does not cut down on Ellen's screen-time. The movie is less successfully directed by Peter Kosminsky who does a straightforward job capturing the suitably wild and rugged Yorkshire locations - nothing fancy but nothing terrible either.

The casting is interesting. In the secondary roles we see a young Jeremy Northam as Hindley Earnshaw and an outstanding performance by Janet McTeer as Ellen Dean. In the major roles, Ralph Fiennes is a very fine Heathcliff - combining ruthless sadism and vulnerability. The problem lies with Binoche as Cathy. Her looks are perfect and she and Fiennes have real chemisty. Her acting - when we consider her physicality and her face - is pitch perfect. The transition from playing Cathy to playing her daughter is beautifully done. Binoche even does a rather good job of supressing her French accent. But she does not finally succeed - and therein lies the rub. I recommend this movie as a sort of experiment - how far will fans of the novel forgive the hint of the French accent given the brilliance of Binoche's physical performance...?

My only other quibble is that this movie plays very much as a tragic passionate love story. But the chilling ghost story element is rather lost in translation to the screen. We are simply not haunted enough by it. Still, this is an interesting cinema adaptation and for all its flaws, tremendously enjoyable and tremendously romantic.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS was released in UK cinemas in 1992 but did not get a US release. It is now available on Region 1 and 2 DVD.

BREAKING AND ENTERING - Minghella bites off more than he can chew

Anthony Minghella's new film, BREAKING AND ENTERING is not quite up to the grand subjects and aspirations it sets itself, but is a compelling relationship drama nonetheless. That drama is set resolutely in London - the London of immigrant crime, prostitutes and that dirty of dirty words, "regeneration". And Minghella must be praised for rendering the back alleys of London's King Cross with as much menace as the back alleys of Venice in THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY. The score is also brilliantly judged.

In this world, Jude Law plays an architect called Will whose long-time partner is a beautiful Swedish woman (Robin Wright Penn). The relationship is crumbling because she cannot quite trust Will to look after her autistic daughter and resents his feelings of neglect. Will works at an architecture firm in Kings Cross whose computers keep being nicked. He follows one of the thieves - a young Bosnian kid - and ends up seducing his mother, played by Juliette Binoche. He does not tell her he knows her son is a thief.

Where this movie works is in its depiction of complex modern relationships - long-term partners with step-children. Jude Law is fine but he is acted off the screen by Robin Wright Penn and Juliette Binoche. The movie also has a deep vein of deadpan humour, supplied by Martin Freeman in a cameo re-run of his character in THE OFFICE. Better still, Vera Farmiga - who I hated in THE DEPARTED - is astoundingly good and wickedly funny in her role as a prostitute. She really elevates the movie and it is a shame when her character drops out of focus.

But the movie fails almost everywhere else. Accents aside, the immigrant story does not feel anchored in fact and minutely observed cultural details. The love story between the white architect and the african cleaner is picked up and tossed aside - as if Minghella's knows this is an interesting contemporary story but has neither the time nor the familiarity with the subject matter to flesh it out. The entire final 40 minutes is a mess - and badly needs a script doctor. The characters do things that seem contrary to their personalities - and the denouement seems - SPOILER ALERT - cobbled together in order to give closure to the protagonist with not a care for the treatment of Binoche's character. This makes the final scene of happy families in the architecture firm stick in the throat.

Finally, what we have is a relationship drama that sort of works surrounded and obscured by bigger social issues that are never convincingly portrayed. If you want a document of social life in London - check out DIRTY PRETTY THINGS - a far better movie all round.

BREAKING AND ENTERING played Toronto and London 2006. It opens in the UK on November 10th and in the US on December 8th. It opens in Australia, Denmark, Belgium, France, Spain, Argentina, the Netherlands, Germany and Brazil in January 2007. It opens in Italy in March 2007.

HIDDEN - Intellectually demanding thriller, superbly executed

Austrian director Michael Haneke's new flick HIDDEN is superb. Indeed, for what it is worth, this is my Best Film of 2005, a triple honour shared by A History of Violence and Kung Fu Hustle. It is a thriller that is tense from the first second to the last; it demands utter concentration and intellectual engagement from the audience. One scene in particular will take your breath away. It repays dividends.

The movie is set in present day Paris (though one of the filming locations is Vienna.) Daniel Auteuil (perhaps best known as Henri of Navarre in La Reine Margot) gives a bravura performance as George Laurent and Juliette Binoche plays his wife Anne. They are a successful couple - he is a famous TV literary figure, a Melvyn Bragg if you will - and she is a succesful publisher. They have a teenage son. They start getting video cassettes of surveillance footage of the street where they live and threatening pictures. The police are powerless to help. George's reaction to this "terrorism" is to become aggressive, taking action on thin evidence, becoming deceptive. Anne "gives in" to the terrror. So by now you should realise that as well as being a superbly executed face-value thriller, this movie can also be taken as an allegory for France's colonial history and recent political/military history.

In a rare example of Awards ceremonies getting it right, HIDDEN won the prize for Best Director at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. I can't say more for fear of ruining the tension, but believe me, if you are not feeling tired and could do with an "adult" movie you could do worse. It's this or David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, and for me, HIDDEN edges it out.

HIDDEN is already on release in France. It goes on nationwide release in Austria on the 18th November, limited release in the USA on 11th January 2006, and nationwide release in the UK and Germany on 26th January.