THE CHORAL*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 5

THE CHORAL is an earnest, often twee but ultimately rather moving film about a fictional choir in a Northern town putting on a performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in the midst of World War One.  Death looms over the entire film. It opens with a young lad delivering telegrams to mothers and wives reporting the death of their loved ones at the Front.  The Choral has to recruit new men to take up the places of those fighting, or worse, killed. The pianist leaves to join up.  We see men carried off to war on one train, and invalids return on the next.  In this context, one might ask about the relevance of a libretto focussed on an old man dying and a fight for his immortal soul.  And so the choirmaster recuts and recasts the oratorio as the story of a young soldier killed in France, with the angel beckoning him to Paradise recast as a young nurse calling him home.

The film is taken at a measured pace that I occasionally found too languorous. It is handsomely directed by Nicholas Hytner but I found the production design rather Farrow and Ball - curated to within an inch of its life - all eggshell blues and taupe.  Similarly, while the film is handsomely acted by an ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Roger Allum, I often felt that the script didn’t give them enough to do.  I would have loved to have seen the love story between the choirmaster and the pianist developed a little more. That said, there is a rather smashing cameo from Simon Russell Beale as a bloviating Elgar.  And among the younger cast members I was particularly impressed by the young actor playing the lead tenor whose name I cannot find on IMDB.  It’s also worth saying that the music is beautifully done, including a bravura fifteen minute compressed version of the concert by George Fenton.  Truly, to quote the choirmaster Dr Guthrie, “art does come from art”.

The script is by the legendary national treasure Alan Bennett, and features his trademark wry and often deadpan wit.  There are plenty of chuckles.  I was, however, surprised by just how frank this film is about sex. One of the choristers is a prostitute, and unsurprisingly a couple of the young lads going to war are obsessed with losing their virginity before they go.  This side of the film sometimes sits awkwardly with the more “heritage” tone of the rest of the piece, but I think that’s the point. These are just young lads, then as now.  And we sent them off to die.  It’s hard not to get caught up in the emotion of that final scene. 

THE CHORAL has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It played Toronto and London. It opens in the UK on November 7th and in the USA on December 25th.

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.

CONCLAVE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 3

Robert Harris' political procedural thriller, CONCLAVE, is one of his greatest novels and it has been beautifully brought to the screen by director Edward Berger (ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT) and screenwriter Peter Straughan (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY). The resulting film is genuinely tense, visually stunning, brilliantly claustrophobic and occasionally hilarious.

Ralph Fiennes stars as the seemingly humble Cardinal Lawrence who is tasked with managing the papal election.  He is allied with the liberal Cardinal Bonelli (Stanley Tucci) who claims he does not want to be Pope, but come on, doesn't every Cardinal want the ultimate power?  They are united in opposing a return to reactionary religion whether in the form of the African Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), the American Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) or the Italian Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto).  

As each ballot is taken, we learn of reasons why each candidate is far from perfect. Lawrence chooses carefully what to expose and keep secret, even going so far as to break the papal seal on the dead Pope's locked door. And each ballot frames a debate about what the Church means - is it tradition or modernity - diversity or unity - progressive on race or progressive on sexuality?

What makes this procedural such an effective film? Well, the cast is exceptional. I would expect award noms for Fiennes and Tucci. But for me the highlight is Isabella Rosellini in a scene-stealing role, and the all-time most powerful on-screen curtsy. But more than the individual performances what makes this movie great is the deft way that Edward Berger creates his hermetically sealed world and helps us to understand its bizarre logic. We never cut away to waiting news crews or crowds in Vatican Square. Events beyond the walls might be heard but are not seen.  We are utterly immersed in the Conclave.  He takes us through the mechanics of the first ballot with precision and then elegantly edits the others.  He uses his editing and framing to give us a sense of moral corruption and stakes.  And then there are the visual flourishes that a 108 men in red robes against banks of white marble or teal cinema seats can give. The mood of the film is austere - the colour palette, score, even the amount of dialogue - is kept to the minimal. We are in a world where a glance, a sigh, a tug on a vape can be portentous. Bravo to a director who strips away rather than overloading us.

ALL QUIET  was a really good film that was perhaps lobbied into a greater awards tally than it deserved. Berger has moved far beyond that film with this one and it's likely awards will be even more richly deserved. Kudos to all involved.

CONCLAVE is rated PG and has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Telluride, Toronto and London 2024. It will be released in the USA on November 8th and in the UK on November 15th.

THE MENU***

My cousin announced she was getting married in Lisbon and as my husband and I hadn't been to Portugal for decades we thought we would make an extended holiday out of it, planning a road trip by picking every single Michelin one and two star restaurant along the way for dinner every night bar the wedding, starting in Faro and ending in Porto.  We are the greedy capitalist bastards, where the dishes become a blur, that have apparently sucked the joy out of cooking and life for celebrity chefs like the fictional Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

As a result, he lures a privileged few diners to his remote island restaurant for an epic tasting menu that will fully express his nihilism and totalitarian control of both staff and diners.  If you have the audacity to ask for mere bread, his maitre d, Elsa (Hong Shau) simply says "no".  Every course is exquisitely described and reveals yet more about the contempt in which the diners are held. And so we come to the inevitable horror-comedy conclusion.

For me, this is a superb social satire cum black comedy that takes the piss out of people like me. It comes as no surprise that it was written by two late night comedy writers - Will Tracy (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) and Seth Reiss (Late Night With Seth Myers). There is a spareness to the comedy that is devastating. And the over-fussiness of the menu seems absolutely spot on.  Mark Mylod (Succession) directs with a cool deadpan tone and kudos to all involved in the production design.  The performances are uniformly good BUT Hong Chau is the stand-out in expressing the cult-like status of these chefs and the rigidity of their approach to actually enjoying food. It's kind of nuts to me that Anya Taylor-Joy has been nominated for a Golden Globe rather than Chau, who deserves awards not just for this but also her performance in THE WHALE. What a year she had in 2022.

However, while I do think the film is worth watching, well-made, and funny, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a really good 60-minute episode of Black Mirror rather than a feature film: a high concept comedy that couldn't sustain its runtime. 

THE MENU has a running time of 107 minutes, is rated R, played Toronto 2022, and is available to stream.

THE DIG

THE DIG is an incredibly earnest and prettily produced historical drama, but one that falls prey to lumpen dialogue, heavy-handed politics and cliched character development.  

It's a retelling of the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial boat and a cache of rare artefacts in an archaeological dig in Suffolk, in 1939.  The find is familiar to most British schoolchildren, especially if like me you grew up in the area, and many of us took school-trips to see the Sutton Hoo finds. They were revolutionary because of their rarity but also because of how they redefined how we considered the "dark ages".  Through the sophistication of the artefacts, historians could see that Anglo-Saxon culture was actually far more developed than had been presumed.  The film wants to tell us this too - and does so with Basil Exposition levels of clumsiness, usually taking the form of excited declamatory statements from Ken Stott's British Museum archaeologist. 

Archaeology being a fairly dull, painstaking exercise, the screenwriter Moira Buffini decides to add some excitement with a couple of action scenes and a hokey romance. The former take the form of a scene where the gifted amateur archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) nearly suffocates when the dig collapses on him, as well as a scene where a RAF pilot crashes into a nearby river.  The latter takes the form of Lily James' archaeologist Peggy Preston realising her husband (Ben Chaplin) is probably gay and at the very least frigid resulting in her having sex with Johnny Flynn's amateur photographer, Stuart Piggott.

Are these spoilers? No, not really. Everything in this film is so clearly telegraphed you can see the character arcs and plot twists coming as soon as the characters are introduced. Lest you ever forget, war is imminent! So we get RAF planes flying overhead at every moment, and this underscores the DOOM that overhangs Carey Mulligan's sick landowner. The inevitable battle between the amateurs and the institutional control freaks at the British Museum is, well, inevitable. And as soon as Lily James turns up in her scantily clad holiday clothes with her frigid husband you can see the affair coming a mile off. 

The politics is heavy handed too. There's a running thread of the Establishment not valuing outsiders - whether it's Mrs Pretty not being allowed to go to university, or Mr Brown not being given credit for the dig, or Peggy Preston being patronised by pretty much everyone except Cousin Stuart. And yet this comes up against an almost Downton Abbey-esque doffing of the flat tweed cap with Mr Brown and his wife grateful for any crumbs of praise from Mrs Pretty. 

What's so annoying about all this is that the film, directed by Simon Stone, is actually well made insofar as it has lovely lush British golden hour country landscape cinematography; a lot of care has been taken over period costumes and art direction; and the cast is first-rate (even in Mulligan is way too young to play Mrs Pretty). It's just all so wasted on such a twee pointless script. I would much rather have watched a doc on Sutton Hoo instead. 

THE DIG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 112 minutes. It will be released on January 29th 2021.

COUP 53 - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Four

In 1953, Iran was ruled by a popular left-wing Prime Minister called Mossadegh who nationalised the Abadan oil fields, much to the chagrin of the state owned British oil company that was reaping the profits. So, the CIA and MI6 funded and plotted a successful coup d'etat that returned the more pliable but dictatorial Shah of Iran to power. Naturally he was about as popular as a shit sandwich, and this resulted in the revolution that brought religious fundamentalists to power, and tanked Iranian-Western relations to this day.

This film is an important and earnest one that attempts to tell us what really happened during that coup, and to provide proof of what MI6 has never admitted - of British involvement in the coup. In its final hour the film is absolutely compelling, thrilling and vital. It takes us step by step though the coup using a multiplicity of voices uncovered from outtakes from a 1980s British TV doc unearthed in the British Film Institute archive - interviews recorded with Iranians present at the time by an amateur historian in Berlin - and most interestingly Ralph Fiennes acting an interview with the key MI6 man that was then redacted from the 80s TV show, but also unearthed by the film-makers.  They also use beautifully rendered animation to take us through the violence of that night.

Arguably even more importantly the film-makers successfully argue that this was a pivotal event in post-colonial history. That the lesson learned was that it was cheaper to stage a coup than to fight a hot war, and that this became the model for CIA operations to this day. In one very chilling shot, the film speeds from box to box of archives of coups throughout the world. 

The problem with the film is that the director Taghi Amirani and his producer and co-creator Walter Murch, feel it necessary to waste an hour taking us step by step through how they pieced the story together.  I get they are proud of their long and arduous journey through archives to uncover the story. But it just holds us up. Frankly, it comes across as indulgent and tedious. That said, this is an important film. Just skip the first 45 minutes.

COUP 53 has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Telluride and London 2019 but does not yet have a commercial release date. 

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE is a consistently hilarious, smart and actually rather moving animated comedy from the team that brought us THE LEGO MOVIE. It's easily the best DC movie in the current reboot, and that includes the gloomily nihilistic Nolan films that it spoofs. To be sure, to get the most out of the film if you're familiar with many many iterations of Batman on screen - from the early Adam West TV show, through Michael Keaton to Nolan and the Battfleck.  But you don't need to be a fanboy - just someone who's lived through the last decades of pop culture enough to understand the tropes that this film is ribbing - the idea of Batman as a hugely egotistical psychologically damaged billionaire whose very existence requires the very supervillains he wants to protect his city from.  

In this film, Will Arnett plays Lego Batman as a lonely douchebag obsessed with his own abs, reluctant to let anyone into his life for fear of losing them as he lost his parents years ago. His deliberate isolation is broken when adopts a son (Robin - played by Michael Cera) while distracted by the pretty new Commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) and butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) forces their intimacy by revealing to Robin that one of his two dads is Batman.  The emotional arc of the story is thus whether Batman can admit that he likes having a family of sorts - Albert, Robin and Barbara.  And that he even likes having the Joker around. Meanwhile, the plot sees the Joker abandon his usual band of Batman villains to recruit an even scarier evil army of assorted fictional villains (everyone from King Kong to Sauron) to force Batman to acknowledge that he's his arch-enemy.

The last woman in England to watch SPECTRE, watches SPECTRE

Despite my avatar name, I actually don't like Bond. His glib superficial sado-masochistic fantasy world of spying struck me as thin soup compared to the morally murky but properly Romantic world of John le Carre. Insofar as I liked Bond, it was to appreciate the role that escapism and big brand consumerism has in all of our lives. In other words, if I must have Bond, let it be Bond - kiss kiss, bang bang - Roger Moore's arched eyebrow - absurd gadgets. And so I have struggled with Daniel Craig's Bond films, filled as they are with existential angst. They're Bond trying to be Bourne, lacking in self-confidence, desperate to show that they KNOW the very concept of Bond is absurd in our post-millennial world. Nowhere is this more obvious, nor as grating, as in SPECTRE.

HAIL, CAESAR!

HAIL, CAESAR! is, of all the Coen Brothers screwball comedies, the least funny and the most tedious. I say this with a heavy heart as a great fan of their work and a shared love of the old Hollywood big budget genre pics it aims to lovingly pastiche.  But the best bits really are in the trailer, and their sharp editing in that trailer gives the impression of a movie of high energy and cannon-fire wit. Sadly the real thing runs at an ambling pace, punctuated by the odd set piece, and stutters to its final close.

The movie's protagonist is studio producer and fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) - a man with a religious conscience - although this is not something that is explored as in their more overtly philosophical movies.  Mannix spends his days and nights getting his movie stars out of illegal problems and massaging the press all to get his movies off the ground. This is contrasted with a job offer from Lockheed - a job that is grown up and in a real industry. But even as that job offer is made we know that Mannix won't take it, because he loves the industry that he's in, for all its deception, egomania and crazy hours.

A BIGGER SPLASH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Six

Director Luca Guadagnino (I AM LOVE) makes a triumphant return to our screens with his remake of Jacques Deray and Jean-Claude Carrière’s LA PISCINE.  One of my all-time favourite films is thus transformed into another superb erotically charged, wonderfully ambiguous thriller.

In this largely faithful remake, we are placed on a small Italian island and a rented villa where rockstar Marianne (Tilda Swinton) is recovering from a throat op that renders her almost unable to speak. She's evidently passionately and mutually in love with her boyfriend, a recovering addict photographer called Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts.) Their gloriously restful idyll is shattered when Marianne's ex Harry (Ralph Fiennes) turns up with his young daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) in tow. 

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Wes Anderson's THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a wondrous set of films within films and memories within memories of a world that never quite existed and yet has such a profound resonance with our own.  It begins with an earnest young girl making a pilgrimage to the memorial of an un-named writer (Tom Wilkinson) in an unspecified Mittel-Europische town. In a technical flourish we change aspect ratio and film stock - something that the unversed viewer will only subliminally mark as a shift in perspective - to see that writer as a middle-aged man, trying to give a po-faced TV interview about how he wrote his now famous work about The Grand Budapest Hotel.  He sits in a perfectly appointed 1970s apartment - every attention paid to the production and costume design - his focus disturbed by his mischievous son shooting a BB gun.  Echoes to THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, and once again, a shift in perspective and memory.  We unravel another layer of wrapping paper to this box of magic and go back further to a Central European Soviet setting with that peculiarly gharish and soul-destroying imposition of dun-coloured formica upon the face of our beloved majestic wedding cake ostentatious Grand Budapest Hotel.  A now younger writer, played by Jude Law, comes across a mysterious vaguely exotic hotel guest (F Murray Abraham) who invites him to dinner to reminisce about the hotel's hey-day.  And at last, we are at the heart of the box of tricks, in the mythical country of Zubrowka, in the mythical hotel that established a kind of aristocratic service that only ever existed in the fictional Browns Hotel of Agatha Christie, or in today in the grand hotels of Venice, like the Danieli or the Gritti, that aspire to give us a sepia-tinted view of the past closer to Downton Abbey than reality.

The lynchpin of the story - the man who gives it its drive, its power, its comedy and its tragedy - is the hotel concierge Monsieur Gustave, played with delicious camp glee by Ralph Fiennes, in his funniest role to date. He squires the hotel's ageing guests, genuinely delighted in their attentions and gifts - a man so far removed from reality and yet utterly self-aware. The mechanics of the plot sees his M. Gustave inherit a priceless (fictional!) piece of art from Madame D., a wonderfully aged up decrepit Tilda Swinton, invoking the ire of her mean son Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Adrienne Brody) and his henchman Jopling (Willem Defoe.) There follows a kind of caper movie as M. Gustave secures his prize, is thrown in jail, and conceives an escape with his fellow cellmate Ludwig (Harvey Keitel) and the legendary Society of the Crossed Keys led by Bill Murray.  All this, and I haven't even mentioned Zero yet!  Zero is M. Gustave's protege, a refugee from somewhere vague and oriental, with no-one to look after him and no papers, hence the name.  And it's the relationship between the camp, extravagant M. Gustave and this earnest, lost little boy that gives the brilliantly shining mirror of a movie its dark backing.  For in this fictional world, a fictional SS is about to arrest Zero for having incorrect papers, and when M. Gustave calls them "darling" and explains that they can't POSSIBLY arrest the Bellboy at The Grand Budapest Hotel, we see the clash between the hermetically sealed world of Wes Anderson and the dark realities of European history.  We see that behind the indulgently rich detailed creation of hotel liveries and scrumptious pastries in delicate ribbon-tied boxes there is a reality that mean and in antithesis to all the values of heroic friendship that M. Gustave embodies. And suddenly this fairytale world becomes even more tragic because we truly understand how fragile it is, and our minds are drawn back to its fate as a crumbling 1970s Soviet bloc bath-house. 

The standard take on Wes Anderson is that he always made these delightfully detailed, beautifully imagined confections whose only failing was their solipsism and similarity. But now, with THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, he has finally made an important film, whose profound subject matter lives up to the wonder of the detailed design indulgence.  But when you sit back and really think about it, his movies have always contrasted hermetically sealed children's worlds of wonders,and shown the tragedy inherent in confronting reality.  They are monuments to the infantile shock at the adult world.  RUSHMORE quite literally memorializes a school;  THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is about returning home to mother in the shadow of incest, suicide, addiction and death; and MOONRISE KINGDOM uses the metaphor of Noah's flood to show our loss of innocence.  Parents are frail, love is desperate and doomed, children are overlooked and hurt.  Wes Anderson's worlds may be as scrupulously curated as a beloved Victorian doll's house, but they are dangerous places.  The only difference in THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is one of scale - the stakes here are higher - it is not just a single child losing innocence, but a whole European civilization caught on the pyre of a fascist war. 

What IS knew in GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is the continuous, raucous comedy, that is far more sweary and frank than much we have seen before in Wes Anderson's films, as well as the patchwork of overt homages to different film genres and directors. We have the chase scene involving the lawyer Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum) that feels like something out of THE THIRD MAN, and the jail break scene that's straight out of THE GREAT ESCAPE, as well as countless other nods to the films of Powell and Pressburger (especially Colonel Blimp).  The humour seems to be something taken from an Ealing Studios caper comedy starring Sir Alec Guinness, and overall, the movie has the air of something from wartime British cinema.  This together with the deft and deliberate handling of the differing aspect ratios, and the self-conscious use of miniature work and stop-motion animation, coupled with the over-arching theme of memory, mis-memory and world-building, makes THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, par excellence, a self-conscious movie about cinema.  It's a film that addresses full-on our need for escapism - what else is it that the hotel sells to its old-maid residents?  It's a film that sympathizes with that need, and delights in providing it, but which also knows the limits of that fiction - and that when confronted with violent reality - the confection inevitably melts away.

This is then, for all those reasons, Wes Anderson's most thoughtful, entertaining, technically accomplished and tragic film to date.  It's also, for those that care, the best movie of the year to date. 

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL premiered at Berlin 2014 and is currently on release in the Netherlands, France, Belarus, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Macedonia, Austria, the UK, Ireland and the USA. It opens on March 13th in the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan; on March 14th  in Canada and Lithuania; on March 20th in Hungary, Singapore and Slovakia; on March 21st in Spain, Norway, Romania and Sweden; on March 27th in Argentina and Denmark; on March 28th in Estonia and Poland; on April 3rd in Brazil and Chile, on April 10th in Australia, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal; on April 11th in Finland; on April 18th in Turkey and in June in Japan. 

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN - LFF 2013 - Day Nine

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN just doesn't work as a film at all.  It's a complete and abject failure, which is a tremendous shame as I have nothing but respect for the star and director, Ralph Fiennes.  His first directorial effort, CORIOLANUS, was a triumph of raw power and supple poetry.  It commanded you to watch.  By contrast, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN is so lacking in passion, so lacking in spark, it fairly lays upon the screen, squib-like.

The movie is a costume drama biopic romance based on the true story of the genius Victorian writer Charles Dickens and his late-life love affair with the much younter actress Nelly Tiernan.  That affair was the subject of scandal and notoriety in his time. The public perception was that Mrs Dickens, mother of many children, weary and perhaps grown banal, had been unfairly cast aside, and that in flaunting his relationship Dickens was being an utter cad.  He even went so far as to write a rather cruel letter to The Times claiming that the separation was amicable and denying the affair. As for Nelly, she has recently been the subject of a super book by Claire Tomalin, on which this movie is based.  Her motivations, and those of her family, are revealed to be nuanced and compromised.  How could a family living on the margins refuse the patronage of one of the most famous men of his time?  The book, and indeed the affair, raise interesting and provocative questions: did Nelly sleep with Dickens? If so was she glamoured by him or really in love?  How could a man who writes with such a burning sense of social justice, be so unjust to his wife in real life?  How far does love, if it was love, justify all?

Sadly the movie barely scratches the surface of any of these issues. In a pivotal scene, Ralph Fiennes' Dickens starts to explain his actions toward his wife (Joanna Scanlan) to his lover (Felicity Jones). She stops him, saying she doesn't want to know. But we, the audience, are desperate for any kind of insight into his motivations and mental state - which have remained obscure.  Dickens was superb at creating a public persona as a charming, youthful, playful man, and we never get beyond that here. The other major and massive problem with this film is that Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones have zero chemistry.  There is no physical or emotional spark.  We don't see why Dickens would have been captivated by this rather dull child, or why she would have been attracted to him, other than because she liked his novels.  We needed to see some erotic spark - some fascination - but there was absolutely nothing.  And without that, I'm afraid, there's just no movie at all. 

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN has a running time of 111 minutes.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN played Telluride, Toronto and London 2013. It will be released in the USA on December 25th and in the UK on February 7th 2014. 

SKYFALL

Despite my pseudonym, I am not in fact a great fan of Bond - rather I named myself after my friend Caspar who famously crashed his car pulling out of Frankfurt airport when distracted by an Aston Martin, and was forever after known as Caespi007.  For me, Bond was a pathetic fantasy denying Britain's post-Suez decline.  A man more in the tradition of Flashman - slick surfaces, sport fucking and sado-masochism.  The movies were, in general, even more ridiculous, with their wonkish gadgetry and porn-name Bond girls.  Some were entertaining in an ironic way, but let's face it, as spy thrillers go, this was a long long way below the standard set by John Le Carre's Smiley. Smiley lived in a world of decay, corruption, failure and bureaucratic incompetence. There was a sense of honour and of love, but it was struggling to survive. 

Of the recent Bonds, CASINO ROYALE was a superior reboot but only because it was trying to be a Bourne film.  Moreover, the dumbing down of the Aston Martin to a Ford, and baccarat to poker, struck me as anti-Fleming, insofar as one cared at all about the heritage of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  We all know that QUANTUM OF SAUSAGE (HT @djeremybolton) was impenetrable, dull nonsense, and undid much of the goodwill that CASINO had rebuilt.  What then could we expect of SKYFALL, helmed by Sam Mendes, a wunderkind British theatre director of middling reputation as a cinema director, starting with the acclaimed AMERICAN BEAUTY and sliding into obscurity ever since? 

The early signs were good - a cast list full of English thespians of the highest calibre - Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney.  A script from Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (CASINO ROYALE) and John Logan (RANGO) that was going to tackle head-on the incompatibility of kiss kiss bang bang Bond with the age of Bourne.  And photography from perhaps the best DP working today: Roger Deakins.  All was shaping up for a Bond that was in tune with London 2012 and the Diamond Jubilee - a country presided over by an implacable matriarch, learning to be proud of its imperial heritage without making the mistake of being shackled to it, looking to a very different future with some slight degree of confidence. 

The result is a movie that is perhaps the most thoughtful and reflective of the Bond series.  A movie that can look upon its heritage with fond humour but safely put it aside.  A movie that is conservative - passionately making the case for on the ground espionage; for men with the experience to tell them when to, and when not to, fire the bullet; for leaders with the balls to take the tough calls but also with the good sense to know they are accountable. It's the kind of movie, in short, where Bond can do his job with just a gun and a radio, but ultimately also uses the rockets in his Aston Martin DB5, and doesn't feel the need to apologise for either. It's the movie in which a joke can be made about the ejector seat, but in which ultimately we are rather pleased to see order restored - M, Moneypenny, Q and Bond, in a tastefully old-fashioned leather padded room.   This was a Bond I could get on board with.

In fact, SKYFALL may well be the Bond I've seen. It had wry humour; real emotional development; perhaps the most sleazy, scary villain in the canon; precious little cheap sex; and real consequences to actions. It felt plausible in a way so little Bond feels plausible.  The acting was superb. And the cinematography deserves an Oscar. I had a thoroughly good time - laughed, cheered, was moved, was scared.  It was the complete entertainment experience.  

The plot has reflection and consequences and sheer heft built into it from the start.  In the precredits sequence, as Bond (Daniel Craig) chases down a man with a MacGuffin, we see M (Dame Judi Dench) take two brutally hard but necessary decisions, resulting in Bond's apparent death. He goes off on a drinking binge post-credits only to emerge when a terrorist attack on MI6 turns into a very personal attack on M. It appears that a rogue former agent (Javier Bardem) seeks vengeance on M precisely for taking those brutal decisions that put the country before the agent.  Bond is broken, unfit and old; M's "fitness for purpose" questioned by her political superior, Mallory (Ralph Fiennes); and even Q (Ben Whishaw) mocks the idea of exploding pens and the necessity of on the ground fieldwork when the world's battles are now fought with computers. 

Through all this M is our unwavering moral compass. She never questions that her decisions were right, but also fully acknowledges their human cost.  Bond is, through her faith in him, reconstituted from broken man to polished active agent, able to acknowledge that the world has changed, that the new Q is valuable, and to see his own worth within the modern machine.  Mallory is a good example of just how well-thought act the script is - that a minor character with only a handful of scenes can challenge our prejudice about him every time we meet him.  Ralph Fiennes is superbly slippery in the role.  The screenwriters do a similarly superb job with Bond girl Eve (Naomie Harris) who begins as an irritating incompetent, and raises our suspicions of typical Bond misogyny, until we realise that it's all part of her character development.  Ben Whishaw is, as always, a scene-stealer as geek hacker Q. And as for the villain, Javier Bardem has created a character as outlandish as Scaramanga, or Anton Chigurh, or Hannibal Lecter - all of which this movie consciously references.  In a tour-de-force piece of CGI work we see just how damaged he is.  He is at once the most pantomime villain of the series - but also the most scary, sleazy and unnerving.  He is the Bond villain that surpasses all others - just as Heath Ledger's Joker redefined Batman villains.

Behind the camera, Adele provides the strongest theme song in years, with Paul Epworth's orchestration echoing, but never quite pastiching the old Shirley Bassey numbers.  Daniel Kleinman's opening credits sequence is also one of the most memorable of the recent Bond outings.  But most of all the superior quality of this film is down to DP Roger Deakins, long-time collaborator with the Coen Brothers.  You can see this most of all in the Shanghai, Macau and Scottish sequences.  In Shanghai, he captures that exciting neon brightness of the modern metropolis - every glass surface reflects luminous advertising - the city has the unreal air of Newton Thomas Sigel's LA in DRIVE.  In Macau, Deakins has Bond arrive at a casino against a backdrop of darkness surrounded by soft orange lanterns that takes one's breath away.  And in Scotland, we see Bond silhouetted against burnt orange night sky that reminded me of some of the most arresting visuals from Robert Elswit's THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

Is everything perfect? No.  Naomie Harris and Daniel Craig do not have enough sexual chemistry to carry off the shaving scene. And the Scottish scene starts off a little A-Team.  But these are all minor quibbles in what is an incredibly beautiful, superbly written and acted film that lifts the standard of the Bond series and puts it on a much more sustainable footing. Kudos to all involved. 

SKYFALL is on release in the UK, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Iceland, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malta, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea and Sweden, the UAE, Switzerland.  It opens next weekend in Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Chile, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, Slovenia, Uruguay, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela and Vietnam. It opens in November 9th in Jamaica, the USA, Albania, Canada and Pakistan, It opens on November 15th in Cambodia; on November 22nd in Australia and New Zealand; on November 30th in South Africa; on December 1st in Japan; and on December 6th in the Dominican Republic.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 12 - GREAT EXPECTATIONS (2012)

Charles Dickens' superlative novel, Great Expectations, has been adapted many times for the small and large screen.  The first theatrical outing was in 1917, the most recent TV adaptation last year, with a notable contemporary version by Alfonso Cuaron starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella and Anne Bancroft as the Miss Havisham character. My personal favourite is the TV movie from 1999 directed by Julian Jarrold (BRIDESHEAD REVISITED), with Ioan Gruffud as Pip, Justine Waddell as Estella, and an absolutely definitive Charlotte Rampling as Miss Havisham.  Given the rich canon of work, a high bar should be set for any new production.  One should ask what this particular interpretation is going to do anything that is new and insightful.  Surely it isn't enough just to create another film simply because it has been five years since the last one, and there's a nice commercial tie-in with the Dickens bicentenary.  Sadly, I suspect that's exactly the motivation for Mike Newell's new version of the novel. And I can't say it surprises me.  His career looks very much like one of a moderately talented director for hire, without any clear over-riding style or thematic consistency.  How else dos one explain credits that vary from DONNIE BRASCO to HARRY POTTER & THE GOBLET OF FIRE to PRINCE OF PERSIA: SANDS OF TIME?

That said, a cursory look at the production notes suggested a movie that could be something very special indeed. Given her personal Gothic style and amazing talent, one might have thought Helena Bonham Carter born to play Miss Havisham - the rich, capricious, vengeful woman who raises her adopted Estella to be a cold-hearted temptress and so have her revenge on men. Holliday Grainger, so impressive as Lucrezia in TV's The Borgias, would not have far to go in depicting the tragically emotionally blighted Estella. Jeremy Irvine, the likeable boy at the heart of WAR HORSE, would make a touching Pip - the young working class lad whose head is turned by an inheritance and his love for Estella.  And the rest of the cast is a who's who of British talent, starting with Ralph Fiennes - so sinister as Heathcliff - as Magwitch, the convict whose life is entwined with that of Pip - Robbie Coltrane as the ruthless lawyer Jaggers and Jason Flemyng as the kind-hearted blacksmith Joe Gargery.  I was quite ready to believe that a half faithful script and half decent production design would allow these actors to create a GREAT EXPECTATIONS that was both Gothic and sinister as well as heartbreaking: the tale of a young boy corrupted by wealth and redeemed by love, and of the corrosive impact of secrets.

On one level, the movie is a success.  The story of Magwitch and his unlikely friendship with Pip - his life mangled by the Justice system, and redeemed by his recognition of a kindly act - is given almost half of the screentime, and Ralph Fiennes really is marvellous.  I'm not sure that Jeremy Irvine matches him, but that would be a tall order indeed.  The story of Pip and his friend Joe, so bound up in the start and end of the story, is also given room to breathe, and I believe that this role is Jason Flemyng's finest and that he is also the best Joe Gargery I've seen on screen.  The problem is with the Satis House storyline.  I'm not quite sure why but Helena Bonham Carter's performance just falls flat. She is neither sinister nor tragic.  Poor Estella gets very little screentime indeed, and her marriage to the brutal Bentley Drummle is rather thrown away.  Does the audience unfamiliar with the novel realise that he has beaten her into submission? Poor Herbert Pocket gets very little screentime, although both Olly Alexander as older Herbert, and Charlie Callaghan as Young Herbert are scene stealers.

Overall, then, a rather flat, imbalanced movie in which the Magwitch storyline is creditably done and Satis House isn't. And as Satis House is what this novel is ultimately remembered for, that is a fatal flaw indeed.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS played Toronto 2012 and will be released in the UK and Ireland on November 30th 2012.  It opens in Germany on December 6th; in Russia on January 24th 2013 and in New Zealand on March 7th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 6 - CORIOLANUS

A simple theory: all revolutions begin for the want of food. The sansculottes wanted bread; the Arab Spring began when a man protested the price of rice; and if you ask the Chinese Politburo, they do not think Tienanmen Square was about wanting freedom but about protesting high food inflation.  The people must eat, and become agitated when they cannot. They come out onto the street when they believe that society is so riven between the ruling class and the people that they have no democratic expression of their discontent.  It is a watered down and rather pathetic shadow-play of these concerns that sees protesters camped outside St Paul's Cathedral in London this week.  I say all this to show the absolute relevance and importance of Shakespeare's tragedy CORIOLANUS as brought to the screen by Ralph Fiennes with a screenplay adapted by John Logan (RANGO, THE AVIATOR).

If that sounds defensive, it's because Coriolanus has typically been seen as a "second-tier" tragedy, ranking behind Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear for complexity and beauty.  Typically, critics argue that it isn't truly great in form because it contains so little poetry, so few soliloquys, so little examination of Coriolanus' interior life.  There is some truth to this - Coriolanus doesn't spend hours examining his conscience and motives in the way that Hamlet does - but that's completely right for the character. Because Coriolanus is a great Roman general, not a student of philosophy. And more than any other Shakespearean military man, he is a man of action.  We see him fight his battles in detail and on stage - each attack and counter-attack - this is what defines him.  And because of this, the short, inter-cut battle scenes in Act 1, the lack of standing and "speechifying", Coriolanus is particularly suited to a film adaptation. The medium suits the man.  In particular, DP Barry Ackroyd's (THE HURT LOCKER) gritty, hand-held camera-work showing Coriolanus in battle in war-torn Belgrade is not merely a contrivance - an attempt by Ralph Fiennes to contemporarise the play - but is absolutely what the play is about.  Coriolanus doesn't soliloquise because he has no self-doubt at all. He knows what he is - a great military leader - and he believes that this is enough to become political leader of Rome.  The problem is, Rome itself has changed.

The City of Rome of the play has only just rejected its King and become a Republic - events that Coriolanus had a hand in. It is a weak and fragile state, split between the ancient ruling patrician families and the mass of common people. As the play opens, the patricians have conceded that the people should have two tribunes to voice their concerns, and it is these men, whose profile depends on antagonism between the patricians and the plebs, who will motivate much of the action.  The meat of the play is how Coriolanus will transition from decorated military leader to politician in this new world where merely asserting one's right to rule is not enough - where one must actively court the masses.  He is proud to be a military hero - pride is his great tragic weakness - but resents the fact that he can only be a hero by the acclamation of the common people. After all, he has been raised to believe that the virtuous life of a Roman consists of noble and heroic service to his City and that virtue, as in the Greek model, can only be possessed by a few.  In other words, Coriolanus is not a democrat, and refuses to even pretend to play the democratic game.*  He resents having to be acclaimed by the people and merely tolerates acclamation by his peers.  He sees his enemy Aufidius as his true peer - and in moments of greatest hubris, sees himself as a god, and thus without peers. After all, the gods rule not by courting the people but because they are just better, greater, more powerful.

This sets up the central conflict in the play. Coriolanus returns to Rome a hero, and while the common people know that he holds them in contempt, they cannot help but acclaim him leader. However, the new Tribunes stir up the people, exposing Coriolanus' veiled insults, and he can't help but raise to the bait, vilifying them and rejecting them. He takes the ultimate step of abandoning his City - a step which Allan Bloom describes as follows:  "What is the good of serving that which is not noble and will not permit him to remain noble?"  Coriolanus' tragedy is that he seeks honour, but honour conferred by the people, who are unworthy judges, is tainted. The logical next step is then for Coriolanus to punish Rome by returning with Aufidius, his once-hated enemy, as a military invader. And in this final part of the play and film he casts himself as a god - the logical solution to his problem of tainted acclamation.  Logical, yes, but unsustainable, because Coriolanus cannot, in the final analysis, be as cold and merciless as a god. When his mother - the wonderfully written Volumnia - appeals to him to make peace, he cannot resist.   In his pity, Coriolanus betrays Aufidius and is punished for it, though in the play (but not the film) he is acclaimed at the end. 

As I have described it, the play is a purely political animal. There are no tragic romances, personal betrayals, ghosts, witches or madmen that enliven and popularise the other tragedies. It is a play that is pure in its concerns, and because it deals with such a cold man, can appear cold and austere to its readers.  Because Ralph Fiennes and John Logan's adaptation is absolutely faithful to the text, I suspect that may well be the reaction to the film as well - all very well-acted and intelligently produced but somehow failing to catch a spark in the audience.  After all, with the exception of Brian Cox' voluble, charismatic Menenius, there aren't any characters that ooze human warmth.  The majority of players are cool political operators and agitators.  There is no romance - when Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes) leaves Rome, we (and he) barely care that he has left his wife Virgilia (Jessica Chastain).  The strongest relationship is between Coriolanus and his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) - an austere woman who sees her role as a mother as one of "duty" not to her son but to her City - to raise an honourable man.  I love that Fiennes puts her in a masculine uniform for much of the play, subverting the expression of her maternal pride into something harder, tougher.  Accordingly, it is far more powerful when she capitulates and goes down on her knees, begging Coriolanus to make peace. 

So yes, one must admit, this is not a movie for those looking for human warmth, humour, frailty and subtlety.  But it is a film that brilliantly brings Coriolanus to a modern setting, and completely understands its subject matter, deftly condensing it to a two-hour run-time. The battle scenes are effective and take us to the heart of Coriolanus' character, and the set-piece confrontations - particularly between Fiennes and Redgrave - are spectacular. Indeed, in a uniformly superb cast, it is Redgrave that stands out. Most importantly, I truly believe that an audience coming to the movie with no prior knowledge of the play, would follow the actions and motivations of the characters, and respond to the tricks of having, for instance, real TV newscaster Jon Snow, playing a newscaster in the film.  More than that, I love how the movie manages to achieve all this while keeping all the iconic lines of dialogue, and goes further, adding layers of visual detail that enrich the viewing experience for those who know and love the play.  For example, Coriolanus' dragon tattoo recalls Menenius' line "This Martius is grown from man to dragon: he has wings; he's more than a creeping thing."  This seems to me the ultimate success of the film. A great play doesn't necessarily make a great film. One has to use the virtues of the medium - ultimately a visual medium - to enhance the brilliance of the text.  And Ralph Fiennes has done this to brilliant effect.

CORIOLANUS played Berlin, Toronto and London 2011. It opened in Serbia in February. It opens in Russia on December 1st, in the US on January 13th and in the UK on January 20th.

*Indeed, one could argue further that Shakespeare is also not a democrat. The criticisms of popular politics that he gives Martius are entirely reasonable and, indeed, prescient.  He predicts the rise of popular politicians like Julius Caesar, who in sharp contrast to Coriolanus conquered Rome because he corrupted the people. 

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2

After the turgid teen-moping of DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1, it comes as quite a relief to see the HARRY POTTER franchise close with what is essentially a two-hour epic battle between good and evil. Director David Yates' DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2 is visually stunning, beautifully constructed, and never falters in pace or tone. Indeed, in its tight pacing, Steve Klove's adaptation beats J.K.Rowling's baggy source-novel hands down.

It feels somewhat superfluous to provide a plot summary for one of the most popular children's books of all time, but for those of us who read the book on release and have since forgotten the mechanics of the ending, here it is. The movie takes place in contemporary England, where ordinary people live unknowingly alongside a world of magic. Young wizards are trained at a boarding school called Hogwarts, and older wizards are governed by the Ministry of Magic. But over the past seven films, we have seen the world of good magic over-turned by the reappearance of the evil Voldemort - a former Hogwarts pupil - with a particular vendetta against our improbable hero, Harry Potter. We pick up the story with Harry Potter and his side-kicks, brainy Hermione and loyal Ron, on the hunt Horcruxes - the magical objects into which Voldemort poured his soul. If the kids can kill the Horcruxes they can save the world from a reign of Black Magic; their school from a fierce magical battle; and Harry from a fateful confrontation with his nemesis.

The resulting film opens as a kind of heist movie, with Harry and co. breaking into Gringotts bank on the hunt for a horcrux, but pretty soon we are back at Hogwarts and into the final battle which absorbs the vast majority of the run-time. The visuals are simply stunning. I have always been impressed by the make-up and CGI effects that transform Ralph Fiennes into the snake-like Voldemort, but the image of his foetus-like horcrux was incredible and unforgettable. And Hogwarts is evocatively photographed in murky gloom (yes, even without those awful and unnecessary 3D glasses), and is hauntingly battered and bruised by the final act. We are basically in the realms of a war movie - and the producers do not shy from showing us death and destruction. The post-battle scene, with nurses dressed in WW1 style costumes, was both deeply affecting - as well as deeply British - as they all sit around and have a nice cup of tea! 

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the film is that the main characters are rather over-shadowed by Professor McGonagall's "Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more"-style battle-cry and Matthew Lewis' scene-stealing turn as Neville Longbottom. Indeed, on the back of his appearance in this film, 6 foot tall and looking for all the world like a young Clive Owen, one can't help but suspect that he might have a brighter post-Potter future than Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint!

If I had any difficulty with the film, it was the use of 3D. I didn't feel that it added anything, and enveloped an already hauntingly dark film in yet another dark veneer. My other two problems rest with the book rather than the film, which after all, has to be faithful or risk disappointing the fans. I continue to believe that J.K.Rowling lost her gumption when it came to Harry's final choice - that there was a darker but more satisfying ending that she could've written. And I rather felt that Neville Longbottom was short-changed in the epilogue.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2 is released globally on July 15th.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 1 - Everything is possible and nothing is meaningful

David Yates continues his plodding, faithful, uninspired direction of the Harry Potter series with the first half of the final book. After ORDER OF THE PHOENIX and HALF-BLOOD PRINCE we should've known what to expect - a workmanlike film adaptation of the novel, with neither the gothic style of Alfonso Cuaron's AZKABAN, nor the ability to portray emotion without mawkishness from Mike Newell's GOBLET OF FIRE. In David Yates hands, this franchise has become a dreary endurance test for anyone other than hard-core Potter fans - descending from the banality of the last installment to unwatchable boredom interspersed with cringe-worthy emotional scenes in this film. I'd blame screenwriter Steve Kloves too, but somehow I can't imagine that these emotional mis-steps can really be the fault of the man who, in a happier earlier career, penned WONDER BOYS.

The upshot is that HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 1 is unwatchable - dull, badly acted, ploddingly paced, full of failed attempts to tug at our heartstrings and basically a complete waste of time. The producers should have had the balls to condense the admittedly baggy source-text into just one film, cutting out scenes where the teenagers sit and brood and focusing on the destruction of the horcruxes. Because this film basically reads as two and a half hours of prologue. I left the cinema thinking, "Is this it?" and worst of all, "Dear God, if Guillermo del Toro wanted to direct this, why on earth didn't they let him?!"

In fairness, it must be hard to inject these films with suspense and emotional shocks - after all, most of us have read the books. Indeed, I am lucky enough that having read them on release, and forgotten most of the detail in the interim, I was more likely to be drawn into the plotting than true fans. As the movie opens another year is beginning at Hogwarts but Harry, Ron and Hermione aren't going back to the happy, colourful adventures of the early films. The world has changed - fascist goons fill the Ministry of Magic; Dolores Umbridge has installed Snape as headmaster of Hogwarts; and there are dark rumblings about registering all muggles. The tone of the film is established - it will be dark, cool-coloured, cold, and full of mis-trust and peril. The film opens and closes with the death of a trusted character and the death of minor characters litters the film throughout.

As the movie opens Harry is being transported by convoy from the Dursley's house, where he has spent the summer, to a safe house run by the Weasleys. The friends are betrayed and Harry, Ron and Hermione set off to destroy the horcruxes that contain Voldemort's soul. Problem is, they don't know where the horcruxes are, or even how to destroy them. And in carting the horcrux around, it fouls their temple, Ring-style. As the film progresses the kids find the sword of Griffindor; discover that Dumbledore had a brother; and that a kid called Grindelwald has been nicking stuff from Bellatrix Lestrange's bank-vault. But we don't really get much further along in understanding the bigger picture of what is actually happening. The plot of the film is thus made up of long periods where the teens sit and brood, inactive, and short spurts of danger where they find, or destroy a horcrux or escape the clutches of Death Eaters. By the end of the film, you are no clearer as to key characters' motivations than at the start.

I was so bored by the inaction, or numbed by the CGI fuelled action, that I started to contemplate the logical holes in the plot. Harry is in such danger his friends have to put him in hiding. And yet he can walk through the Ministry of Magic for a good few minutes before any of the fascist goons recognise him! And, even before that, Harry's friends risk his life to transport him to safety. Why don't they just apparate him to the safe-house? And why didn't Ron, Hermione and Harry just apparate out of the Ministry of Magic once they found the horcrux? After all, apparating is used to get them out of plenty of holes later on in the film - unless the director feels we need a good chase scene. And if apparating has been used too much, they can use the convenient fiction of the house-elf, who can apparently go where he pleases and find what he wants. If it's so easy for Creature and Dobby to locate Mundungus and bring him to Harry, why don't the kids ask them to find the Horcruxes and sit back and relax? Now I know that's just ridiculous, but by using these deus ex machina so often, J K Rowling damages our belief in the rules of her universe and makes everything possible and nothing meaningful.

So, is this film worth seeing? No, not unless you're a mega-fan. The only things that really work as cinema are a beautifully animated sequence telling the tale of the Three Brothers, made by Ben Hibon; and the character Dobby the House-Elf, voiced by Toby Jones, who alone delivers lines that are genuinely funny and genuinely moving. Together these two factors make up perhaps twenty minutes of screen time leaving two hours of dross. Low-lights include a scene where Harry tries to cheer Hermione up by making her dance - the actors looked as embarrassed as the audience - and a gauche scene where Ron imagines Harry and Hermione kissing.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 1 is on global release in all bar France, Switzerland and South Africa where it opens next week and Hong Kong and South Korea where it opens on December 16th.

DVD Review - CEMETERY JUNCTION

CEMETERY JUNCTION is a really lovely heart-warming coming-of-age drama set in 1970s provincial England. It tells the story of three school-friends on the cusp of adulthood, when you're still trying to figure out how to talk to the opposite sex, which sort of a job you want to do, and basically what sort of a life you want to lead. The engine of the plot is that one of the friends, ambitious Freddie (Christian Cooke) gets a white-collar job as an insurance salesman. This sparks off two different problems, reflecting the social upheaval that was going on in the UK at the time. First, by trying to move away from blue collar work, Freddie alienates his father and his friends, who think he is implying that he thinks he's better than them. Second, through his job, Freddie comes across an old flame, Julia, who happens to be the boss' daughter. Julia's life has already been mapped out for her by her dad, Mr Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes). In encouraging her to get engaged to his similarly chauvinistic side-kick, Mike (Matthew Goode), he's condemning her to the same life her mother (Emily Watson) has - invisible mother and helper. Freddie wants Julia to leave Mike not just to because he wants her for himself, but because he wants her to have the life and career that she really wants.

The resulting relationship drama is sensitively handled, often laugh-out-loud funny, but ultimately far more concerned to hit the right emotional notes. I really bought into the idea that Freddie, Bruce and Snook were old friends - the banter and body language was spot on. I also really loved Ralph Fiennes and Matthew Goode as the older and younger versions of the male chauvinism. But the actress who really impressed me was Emily Watson - who is able to make herself appear so small and oppressed despite her star power - and with the slightest change in expression and a relatively small amount of screen-time, communicate so much.

Most of all, it's exciting to see Gervais and Merchant in their first co-directed feature film. CEMETERY JUNCTION has some of the finely judged social comedy of THE OFFICE, but it's a much warmer, gentler and optimistic film that THE OFFICE was ever allowed to be - and certainly less self-consciously clever and grim than THE INVENTION OF LYING. I think it's encouraging that two people who have become famous for a very particular brand of observational humour feel able to tackle something quite different. That they are able to bring it off is highly impressive.

Additional tags: Stephen Merchant, Tom Hughes, Christian Cooke, Jack Doolan, Julia Davis, Tim Atack, Valerio Bonelli

CEMETARY JUNCTION was released in the UK in April 2010 and was released on DVD and Blu-Ray today.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - CLASH OF THE TITANS

I would imagine that you have to try pretty hard to take material that is literally mythic, and a stellar cast, and produce a movie as plodding, hokey and unconvincing as CLASH OF THE TITANS. Director Louis Leterrier (THE INCREDIBLE HULK, THE TRANSPORTER) delivers a flick in which the CGI looks shittier than Harryhausen stop-motion and every single actor looks as automated as the Kraken. Leterrier has supermodels cast as Greek godesses and the not unattractive Mads Mikkelsen swinging a sword. He has Liam Neeson cast as Zeus; Ralph Fiennes cast as Hades and throws bit parts away on actors with the heft of Pete Postlethwaite. Most of all, he has a story filled with characters that have captivated audiences since thousands of years before Christ was born. And with all this, he creates a quivering mess. Shame, shame, shame.

This is, I suspect, what happens when you have a big budget, big actors and a lot of CGI. There's a sort of spreadsheet calculation that the movie simply can't fail. And yet, and yet, where is the directorial vision to cut through the large cast of characters and shape the underlying story? Where is the unique style of an epic like 300? Where is the producer to pull up the director and tell him that the eighty foot scorpion-Kraken is laughable?

Long story short, this movie sucks. But for the sake of form (and I can't believe I'm doing this because didn't we all learn this in school?) here's the plot summary. Zeus, chief God on Mount Olympus is pissed off because the people of Argos have become so arrogant that they refuse to worship him. In a fit of pique he allows his brother Hades to terrify the Argosians by unleashing a big beastie called the Krakan. Hades tells Zeus that this will cause the men to love him again and beg for his help; really Hades just wants to cause panic and seize power himself. So, back in Argos, the King's daughter Andromeda is to be sacrificed to the Kraken unless the demi-god Perseus (Sam Worthington - Aussie accent comical) can kill the Kraken first. He does this by cutting off the snake-addled head of Medusa (Natalia Vodianova) and using it is as a weapon. All this while Perseus has to come to terms with the fact that daddy was a god who forced himself upon mummy and then had his family killed. Perseus defeats the Kraken with the help of some buff Argossians (Mads Mikkelsen) and a hot chick who doesn't age (Gemma Arterton). And in an ending that defies legend with typical Hollywood producer arrogance, Perseus and Io have a nice romantic ending despite the fact she is pace legend basically his great grand-mother to the power of n.

Additional tags: Alexa Davalos, Elizabeth McGovern, Luke Treadaway, Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi, Beverley Cross, Agyness Deyn, Natalia Vodianova, Ramin Djawadi, Peter Mezies Jr

CLASH OF THE TITANS was released in April 2010 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.