Drama

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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Updating the body-swap genre for a teenage audience, 17 Again stars young heartthrob Zac Efron as a failed sports star who is given another chance at life.

Forty-something Mike O’Donnell (Matthew Perry) can only be described as a loser. Unemployed and on the brink of a divorce, he dreams of the days when he excelled on the school basketball team and dated the prettiest girl in the class, little knowing her pregnancy would mean the end of his dreams of sports-stardom and a prestigious college scholarship. Then one day during a nostalgia trip to his old school he meets a mysterious, twinkly-eyed caretaker and falls into a Twilight Zone vortex to emerge as a muscle-bound Zac Efron, aka Mike aged 17. His body may have regressed 20 years, but his surroundings are very much as they left him: same wife, same kids, same problems.

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On 16th November, 1859, the flamboyant American author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote, reads an article about four members of a well-respected Kansas family who were brutally murdered one night. The notion of two very different worlds colliding - the protective unit of Clutter family and the rootless, amoral sphere inhabited by their killers - enthralls him, and Capote phones up William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, to ask if he would be interested in a magazine article examining the effect of the murders on the local community. Shawn gives him the nod of approval and Capote leaves for the wind-swept plains of the Mid-West along with his childhood friend Harper Lee.

Speaking to an agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Capote admits that he is not bothered whether the murderers are caught or not - he is satisfied that the subject matter will play to his ambitions of producing writing that combines the emotional intensity of fiction with the raw urgency of hard facts. But when two young vagabonds, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, are arrested and charged with the crime, Capote realises their stories could bring him the wealth and acclaim he so craves. Six years later he would publish In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel” that made him the most famous writer in America, a millionaire, and destroyed him from the core.

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Adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller and starring Kate Winslet as a former SS officer and David Kross as her schoolboy lover, The Reader throws up difficult questions about the nature of culpability in the Holocaust.

Ralph Feinnes plays Michael Burg, an uptight German lawyer who is first seen in his sleek, minimalist apartment preparing an orderly breakfast for his bedfellow before bidding her an awkward goodbye - director Stephen Daldry does not shy away from stereotypes of standoffish Germans. The film then flashes back to the late 50s to when Michael (now played by Kross) was 15.Not yet out of school, he begins an illicit and passionate affair with a 34-year-old tram-conductor named Hanna (Kate Winslet), who first encountered him on the street when he was suffering from a painful bout of scarlet fever. She enjoys listening to him read to her, and lust soon blossoms into love, until one day Hanna disappears without trace.

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My Life as a Dog is an astute, sensitive portrayal of the turbulence of childhood, and won Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström world renown when the film was first released in 1985, before he went on to produce schmaltzy blockbusters such as Chocolat and The Cider House Rules.

Eleven-year old Ingemar, played by Anton Glanzelius in one of his only major roles, is a sweet, spirited young boy whose mischievous exploits drive his frail and ailing mother to despair. In order to bring her some respite, Ingemar is sent to stay with his maternal uncle and wonderfully forbearing aunt in a small Swedish village, away from his churlish elder brother and beloved puppy. The village is home to a collection of eccentrics, including a football-playing tomboy who worries about her burgeoning breasts, a maverick sculptor who adds erotic touches to his creations at the local glass factory, a buxom blonde who poses naked for said sculptor, and a bedridden old man who likes to hear Ingemar read to him out of a lingerie catalogue. Ingemar himself has an eccentric side, and fits well into village life: he is unable to drink out of a glass without spilling its contents all over himself, and has a tendency to get down on all fours and bark manically when overexcited. It’s a harmless, playful gesture but also provides a way for Ingemar to hide feelings of guilt over his mother’s death.

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Written and directed by brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, Fireproof is an inspirational film about a troubled marriage that is given a new lease of life through faith.

Kirk Cameron plays Caleb, a fire-fighter whose loveless marriage to Catherine is on the rocks. Caleb’s work motto is “never leave your partner behind”, but he fails to apply this to Catherine (Erin Bethea), who, as well as holding down a demanding PR job is also responsible for doing the weekly shop, cleaning up after her lazy husband and caring for her ailing parents. Caleb is dedicated to his job, but not to his wife. A perennial slacker, he won’t lift a finger when it comes to the housework and spends most of his time “pleasuring himself on the Internet”, as Catherine tersely puts it, and obsessing about the sailing boat he plans to buy.

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