REVIEW: The Connection (dir. Cédric Jimenez)

Cast: Jean Dujardin, Gilles Lellouche, Céline Sallette, Cyril Lecomte,

Marseilles, in the 1960s, was the heroin capital of the world. Post-war migration saw an influx of Corsican mobsters to the sleepy industrial port city, who brought connections to Turkish opium, and opened up the lucrative American market. By 1969 the Marseilles mob was responsible for around 90% of all heroin arriving into the United States… and all of this just as Nixon’s War on Drugs was heating up. The mobsters took control of the city’s bars and clubs, spreading their influence throughout the police force and political establishment. The Marseilles authorities, under fire from the DEA, were powerless to act. The mobsters gradually unified under one title: La France, or, translated… The French Connection. Their leader: a tyrannical ex-enforcer by the name of Tany Zampa.

The Connection tells the real life story of a fearless young judge, Pierre Michel (Dujardin), who would stop at nothing to bring Zampa down. Michel is a puritanical workaholic: an ex-gambler, driven by some unflinching moral desire to eradicate heroin from his city. From day one, it’s clear he means business. “We’ll find charges later” becomes something of a catchphrase. He’s not scared of the Connection, and he’s not above using dirty tricks like planting evidence and arresting mobsters wives to slowly choke Zampa into submission. He alienates loved ones, colleagues, and powerful figures in the judiciary as he embarks on his crazed one-man crusade.

The Connection could be seen as a sister film to William Friedkin’s The French Connection, exploring what really happened in Marseilles while Popeye Doyle was skulking around a grey and lifeless New York City. The irony is that while Friedkin’s film was fictionalised, it was handled with a greater respect for realism and the slow burn of honest drama. Marseilles native Cédric Jimenez – who grew up in the era of the Connection and counts Zampa’s daughter amongst his group of friends – has eschewed such high-mindedness in favour of all-out genre fare. The Connection is a big, blustery Cops ‘n’ Robbers crime film. It feels more like a descendent of Scorcese’s ballsy, cocaine-fuelled storytelling circa Goodfellas and Casino.

The film is lavish in its production design and styling. While Friedkin was making a ‘present day’ film back in 1971, and had to make do with Irish cops wrapped up in grey wool coats on blustery New York wharfs, Jimenez takes great pleasure in depicting the most romanticised vision of 1970s Marseilles – ovular sports cars, azure seas, Gallic hippie rock music, coiffured hair and well cut suits.

It’s a classic genre story: the lowly puritanical cop slowly closing in on the purring, all-powerful alpha kingpin, hiding in plain sight. It’s familiar. We see the tale unfolding before our eyes from the beginning. But that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. It’s a fast-paced story, confidently told. Originality takes a backseat, allowing adrenaline and smooth-talking charm to take the wheel.

REVIEW: While We’re Young (dir: Noah Baumbach)

Cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin

‘While We’re Young’ opens with title cards featuring dialogue from Ibsen’s ‘The Master Builder’. A conversation between Solness and Hilde. The middle-aged professional, stooping under the weight of his life, and the beautiful, wicked young siren who will lead him to his downfall.

If Noah Baumbach wishes us to carry this idea forward into his story, then Josh and Cornelia are our Solness. All lust for life, lost. They’ve forgotten how to enjoy the pursuit of their half-fulfilled objectives, and are now buried beneath them. Josh’s documentary, eight years in the making, remains unfinished. He can barely bring himself to look at it. They’re trapped in the shadow of Cornelia’s famous documentarian father, Leslie. Cornelia produces his films while Josh has never quite lived up to the mantle of Leslie’s ’protege’. Not helping matters, their best friends have just had a child and can speak of nothing else. They’re happy for them, of course; but nothing amplifies life’s metronome like watching your best friends play happy families while you forget the plot line to Goldilocks & the three bears.

Jamie and Darby are our Hilde. Married twentysomethings living the Brooklyn Renaissance dream. “They just make things, all the time!” Incorrigible, unjaded, filled with that youthful, malleable passion that can be redirected at a moment’s notice. They make ice cream, they make desks, they make documentaries. They have a record collection that should have taken three decades to amass. Their apartment is filled with “all the things we threw out, but they make it look cool”. Record players, typewriters, old projectors, books, vintage furniture.

While Cornelia and Josh are playing iPhone games and watching Netflix, Jamie and Darby smoke weed and cook and listen to old records. The young, steal our youth. While we’re constantly trying to keep up with the present, they’re building their future out of the wreckage of our pasts. And when we turn back to stare, it throws the even tenor of our lives into a tail spin that is as alluring as it is disorientating. If life’s a race, we hope it’s at least a straight one. But moments like this make us realise we’re running through a hall of mirrors.

The two couples become friends when Jamie, hoping to become a documentarian himself, sneaks into an evening class that Josh teaches. Josh sees in this young man a sort of selfless, boundless passion that he wishes desperately to rekindle, not just in his career, but in his relationship with Cornelia. Their flirtation with this youthful couple is not just for kicks. It is an honest attempt to burrow backwards into their own lives to work out where things started to go wrong. Or, rather, where things just stopped feeling “right”, and enjoyable for their own sake. Baumbach does an astounding job of making a ‘mid-life crisis’ seem less about foot-dragging and immaturity, and much more about the desperate attempt to right the wrongs of the past before it’s too late.

Ben Stiller creates an almost loveable character in Josh. Rounding off the edges of that misanthropic, wincing sarcasm, making it look more like pathos. Adam Driver channels Jamie effortlessly: the dopey, handsome over-confident shyster, masking a timidity that still shows in the eyes. Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried do their best to match up to their male counterparts, but they’re never given the time. Perhaps exhausted from the wonderfully nuanced and feminine ‘Frances Ha’, Baumbach has made a film here that is most certainly about men.

Josh buys a fedora and helps Jamie with his fledgling documentary project. Cornelia chooses hip hop dance classes over spending time with her maternal best friend. They sack off a weekend cookout in Connecticut with their middle-aged friends to attend an ayahuasca ceremony with a bunch of childish hipsters and hippies. But it can only ever be a flirtation. The more they discover about themselves, the more they realise it’s probably too late to change.

In order to regain our youth, we must see the world through young people’s eyes. And it is always a different world, with different morals, different attitudes, different neuroses. You cannot simply default back to 26-years-old. It’s not the crow’s feet that will give you away, it’s the lens you see the world through that is old.

And the more they discover about Jamie and Darby, the more they realise things may not be as they first appeared. Has Jamie masterminded their friendship from the beginning in order to gain their support for his documentary? Is Darby the sweetness and light she at first appeared to be? Is their young marriage as pure and impenetrable as they make out?

Baumbach’s latest film ambles along in this slightly hazy, directionless fashion from start to finish. It is to be applauded, really. He allows short bursts of impeccable, comedic filmmaking - with sharp editing, a masterful attention to pace, and wonderful performances - to build slowly in the midst of life’s whimsical funk. You never feel as if he is leading you anywhere in particular. His films do have an economy and discipline that makes 97 minutes slip by quickly, but they are well hidden. There will be moments where you begin to feel bored, but then before you know it you’re laughing again. And then, at some point, the lights come up, and you make your way out of the theatre with a grin and a furrowed brow. In that respect, it might almost be said that Baumbach does have a touch of Ibsen about him. It’s a very generous parallel, but if he wants it, I’ll give it to him.

REVIEW: 20,000 Days on Earth (dir. Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard)

Cast: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue, Blixa Bargeld

“You’ve dreamed yourself to the outside, and nothing can bring you back in.” Nick Cave

Sometime during your mid-fifties you will wake up on your 20,000th day on Earth. For most of us, it will pass without celebration or ignominy; one of so many days that skip gaily past as we stare on blankly, our backs turned against the future. But Nick Cave is not like most of us. In fact it’s hard to believe he has allowed a single day of his life to escape so casually unappreciated. In a career spanning four decades he has poked and prodded himself to breaking point, and shaped his discoveries into an endless torrent of melodious grumbling. That he took the occasion of his 20,000th day on Earth to open himself up to his own life and art is a great blessing. That he invited Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard to document the event is a great relief.

’20,000 Days on Earth’ follows Cave during the recording of his latest LP, ‘Push the Sky Away’. Footage of his band recording in the French countryside is interspersed with scenes from his daily life on the south coast of England: lunch with long-term collaborator and friend Warren Ellis, a few hours helping his archivists sort through the myriad scrapbooks and photo albums of his life, and so on. Devoid of any particular moment - an announcement of retirement perhaps, or a world tour - the film provides a snapshot of Cave that feels all the more intimate and truthful for its arbitrariness. It feels more like the stitched together outtakes of a ‘Nick Cave’ documentary: all the moments between the clapper’s snaps, the quiet reflective meanderings, the anecdotes and naughty stories. It is unabashed and unreserved. It has a sort of sentimental, playful similarity to his friend Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Broken Flowers’: a man wakes up one day, and for no particular reason decides to come to terms with his past.

Clearly, Forsyth and Pollard have discovered that the only way to really understand Nick Cave is on his own terms and in his own time. An early section of the film sees Cave sitting with a man who we may assume to be a therapist; surely an excellent opportunity to get beneath the skin of one of modern music’s most provocative practitioners? No. Watching somebody of Nick Cave’s intelligence and creativity undergo psychoanalysis is almost laughable, he is so utterly in touch with his memories and feelings and the effect that various moments have had on his life. When asked to recall the first time he ever saw the nude female form, he describes “a girl with a white face” who was his first kiss, and who had a “profound effect” on his childhood, leading him to occasionally dress in women’s clothing to feel closer to her. When asked to describe his father, he recalls the moment, “my father took me aside and read the first chapter of Lolita to me.” All these memories are too fortunate, too complete, too perfectly ‘pre-artisic’.

But then we cut to footage of Cave recording the piano and vocals for ‘Give Us a Kiss’, and we are reminded that everything we will ever know about this man comes from his music. His art is his memories. This stunning, quiet, solitary piano piece performed in a studio, alone, tells us more about Cave than any number of hours searching through his archives. “Give us a kiss. One little sip sip sip, before you slip, slip, slip.”

Aside from the aural bliss of the studio footage, it’s in the moments when Cave is having fun with his memories that the film really comes to life. Listening to Cave and Ellis discuss the Meltdown festival that he curated, and invited Nina Simone to headline, is fascinating, intimate, and often hysterical. At an early point in the film he recalls how Simone wandered on stage, hunched and menacing, and left her gum on the piano. He brings the memory up with Ellis later at lunch, and Ellis casually mentions that he kept that gum, and still has it somewhere in the house. It is a rare treat to hear these two impassioned veterans discussing the music that has affected them. It’s a rumination on what music has been, leaving open the question of what it is now, and could become.

And then there are the ghostly apparitions that appear beside Cave in his car as he roams the outskirts of a grey and dreary Brighton. Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue, and Blixa Bargeld all join Cave at various junctures (or junctions?) to help him relive past successes and failures. These are moments divorced from any real time or place: more musical and dream-like than factual. They are eerie, hazy, half recollections; all the more powerful for their lack of veracity. They fit comfortably into our growing, elliptical understanding of Nick Cave. To quote the man himself during one of these car journeys, “Who knows their own story? It only becomes a story when we tell it.”

With Minogue he discusses what a live show should be; insisting on the artist’s need to elicit a mixture of terror and awe, because on stage you can’t have one without the other. This final conversation gives way to a truly ecstatic finale: a beautifully shot, climactic live performance of ‘Push the Sky Away’ that Forsyth and Pollard match cut with old archive footage from throughout Cave’s career. It is a deeply affecting technique: all of these Nick Caves crashing into one another, none of them old or wrong, none of them honed or perfect. It is an astonishing, breathtaking execution of a filmed live performance. All these various machinations and appearances of a fascinating, unknowable man.

REVIEW: Obvious Child (dir. Gillian Robespierre)

Cast: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffmann,  Gabe Liedman, David Cross

Donna Stern’s life seems to be falling apart around her. On the same day her Brooklyn bookstore ‘UNOPPRESSIVE, NON-IMPERIALIST  BARGAIN BOOKS’ is forced to close down, she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with her best friend. But while most twentysomethings in her position would “literally die” because they “actually can’t right now”, Donna is driven forward by a meek but powerful urge: to collect all her trauma and project it into the one thing that gives her life meaning… her comedy. After a disastrous stint at her local comedy club, she wakes up from a one night stand to discover that she is pregnant, and the earliest date she can have an abortion is two weeks hence - on Valentine’s Day. Her “three bad things” now dispensed with, Donna’s struggle to overcome and understand this new angle on life makes for a charming story of young adulthood in Brooklyn - the borough of obvious children.

Gillian Robespierre’s debut feature feels, unsurprisingly, a lot like a film made by comedians. It is filled with flittering moments of observational comedy - quick one-liners and self-fulfilling gags. But beneath the clinical, sarcastic wit, there is a depth to her treatment of the story that builds gradually into a poignant, mature understanding of her central characters and the world they inhabit. Between and beneath the frenetic bursts of comedy, there is a very real, charming warmth to this film.

Jenny Slate is the perfect muse for Robespierre: brash and confident without, detached almost; but her wit cannot cover the vulnerable, yearning young woman within. She has an almost avian quality: strong but light, an angular face with deep brown eyes. Her every sentence seems to push you away but really she’s begging you to stay. She's frankly anything but an obvious child.

In the end Donna’s trials are not so insurmountable. She has perhaps the two most caring besties in the world in Nellie and Joey (her gay comedian roomie who needs to play Verdi in the bathroom because of his “shy bowels”). And Max - the one night stand - turns out to be a winner. He’s “so Christian, he’s a Christmas tree. He, like, knows Santa”. Schooled in a barn in Vermont, he’s the sort of guy who brings flowers to an abortion clinic (because... it’s still Valentines Day!) He’s a welcome interlude in a life filled with unfulfilled plans, unfinished chores, pushy, successful mothers, and lecherous comedy club owners. Untainted by the ruthless frisson of Brooklyn life, he knows only honesty and kindness. In the end, even Donna’s pushy matriarch proves to be a loving and understanding mother.

But the film, as with it’s titular character, is not trying to make a big deal of its issues. It’s trying to be open and honest about them. In the days following Robin Williams’ sad passing, it’s consoling to be reminded of the transformative power of comedy, not just for the viewers, but for those who enact it because it is the only way for them to make sense of their lives. The way Patch Adams wished to treat mortality, this film manages to treat everyday life, “with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humour.”

REVIEW: Catch Me Daddy (dir. Daniel & Matthew Wolfe)

Cast: Sameena Jabeen Ahmed, Conor McCarron, Gary Lewis, Wasim Zakir, Anwar Hussain, Barry Nunney, Shoby Kaman, Adnan Hussain, Ali Ahmad, Kate Dickie, Nichola Burley

“The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.
The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.”
Ted Hughes, Heptonstall Old Church

Laila (Ahmed), a British-Pakistani girl, and her white boyfriend Aaron (McCarron), live a life of solitude on a caravan park in the Yorkshire moors. It is a life of forced isolation, overshadowed by the fear of being discovered by Laila’s family, who would stop at nothing to recover their wayward daughter. The money Laila earns sweeping hair at a local salon is spent carefully on vitals and codeine. It is a melancholy, peaceful existence, slipping past in opioid numbness, scored by old Patti Smith records. And it is about to be torn apart…

Barry (Nunney) and Tony (Lewis) are ex-bouncers turned hired goons - a role the aggressive Barry relishes more than his introspective elder, whose role is to drive and not ask too many questions. Junaid (Hussain) and his gang of Asian teen thugs - including Laila’s brother Zaheer (Ahmad) - are friends of the family who will stop at nothing to return Laila to her father (Zakir). The gangs converge on a roadside service station and head off in two cars, arriving in Laila’s town under cover of darkness.

Little more need be said of the plot for Daniel Wolfe’s blistering, brutal debut, Catch Me Daddy. It is a disarmingly simple story – existing at some rugged intersection between Bruno Dumont’s sullen existential meanderings, and Sam Peckinpah’s unwavering genre classics of the 1970s. Wolfe – exhibiting a patience rarely seen in debut features – is in no rush to tell his story, allowing characters and landscapes to establish themselves individually before they collapse in on themselves later in the film.

It is an isolating and intriguing approach that gives the story space to breathe. Award-winning cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s camera is left to float unhindered across the craggy, undulating, timeless moors; through dustbowl towns of angular, fired-brick estates and stuccoed terraces draped in St George's flags; and amongst the glum, time-worn faces of these people, left alone in the moors, waiting to be swallowed whole by history.

Wolfe then wraps this loose-knit tapestry around a hard-boiled, simple chase narrative. The result is an intensely absorbing, painful, and truly unique portrayal of love on the run.

This approach also establishes an important sense of boredom: the rhythmic, plodding monotony of the gang’s task feels all the more brutal when freed from the easy excitement of a ‘chase movie’. With nothing but time on their hands, the various gang members become an unwitting source of gallows humour: telling each other of their dreams, play fighting in car parks, performing impressions and caricatures, and showing off pictures of pet parrots.

There is a flowing, observant humanism to the way Wolfe portrays these murderous criminals. These are not career gangsters - they are often clumsy and inept in their task - they are simply men who have become hardened and infected by the harsh world they inhabit. One match cut takes us from inside Barry and Tony’s car - where they are listening to old Tim Buckley records and discussing acupuncture - to the inside of Junaid’s car where they’re smoking weed and blasting Trap music. It’s this odd charm that makes their sudden bursts of horrific brutality all the more real, unavoidable, and unsettling.

There is a natural flow and rhetoric to the imagery of the film. Our victims - Laila and Aaron - are always indoors, always in the light, always encased by windows and nestled together like chicks. Their adversaries exist almost exclusively outdoors - in their cars, yearning, searching, like wolves sniffing in the darkness. This dichotomy holds more or less true up until the climactic moment when Barry lies in wait in the shadows outside a brightly lit convenience store, waiting for Aaron to leave. From this moment on, our victims are quite literally dragged out of their nest and forced to run for their lives.

From here, the film becomes a truly nightmarish vision. The disorientating darkness of the moors seems to play with the very foundations of time and space. Distances contract - one moment the pursuers are whole towns away, and then suddenly they’re right on our tails again. In such darkness, sound becomes our primary guide: the rustle of gorse whipping past and the sound of gurgling streams feels primal and strangled when combined with the unearthly din of Matthew Wolfe and Daniel Thomas Freeman’s primordial score. This overpowering chaos is interrupted only by flashes of torchlight and the screams of names and obscenities in the night. It is an intense and impressive section of the film that perhaps plays into Wolfe’s technical acuity as a renowned music promo director.

People looking for a film held together by action-packed, ‘tent pole’ moments may be disappointed, but they’d do well to consider how expertly the film fulfils the needs of a genre film without relying on the tropes of a genre film. Wolfe and his brother are clearly studious film enthusiasts, and the story leads us expertly through the beats of a chase narrative; but when we arrive at those important moments, they are given no extra attention. In this film murders, bar brawls, and car crashes are no more important than the long rides that connected them. It is a harsh and alienating vision, and one that Ellroy might be proud of.

The performances blend perfectly into Wolfe’s vision – in part due to his decision to cast non-actors from the region in which the film is set. With the exception of Gary Lewis, every member of the gang is a non-actor relying on Wolfe’s direction to bring his character to life. The whole is more important than any individual performance here. The characters are part of the landscape; the landscape is one of the characters.

Sameena Jabeen Ahmed’s first performance on camera is one that many more experienced actresses will weep over this festival season. Guided by two superb professional performances from Conor McCarron and Wasim Zakir, she has created an absorbing, surly, reluctant child in Laila. Wolfe’s singular vision of hopeless destruction finds its muse in this charming and powerful young actress. Her performance in the film’s final moments will exhaust the most reluctant of viewers. Her strength will pull out what is left of your breath like a vacuum, and leave you stumbling for the exits in need of respite.

REVIEW: The Two Faces of January (dir. Hossein Amini)

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, Kirtsen Dunst,

Athens, 1962. Chester MacFarland (Mortensen) and his wife Colette (Dunst) are taking a tour of the Parthenon. You’d be forgiven for thinking they are on their honeymoon, such is the giddiness of their ardour. But beneath his glamorous and hearty exterior, Chester is clearly a man who can’t let his guard down. And so it is that he becomes distracted by a young man who has been watching them intently throughout their visit to the site. The young man is Rydal (Isaac). a New Jersey ex-pat who looks every bit the Mediterranean Lothario, he earns his keep leading impressionable female college students around the ruins of the Parthenon. Rydal is intrigued by this handsome gentleman who reminds him, uncomfortably, of his recently deceased father; and he quickly becomes besotted by Colette.

And so, when he arrives at the MacFarland’s hotel room to return a lost bracelet, and finds Chester dragging the lifeless corpse of an American gangster into a hotel room, he makes the life-threatening mistake of offering to help the couple to escape. This being the Sixties, and their being in Greece, nothing happens as quickly as the trio might have hoped. Thus the stage is set for a slow, tense, emotionally embroiled escape from the authorities, and exile on the island of Crete.

Hossein Amini’s first feature is loyal and unswerving crime fiction from start to finish. At times it is a masterclass in the genre: a densely layered, patient exploration of three lives fraying as they struggle against one another, and against their own urges and longings. But at other times it becomes the victim of its own loyalty: safely played, predictable, too calm when it should be shocking, too melodramatic when it should be muted. Moments that, played quietly, might have had more strength, get lost in flatulent camerawork and a score that pays more heed to Carol Reed than it does to its own characters needs.

The setting plays to its own strengths (making modern day Athens and Crete look like 1960’s Athens and Crete requires almost no work) but the costumes are impeccable, and without a change of clothes between our three protagonists, they become a bedraggled and threadbare reflection of the characters’ internal struggles.

The performances are virtually faultless. Kirtsen Dunst is the charmed American girl, startled by riches, done up like Ingrid Bergman but faltering under the disguise. Viggo Mortensen is the grey-eyed, watery criminal whose life could have turned out so differently if it weren’t for the cowardly greed that grips him. He’s a white-collar criminal, way out of his depth, and he’s made the fool’s mistake of actually falling in love with his wife on the lam.

But the star of this film is without doubt Oscar Isaac as the brooding Rydal: a young man who is no less on the run than the MacFarlands. On the run from his family, from his dead father, from the vast chasm of his own empty future. His is perhaps the most convincing character trajectory of the film: from a sullen man child living off sorority girl handouts, to a towering, ferocious presence hellbent on revenge. The film is worth watching just to see his performance grow through the final third: as misery, grief, and hate fuse together in a tumultuous, hopeless climax.

NewYorkCityPhilia

On arriving at Heathrow airport to a rattling board of cancelled flights, the reasonable man would retreat and carefully plot a new course to New York City. The unreasonable man would book a seat on the next thing smoking to the Eastern seaboard, then finding his connecting flight to a deluged La Guardia cancelled, he would not see the night out in a Toronto airport hotel but would race for the last plane to Philadelphia. There, bolstered by the firm American turf beneath his feet, he would rent the last car on the airport lot and drive for three hours through a pitch black, hurricane-blitzed Garden State, with only an outdated SatNav for company. Were that SatNav to send him hurtling towards a flooded Holland Tunnel, he would not turn back, but would instead rely entirely on guesswork to creep his way along the toll roads and turnpikes of a half-submerged Staten Island to finally reach Brooklyn - that bolshy, sighing, stylish older brother to the flashy kid, Manhattan.

I did not take the path of the reasonable man.

No other city on earth could so stir my blood and send me hurtling recklessly into a storm to visit her. Not even my own. My infatuation with New York is verging on some '-pathy' or '-philia'. I have loved her since childhood and while my reasons have upended and overrun one another, the passion has never ebbed. I will never deny or seek to contain the giddiness that overwhelms me when I emerge from Penn Station to a blast of cold Hudson air and that dazzling canyon of glittering midtown lights; but it's not Christmas and Time Square and yellow cabs that get my heart racing anymore.

It's the cracked and cobbled streets of the LES. The Sartorialist will-be's on every West Village corner. The 'shhhhh' bars and the speakeasies. The droll Billyburg baristas. The plaid-frocked, moustached taco stand owners of Rockaway Beach. The Victorian-era tattoo parlours and wincing scotch enthusiasts. The local microbrews and the esoteric jukebox selections. These are the flavours that my ever-evolving palette longs for now.

Aside from all of this, there are also those constant and abstract values that will never shift from this city. The resilience. The stubbornness. The gruff, beguiling charm. The openness. New Yorkers are New Yorkers not because of where they were born, but because of how invested they are in the narrative of their city. They are wholly caught up in it. They take pride in it.

This was broadcast to the world this week in the form of a muted and careful response to days of flooding, fires, and black outs. When a boardwalk in the Rockaways washed away people lamented it all the way from Queens to the Upper East Side, because it's their city. It chills my blood to picture that hurricane hitting almost any European city right now. It would be chaos and anarchy. There is real hate and nihilism spreading quietly like dry rot across so many of our cities. How much must a metropolis of this size be doing right to bear this sort of catastrophe with such powerful humility? The fraternity of New York - a city of immigrants, lest we forget - is an astonishing and valuable thing. It is addictive, and I am in deep.

And finally there's just the sight of the place, which to this day makes me draw breath. By day the brick and concrete buildings and thick hulking girders stand proud beneath a clear, powder blue sky. It is industrial magnificence writ large in brown and grey across an island as slender and strong as any of her buildings. No other city feels so BIG. The Coliseum, St Marks Cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - all are undone by the minute details that distort the beauty of their sheer size. In New York, such fussiness would be sniggered at. Here, the only interruption to sleek concrete and iron are the nuts and bolts that join them. The closest thing to "decoration" is the Empire State Building with its glaring steel eagle gargoyles - and without a giant ape or a caped crusader hanging from them, they look out of place.

By night the whole city is transformed. Driving along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Wednesday night and staring across the East River at the gigantic skyscrapers in darkness was the closest I will ever come to a slumbering Leviathan snoring in the shallows. This was the city that wowed Fitzgerald with its, "flashing, dynamic good looks, its tall man's quick-step." From the astounding billboards of Times Square to the dingy neon of Greenwich village. From the mirrored apex of the Chrysler building to the pulsating grid lights of the Marcy Projects. When the sun retreats the whole city sparkles like a pinstriped emerald. A crystal city standing proud where the unfathomable tide dissolves the shore.

Butterflies and Bruises: Alma Har'el's Fjögur píanó

N.B. Click on the image above or scroll down to the bottom to watch the film.

How would you tell the story of love? Split it up into acts and set pieces? A sleek dialectic of heady triumphs and devastation? Give it a beginning without an end? Impossible. Love is a hazy netherworld. A performance of repetition. A choreographed dream.

And what colour would you paint it? Rich, dark, Renaissance crimson? You’d be wrong to. Love has a pale colour palette of flesh and curtain lace. Ruptured by smeared charcoal and finger-scraped scars. Gentle plum bruises. Butterflies and shawls that warn more than they delight.

Alma Har’el’s beautifully conceived film for Sigur Ros’ Fjögur piano is an astounding exploration of love: bleak and indicting, yet strangely hopeful. Cautious, honest, and deeply moving.

Shia LeBouf and Denna Thompson tumble majestically through a staggering and intimate performance. Painfully rehearsed honesty boxed in by a bedroom window frame.

Diving into trashy, colourful, hedonistic video guilt. Glaring aquamarine. MTV and ketamine. Generation something.

Slipping silently into a room filled with butterfly memories. Carefully preserved. Muted mauve melancholy. Calm. A delicate and cherished place they intrude upon with the people they've become – crashing in at dawn, trailing the mire of late nights and unblinking eyes.

Pushing each other into sudden frenzied anger. Volatile. Locked in to one another. Free falling.

Then suddenly absent. Panicked and lonely. Fragile.

Then clashing again. Tearing and grasping at each other. Frenzied hand marks tracked in tar. Laying in a nest of hair and tear stream smears. Frozen mid fight in a petrified, breathless sleep.

Waking to a new day. A new tussle of love…

Love. The most impossible dilemma and the simplest truth. A shifting, ungraspable boundary we yearn for like a desert horizon - longing for that crisp canyon cut while we're swallowed whole by the endless earth.

The sweet Harpy song that tears you away from the things you knew and throws you headlong into a gathering storm. All life's lessons unlearned in an instant.

Love is endless splendour. Bewildering and dangerous. Blamed and cherished. The suture for our deepest wounds. Never. Ever. Forgotten.
The Halcyon bird.
The Phoenix that survives the flames.

REVIEW: Anna Karenina (dir. Joe Wright)

Cast: Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Olivia Williams, Domhnall Gleeson

Anna Karenina (Knightley) has settled quite happily into the safety and luxury of marriage to a respected St Petersburg aristocrat by the name of Alexei Karenin (Law) – a steely, stoic man with watery eyes and thinning hair. But on a visit to Moscow to save her brother's marriage, she meets the youthful and charming Count Vronsky (Taylor-Johnson). Their first meeting is marred by the tragic death of a railway worker, but there is no mistaking what has passed between them… they are in love. Forced into exile by a society that cannot accept their forbidden tryst, Anna and Vronsky find themselves alone, shackled together and tumbling headlong towards tragedy. There can be no peace for them, only misery and greatest happiness.

Joe Wright’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece is a wonderfully theatrical affair. Scene transitions involve magical, clunking, mechanical sets and hordes of sooty stagehands in period garments. Many scenes that should take place in streets or restaurants actually take place in the atriums, hallways, and rafters of a gigantic Russian theatre. Sometimes a scene appears to be on location, but suddenly a wall pulls away and we find ourselves back beneath the hulking proscenium arch.

Wright’s stylish vision successfully evokes the theatrical nature of late 19th Century Russian aristocracy in a new and exciting way. But the story relies too heavily on this visual treat for pace and energy. The flashy modern aesthetic – part Fosse, part Gondry, part Brecht – cannot be relied upon to update the tattered subject matter. What relevance does Tolstoy's story of forbidden love have at a time when our heir apparent has married his (alleged) mistress without so much as a raised eyebrow? How much more important are films like Shame that deal with the consumptive, addictive power of lust in a modern society where every need is catered for, and nothing is out of bounds?

That aside, there are also the usual pitfalls of reducing a 900 page tome into a modern feature film. Tolstoy’s novel is timeless because of the minutiae; Wright’s film is over a century out of date because it is forced to deal in generalisations. Characters are half-etched, dialogue over simplified, entire story strands overlooked. The cast can hardly be blamed for failing to mark their characters with anything approaching real emotion (with the exception of Domhnall Gleeson whose performance as Levin is breathtaking).

We are left with an entertaining but hollow story filled with entertaining but hollow characters. By the end, you’ll feel as though you’ve just left one of St Petersburg’s many large social gatherings: so many people you desperately wanted to meet, but as the carriages arrive you’re left with nothing but a procession of strangers and ghosts, known by name but nothing else.

REVIEW: Casa de mi Padre (dir. Matt Piedmont)

Cast: Will Ferrell, Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal, Genesis Rodriguez

To make fun of a genre film, you really have to love the genre. When you watch Blazing Saddles - or Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood - it feels like the filmmakers are ribbing a dear old friend, rather than spitting on a hated foe. When you watch the later Scary Movies there is no joy to be had, because the passion for horror cinema has disappeared. Fortunately, by the end of the opening scene of Casa de mi Padre, we are left in no doubt that Matt Piedmont and his gang of talented artistes have an unabashed passion for the trashy Mexican Westerns of the 1950s and 60s. I don’t know if it’s the intentionally disastrous continuity errors, the badly painted backdrops, or the fact that Will Ferrell speaks in seemingly fluent Spanish… but something tells you that these guys really love what they’re doing. Maybe too much.

Armando Alvarez (Ferrell) is, as his father regularly points out, not the sharpest nacho on the platter. Compared to his recently returned prodigal brother, Raul (Luna) – a sharp-suited, slick-haired lothario – well, let’s just say you wouldn’t leave Armando alone to pet your rabbit (and if you think that’s some sordid analogy, you need to read Of Mice and Men… immediately). Raul’s return from Mexico City, and the announcement of his engagement to the jaw-dropping Sonia (Rodriguez), are greeted with screams of praise from the entire Alvarez ranch… finally Raul has returned to save the family!

Unfortunately, Raul didn’t make his money the hard way in the city. He’s a major drug baron with a long list of enemies, and his return to the family ranch brings unwanted attention from the local drug lord Onza (Garcia Bernal), who also happens to be Sonia’s uncle. When Armando discovers that his brother is a no good gangster, he realises his time has come to take the mantle of hero and patriarch, and save his family from the wolves and coyotes gathering at the gates.

If that brief synopsis sounds melodramatic then I’ve still probably underdone it! This is easily as uproariously clichéd and on-the-nose as any of the wonderful B-movies from that era. This is pure send-up, pure farce. You’re never allowed to settle into the story and start the laborious process of “caring” about the characters, because every time you start down that road, Garcia Bernal sticks three cigarettes in his mouth at once, of Ferrell attempts to help a lady onto a horse but gives up halfway and leaves her hanging awkwardly off the side. It’s a mad-dash slapstick caper with wonderfully shoddy sets and intentional ham acting.

Of course, being objective, that’s as much a tick in the ‘con’ box as it is in the ‘pro’. There’s plenty of room for fun in a film with some heart, and removing all the emotional depth from any human story – no matter how melodramatic and funny – is a shame. But at a trim 84-minutes, there’s plenty to keep us entertained and I can’t imagine anybody leaving the cinema dissatisfied.

And the whole production actually works as a new canvas for the wonderful Will Ferrell. We’ve seen him in his own projects and in a few great dramas in recent years, but this is the first time we’ve seen him in a feature film that is as surreal and farcical as his early SNL sketches. The camp madness that surrounds him here lends his grumpy upturned smile, shifting bear-like eyebrows, and twinkly blue eyes a strangely mature and sturdy edge. Compared to everything around him, he seems to be underacting! It’s an interesting and enjoyable spectacle.

REVIEW: American Reunion (dir. Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg)

Cast: Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Tara Reid, Seann William Scott, Mena Suvari, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge,

Ten years after that fateful, ‘virginity-busting’ prom night… nothing happened. There was probably some sort of reunion, but Jim, Kevin, Oz, and the rest of the gang were too content in their lives to dig up any of those old feelings and memories. Three years later, however, and everybody is miserable: Jim and Michelle’s leporine flame has been extinguished by the arrival of their first child; Kevin, now a full-time househusband, is too scared to tell his wife how much he hates reality TV; and Oz presents a sports newscast and has the ditsy pin-up girlfriend to prove it (she’s a queen bitch, and couldn’t be less suited to our rugged, cuddly lacrosse star.)

It’s clear a trip back home is exactly what the boys need to get a bit of perspective on their lives. Fortunately, that all-important 13th High School Reunion has arrived – what a great excuse to get the old band back together!

Finch arrives before they’ve even entered their first bar: screeching up the street on a supercharged motorcycle with tales of his adventures in Latin rainforests. Shortly after, they run into the one person they’d hoped to avoid… Stifler. Ah, Stifler: still living at home with his slutty mother, and even as an office temp he manages to wreak havoc wherever he turns. The moment he arrives the shots start flowing, and we sense that everything is slipping out of control in much the same way it did thirteen years ago.

That’s all I’ll give you in prose, but here’s a little list of buzzwords to whet your appetite: an 18th birthday party by a lake, more awkward conversations with Jim’s dad, bondage gear, taking a dump in a beer cooler, more awkward moments in Jim’s kitchen, MILF chants, waking up next to Vicky, waking up next to Heather, waking up next to Stifler’s mum (Eugene Levy, you dawg!), realising you’re not in High School anymore and it’s time to grow up, waking up next to Finch’s mum.

Well, that about covers it. There is nothing new here: nothing progressive in the script, nothing original in the comedy or performances, nothing complicated in the narrative. But it’s not a ‘new’ film… it’s a reunion! You can sense it as soon as you glance around the cinema at all the other late-twentysomethings giggling with glee and remembering all the naughty little things they did in their teens, after they first saw American Pie. Anyone who remembers the heady teen thrills of the original film can’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia the moment Jim wanders into his childhood bedroom. It’s a treasure to revisit a place with so many fond memories, even if the memories aren’t technically real… or ours.

REVIEW: Contraband (dir. Baltasar Kormákur)

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Kate Beckinsale, Giovanni Ribisi, Lucas Haas, Diego Luna

Getting out of the game… it’s so hard, it almost makes you not want to get into the game in the first place. If Carlito and Michael Corleone couldn’t work it out then nobody ever will. In Baltasar Kormákur’s Contraband, Mark Walhberg plays Chris Farraday: a major smuggler transporting drugs and counterfeit money into the impenetrable USofA via the world’s major cargo lines. But... ah blast! He’s just done his last job, and we missed it. Ah well, everybody out of your seats, lets see what’s showing on screen sev... wait... what’s this? Farraday’s cowardly little brother-in-law just got himself into trouble with the biggest gangster in New Orleans? and now Chris has to dive back “into the game” to save the youngster’s life? Well, it looks like we’ve got a bit of a film on our hands after all.

So here we are: a reluctant criminal mastermind has reassembled his trusted crack team to bring in “one last heist” to save the life of his little brother. If Gone in Sixty Seconds was Speed, then this is Speed 2: it’s the same story… just on a massive boat. Fortunately for us, this is no shimmering ocean cruiser: it’s a hulking, rusted leviathan full of shifty-eyed dock workers and a pompous captain with a thick Southern drawl and a cracked, bitter, evil face. We can smell the stench of oil and metal. We can feel the cramped, tinny confines of the sleeping quarters. Kormákur possesses that very Icelandic ability to translate the salt and grime of the ocean onto film; and it makes for a surprisingly gritty and believable tone for this unabashed, action-packed blockbuster.

It’s when the crew touch down in Panama that the film bolts out of the gates, dragging us through the Latin dust like an angry bull. They have a matter of hours to locate their contact, load the huge crates of counterfeit bills into a truck, and get back to the ship before anyone notices they've left. Unsurprisingly the plan falls apart, and suddenly it’s a race against time that is frantic and powerful enough to whip us up into a frenzy. Unfortunately, the unrelenting force of our hero's progression actually damages the suspense. The film is so eager to get to Farraday's climactic, heroic ending that we are never really given time to doubt his success or feel he might lose.

The twists and turns of the ending are in turns exciting and hilarious, but again, they are never exactly “edge-of-your-seat”. Ben Foster, Diego Luna, Giovanni Ribisi and J.K Simmons provide wonderful support as the 'bad guys', but their power is muted by the inevitability of Farraday’s unimpinged success.

All in all, this is an exciting, evocative, and beautifully shot action movie with some great central performances. It feels gritty and dirty despite its obvious Hollywood sheen; and the ending is still very entertaining despite its truth-stretching and predictability.

REVIEW: Wanderlust (dir. David Wain)

Cast: Paul Rudd, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux, Alan Alda, Ken Marino, Malin Akerman

In America, you have to be for something or against it. Democrat or Republican, North or South, hawk or pacifist, vegan or carnivore. At one end of the scale you might find a man in a golf shirt driving a Lincoln 4x4 between his various mistresses while his frail, slutty wife drinks herself into a stupor in front of their 65" plasma. At the other end, you'll find a gang of nudist, vegan winemakers practicing free love on a ranch commune in Georgia. People who live in New York are uniquely privileged in being able to avoid this dialectic: they can own a "micro-loft" apartment and buy locally produced groceries from a "village store", whilst still working for a giant corporation and owning the 65" plasma. But what happens when your company goes bust and you can't afford to live in 'The City That Doesn't Have To Make Up It's Mind' anymore? You have to choose: are you with the guy driving the Navigator between his suburban pile and his lucrative Portaloo company? Or are you with the free-lovin', hummus-dippin' hippies?

This is the central premise of 'Wanderlust', David Wain's latest creation starring the louche and sparkly-eyed Paul Rudd, and the still-somehow-smiling Jennifer Aniston. When George and Linda's NYC dream comes crashing down around them they are forced to move to Atlanta to live with George's jockish, unbearably "American" brother, Rick (played by co-writer Ken Marino). On route they stop off at a roadside ranch called Elysian to rest their heads, but discover themselves captivated by the free-spirited and light-hearted community of oddballs that resides there. After a few days under his brother's thumb, George decides they should return to the ranch and allow their spirits to truly wander free for the first time. What follows is a hilarious and observant take on America's modern day hippie subculture - nudity, peyote and all - and what happens when middle-class people try to embrace it.

David Wain is probably best known these days as the creator of Role Models - another charming and funny Paul Rudd vehicle - but he was also a key proponent of the wonderful 90s sketch troupe The State, and co-collaborators pop up all over this film. Ken Marino picks up a screenwriting credit as well as starring as the utterly pathetic and detestable Rick; and Joe Lo Truglio also stars as Wayne, the nudist winemaker. American comedy veteran Alan Alda also gives a delightful performance as the frail, acid-frazzled founder of Elysian. Other familiar relationships have shaped the cast of this project: Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd spent years together on the set of Friends, and Aniston's current beau Justin Theroux stars as Seth, the talisman and lothario of the commune. In fact the only person that doesn't have an obvious connection is Malin Akerman; and the reasons for inviting her along are self-evident.

I labour this point because of the old adage, "you only get out of it what you put into it". If you put a gaggle of like-minded, familiar, and hysterical friends in an idyllic, summertime location and set a camera rolling, you'll make something hysterical, charming, and friendly. That's how it works. This film isn't going to stick in your mind because of a stirring and original narrative or heart-wrenching lead performance; it's going to stick there because it is just good fun, plain and simple.

It is also laugh-out-loud hilarious. The mixture of breezy ad-libbing, masterful comic timing, and a brilliant, observant script should be enough to make the most dismissive viewer chuckle. Who wouldn't laugh when Seth, asked why he sleeps outside in the rain, says, “I drink the nourishment that God is feeding me through her cloud teats.”Anyone who dismisses this as "another Jennifer Aniston film" would be doing an unforgivable disservice to the legion of talented comedians and comic filmmakers involved. And, frankly, they'd be doing a disservice to Aniston too. Maybe she'll never win an Oscar, but she has put the hours in throughout her career and fashioned herself into the sort of wilful, doe-eyed comedienne that the world learned to love with Meg Ryan.

Still not convinced? This film has the best cameo appearance since Bill Murray in Zombieland. There… now you have to watch it.

REVIEW: In Darkness (dir. Agnieszka Holland)

Cast: Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Agnieszka Grochowska, Maria Schrader, Herbert Knaup

In Darkness is perhaps the bravest setting for a film in recent years: not because of its social context (although in dealing with the ransacking of a Polish ghetto by German forces, it certainly stakes a claim), but because it is set almost entirely in the dark and fetid confines of a sewage system.

When news of an impending attack spreads through the ghetto of Lvov, Leopold Socha agrees to aid a group of Jews into the city’s sewers. Socha is the only man left in Lvov capable of looking after the sewers, and is trusted by the local authorities and their German overseers to maintain the labyrinth of tunnels and caverns that burrows beneath the crumbling city. His decision to aid the group is born out of a need for money (he dislikes “Yids” as much as the rest of his country folk, and has no qualms telling Chiger to turn some of his group away to their certain deaths). But as the months wear on, and the money runs out, Socha must decide whether he is the sort of man who will stand back and watch evil run its course, or risk his life and the safety of his family to save an innocent group of people he barely knows.

Working under Poland’s cinematic talisman Andrzej Wajda – followed by stints directing episodes of The Wire, The Killing, and Treme – has given Agnieszka Holland a mature confidence and masterful touch. The opening is gripping; choreographing vast numbers of extras across a large set to perfectly capture the panic and hysteria of an impending Nazi invasion. The scope of the scene condenses to a small room with a rabble of desperate Jews attempting to escape into the sewers: and all that energy is packed into the room with them. Moving further, we find ourselves trapped and disorientated in the darkness of the sewers, racing through the muck and mire.

The cinematography down in the tunnels is wonderful: using limited lighting to great effect. In moments of tension, the darkness is interrupted by sudden bursts of action and light. Torchlight that seems some way off suddenly ruptures the entire screen; blinding us momentarily in the darkness of the cinema and leaving us preying not to be caught. At other times the lighting is cruel and cold: projecting a sickly, Francis Bacon pallor across the fetid sewers as we come face to face with the constant, plodding degradation. But then somehow there are also moments of great warmth: bathing the characters in a homely glow as they find brief glimpses of humour and humanity in their plight.

The performances are equally astute. Fraying nerves, desperation and utter grief are boxed up in the confines of this dank, dripping hell. It is almost inconceivable that such horror could be composed and structured into a meaningful emotional journey shared by so many individual characters, yet somehow Holland and her cast have succeeded spectacularly.

Despite it’s many merits, the story drags, and at 145mins it is perhaps too long. The problem arises when we start to see too much of Socha’s life above ground. No matter how much we see of his family life, we will never fully understand why he is doing this. Holland should have the confidence to let him alone, and concentrate on the drama below ground, where the truly mesmerising and cinematic story takes place.

Of course it should be a moving and melancholy film. But other films have used the Holocaust as an excuse to be just that. This film is trying to do more – it wants to be visceral and energetic – and with a more confident cut it could achieve it in bundles.

REVIEW: The Deep Blue Sea (dir. Terence Davies)

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Ann Mitchell, Karl Johnson

Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is the finale that marks the end of Rattigan’s centenary year. One of the most underrated playwrights of the twentieth century, Rattigan’s devastating wit and subtle emotional depth need to be broadcast to a new generation; and nobody is better suited for the task than Terence Davies.

Her suicide note penned, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) is lying in a foetal position before the gas fireplace; staring at the rippling stream of noxious fumes for which there is no flame to burn. As she drifts off we see a quiet montage of images: Hester with an older gentleman, her husband, Hester with a younger gentleman, her lover. If you have any expectations of a Rattigan adaptation, they are not being met. This is no kitchen sink drama. This is Luis Bunuel. Abstract, surreal dream sequences; soft hazy memories that have the faint chill of something nightmarish. Davies finds a way to imbue all the tingling anxiety of a Rattigan play into this very cinematic opening.

But the opening subsides, as they all do, and makes way for a more traditional reworking of the play. Hester leaves her stuffy aristocrat husband (played with grace and poise by the inestimable Simon Russell Beale) to pursue love of a more lustful flavour with Battle of Britain survivor Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). She is a victim of the post-war appetite for freedom and discovery. The world has changed since she was married, and she wants to be out there getting dirty in it. But it doesn’t take long for her to realise that her love for Freddie, and for that brand new sparkling world, cannot be requited.

Davies knows how to fracture a narrative, and does so here with effortless skill. The basic story is simple and coherent, but scenes from different points in the story interrupt each other, creating an extra layer of emotional and psychological distress. Alas, somehow the freshness of the narrative structure is choked out by the traditional, yawning melodrama. Everything from the stained rococo wallpaper to the raucous sing-a-long in the local pub conspires against innovation. There is something timeless about Rattigan’s work, but also something inherently nostalgic and dated; and Davies doesn’t help matters by plastering a violin score onto the film that is too loud and overdramatic.

At 40, Rachel Weisz was the right age to play Hester when filming commenced; but Davies knew that she wouldn’t look a day over 30 on screen. Hester’s youthfulness turns the entire play on its head: what should be a broken adult running away from life is now a doe-eyed English rose escaping the shackles of aristocracy and joining the excited ranks of England’s post-war youth. As this lustful dream crumbles around her, however, we realise that she is not so young after all: she is old enough to be both cruel and utterly dependent.

Without this new perspective this is really just the story of a woman who can’t make her mind up; but fortunately Weisz revels in it. Her weary, haunted gaze veils her delicate features throughout, and were this a more surreal film one might almost suggest that the entire story is a figment of her fume-choked imagination during the throws of attempted suicide. If Davies has borrowed from Bunuel, then Weisz is his Deneuve: she is distant, never quite there, but when she crumbles into tears we feel them in our own throats.

There is a pleasant circularity to the film that is all Davies. Left alone and in tatters, Hester once again lies before the fireplace and allows the fumes to leak out; but with a flick of her wrist she ignites the fire, introducing a flame that warms her already radiant face. She will live to fight on.

REVIEW: J. Edgar (dir. Clint Eastwood)

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Geoff Pierson

J. Edgar examines the life of one of America’s most mysterious figures, FBI Director Hoover. The film follows Hoover (played by an unrecognisable Leonardo DiCaprio) towards the end of his life, as he attempts to dictate his memoirs and the story of the FBI (the two being wholly intertwined).

In 1924, at the tender age of twenty-nine, Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation, and remained until his death in 1972. The Bureau was his life: he never married or had children, and he kept his secretary, Miss Gandy (Naomi Watts), and deputy Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), with him throughout his career.

Hoover’s tenure at the Bureau oversaw some of the most important controversies and scandals of the American century: John Dillinger’s capture, The Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, the death of Marilyn Monroe, Hoover’s name crops up everywhere. Clint Eastwood’s film stumbles nervously through a few of these energetic and utterly cinematic situations before settling on the most stale and untenable facets of Hoover’s life: his cynical involvement in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and his homosexual love affair with Tolson.

In March 1932 legendary aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped from the family home. It was a case for the state police, but Hoover used the ensuing trial to widen the scope of the FBI and to create a centralised fingerprint database. It is an important part of American history, but a comparatively boring one. As for Hoover’s homosexuality: it can never be proven, and allowing it to consume our understanding of the man is demeaning. He wasn’t a good person, but he was a multi-faceted one. Tarring him (for two hours) with this brush is irresponsible and, again, boring.

This is all a huge shame, because Hoover was unarguably one of the most sinister and shadowy figures of the 20th Century. He answered to nobody, and used his power to amass private files on every political figure and celebrity in the United States. He was Norman Bates with a more attuned and sinister “Mummy” complex. He didn’t need to spy through a hole in the shower, he had the most well funded institution in Washington for that. He spied on John F Kennedy and used the resulting sex tape to bribe brother Bobby, then Attorney General, to fund his ongoing and entirely pointless anti-Communist campaigns. You could close your eyes and poke a stick into almost any part of the man’s life and come up with a story bristling with intrigue and energy.

How Eastwood has managed to create so dull a film is actually quite stunning. Nor can Eastwood argue that he didn’t want to cast aspersions on unproven stories: if this were the case, he surely wouldn't spend half the film watching Hoover and Tolson’s wild and emotional love affair, for which there has never been a shred of corroborated evidence.

The film is almost saved by its three central performances. DiCaprio, Hammer and Watts have their faces caked in varying degrees of makeup and prosthetics throughout the film in an attempt to convey the almost half a century over which the story takes place. The makeup is as good as you will see without the overpriced CGI geekery of Cameron or Fincher, but it is hugely distracting for the viewer and, with less capable actors, might have destroyed the natural performances.

Fortunately these are not lesser actors. DiCaprio is, as we have come to expect, excellent as Hoover. He transcends the prosthetic appendages and conveys the slow deterioration of a powerful man in ways no makeup or CGI ever could. His eyes are always alight, but his voice slowly weakens to a croak, and his shoulders stoop to creaking. It is a powerful performance, supported admirably by the understated grace of Naomi Watts and the chirpy, disarming Armie Hammer.

REVIEW: Cowboys & Aliens (dir. Jon Favreau)

Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano

Arizona, 1873. Jake Lonergan (Craig) doesn’t remember anything. He doesn’t know that he is a wanted man, he doesn’t know that he is on the outskirts of a town run by ruthless landowner Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), and he certainly doesn’t know how this damn extraterrestrial bracelet got shackled to his wrist. He doesn’t know that he shouldn’t be talking back to the pistol-wielding town drunk (Dano) because he is Dolarhyde’s heir, and he doesn’t know why the doe-eyed beauty at the bar (Wilde) is so desperate to know where he came from. Jake’s amnesia is getting him into a whole world of trouble; but then an alien strike-force descends and plunges the whole world into trouble.

That’s right, it turns out New Yorkers weren’t the only impatient alien species invading the Wild West during the nineteenth century in search of gold. This brutal species carpet bombs the frontier town and lassoes innocent men, women and children before disappearing into the night. With so powerful a common enemy, Lonergan and Dolarhyde’s conflict pales into insignificance; along with the remaining townsmen and Ella (the mysterious beauty from the bar) they race off in pursuit of the alien base, hoping to recover their loved ones.

Just in case anybody is still uncertain, we really are talking about actual aliens here. This isn’t about a gang of Mexican’s crossing the border; these are the sort of aliens that man, even a century later, was unable to destroy without the help of a suicidally drunk Randy Quaid. So how does Favreau get around the obvious imbalance of power? Well his previous masterpieces (the Iron Man dilogy) should point the way to the disappointing answer: man is boring and worthless, but stick a futuristic machine on his body and he can be a hero. Jake’s mysterious bracelet, which blows up aliens when they get too close, is the humans’ only weapon throughout the entire film. Unsurprisingly, this one simple device gets old quickly; but Favreau never attempts to escalate the conflict by finding a new and interesting way for the cowboys to fight the aliens. So in much the same way that Transformers is essentially a robot war with a few humans stumbling around trying to get laid; this film should really have been called ‘Alien bracelet vs Aliens… with some cowboys falling off their horses’.

Disappointing conflicts aside, there is actually something in the tone of this film that commends it. After all, who doesn’t love a film set in the Wild West with Harrison Ford on the team? The cinematography is often exquisite, and the central performances are solid throughout. You can’t ask for much more than 007 and Indiana Jones for a central duo; and Sam Rockwell and Olivia Wilde round out the palette beautifully. The aliens are mysterious and eerie while they stick to aerial attacks; but when we meet them up-close-and-personal it is a shame to see how anthropomorphic the animation team have gone. All-in-all, an average disaster movie with enough heart and production quality to justify the cinema entry price.

REVIEW: Project Nim (dir. James Marsh)

In 1973, Columbia University professor Dr. Herb Terrace embarked on one of the strangest scientific experiments of his generation (a generation, let’s not forget, that included Timothy Leary). He decided that by bringing up a newborn chimp, Nim, in a human environment and teaching him sign language, he could prove that the capacity to form language is not a uniquely human trait. The experiment failed to provide conclusive results; but what Terrace did prove is that if language is a defining characteristic that separates man from ape, then it is the only one, because compassion, reason and foresight clearly do not play a part.

The opening of Marsh’s film follows the aesthetic of his previous project, Man on Wire, by splicing grainy documentary footage with a stylised, almost noirish dramatic element. This approach worked so well for the suspense of Man on Wire, but it does little justice to Nim’s melancholy and bizarre story. Where Man on Wire was a high-octane heist movie, Project Nim is a slow-burning story of human endeavour and pathos. Marsh quickly retires this style, but with no back up plan he never quite works out how best to tell his story, and reverts to ‘talking heads’ and archive footage for the rest of the film.

It doesn’t take long to realise that Nim’s first surrogate, Stephanie, is bat shit insane. She allows him to run amock and becomes obsessed with his “sexual awakening” and watching him masturbate. When Nim outgrows city life Terrace sets him up in a huge country mansion with a harem of buxom and pliable young female teachers who, in the space of a few months, teach Nim a considerable vocabulary of signs with which to express himself. Terrace remains distant throughout, his interest only piqued by occasional newspaper attention and regular sex with one or more of the “teachers”.

Eventually the entire experiment is abandoned as Nim becomes too powerful for his teachers; and he is dumped in a chimpanzee enclosure. Terrace confirms himself as a repulsive and apathetic man: he has satiated his lust and is happy enough with the half-baked and arbitrary results of his mangled experiment. He allows Nim to tumble from enclosure to medical testing facility to lonely farm sanctuary without ever trying to intervene.

After 10 years of confusion, one of Nim’s old carers locates him and decides to visit. Bob approaches cautiously as a barely recognisable Nim rocks back and forth in his cage. Nim turns to face his old friend and immediately throws out his most simple and favourite sign, one of the few signs he created on his own, “play”.

Our sympathy for Nim, and our wonder at the madness of his captors, only takes us so far, however. By the end of the film we feel as if we know a bit more about Project Nim, but we aren’t sure why. Marsh is too content framing the entire film around the narrative spun by its subjects, rather than stamping his own authorship on the film, and as a result it lacks the power and depth of his previous work.

INTERVIEW: Ryan Roberts on Oliver Sherman

Ryan Roberts’ feature debut, Oliver Sherman, follows the lives of two US war veterans as they struggle to come to terms with life after war. Franklin has left his old life behind and is happily married with children; but this tranquil life is thrown into turmoil when old friend Sherman shows up on his doorstep in need of bed and board. Sherman has not recovered from the trauma of war, and his presence in Franklin’s home has chilling consequences. Roberts’ film, based on Rachel Ingalls’ short story Veterans, is a tragic and poetic exploration of friendship, trauma, and broken masculinity.

FtF: So what attracted you to Ingalls’ short story?

RR: Well I had spent almost five years on what I thought was going to be my first feature, but it turned out to be too big for a first feature. And there was a momentum behind it in terms of development and financing, in terms of producers and crew attached, so I knew I could get some sort of movie made. I had never attempted adaptation before but I thought that it might provide an easier immediate answer in terms of making a movie; so I started reading short stories by the boat load thinking I could read something and than make it my own if it was a short story. I was in Canada, in my local bookstore Indigo Chapters, and I spotted this book that I had seen over five years earlier in a Village Voice ‘Best of Year’ list. And just in the store I started reading this short story and read the whole thing in one fell swoop and started having ideas then and there. I suggested to my producers that maybe this should be the first feature; so they went and got the rights, and that’s how it happened.

FtF: So you weren’t actively seeking something in the thriller genre? Or something with a military theme?

RR: No, but weirdly it turned out to be quite similar, thematically, to the project I had been working on for the previous few years: in terms of the threat of violence and the notion of damaged masculinity. Those things from the previous project are evident in what I did with this short story.

FtF: What was your experience of adapting the story?

RR: Well it was almost a novella, it was about 70 pages, but this is a very loose adaptation. I didn’t work with the author in any way because I didn’t want to be indebted to her or feel guilty that I was deviating from her initial impulse. So I never talked to her or contacted her, and I don’t know if she has seen the movie. The short story is more literary than the movie; the main character is a bit more cold and removed than he is in my movie. But I think the movie respects what she was doing.

I would say the short story was not inherently cinematic. The majority of scenes are not actually in the short story; they are a visual embodiment of ideas from the short story. What I like about her work is that it is very timeless and you don’t know where it’s set. I embrace that thoroughly in all my work. I try to aim at something lyrical and displaced, and that drives some people nuts but I like it a lot.

FtF: The film is certainly timeless. You avoid any mention of specific times and places for their military service.

RR: Yes that was a conscious decision. There have been so many movies that are political and are specifically about the Gulf, etc. But even if there wasn’t a war on I still would have made this movie. The novella actually takes place during the Korean War, but in the entire 70 pages I think it is only mentioned in one line. I would say her work is not really alluding to any given context. She doesn’t want to make political things, she wants to make timeless things, and that’s why I chose it.

FtF: Did you already have this superb cast in mind? And what was your experience working with them?

RR: Well the first person we cast was Molly Parker. It sounds ridiculous but to get Canadian financing you need to cast a Canadian actor in a lead role. But I thought she was perfect for the role, and I knew she had been on Deadwood with Garrett (Dillahunt) so I thought she could help us get to him as well. Sure enough she did help to facilitate that so I went to meet Garrett and we got along. Strangely the hardest part to cast was the third lead, the husband, because the Canadian financiers were literally counting lines and decided that Molly’s character had fewer lines than Garrett and the Franklin so we needed to cast another Canadian actor in the third role. So in the end we cast Donal (Logue) because it turned out that he had been born in Ottawa and lived there for about two days. But Garrett and Molly had been on Deadwood together and Garrett and Donal had been on Life together about a month prior to shooting. So I didn’t know them but they all knew each other well.

FtF: Did any of them bring anything specific to the table regarding their characters?

RR: Well, you would have to ask them. I mean I know that Garrett lived next door to a Vietnam vet when he was younger, and he said that a lot of what’s in that role is what he witnessed from that guy back in Seattle, where he is originally from. We had about five days of rehearsal, and it was sort of frightening for me because I had never done rehearsal before, so there was no one giving their all in terms of rehearsing scenes, it was more about the four of us reading through the script and talking through it, discussing what things meant and making sure we were all on the same path. I would say that Garrett, especially, was so disciplined and such a gentleman at all times during the making of the film. Nothing like his character at all! If every movie I make could have Garrett in it I would have him in it.

FtF: There is an unseen TV set playing in the background during some of the domestic scenes. What was that about?

RR: It is a movie without any real soundtrack; it is just natural sounds. So we were trying to figure out how you build tension with background sounds, and also how you fill the background without it being too predominant. But in that specific instance there is no hidden message or specific reason for that track; it was just an attempt to fill space without using some giant Spielberg score. I think it is more unnerving when there is no score and there are just background sounds. I embrace that, although it makes the sound design all the more difficult because you need to fill the spaces and stop things from being flat or boring. I wanted to keep things quiet, I didn’t want a score, we wanted to work with diegetic sound. People expect a score now, so to withhold that creates another type of tension.

FtF: So what are your plans for the future?

RR: Well I spent five years on what I thought would be my first feature. We had a whole crew for it, government funding for development, producers, etc. All of that ended up going into this so this film actually got made quite quickly. At the moment I sort of feel like I am recovering from this. Toronto was the festival premiere and that was almost a year ago. But at the moment I am still concentrating on this and we will see if the other project gets off the ground soon.

REVIEW: Jack Goes Boating (dir. Phillip Seymour Hoffman)

Cast: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega

There are a lot of things Jack can’t do: two of them are swimming and cooking. As a chauffeur for his uncle’s limousine company, Jack spends his life counting the miles through New York’s hinterland of crumbling freeways and soot-stained tower blocks. He has locked all the colour of life away in a Reggae collection and a beanie hat that hides a tumbling mess of half-formed dreadlocks. But the time has come to open up his heart to the tempest, and see how it flies.

Jack agrees to a double date with best friend Clyde, his wife Lucy, and her colleague Connie. The timid first encounter prompts Jack to make two rash decisions: he agrees to go boating with Connie in the summer, and he promises her a dinner party. There are two problems: Jack can’t swim, and Jack can’t cook.

The ensuing film centres on Jack’s journey to improve himself and grasp life more firmly. It is a heart-warming exploration of how one man’s change can ripple through the lives of those closest to him. Jack is the hero, the centre of the story; but he is also a fulcrum, and his trio of friends will find the balance of their lives upended as he pivots and shifts and, finally, comes to rest once more. Nowhere is this shift clearer than in best friend Clyde. Jack may always have been a kind and attentive friend, but unburdened by the complexities of adult life he can hardly have been a helpful confidante. As Jack begins the journey into adulthood, the relief with which Clyde finally opens up about his haggard marriage is powerful and moving.

There is little tragedy or suspense – no churning upheavals or heartbreaking ennui – but this hole is plugged by the charming characters and bittersweet dialogue. Tradition dictates that Jack and Connie should fumble awkwardly, leaving feelings buried until it is almost too late, and then eventually, courageously, race through an airport as the score climaxes. But Jack and Connie aren’t like that at all…

They are hopelessly, wonderfully unromantic. When Jack suggests “a little good night kiss? Y’know, nothing overwhelming” Connie replies, “I’m not ready for penis penetration”. But then, surprisingly, when they do become intimate, Connie remarks, “I like how you touch me, how you barely touch my skin”. She has a powerful sensuality that has not spoiled, but untouched has become more refined. Jack might seem like the sort of man to shy away from passion; and when Connie suggests, “I might be ready, if you overwhelm me, if you force me” we assume this will be too much for our timid hero. He stands for an eternity, breathing heavily. Will he flee? Can he… then BAM… he bull charges her onto the bed and lands with a thud atop her. This man is charging forward with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he won’t let that slow him down anymore.

Their disarming strength and confidence allows the film to turn away from cliché and venture into territory that is underexplored in romantic comedies: the necessity of friendship, the floodgate that opens when you invest in another life, the childish impulses that awaken when your heart is fiddled with.

Too many great actors ruin their directorial debuts by falling back on the crutch of their own performances; but the powerful, shy Phillip Seymour Hoffman does not allow himself so central a role in the fabric of his first film. This is not the sort of grumbling, frenetic tour de force we have come to expect from him as an actor; but it is a quiet, patient romantic comedy that breathes freely and never feels too much like a showcase for its director-star.

The film captures the warm glow and crisp freshness of New York in winter, but it is not a crass festive vision done up in tinsel and fairy lights. As with everything else in this film, it relies on a beguiling sincerity and quietness: frosty park benches, soiled piles of ploughed sidewalk snow, a strong winter sun melting the icy skyscrapers at dusk, all accompanied by the melancholy sounds of Grizzly Bear - perfect New York winter music.