Reviews

An intriguing plot that twists and turns and has you on the edge of your seat at times; an all-star cast (mainly male though); some truly excellent special effects and, as you might expect from director Martin Scorsese, a wonderful sound track.

These are the ingredients that combine to make this a truly memorable picture. The central plot deals with a corrupt Boston police force and a mobster, played by Jack Nicholson at his demonic best. The police have an undercover operative in the mobster's gang, and he in turn has a snitch with the cops. The best scenes of the film occur with these two, portrayed by Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio, trying to discover the identity of the other, while the audience tries to work out which of the two is the real villain.

There is also a common love interest (which reminded me somewhat of LA Confidential) and plenty of gory action. The supporting cast is great, and includes William Baldwin, Ray Winstone (does he ever turn in a below-par performance - I think not!), Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg who has the best role of his career as a menacing police detective.

The movie runs for about 150 minutes, and yet it easily maintains interest and suspense for its whole length. Although superficially a cop flick, the principal three characters provide plenty of depth and complexity, and like a good wine, this movie can be savoured to the last drop.

The wilderness areas of Alaska provide the background scenery for this movie which has Barry Pepper in the lead role of Charlie, an arrogant pilot in a small aircraft fleet run by Shepherd, played by James Cromwell.

Charlie accepts a bribe to divert from his flight plan one day to transport an Inuit passenger, sick with TB, and the flight ends badly. Charlie and his passenger have to decide whether to stay with the plane or strike out towards civilisation. In the harsh conditions, it is the arrogant Charlie who goes to pieces and the gentle Inuit passenger Kanaalaq, played by Annabella Puigattuk, who has the strength to overcome the elements.

Unfortunately the plot never rises to any great level. Kanaalaq has almost no English at the start of the ordeal, but is miraculously putting sentences together by the end. Pepper's character, a pilot with many years' experience including flying during the war, is almost totally useless in a crisis.

The cinematography is pretty good, and James Cromwell is believable as the harried boss of the airline. There are better offerings around.

Put together more than 13 years ago, The Fugitive is still worth a look on DVD. It is a fast-paced thriller, with excellent special effects, two lead actors at the top of their craft, and a story-line that keeps you on the edge of your seat right until the end.

The story in brief: Rich doctor accused of murdering his wife protests his innocence, claiming the murder was committed by a one-armed man he saw at the murder scene. The doctor is found guilty, and sentenced to death. Circumstances provide an illegal escape from prison, and the doctor, now the fugitive, has to prove his innocence by finding the one-armed killer.

While doing this he saves the life of one of his prison guards, saves the life of a boy needing emergency surgery and spares the life of his chief pursuer who would have undoubtedly killed him in a heartbeat. Sounds too trite? In the context of this film, and with a frenetic Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford being... well, Harrison Ford, the film actually works quite well.

Director Andrew Davis has provided a movie that has stayed fresh and exciting.

This film, set in the north of England, tracks the story of 5 year-old Damian, who is trying to make sense out of having just lost his mother. He has a photographic memory for saints, recalling the miracles they performed and even their years of birth and death. He is certain that his mother is now a saint herself.

One day when Damian is playing near the train line, a bag of money lands literally at his feet, and Damian is convinced it has been sent to him by God. He sets out to give it to the needy and poor, but finds out that is easier said than done.

The plot expands when Damian and his brother discover where the money has really come from and they realise that there is only a small window of opportunity before Britain adopts the Euro currency and their sterling windfall becomes useless.

Director Danny Boyle gives us a beautifully photographed film, with Alex Etel wonderful as the irrepressible and optimistic Damian. There are great supporting performances from Lewis McGibbon as Damian's older brother Anthony, James Nesbitt as their father and Daisy Donovan as the father's girlfriend.

The first fifteen minutes of this film confirmed my initial fears about it. Jude Law stars as Alfie, a roguish Englishman living in Manhattan; a lowly chauffeur who is poor and lives in a flea-pit. Despite these apparent handicaps, Alfie has chicks swooning at every glance, and he appears to have more shags than hot dinners.

He casts off conquests at the glimpse of a too-hairy arm, and forgets his dates' names almost as soon as as he discards them. Alfie is "semi-permanently" involved with Julie (Marisa Tomei), and has a key to her apartment, but only seems to go there when all else fails. When that relationship predictably is not enough for Julie, Alfie's main lament is that he may no longer see her young son, with whom he has formed a bond.

Alfie does have dreams of improving his lot in life, and he and his pal Marlon, played to perfection by Omar Epps, have a plan to form their own business. Marlon has his own love problems, having just broken up with his sweetheart Lonette, and it is when Alfie tries to help his friend through these problems that the story takes a turn for the believable.

The rest of the film is much more involving and realistic. The hedonistic Alfie finds that the world is not necessarily his for the taking, and that real relationships are made of gold, and like gold, are quite difficult to find.

There are not a lot of similarities between this film and the earlier version, where Alfie was played by Michael Caine. One such similarity involves a sexy older woman, deliciously portrayed in this film by Susan Sarandon (Shelley Winters in the original), who makes quite an impression on Alfie.

The second half of the movie is really quite well done, and Jude Law manages the task of moving Alfie's character on from a careless and carefree playboy extremely well. The scenes involving Alfie, Marlon and Lonette are pivotal to the whole movie and all three actors make these crucial scenes sizzle with emotion.

If you can suspend disbelief for the first 15 to 20 minutes, you will find a worthwhile experience.

This film is now showing on cable here in Australia, and is a far better than average offering.

Written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, the film is a powerful family drama set in the sixties in the south of the USA. It stars Samuel L Jackson as a small town doctor with a wandering eye. The story is told from the viewpoint of his middle child, Eve, wonderfully played by Jurnee Smollett, who sees her middle-class family life threatened by her father's infidelities.

No tale set in a bayou village could exist without references to black magic and voodoo, and this film also has them as a rather central part of the plot. But these elements are handled skilfully and believably, and heighten the tension that develops.

One of the interesting tools used by Lemmons is to tell and retell a story from different characters' perspectives, asking the viewer to determine which is more truthful, and indeed, whether the truth is paramount.

Jackson gives a sparkling performance as Dr Louis Batiste, a man of warmth and generosity who is well regarded by the local community that he serves. His family is seemingly a happy and close one, until the children begin to question some of the adult behaviour they witness.

Jurnee Smollett's Eve is the main protagonist around whom much of the story is centred, and she effortlessly moves back and forth between being a precocious brat and a young woman with powerful emotions. The rest of the cast is also very good, including a voluptuous Lisa Nicole Carson as the temptress Mattie Mereaux, and Diahann Carroll as a bayou witch.

This film moves along at a good pace and is a little more than you might expect.

When a film is directed by Oliver Stone and has in its cast such luminaries as Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Colin Farrell and Val Kilmer, a prospective viewer would feel entitled to expect something special. Unfortunately, in watching this film, most viewers will find only something ordinary. Very ordinary.

Like the Torture of a Thousand Cuts, there are a thousand annoying ways in which this film fails to satisfy. For a start, there are the accents. Colin Farrell and Val Kilmer appear to have affected some form of Irish accent while Angelina Jolie sounds as though she is doing a poor impression of Count Dracula. Among the support cast there is such a myriad of various accents that one could feel like a visitor to the United Nations on open day.

Then there is the acting. With the sole exception of Anthony Hopkins, who delivers a measured and convincing performance as the narrator of the story, Old Ptolemy, all the other players seem to be reaching for something and coming up short.

Rosario Dawson looks divine, but fails to even reach mediocrity as Alexander's wife Roxane. The scenes between Farrell and Dawson had me squirming in my seat, as if I were listening to a poorly-tuned piano.

The battle scenes (as you might expect, there are more than a few) are, on the whole, better than average, although I do have to be a bit critical of Stone's reaching for the clichéd slow-motion effect rather too frequently. At least the viewer has some chance of determining who is who in the fighting - some recent action films (think Troy, King Arthur) presented blurred kaleidoscopes where the viewer was left with no understanding of what transpired.

Of course, the plot has Alexander marching ever onwards in an attempt to conquer the world from end to end (it was flat in those days!). There is a degree of behind the scenes skulduggery involving his mother, Olympias (played by Jolie), who has convinced Alexander that his father is the god Zeus. A further sub-plot surrounds Alexander's love life, principally his relationship with his boyhood friend Hephaistion.

In the end, this film is largely unsatisfying. There are no stand-out performers amongst this A-list of actors, and the plot is not well enough constructed to hold the viewer's attention throughout.

Look back over the career of Anthony Hopkins in IMDb and marvel at the list of characters he has portrayed - such famous and infamous, real and fictional personalities as (in no particular order) Quasimodo, Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler, Professor van Helsing, Abel Magwitch, Guy Burgess and of course, Hannibal Lecter. There are literally countless others too. Is it any wonder that he is in the pantheon of character actors? In this film, Hopkins portrays another actual person, Burt Munro, an eccentric New Zealand mechanic with a dream to race his Indian motorcycle on the salt flats of Bonneville in Utah, USA.

Director Roger Donaldson takes his audience from sleepy Invercargill at the very south of New Zealand to Speed Week at Bonneville, where everybody and his Indian has arrived to see if they can set some sort of speed record. The early part of the journey is a little too slow for my liking, watching a 68 year-old Burt tangle with bikie gangs, transvestites, thieves and even a couple of sexual conquests thrown in for good measure.

The real action starts when Burt arrives in Bonneville. He is penniless, has no support team and nowhere to stay. His bike was made in the 1920s and is the laughing-stock of the speed freaks who have gathered there. He hasn't even pre-registered to race his cycle, and the race officials want to turn him away.

Through the film, Hopkins develops an amiable, persistent, inventive elderly larrikin from Down Under as Burt Munro. He provides a more than passable Southland Kiwi accent, and a genuine wide-eyed wonderment at eventually finding himself at Bonneville, the place he has been dreaming of for 25 years.

The script has some schmaltzy but heart-warming moments, as well as quirky humour which mainly revolves around Burt's eccentricities (watch out for him trimming his toenails with an angle-grinder) and predictable racing action.

The main character is thoughtfully drawn by Hopkins, and while it may not become his greatest ever accomplishment, there is more than enough in this film to enjoy.

Alright, unless you've been orbiting earth in the space-station, you'll be aware of Philip Seymour Hoffman's multi-award winning performance as Truman Capote. And this film is worth seeing for this performance alone, even if it had nothing else to offer you.

But it does have more to offer - a lot more, in fact.

Let's get Hoffman's performance out of the way first, though. Not to dismiss it, but to laud it because it is the most significant factor of the film. Of course, I've never met Capote, and never seen him in the media, at least not that I recall. Hoffman creates a multi-faceted character - at times sweet and endearing, at times cold, calculating (even ruthless), and always "theatrically flamboyant" if you catch my drift. Hoffman portrays Capote's foray into regional Kansas, where you could safely assume they had never seen anyone quite like him, with bravery, humour and courage all rolled into one effete identity. Truly outstanding. If Capote was indeed like this, what an interesting personality he must have been.

The guts of the film revolves around Capote's desire to re-establish himself as America's foremost novelist. It seems there was a significant drought following "Breakfast at Tiffany's", and his creative juices are set flowing when he reads of a multiple homicide in Kansas. His idea is to create a factual novel woven around this horror, and he recognises that if he does it well enough, it will be an icon of literature. He has confidence that he is the writer to do just that.

The significance of the title of the resultant book, "In Cold Blood" is cleverly presented to the viewer as not only the original crime, but also Capote's naked ambition to use the jailed murderers to his own ends.

The other actors in this quality film shouldn't be overlooked, even though Hoffman is in almost every scene. Chris Cooper is great as a weary law enforcement officer trying desperately to arrest the killers of his small-town neighbours and friends. Catherine Keener plays the soon-to-be-famous author Harper Lee with refreshing candour and the inquisitiveness one would expect of the character. And watch out for Clifton Collins Jr as Perry Smith, one of the captured murderers, and the one from whom Capote draws much of the information about the terrible events at the lonely farmhouse. Collins presents the character in almost overwhelming sadness, together with a chilling, bitter side.

The director, Bennett Miller has done a creditable job of weaving this tale together, and the cinematography easily copes with the lonely murder scene, the depressing jail environment, as well as Capote's social scene in New York City.

This movie isn't for the faint-hearted, however those who choose to view it will be rewarded with several excellent performances (including Hoffman's superlative portrayal of Capote) and a rich and compelling story line. Don't miss it.

This film will crystallize the stresses of modern life for many of its viewers.

Nicholas Cage plays Dave Spritz, a local TV weather man, whose life is almost dysfunctional on every level. Although he is handsomely paid, his job holds no satisfaction; he is separated from his wife and children; and his father (masterfully played by Michael Caine) has a crisis of his own.

Spritz seems to stumble through life with every one of his problems becoming too much to deal with, and indeed his pathetic attempts to address issues seem to make circumstances even worse. His desire to assist his children to have happy and fulfilling lives causes them all sorts of angst, and his attempts to reconcile with his wife are abject failures.

In the midst of these problems, which by now have snowballed into one massive dilemma, he receives a job offer which would take him to a national network with a much higher salary. He is tempted to take his family to New York and start afresh.

If you watch this movie wanting a schmaltzy feel-good ending, you'll wish you had taken out Mary Poppins. But if you want to take a look at the harried middle classes who seemingly have every material wealth but not much love or satisfaction in their lives, this could be for you.

Cage does a passable job as the hassled and inept protagonist David Spritz, but the movie takes a long time to get where it is going.