Harry Brown: Mr Brown went off to town
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Following on from the earlier ramble about the forthcoming Watchmen film (which may or may not happen) we rifled through our DVD collection and dragged out The Hughes Brothers 2001 adaptation of From Hell – another Alan Moore graphic novel adaptation, this one about Jack the Ripper.
It’s ten minutes to midnight.