Drama

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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Any film that receives a 10 minute standing ovation after its premiere has probably got something a bit special.

The Hurt Locker was greeted with this extraordinary response when it was screened, for the very first time, at the Venice Film Festival. Producers were hoping to find a US distributor; they got a lot more than that, with The Hurt Locker vying for no less than nine of those little gold statues that personify supreme achievement (and more often than not trigger a spike in sales).

The Hurt Locker tells the story of three soldiers in Iraq who are part of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, the guys who handle IEDs - improvised explosive devices.

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Directed and adapted by Caroline Link from Stephanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel of the same name, Nowhere in Africa tells the story of a well-to-do German Jewish family who flee the Nazis by going to live and work on a farm in rural Kenya.

A successful lawyer in his former life, Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) throws himself into his new role as farm manager, which involves much toil for little pay. Courteous and friendly, he quickly gains the locals’ respect. Not so his beautiful, snobbish wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler), who makes no effort to hide her contempt for Kenya and its backward ways. She treats the farm cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), like a servant when he sees himself as a professional, and insults him by asking him to carry water, a job reserved for women in his tribe.

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More serene than the films that shaped Wong Kar-Wai’s early career, such as Chungking Express and Ashes of Time, this is an exquisite paean to the agony of repressed emotions and unrequited love. In the Mood for Love forms the second part of a loose trilogy, together with Days of Being Wild, and 2046, released in 2004. Set in the straight laced society of 1960s Hong Kong, the film focuses on two neighbours whose friendship deepens when they suspect their respective partners of having an extra-marital affair.

His name is Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung). Hers is Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung). He is a journalist for one of the Hong Kong papers, she’s an executive assistant. Neither is wanting for money, as evinced by their elegant attire, but they frequently find themselves alone, despite living in a shared building where the neighbours play majong and gossip late into the night. Looking for company during the lonely evenings, the two of them meet for noodles at a local café. When they discover their partners are cheating on them, Mr Chow and Ms Su vow to keep their own friendship pure. Interestingly, Wong chooses to keep the cheating couple off screen. Their adultery is tawdry and commonplace, while the reticence of the two leads lends their growing love for each other a sort of quixotic nobility.

Christopher Doyle’s camerawork is breathtaking. Featuring the lush, saturated colour palette of film noir, each shot becomes a work of art. The camera acts as a voyeur, capturing scenes through doors, windows, swirling cigarette smoke and the heavy monsoon rains. (more…)

Departing from the horror films that made his name, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa tells the story of an unemployed salaryman in this intricate family melodrama.

The film centres around a traditional Japanese family whose lives are defined by routine and custom. When the father, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), loses his well-paid job at a medical equipment company to cheaper Chinese workers, his pride prevents him from admitting this to his wife and children. Instead, suited and booted with briefcase in hand, he makes a pretence of leaving for the office each day, whiling away his hours at the local library and queuing for free food at the soup kitchen. His demure wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), soon guesses at the truth but, so as not to undermine her husband’s authority in the household, pretends not to know.

Although his children are not aware of his redundancy, the longer Ryuhei lives a lie, the less respect they have for his authority. In a spirit of rebellion his elder son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) signs up for the US Army, while his younger son Kenji (Inowaki Kai) uses his school lunch money to pay for piano lessons, after Ryuhei point blank refuses to pay for them himself.

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The Founding of a Republic, a star-studded epic which marks the 60th Anniversary of China’s Communist revolution, opens in UK cinemas on Thursday.

The film, which tells the story of the communist rise to power in 1949 from Chairman Mao’s days as a young soldier, was made by the state-run China Film Group, and stars over 100 of the country’s best-known actors, including Hong Kong king-fu heros Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as Crouching Tiger actress Zhang Ziyi.

The film’s producers hope that the cast list and subject matter will attract both older viewers and the internet-savvy younger generation, with the film tipped to be one of the highest-grossing films the country has seen for years.

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Released in 1994, Chungking Express is one of Wong Kar-Wai’s best-known films, and provides a good introduction his cinematic style. Following on from the director’s first masterpiece, Days of Being Wild, the film explores themes of isolation and despair in the big city, and an escapist desire captured in the song “California Dreaming” which is played repeatedly throughout the movie.

The film revolves around two Hong Kong cops, both of whom wander the city, haunted by memories of lost love. Their stories are told separately, one following the other, and they cross each other’s path only fleetingly. In the first, Taiwanese policemen He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) remembers a former girlfriend by collecting tins of pineapples that expire on the 1st of May, a month after she left him. “I wonder if there’s anything in the world that won’t expire,” he muses. One night, Qiwu becomes transfixed by a mysterious blonde-wigged woman he meets in a bar who drags him into the seedy underworld of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a labyrinth of fast food stalls, market places and squalid guesthouses. Christopher Doyle’s frenetic camerawork captures perfectly the restlessness of this neon city, weaving in and out of noisy streets and dingy corridors in a frenzied sequence of colour, light and action.

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Adapted from director John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, Doubt explores notions of tradition, truth and compassion, and demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of blind justice.

The film is set in and around the church of St Nicholas, a largely Irish-American parish in the Bronx of 1964 - a year after America’s first Catholic president was assassinated. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the jovial and kind-hearted Father Flynn, a modernising priest who believes the old orders should serve the wider church community with compassion, rather than sitting above the laity in moral aloofness. The austere Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), who runs the parish school, represents the old guard. Feared by staff and pupils alike, she believes she must protect the children in her charge from a corrupt and rapidly changing world, which means no dancing, no ballpoint pens and certainly no secular songs.

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A modern-day prodigal, Kym (the beautiful Anne Hathaway) is the recovering drug-addict who takes a day’s leave from rehab to celebrate the wedding of her sister. But the cracks in their fragile relationship soon show when Kym’s problems threaten to upstage the bride on her big day.

In spite of its seemingly transparent title, Rachel Getting Married is far more concerned with the wastrel sister than Rachel herself. Wearing her scars like a badge of honour, Kym is at once vulnerable and bristlingly obnoxious, revealing her egocentric perspective at the most inappropriate of moments. One such incident is the wedding speech in which Kym offers an overblown apology for her behaviour over the years, once again taking the spotlight off the married couple, and back onto Kym and her “issues”. One can’t help but cringe.

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Following on from Tamara Jenkins’ ascerbic directorial debut Slums of Beverly Hills, The Savages takes the theme of the dysfunctional family and applies it to the older generation.

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Jon Savage, a shabby academic who spends his days agonising over a book on Berthold Brecht that he is writing. His neurotic younger sister Wendy, played by Laura Linney, is an aspiring but unsuccessful New York playwright who makes ends meet by temping. They are not particularly close, but enjoy banter about Sam Shepherd and the theatre of the absurd, none of which comes in very useful when they receive a call about their ailing father who has started plastering the walls with his own excrement.

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