SILENT NIGHT****

Camille Griffin's brilliantly nasty little black comedy, SILENT NIGHT, deserves to become a cult Christmas classic alongside BAD SANTA and TRADING PLACES. It basically satirises all those posh, mawkish, godawful Richard Curtis films as well as middle-class Englishness in general. It gathers together a bunch of well-heeled university friends in a lovely country house for Christmas dinner, where the angst is about whether or not Waitrose has run out of sparkling water and sticky toffee pudding. Except, there's something bigger going on than your typical One Percent Problem. The world is about to end because of an irreversible environmental disaster, and everyone is going to take a suicide pill after Crimbo dinner.  These pills have been provided by the government. I mean, not to everyone, you understand. Not to immigrants, and the homeless and people who don't count in our affluent society. And as with the current climate and epidemiological crises, there are people who are in denial and think it's all a conspiracy. Not least the increasingly desperate son of the hosts, played by JOJO RABBIT's Roman Griffin Davis (conveniently the son of the director) much to the chagrin of his exasperated parents (Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode in standard posh mode).

The darkest of dark comic conceits is played beautifully by the superb ensemble cast. My favourite moments are those with the best swearing, or those with the most surprising pathos:  a little girl who won't cuddle her mummy, because mummy spent her trust fund on a pair of shoes.  It prompts a fun parlour game: what would YOU do if the world were about to end? What would you spend on? Who would you shag? And would YOU take the pill?

SILENT NIGHT has a running time of 92 minutes and is rated 15. It played Toronto 2021 and is on release in the UK.

THE AFTERMATH

James Kent (TESTAMENT OF YOUTH) returns to our screens with another earnest, deeply felt, beautifully staged, but ultimately un-engaging wartime drama. This time, we're in Hamburg in 1946 during the British occupation of the city they bombed. Jason Clarke - by far the best thing in this film - plays the only really fascinating character - a tight-lipped British officer, turned humane by his brutal experiences of war, struggling to communicate with his wife since the death of their son.  The wife is played by Keira Knightley taking a million steps back from her more challenging and interesting performance as COLETTE to play the kind of role she did before - very posh, very repressed, very superficial British woman. She acts out at her husband's coldness and grief by at first being hateful to the Germans she blames for her son's death, and then having an affair with one of them - the moody, soulful, pretty architect, now houseboy played by Alexander Skarsgard. I've commented before at how uncomfortable I feel when an affair with a third person merely exists to cause self-reflection and evolution for the protagonist. Skarsgard's character is used here in more way than one, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth at the film's resolution. I came to the conclusion that I couldn't believe it because the husband seemed to be operating on such a deeper plane of intelligence and profundity than his wife.  The result is a rather obvious, predictable film, with a hammy lead actress performance and a so-called passionate love affair at its centre than fails to catch fire. 

THE AFTERMATH is rated R and has a running time of 108 minutes. The film was released earlier this year and is now available to rent and own. 

COLETTE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Two

Wash Westmoreland switches gears from his wonderful STILL ALICE to a period drama about the French Belle Epoque novelist Colette, and her marriage to the literary impresario "Willy".  As the movie opens we see the charming, avuncular Willy come to rural Burgundy to woo the girl over a decade younger than him, but our expectations over-turned as this apparent innocent meets him later in a hay barn for a quickie.  They then move to Paris and begin their married life. She is frustrated by his affairs and flirtations - he says it's just what men do.  But the real conflict will come when Willy enlists Colette to be on his "factory" of writers. They provide the words - he the brand name and marketing.  Colette pours her childhood memories into books that effectively create a new genre - coming of age stories with a hint of subversive sexuality for young women.  Combined with Willy's carefully orchestrated PR machine, the books are a success. But all under Willy's name....

What's wonderful about this film is its recreation of a fascinating period of history - one of bold ideas, beautiful art, freedom and flirtation.  The costumes and sets are beautifully done, and even Thomas Ades' score introduces what would then have been cutting edge compositions. After all, it's this artsy salon crowd that would first have embraced Satie's Gymonpedes. I also love the completely unflamboyant way in which the film embraces colour-blind casting, and its straightforward depiction of gay relationships and gender fluid living.

As for the main strokes of the story, the script (Wash Westmoreland, the late Richard Glatzer, Rebecca Lenkiewicz) commits sins of omission rather than commission.  It is very true to the life of Colette and Willy, and especially to their facility with words. What might have been quite a dirge-like film about a woman exploited by a man is thus transformed into something very smart and witty, and often laugh out loud funny. To that end, Dominic West - who has been getting away with rogueish behaviour since THE WIRE - is perfectly cast as the "fat arsehole".  Indeed, after a rather triumphant speech by a career-best Keira Knightley, one feels rather uplifted and hopeful at the end of the film - something confirmed by end title cards that tell us how happy and successful Colette was, and of her position as the premiere women of French letters.  

My only slight complaint is that the film wants to subtly shoe-horn the Colette story into having an ending that's more streamlined and progressive than the reality would prove.  If you knew nothing else about her than what you saw in the film, you might suppose that she fought for and won all the rights to be seen as the sole author of her work and that she had a long and happy relationship with Missy.  By contrast, the relationship with Missy ended (Missy ended up committing suicide after the war) and Colette married a man and had a child.  And while she did win the rights to be sole author after Willy's death, after HER death, Willy's son contested the authorship again. 

COLETTE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Sundance, Toronto and London 2018. It went on limited release in the USA on September 21st and will be released in the UK on January 25th 2019.

THE IMITATION GAME - LFF14 - Day One

THE IMITATION GAME  is a compelling and important film - superbly acted - and no doubt championed by Harvey Weinstein for major awards.  It tells the story of the English mathematician Alan Turing  - a prodigious talent who was instrumental in cracking the German cryptography machine, Enigma, thus shortening World War Two and saving millions of lives. The tragedy of his story is that this socially awkward man lived a life of isolation and worse still secrecy: he was a homosexual at a time when to admit such a thing meant prison and ostracisation.  Turing could either work or be honest: an horrific and impossible choice. In the end, when an ungrateful country condemned him for indecency - condemned him to chemical castration, Turing committed suicide. He was only 41. And it was only last year that the government finally apologised. 

ANNA KARENINA (2012)

I have a major problem with director Joe Wright. I think he is a technically accomplished director who creates wonderfully fluid, extravagantly choreographed shots that are entirely at odds with the content of his films. I first noticed this in ATONEMENT, where his long tracking shot on the beach at Dunkirk didn't advance either plot or character - it was a showy distraction in what should have been (viz. the novel) a tightly structured, chamber drama. Sadly, in ANNA KARENINA, this desire to be as contrived and artificial and intricately choreographed as possible has over-taken the film to the point where all passion, tragedy and joy is lost in a never-ending series of delicate backdrops that showcase the Chanel Haute Joaillerie collection.  This film is not so much a tragic romance as a musical without songs, and a perfume advertisement that lasts two hours.

I am not entirely sure who is to blame.  Who was it that came up with the conceit to imprison what many have called the greatest novel ever written in the simplistic straitjacket of a theatre metaphor?  Was it Joe Wright, or playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard? In their version of 1870s Imperial Russia, high society becomes a theatre in which every aristocrat has a part to play, and rules to which they must confirm, or else be brutally cast aside.  This is the lesson which Anna Karenina learns when she sacrifices her son and her marriage to have an affair with the dashing Count Vronsky.  He also loses - his Commission, his freedom, the respect of society - but not as much as Anna -  because he can still contract a good marriage and so redeem all.  Both Anna and Vronsky learn that happiness is tarnished by the exigencies of real life, and ultimately, they are made wretched by each other and their situation. 

The intensity with which Wright and Stoppard used the theatrical metaphor is dazzling in the open twenty minutes of the film - so ingenious it quite crowds out our attention.  I barely noticed Anna and Vronsky fall in love, or Kitty's heartbreak when Vronsky leaves her for Anna.  Anna's brother Stiva becomes a caricature of a decadent aristo, like a larger than life minor comic character in Dickens.  I kept waiting to see marionette strings.  And as for the production design - it was so rich and beautiful as to be claustrophobic, and then became a parody of itself, with Princess Betsy turning into Effie Trinkett from THE HUNGER GAMES with her outlandish dresses and coiffeur.   Underneath all the anachronistic dance moves that distracted with their inelegance and artifice, I detected what looks to be a more mature and nuanced performance from Keira Knightley, and especially Jude Law as her dogmatic husband Karenin.  Too bad those performances didn't have room to breathe. But as for poor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, his Vronsky was never more than a vain poseur.  When never feel and see his love for Anna, and his motivations are not rich enough - either in respect to Anna or the  eligible young Princess Sorokina. Maybe it's the fault of the script, but Jude Law did better with less.

The result is a film that looks fabulous and moves with the intricacy of a Swiss watch, but which feels insubstantial and skates over us too lightly.  Perhaps it's because Vronsky is so poorly written.  Perhaps it's because the larger, metaphysical discussion is entirely absent.  In the novel, Anna's attempt to escape society's constrictions is contrasted with the gloriously good but conflicted and occasionally delusionally idealistic Levin, who flees to the country but never quite loses sight of the dark backing to the mirror.  We see nothing of Levin's confusion, nothing of Kitty's process of maturing, nothing of his happiness and final equivocations.  Short-changing this story might have seemed like a narrative necessity in a two hour film - editing the "secondary" story to give Anna and Vronsky more screen time. But it's a fatal cut.  Anna's story works in relation to Levin's.  And, indeed, it's possible to see ANNA KARENINA as Levin's story after all.  Without it, the film has none of the intellectual heft of the book - and it loses perhaps the best description of happiness in literature.  Still, given these constraints, I have to say that Domnhall Gleeson was absolutely superb as Levin.  I just wish I'd seen more of him.

Of course, I am well aware that after my tirade against TINKER TAILOR, I might be giving the impression that I have a pantheon of novels that have become so much a part of my life that I cannot conceive of a film-maker's interpretation that would do my vision justice. Not so in the case of ANNA KARENINA.  I admired the 1997 Bernard Rose adaptation, starring Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean and Alfred Molina, very, very much indeed. 

ANNA KARENINA played Toronto 2012 and is released this weekend in the UK and Ireland.  It opens on November 16th in the USA and on December 6th in the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. It opens on January 3rd in Russia and Turkey; on January 10th 2013 in Denmark; on January 17th in Australia; on January 24th in Australia; on January 31st in New Zealand and Brazil; on  February 14th in Argentina, Norway and Sweden; on February 21st in Italy; and on March 13th in Belgium and France.

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is a boring, tonally uneven, miscast mess. Which is a shame, because writer/director Lorene Scafaria's previous flick, NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST was a genuinely funny, sweet rom-com with an awesome soundtrack.  Maybe it was helped by it's simple conceit - two kids go on a road trip to see a band play a secret gig.  By contrast, SEEKING A FRIEND is hamstrung with a really bizarre conceit that the director clealru doesn't know how to handle: the world is going to end in three days when an asteroid hits the Earth.  

The rom-com implication of the end of the world is that Dodge (Steve Carrell) goes on a road trip to find his college sweetheart, aided by his neighbour, Manic Pixie Dreamgirl Penny (Keira Knightley). Naturally, despite the fact that he's a boring insurance salesman and she's, well, a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, he's going to fall in love with her en route.  This storyline doesn't work. Prim and proper Keira Knightley can't sell Manic Pixieness and she has no chemistry with Carrell, who basically looks like her father. Plus, the whole kooky rom-com vibe is totally offset by the disturbing background of looting and survivalists. I mean, can we really root for Penny when she abandons her boyfriend (Adam Brody) to a crowd of violent looters?

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is currently on release in the USA, Canada, Croatia, Slovenia, Israel, Ireland, Poland and the UK. It opens on July 19th in Russia, July 26th in Hungary, August 2nd in Singapore, August 8th in France, Greece, the Netherlands and Iceland, August 17th in Lithuania, August 20th in Bulgaria, August 23rd in Australia and Estonia, August 31st in Brazil, September 6th in Hong Kong, September 14th in Mexico and Turkey, September 20th in Germany, September 27th in Portugal, October 18th in Chile and November 7th in the Philippines.

The film is rated R and the running time is 101 minutes.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 13 - A DANGEROUS METHOD

A DANGEROUS METHOD is a deeply disappointing movie - dull, vacuous, with a desperately poor central performance by Keira Knightley - little sexual or emotional tension - it rolls through its scenes until it comes to a sudden halt. Frankly, the most exciting that happened during the Gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival was some poor sod having a seizure. Fans of Cronenberg's dark, dangerous films will be underwhelmed, I suspect, and those of us looking for Christopher Hampton's trademark elegant screen-writing will feel let down.  And if you want to see Michael Fassbender in psychologically challenging material, look no further than SHAME.

The central conflicts of the movie are almost bourgeois in their banality.  The first conflict is between Dr Carl Jung (Fassbender) and his one-time mentor Dr Freud (Viggo Mortensen).  Jung thinks not all neuroses have sexual origins, and that psychiatry should also embrace spiritualism.  Freud thinks Jung is discrediting an already embattled new field of research with his mystic nonsense.  Moreover, the poor Viennese academic resents Jung's rich wife.  The second conflict is between Jung and Sabine Spielrein (Knightley), Jung's patient, lover and finally his academic peer. Initially traumatised by her father, whose spankings excited her, Sabine progresses to become a psychiatrist of greater skill than Jung. Moreover, in the Freud-Jung conflict, she sides with Freud. She also escapes their love affair a stronger woman, whereas we are asked to believe that engaging in sado-masochistic sexual practices precipitated Jung's nervous breakdown.  

All this should have made for an intellectually challenging, daring, complex film.  But it does not.  The almost sterile production design; stilted camera-work; and almost coy treatment of the sexual material make for what can only be described as a kind of TV afternoon movie biopic.  I am hard-pressed to think of less erotically charged sex scenes, and a movie about overcoming sexual repression where the actors faces seem so wooden.  Worst of all, in the early scenes of most acute neuroses, Keira Knightley acts "at" being mad, rather than portraying the emotional truth of the scenes. Her physical contortions are mannered rather than real - the part was simply too challenging for her.  Still, the movie could've survived this had the script been more profound, the conflicts mined more fully, and the camera-work more innovative.  I wanted to see more of the anti-semitism and mistrust of psychiatry in Vienna. I wanted to see more of the reaction to Otto Gross' (Vincent Cassel) breakdown.  This film desperately needed widening out. 

A DANGEROUS METHOD played Toronto and Venice 2011. It opened earlier this year in Italy. It opens in Germany on November 10th, in the Netherlands on November 17th, in the USA on November 23rd, in Spain on November 25th, in France on November 30th, in Denmark on January 12th 2012, in Sweden and the UK on February 10th and in Hungary on March 8th.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 1 - NEVER LET ME GO

NEVER LET ME GO is a patiently paced, melancholy sci-fi movie that looks like a Merchant Ivory film - BLADE-RUNNER meets THE RAILWAY CHILDREN.  As it opens, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are children at a picturesque English boarding school called Hailsham. They are good little children - they accept what their teachers tell them about the dangers of the outside world and the importance of keeping well. They are, and I'm sure everyone knows by now, bred as organ-donors. Indeed, the strength of the film is that this fact is taken as read. Far more interesting to avoid petty suspense and to spend precious cinema time examining the ramifications of that fact.  The children know they are donors but also know that they are human - they feel, love, make art - in short have souls - an idea that is deeply disturbing, indeed repugnant, to the society that has bred them.

The sci-fi/pol theory content of the book and film is softened by its immersion in an emotional drama. Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) fall in love as teenagers, making Ruth (Keira Knightley) resentful and ultimately destructive.  What could be more human than love and jealousy?  And what is more powerful than confronting people with the consequences of their actions?

But, as with many a London Film Fest Opening and Closing Night Gala, this movie is technically well-made (director - Mark Romanek, ONE HOUR PHOTO) and by no means unwatchable, but it's lacks any real spark.  The pace is too lugubrious for me - the emotions too restrained. Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield are superb as Kathy and Tommy but Keira Knightley is utterly flat as Ruth.  I'm not sure how far this is down to Alex Garland's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel - in the novel Ruth has more passion to her, more spark - or whether it's just that Knightley is quite simply outdone by Mulligan.  At any rate, by the time the whole thing limped into a final scene with a clumsy voice-over I was rather bored by it.

NEVER LET ME GO played Telluride and Toronto 2010 and was released in the US last month. It open sin Singapore and the UK on January 20th 2011, and in Belgium, France and Germany in February.

SILK - lavish but strangely uninvolving

SILK is writer-director Francois Girard's adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's best-selling novel. Set in 1860s France and Japan in the 1860s, it focuses on a young couple Herve and Helene Joncour (Michael Pitt and Keira Knightley). Herve is hired by Baldabiou (the wonderful Alfred Molina) to travel to an isolated village in Japan to buy silk-worm eggs. The mission is a success but Herve's marriage is lost. He becomes obsessed with a Japanese woman, and even when he returns to France, is transfixed by her love letters to him, begging him to return.. Nothing much actually happens but everyone looks miserable.

Michael Pitt does his typical moody, longing schtick and Keira Knightley follows suit with a series of emotionally pregnant glances that prefigure her (far better) performance in THE DUCHESS. The denouement tries to inject some drama but, given the simpering that preceeded it, it struck me as quite out of character.

On the plus side, SILK does look beautiful.

SILK played Toronto 2007 and was released in the US, Canada, Italy, the UK, Hong Long, Singapore and Greece that year. It opened earlier this year in Taiwan, Japan, Israel, Thailand, Mexico, Kuwait, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Australia, the Netherlands and Argentina. It opens this week in Belgium and is also available on DVD.

THE DUCHESS - hollow

I came to Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as someone passionately interested in the politics of the late 18th century - particularly the relationship between Fox and Pitt the Younger, and the impact of the French revolution on British political culture. I was drawn to the book because of Amanda Foreman's thesis that Georgiana, as wife of a powerful Whig patron, had a profound influence of the role of women in electioneering, by deliberately exploiting her influence as a woman of fashion.

I was far less interested in the social history of Georgiana. Yes, it is tragic that she was trapped in a loveless marriage, legally her husband's property and valued only as a means to produce an heir. But this is the history of many women before the late twentieth century and one might as well read THE FORSYTE SAGA or histories of Marie-Antoinette. That Georgiana, like Marie-Antoinette, masked her troubles at the gaming tables was also not especially interesting to me. I found it far more fascinating that men who would rule the country and its finances, such as Fox, would game all night and politick all day.

It seemed to me that the biography sold because of readers' prurient interest in the fact that the Duke of Devonshire kept his mistres, the Duchess' best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster, in the same house as his wife, apparently with his wife's consent. This new film panders to that prurience, especially in its ill-judged marketing campaign.

By stripping away the social and political context - the gambling, the significance of the electioneering, the profound disruption of revolutionary politics - the film becomes a mono-dimensional romantic drama. Naive young Georgiana is excited to make a dazzling marriage into the very pinnacle of society. But her husband is uncommunicative and, given her failure to produce a male heir, disrespectful. He callously keeps his lover, her best friend, in their house(s). And when Georgiana finds some happiness with her lover, the Duke forces her to renounce him and their love-child, or to give up her legitimate children. Georgiana does the honourable thing - after all, this is a woman so maternal that she has raised the Duke's illegitimate child as her own.

This hard-boiled story was not enough to satisfy me. The Duke (Ralph Fiennes) is a void - a misogynistic adulterer who communicates nothing. The mistress (Hayley Atwell) is insufficiently drawn and given insufficient motive. She knives her best friend so as to see her children. Very well. But Atwell is given little scope to make her seem sympathetic or even interesting. And she and Fiennes have no sexual chemistry. The Duchess (Keira Knightley) is again rather one-dimensional. Stripped of her gambling addiction, and made to renounce her lover for the noblest of reasons, she is so virtuous as to be uninteresting. That said, Keira Knightley gives a nuanced performance that brings her to life more than one could've expected given the script. This is a good performance. It's not, let's say right away, Oscar-worthy. Sadly, Dominic Cooper is rather out of his depth as her lover, Grey. He lacks the gravitas to play a potential Prime Minister, and speaks with a pronounced Estuary accent.

Will the film get away with the hollowness and thinness at its centre? Perhaps. Audiences will wallow in its lush period settings and handsome costumes. Charlotte Rampling gives a fine cameo performance as the Duchess' mother and Simon McBurney is typically captivating as Fox. Still, this could have been a far more substantial film, either in terms of content (if they had tackled the politics and gambling head on), or in terms of the visual style (if they had taken a more daring approach, as with Sophia Coppola's MARIE-ANTOINETTE.)

THE DUCHESS is on release in the UK. It is released in the US on September 19th; in Hong Kong on October 1st; in Australia on October 2nd; in France on November 12th; in Israel on November 13th; in Belgium on December 3rd; in Italy on December 23rd; in Finland on January 9th and in the Netherlands on January 15th.

THE EDGE OF LOVE - Keira Knightley rises to mediocrity

Hard-drinking, womanising poet fucks wife and ex- in Welsh squalor. Cuckolded husband understandably pissed off at funding menage a trois while fighting WW2, returns with psychological trauma and loaded gun. Cillian Murphy phones in perf. as English cuckold; Matthew Rhys suitably charming as Dylan Thomas; Keira Knightley surprisingly not a disaster as The Ex, including plausible Welsh accent; Sienna Miller steals show as discarded wife despite complete lack of Irish accent. Highlight of film is close-up of Miller cryng, book-ending scene wherein she is betrayed. Other 100 minutes desperately dull despite visual flourishes.

THE EDGE OF LOVE is on release in Ireland and the UK. It opens in Australia in August and in New Zealand in October.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - PURE

PURE is an oddly sentimental movie about a very nasty subject: a small boy coming to terms with his mother's heroin addiction. We first meeting him cooking up her "medicine", lashing out as nasty neighbours who call her what she is - a junkie. Later, he'll try to nurse her through cold turkey. Scenes where she tells him she wishes he'd never been born are almost unbearable to watch.

Molly Parker turns in a brilliant performance as the addict mother who undoubtedly loves her son. David Wenham is quite scarily convincing in his cameo role as the sinister dealer. But the real star is a young Harry Eden, seen recently in FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL. He's utterly convincing and heart-breaking as the young boy old before his time with worry, eager to do right by his mum.

What stops this movie well short of greatness is its tendency towards mawkishness, as reflected in Nitin Sawhney's score. The other great flaw is Keira Knightley trying her best with a chav London accent but failing miserably to convince as a pregnant working-class junkie.

PURE played Toronto and London 2002 and Berlin 2003 where Gillies Mackinnon and Harry Eden won awards. It was released in the UK in 2003 and in the US in 2005. It is available on DVD.

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: LIFE THROUGH A LENS - weak doc; great career

ANNIE LEIBOWITZ: LIFE THROUGH A LENS is not a particularly well-made documentary. Film-maker and sister of the subject, Barbara Leibovitz, doesn't have much visual flair, imposes no daring structure onto the material and her editing doesn't draw out incisive comments. Nonetheless, LIFE THROUGH A LENS remains an interesting movie because it's about a fascinating and iconic photographer and features interviews with film-stars, rock musicians and famous politicians.

The documentary is basically a chronological and methodological look at Annie Leibovitz' career. By chance, Annie finds herself a student photographer in San Francisco in the 1960s - just as the cultural revolution is kicking off. She establishes her reputation with gritty photo-reportage for Rolling Stone - sitting aside the great chroniclers of that age - Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Along with the politics, Annie also gets fantastic photos of all the great rock acts of the day by taking the time to hang out with them, put them at ease, and capture them off-guard. The downside of the frenetic lifestyle was drug addiction.

Some time around the end of the seventies, Rolling Stone "sold out" of San Francisco and moved to New York. It had grown up and gone mainstream. Annie also went mainstream. She cleaned up in rehab and went to work for Tina Brown at Vanity Fair. Her style of photography underwent two changes. First, Annie was photographing celebrities and film stars, pandering to the egos of the Trumps. Instead of capturing intimate pictures of grungy rockers, it was all about surface gloss and the "best side". Second, instead of capturing moments in reality, Annie was increasingly creating complicated story-board tableaux. These got more elaborate (and expensive) over time, and culminated in an over-dressed style that I personally find rather claustrophobic and alienating. Still, you can't deny that amid all the hoop-la there have been some iconic images - the naked pregnant Demi Moore, for example.

The documentary was a great way to devote 90 minutes to really thinking about Annie's work and to see the evolution of her style. I saw a bunch of photographs I'd never seen before as well as learning about the context of some that I was aware of. Seeing everything chronologically made me realise just how far I had become alienated from her recent work, but also made me appreciate just how much I loved those early Rolling Stone pictures.

What this movie isn't is a film about Annie Leibovitz' personal life. The drug addiction is dealt with very quickly. We do see Annie discuss her relationship with, and photographs of, Susan Sontag - but this is obviously deeply distressing and passes quickly. Some reviewers have criticised this discretion. I disagree. Leibovitz herself argues that her most important relationship has been with her work. As such, the focus of this documentary is spot on.

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ was released in the US and Spain in 2007 and opened in Japan earlier in the year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in France in June.

Crimes Against Cinema: The Ten Most Piss-Poor Movies of 2007 OR Why Danny Dyer Should Be Tried as a Serial Offender

Piss-poor cinema is typically lazy, formulaic, badly produced and lacking in ambition or artistic integrity. In previous years, the chief aggressors were studio hacks pumping out weak franchises aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator. But in recent years, we've seen the co-option of the American independent cinema movement, with a certain style of "Sundance" movie feeling as jaded and derivative as the studio fodder it seeks to replace. Hands up all those sick of quirky characters, faux-naif camera-work and self-conscious music choices. So this year's Worst Of List eschews the usual commercial crap that harbours no ambition of greatness. Instead, we focus on movies that really were trying to be good but failed.

My first two picks are both low-budget British erotic revenge thrillers that reach for profundity but stumble into cheap exploitation. Both also star Cockney geezer Danny Dyer in performances that demonstrate his limited range. The first offender is STRAIGHTHEADS - in which a women is brutally raped by a couple of slack-jawed yokels in deepest darkest Worcestershire (from the look of it.) She turns into a psycho-killer and exacts a revenge that will be familiar to readers of Marlowe's Edward II. The second movie is called THE GREAT ECSTASY OF ROBERT CARMICHAEL. In this flick, a young man desensitised by popular culture and political violence brutally rapes and kills a random middle-class woman. We know this is meant to be a "serious" movie about "issues" because the psycho-teen rapist listens to classical music, just like Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. The problem is that neither film has the intellectual gravity of ORANGE or STRAW DOGS. As a result, they just feel like crass exploitation flicks.

The third film in this year's list is yet another low-budget British revenge film featuring Danny Dyer! The only slight difference with OUTLAW is that the pscho-revenge-killings are not prompted by rape. But everything else is depressingly familiar: from the incredible dialogue to the insufficient character delineation to the weak performances. Grim.

As we move away from the low-budget revenge thriller, you might think we'd be leaving territory besmirched by the inappropriately smirking face of cinema's equivalent of Victor Willis. You'd be wrong. Still, in fairness to Dyer, his typically one-note performance was by far not the worst thing about low-budget British comedy THE ALL TOGETHER. He was trumped by the arid wasteland where Comedy Used To Live.

Speaking of which, the fifth item on the list is, you guessed it, a low-budget British flick called MAGICIANS. I'm not sure how it happened but this flick took two of the funniest guys on British TV - Mitchell and Webb - and put them in a feature length film that was almost entirely devoid of laughs. There's a PhD for some poor film student in working out what goes wrong when TV comedians fail on the big screen.

Venturing outside of the UK, we had plenty of examples of formulaic American movies in the faux-naif genre. YEAR OF THE DOG is a case in point. Quirky characters up the wazoo; a cast-list stuffed with darlings of independent cinema; this film has Sundance ooozing from its pores. It's also faintly patronising toward its characters, unfunny and unable to engage its audiences in it protagonist's emotional crisis. These directors need to realise that if quirk is not balanced with genuine comedy, it's just irritating. Moreover, it's a barrier to the audience relating to the protagonist.

The seventh movie on the list proves that the Spirit of Sundance is infecting cinema as far away as New Zealand, and that Mitchell and Webb are not the only successful TV comedians to suffer an embarassingly laugh-free transition to the big screen. In EAGLE VERSUS SHARK, Jemaine Clement of the hysterically funny duo Flight of the Conchords plays a quirky geek who pisses off his long-suffering quirky geek girlfriend. Then he fights a disabled guy, which is quite funny. Then the movie ends. Weak beyond belief.

The eighth movie on my list is THE DARJEELING LIMITED. Wes Anderson is the director who can most clearly take credit for inventing the Sundance style, despite the fact that he actually makes studio films. But as his characters have become more wealthy and his reputation has become more august, his films have delivered diminishing returns. Where we had genuine emotions and love-able characters in BOTTLE ROCKET, we now have ever-more flowery production design and ever-more vacuous characters and thinner plots. I don't care about the characters in THE DARJEELING LIMITED. They are as indulged as this film is indulgent. I despair of Wes Anderson.

The ninth movie on my list is a genuine all-out fiasco called ANGEL. It's a French-produced melo-drama set in Edwardian Britian called Based on a sappy sub-Mills and Boon novel by Liz Taylor, the movie is about a wilful authoress who manipulates everyone around her. Director Francois Ozon will no doubt argue that the over-acting, absurd dialogue, fantastical costumes and sets, are all intentional. But a pastiche is interesting for only so long, and this film certainly does not sustain our interest. I only hope that talented actress Romola Garai's reputation survives.

Note that, despite their failure, I still have more respect for these nine movies than piss-poor studio films that don't even try to do anything different. A noble failure is better than a mediocre, banal auto-flick. Having said that, I can't help mention a string of uninspired shameless cash-ins from our friends in the West - namely HOSTEL PART II, HANNIBAL RISING, BECAUSE I SAID SO, GOAL 2 LIVING THE DREAM or the most piss-poor studio films of the year: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END and SPIDERMAN 3. Of all these movies, PIRATES 3 must take the biscuit as the example par excellence of all the traits that characterise flabby, over-busy franchise films. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I give you: Ikea Knightley's and Orloondo Bland's* wooden central performances; a plot so convoluted you could catch fish in it; the indulgence of Johnny Depp's ego; the inability of the screen-writers to stick the rules of the fantasy genre that they set up in the first film; the reliance on running and shouting rather than genuine chemistry between the romantic leads or genuine tension in the adventure story plot. *TM BBC Radio 5 Live, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode on film.

ATONEMENT - showy and weighty where it should have been slippery and elegant

ATONEMENT is handsomely designed and photographed film. But the design is so insistent as to be distracting. The classic example is the much-praised 5 minutes tracking shot of Dunkirk, which looks stunning, but advances the film not one jot. Another example is the incredibly obvious and self-conscious sound design that incorporates typewriter keys into the orchestral score. The worst example is a scene in a tea-room that Joe Wright directs as a pastiche of BRIEF ENCOUNTERS. And here we come to the heart of my criticism of ATONEMENT - Keira Knightley's mediocre performance in the central role. If it is possible, her accent becomes even more strangulated than usual - standing in sharp contrast with the more natural cadences of Benedict Cumberbatch, Saoirse Ronan et al. The limits to Knightley's range are most clearly shown in a scene between herself, James McAvoy, Romola Garai. Garai in particular, and McAvoy to a lesser extent, act her off the screen.

So what is left to like? A very impressive supporting cast, including Brenda Blethyn, Gina McKee and I thought I detected a cameo by Tobias Menzies? Most importantly, Ian McEwan's intelligent and genuinely affecting story is left almost untouched by Christopher Hampton's faithful script. I won't give a synopsis because I think it's important that you see the key events fresh in the cinema and unaffected by reviewer's interpretations. This goes to the heart of the story. Suffice to say that this is a movie about class difference, thwarted love, misperceptions, a lifetime of regret and the impossibility of narrative.

Apparently, some reviewers have hailed ATONEMENT as an "instant classic". Let's be clear. It's no FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. Nor is it BRIEF ENCOUNTERS. It is a well put-together if highly self-conscious WW2 drama in which a better than usual script offsets a weaker than usual leading lady. As such, it justifies a viewing but not hysteria.

ATONEMENT played Venice 2007 and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in Italy and Finland later in September and in Turkey in October. It opens in Argentina, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Norway and Sweden in November. It opens in the US, Singapore, Slovakia and Australia in December and in Belgium, France, Denmark and Spain in January 2008. It finally rolls into Mexico in March.

You can tell they started filming PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END without a finished script

Unlike director Gore Verbinski, I am going to keep my review of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END short, structured and to the point.

Positive aspects:
1. Handsome production values;
2. Plentiful funny sight gags;
3. Occasional witty dialogue;
4. Admirably restrained handling of the Keith Richards cameo;
5. Acc. to Nik, an ending that "twisted and turned so much, and was so laughably stupid", it was rather fun.

Negative aspects:
1. A labyrinthine plot that is near impossible to follow and therefore to care about;
2. A plot so full of random shit and plot lines that the film-makers don't have time to take each strand to fruition;
3. Johnny Depp slipping into self-parody;
4. All other actors wooden or on auto-pilot;
5. Chow Yun-Fat's incomprehensible English;
6. Misplaced political allegory in opening scenes and in Keira Knightley's absurd "I have a dream" speech near the end;
7. A bloated, indulgent run-time;
8. Markedly less light-hearted and funny than the original movie;
9. Absurdity of Jerry Bruckheimer peddling a movie wherein the audience has to sympathise with renegade freedom-loving pirates (who are bound by an iron-clad Pirate Code, by the way) as opposed to the capitalistic, "big business" Hollywood studio, I mean, East India Company!

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END is on global release.

APPENDIX: An email exchange.

Bina007: You're remarkably positive about your experience given how shite it was.

Nikolai: Well, you see, somehow the film retained a charm. Probably because it was so unpolished. It was like being at a dress rehearsal. You don't expect the play to be good, and you feel for the actors personally when they get their lines wrong and shit. You think, awww, Johnny Depp, you're making it up as you go along aren't you? And then at the end of the film, and I mean the last 5 - 10 minutes, they'd almost recaptured what made the first one great! And it's like - fuck - why couldn't the last 2.4 hours have been like this? And what happened in dead man's chest? Why did they have to embellish a simple formula that worked with all this dumb-assed CGI and stupid baddies and unbelievably intricate plots sub-plots double-plots and wank. So yeah, I had some sympathy for the film - in the same way as I have sympathy for a lame beggar trying to walk down the street to get to a better begging station. Capiche?

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST – a degradation

Let me state for the record that I loved the original PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie. From the very beginning, when we see Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow sailing into Port on a sinking ship and bribing the guard, I knew I was in for a good time. A summary of the film reads like the memorable description of The Princess Bride: pirates, duels, fear, death, true love... In short, there was swash and there was buckle and there was rum. A good time was had by all. If you take all these characteristics and negate them, you have the essentials of the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest.

But first, let’s glory for a moment in the good parts of the film. First off, the production design is lavish and glorious. Pirates are grimy, locals are exotic, ships creak, waves roar, and the un-dead morph into sea-beasties. It’s everything we expect from a big-budget summer crowd-pleaser. The second good thing is the casting, which is at worst good and at best brilliant. Keira Knightley is a good sport and brings her usual vim to the role of Elizabeth Swann – the Governor’s daughter who secretly wants to be a pirate. Admittedly, she is wearing less realistic hair extensions than in the first film(!) but I rather liked the development of her character into a horny teenager tempted by the scoundrelous Sparrow. Who wouldn’t find the flaccid goody-two-shoes, Will Turner, a turn-off? Poor Orlando Bloom reprises his role as the Elizabeth’s fiancé. His acting role is reduced to looking put-upon and being the good guy, cuckolded in spirit if not in fact. But he does his best. Indeed, all the British character actors - Tom Hollander, Jonathan Pryce and Jack Davenport, Mackenzie Crook - turn out sterling performances in what are often cameo roles with limited potential. Special praise must go to Bill Nighy and Naomi Harris. Nighy manages to be almost sympathetic as the villain of the piece, Davy Jones, despite looking like an octopus. And Naomi Harris is utterly convincing and captivating as the witch, Tia Dalma. Finally, of course, we have Johnny Depp reprising his role as Captain Jack – the scoundrelous pirate.

Okay, so now on to the manifold problems. To summarise: the film is too long; the narrative arc is confused; the movie rips off Star Wars; there is too much angst and too little piracy.

At two and a half hours, DEAD MAN’S CHEST is longer than any summer block-buster should ever be and could happily lose an hour. It’s full of little segments which while full of spectacular CGI do not advance the plot one iota. For instance, we spend about 15 minutes early on the movie on a segment where Will Turner is searching for Jack Sparrow on a tropical island. Will is captured by natives who are straight out of Peter Jackson’s KING KONG. But the blatant rip-off doesn’t stop there. Turner is roped to a wooden pole, Luke Skywalker-style and taken before the natives new god-incarnate – Jack Sparrow. Now Jack, who is also a captive, must decide Will’s fate, clearly ripping off the C3PO and the Ewok’s plot strand in STAR WARS EPISODE VI: RETURN OF THE JEDI. The whole segment is meant to be fun, and there is the odd frame of visual humour. But apart from being a blatant rip-off, it doesn’t take the audience any further along the story.

And believe me, a bit of obvious plot signalling would have been nice, because this is one of the most confused and bloated narratives I have seen. The basic idea is that a lot of different people are after Davy Jones’ chest. Davy Jones is the un-dead spirit of the sea who captains a ship of the damned and commands the vicious sea-beast – the Cracken. The chest represents bargaining power over Davy – whether to rescue a loved-one, repay a debt or open up the Atlantic to trade(!) So we see people run after Jack’s compass, which will direct them to the key to the chest, or straightforwardly to the key, or indeed the chest, or its contents. The movie hasn’t just got one MacGuffin – it’s got four! The sad part is that the characters don’t just get on with chasing after this stuff but get side-tracked doing other stuff, like ripping off King Kong. This leaves no time for anything as obvious as, say, hijacking a ship or being hunted down by the British navy. In short, there is not much actual piracy in the second movie.

But let’s get back to the blatant rip-off of Star Wars. The blatant stealing from Star Wars goes beyond the C3PO and the Ewoks segment. While on Davy Jones’ ship, Will meets his father, played brilliantly Stellan Skarsgård. Papa Turner has been condemned to servitude to the evil Davy Jones for staging the mutiny against Jack. Although he abandoned Will to go pirating, Will still sees “good in him” and vows to rescue him. Do you see where we are going with this? An evil slave master controlling the father who must be redeemed by the son. I swear that at the point where Davy Jones makes Bootstrap Bill Turner scourge his own son, Will, all I could think of was the Emperor telling Vader to destroy Luke on the Death Star. And it doesn’t end there. In the climactic scene, the Black Pearl is under attack from the Cracken and Captain Jack has abandoned his crew-mates to their fate. However, it classic Han Solo in Episode IV style he returns to the ship just in time to help Will and Elizabeth blow up the Death Star kill the Cracken. Could it get any cheesier than the bullet-time shot of his decisive stroke?!

Which brings me to my general point that there is too much angst and not enough swashbuckling. The original movie succeeded because Captain Jack was a devil-may-care rogue. Turning him into a nice guy subverts the pleasure of the franchise. There is too much soul-searching and not enough humour! Yes, humour. The humour, where it exists, relies on Captain Jack being ambushed my baddies and uttering “Oh, bugger” in a mockney accent. It’s funny the first time, less so the fifth, and anyway, haven’t we done that to death with Blackadder?

So to summarise, this movie combines a bloated and over-complicated plot with a subversion of the roguish nature of Captain Jack Sparrow. What we get is a beautifully rendered series of spectacles with no narrative drive and little emotional impact. I didn’t laugh. I was not entertained. I want my money back.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST is on release in the US, UK, France and Australia. It goes on release in Finland, Sweden and Israel on July 12th. It opens in Brazil on July 21st, Austria and Germany on July 27th and Spain on August 11th 2006.

IMAGINE ME & YOU - derivative then daring then dull

IMAGINE ME AND YOU starts as a British romantic comedy firmly in the Richard Curtis style. It is set in aspirational London - beautiful young professionals who live in apartments furnished by Heals and The White Company with the odd choice "objet" from an auction. They live in Notting Hill or Primrose Hill rather the Chelski or Mayfair and work vaguely in The City or The Arts or beautifully quaint shops. They have lovely country weddings with quirky guests giving witty speeches in clipped upper class accents. I have nothing against this except the fact that having been done so many times before (often with great box office success) it all seems a little derivative. IMAGINE AND ME AND YOU draws in its audience thanks to this easy familiarity. It starts with a wedding - between a dull but sweetly in love couple called Hector (stock-broker) and Rachel (vaguely at work in trendy office). They are played by the charming and blandly good-looking Matthew Goode and Piper Perabo. Naturally they have odd, but vaguely funny parents (Celia Imrie and Anthony Head) and a loveably sleazy best man (Darren Boyd).

Now, after about twenty minutes the movie does something rather daring and I got radically more interested. It makes the extra-marital love interest gay. So Rachel finds herself attracted to a florist named Lucy, played by Lena Headey - an older, more charismatic version of Keira Knightley. At this point I thought to myself, wow, this is really clever. They've suckered in Middle England with a cut and paste safe as houses British rom-com but now they're going to do something daring and brilliant. Sadly, I was wrong. There is a lot of long-winded trauma concerning whether Rachel can ditch her lovely husband for the lovely florist, but then the movie snaps back into Curtis mode with a typically absurd love scene at the end. It involves people declaring their love across traffic jams atop cars. Schmaltz to the max. And in case you were wondering, absolutely no graphic lesbian sex scenes of the kind that might shock your grandmother. In fact, this film is so safe it's actually disappointing and you could get a more moving treatment of similar material in KISSING JESSICA STEIN.

Still, for about 15 minutes IMAGINE ME AND YOU was brilliant, and for the rest it was a well-acted if derivative rom-com. There's also a very funny cameo from Ben Miles as Hector's greedy capitalist bastard boss, Rob. (Exchanges like: Hector to Rob: Fuck you bonus. Rob to Hector: I wish I could!)Perfectly harmless and fine for a DVD and a dinner date, I suppose.

IMAGINE ME AND YOU showed at Toronto 2005 and went on release in the US, Australia, Israel, Greece, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Italy later this month, in Poland in July, in Portugal in August, in Singapore in September and in France in November.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE - it'll do, I suppose

The story is familiar to most, but if not, here is the set up: Mr Bennet is a gentleman with a vulgar wife, no son, and hence no property to leave to his five daughters. The eldest daughter Jane is on the verge of engagement to the wealthy Mr. Bingley, when Bingley's proud best friend Mr. Darcy persuades him against such a poor match. But will Mr. Darcy be so "kind" to himself when he falls for Jane's younger sister, Lizzie?

I say that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is a harmless and pretty film because, despite manifold failures and errors of judgement, the source material itself is so charming that, to the faithful Austen fan, there is a certain happiness in just seeing another run through. Any adaptation that keeps the famous witty repartee and chooses idyllic English country houses shot in perpetual sunshine will produce something that slides down as easily as a good up of tea. This is "heritage" cinema and as far as it goes, there is nothing wrong with that. Note also that on this point you should not be led astray by press banter from the director, Joe Wright, who claims to have "roughed up" Austen. Yes, the Bennets have geese and swine running through the back yard. But a little mud does not make this Dickens and while some characters do have sordid pasts this is all off screen. We are by no means in the realms of recent BBC adaptations of Dickens and Thackeray where all the dirt, grime, corruption and pollution is on screen. By contrast, everyone in this adaptation looks like an advert for The National Trust.

But when you look beyond the pretty gowns and carriage there is something very wrong with the mechanics of the thing. I think this is half casting and half scripting. Keira Knightley looks lovely as Lizzie Bennet and has the right sort of energy, but too often looks petulant rather than passionate. Much has been made of the fact that she is the same age as the fictional Lizzie Bennet but I, and it would appear much of England, prefers Jennifer Ehle's portrayal in the 1995 BBC adaptation. Matthew Matthew MacFadyen is similarly miscast as Mr. Darcy. He has none of the fearsome authority that would silence a ballroom ( a proposterous scene). Rosamund Pike is delightful as Jane Bennet but her Mr. Bingley is hopeless. Not that I think that this is fault of acting as much as of scripting. Poor Simon Woods is made to look a complete buffoon. Bingley is meant to be too trusting and too persuadable, but not an idiot. Against such a poor cast, it is no wonder that Tom Hollander stands out as the odious, obsequious Mr. Collins.

The other half of the problem is scripting. By this I mean that while it is not inconceivable that we should have a 2 hour PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, this is not it. In choosing what to slash and compress some wrong choices have been made. The plot strand that really suffers is Lizzie's infatuation with Mr. Wickham and her conviction that Darcy has done him wrong. I am convinced that Rupert Friend was only cast as Wickham because he looks vaguely like Orlando Bloom and he gets precious little screen time with Lizzie. As a result, we hardly understand why she should take against Darcy on his account. This undercuts the development of the relationship between Darcy and Lizzie - the very centre of the story.

Overall, then, a decent enough romp through familiar territory but hardly anything to recommend a second viewing. To be sure, it does not have the luxury of 6 hours playing time, but even in the shorter time-frame allowed more could have been made of the cast. Perhaps viewers unfamiliar with the iconic BBC adaptation will not hold this version up to that high benchmark and take this version on its own terms as a sweet, period drama. But ardent Austen fans, while thankful for any big-screen indulgence, will be disappointed.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE was released in the UK in September and in Germany and Austria in October. It is released in the USA on the 23rd November and in France on the 28th November. A 10th anniversary DVD of the BBC production has also been released.

DOMINO - like a ferret on crystal meth

DOMINO is a failure of a movie. Shot and edited like a ferret on crystal myth, this movie is the most likely to cause motion sickness since RAG TALE. With so many freeze-frames, jump cuts, colour-saturated action sequences, it takes a real effort to actually concentrate on what is actually going on. Perhaps this is the intention of the director, because the plot is poor. Do not be fooled by the fact that the central concept is fascinating or that the screenplay was penned by Richard Kelley, the wuenderkind who wrote and directed DONNIE DARKO. Donnie Darko was a great flick but let's tell it like it is: Kelly screwed up a perfectly fascinating tale. For DOMINO is a very loose biopic of a woman called Domino Harvey. The daughter of a famous actor and a supermodel, Domino reacted against the stuffy British establishment and the Beverly Hills crowd. She got thrown out of a bunch of boarding schools and eventually became a bounty hunter in South L.A. Now, that's a story, and Tony Scott, director of TOP GUN, TRUE ROMANCE and SPY GAME, thought so too.

Here's the glitch. Kelly or Scott or whoever had the brainwave of overlaying Domino's story with a heist movie. Worse, a heist plot that is difficult to believe, so reliant is it on absurd coincidences. Then, just to add to the general chaos obscuring the central story, they added a whole bunch of fascinating but totally out-of-place discourse on pop-culture. There are lots of fun critiques of reality TV, for instance, but the satire is blunt and moves away from the point.

All of which makes DOMINO a rather uninvolving and annoying viewing experience. Who knew? A Christopher Walken film I would happily not see again.

DOMINO is on release in the US and UK. It goes on release in France on November 23rd 2005 and in Austria and Germany on December 29th.