Crime Drama

Prior to his untimely death in 2004, Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson wrote a trio of novels collectively known as the Millennium Trilogy. Written in his native Swedish tongue, the stories have proved a critical and commercial success, and all three have already been turned into Swedish language movies.

This month sees the DVD rental release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, originally titled Män Som Hatar Kvinnor or Men Who Hate Women. The film, much like its source material, has enjoyed mass acclaim from pretty much everyone, and deservedly so.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo introduces the trilogy’s two main protagonists; firstly Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged investigative journalist writing for the magazine Millennium. His attempts to uncover the corrupt nature of Swedish billionaire and industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström have gone awry and resulted in a libel case against him. He will have to serve three months in prison, but has a few months before he must face his sentence.

The title character and movie heroine is Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-something with prior issues relating to behaviour and mental stability, but a brilliant researcher. She has been hired by ultra-rich Henrik Vanger of the Vanger Group in order to check the legitimacy and authenticity of Mikael Blomkvist’s reputation as a skilled investigator.

Satisfied with Mikael’s credentials, Vanger meets with Blomkvist and requests that he investigate the disappearance of his foster child Harriet, who has been missing for 40 years and presumed dead. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance are more than suspicious, and Henrik suspects foul play from none other than a member of his own twisted, money-hungry family.

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Modern cinematic heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for the fourth time in this eerie and brooding mystery thriller, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.

Set in the fifties, Shutter Island sees Leo’s U.S. Marshall Edward ‘Teddy’ Daniels investigating the apparent disappearance of a mental patient from a totally locked and guarded room. The patient, Rachel Solando, is a resident at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, located on the otherwise desolate Shutter Island.

Daniels is accompanied by his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), as they attempt to solve the unusual case. Their hospital ‘guide’ is head psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley, portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley, who makes no bones about coming across as rather sinister and creepy.

It does not take long to establish that there is a lot more going on that a crazy woman with a talent for matter displacement. Daniels believes from the offset that the island and its inhabitants, including Cawley, have some dark and desperate secrets buried within those not-so-solid hospital walls.

Secrets from Teddy’s own past, a few suspect twitches from various characters, a cameo from Max von Sydow, a visit to the ‘off-limits’ prison/hospital on the hill, a secluded and mysterious lighthouse and some weirdness on a cliff all help to create a bizarre, baffling and intriguing mystery shot by a master of cinema.

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Harry Brown is a cracking British thriller which pits the legendary Sir Michael Caine against a gang of drug dealers on a south-east London estate.

Caine plays the titular Brown, an ex-Royal Marine who is spending his twilight years making regular visits to his dying wife’s hospital bed and playing chess in the pub with his only friend Leonard.

Leonard reveals his constant harassment by local youths, and he is starting to show signs of cracking. A local underpass serves as a gathering point for the dealers. It also acts as a shortcut to the hospital but Harry refuses to take it, fearing for his life.

In one moving scene, after having taken the long way round to the hospital, Harry finds that his wife has already been removed from her bed; succumbing to her illness before he arrived.

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Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code was one of the highest-grossing films of the decade, earning over US$230 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Yet you’d be hard pushed to find a critic who gave its contrived storyline and turgid script the thumbs up. Angels and Demons, which comes before The Da Vinci Code in Dan Brown’s canon but has been adapted for the big screen as a sequel, is slicker and pacier than its predecessor. Howard, along with adapters Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, stick less rigidly to Dan Brown’s clunky prose this time round, resulting in a more confident, dazzling production. Unfortunately, despite the film’s glossy exterior, it tells a story that is both convoluted and, at time, utterly ludicrous.

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Burn After Reading is another screwball comedy from the Coen Brothers, which takes a bunch of Hollywood A-listers and lets them play the fool in the world of political espionage. This is a parody of the classic spy thriller, where nothing is at stake, caution is thrown to the wind and chaos reigns supreme.

The whole film hinges around a lost disc containing the memoirs of Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), recently sacked from the CIA following a drink problem, which falls into the hands of two gormless gym employees, middle-aged plastic-surgery junkie Linda (Frances McDormand) and easygoing airhead Chad (Brad Pitt).

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Acclaimed for his theatre work, writer/director Martin McDonagh now brings his brilliant mix of the absurd and macabre to the big screen in this exhilarating comic thriller.

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell play two chalk-and-cheese Dublin hitmen who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges after a job in London goes horribly wrong. Ray (Farrell) is a hot-headed novice who has no thoughts for anywhere but Dublin. He rather shot himself in the foot when he accidentally killed a young child on his first hit along with the priest who was his target. Ken (Gleeson) is a kindly, avuncular figure, keen to make the most of a couple of days’ sightseeing in “the best-preserved medieval town in Belgium”.

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I first heard about Gran Torino in a New York Times review, in which it was billed as “a sleek, muscle car of a movie made in the U.S.A.” which presented life in the “industrial graveyard” of real America - run-down shells of once grander houses in suburbs ruled by the same vicious gangs you would expect to find in tough, inner-city ghettos. This is a far cry from the aspirational, model-village setting of American Beauty or Desperate Housewives. But while the film’s premise is a promising one, a starchy script and wooden acting fail to deliver.

Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, an embittered Korean War veteran who spends his days sitting out on his front porch, rifle by his side, gulping back beer and snarling at his troubled neighbourhood which has gradually slid down the monopoly board and is now largely inhabited by impoverished immigrants.

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The newly released double box set of Ang Lee’s enigmatic epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Stephen Chow’s slapstick farce Kung Fu Hustle (2004) couldn’t offer two more different perspectives on the Wuxia genre of filmmaking.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a great deal more than a mere kung fu film. This sweeping, majestic fable is a near masterpiece, combining beautiful cinematography, fight scenes that will take your breath away and a two touching love stories with very different outcomes.

Based on the fourth part of a 1930s pentalogy by novelist Wang Du Lu with a script by James Schamus, Crouching Tiger is concerned with the theft of a holy sword, the Green Destiny, which belongs to the legendary warrior Li Mubai (Chow Yun-Fat). Looking for a quieter life, Mubai entrusts his sword to the gifted martial artist Yu Shulien (Michelle Yeoh), with whom he shares an unspoken love. Yu takes the sword to Beijing, where she meets Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the teenage daughter of a political bigwig, whose nurse bears a striking resemblance to the murderous witch Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei). But when the sword is stolen, everyone leaps into action in a frantic search to retrieve it.

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Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla has one thing in its favour: it is better than his last two movies - Swept Away, the awful Madge-on-a-beach romantic comedy that fared so badly in the US it never even made it to British cinema screens, and the nearly incoherent Revolver. Here Guy Ritchie returns to the familiar territory of London’s seedy underworld that we saw in the 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its 2000 follow-up Snatch.

The problem with RocknRolla is that despite a homoerotic twist and a fresh cast, we’ve basically seen it all before. With the exception of a couple of tough-talking females, Ritchie essentially offers us ‘geezer’ cinema created around his trademark formula - gangland parody packed out with well-mounted action sequences, slick visuals, eclectic scoring and some witty hardman banter from an array of mockney thesps.

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Once seen as a respected institution of Western movies (and Dirty Harry), Clint Eastwood, now 78, has revealed himself to be an adept storyteller who just gets better and better with each new release. Like his 2006 war film Letters from Iwo Jima, Changeling is a provocative and relentless film that looks on the past with coldness and suggests the present has learnt few lessons from it. Child abuse and infanticide feature heavily, but really act as a prism through which the central themes of real-life police corruption and the disempowerment of women are played out with brutal force.

Meticulously researched by the former journalist and Babylon 5 creator  J. Michael Straczynski, who lifted most of the screenplay directly from court records, Changeling is the factual account of a mother whose young boy disappeared, and of a corrupt Police Department in 1928 Los Angeles that would go to any lengths to save its own skin.

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