Reviews

This is simply the best movie I have seen since Shawshank Redemption. It tells the story of a family living in the wilderness who are forced to face modern society. Its funny, with a pinch of sad, and a huge dollop of thought-provoking.

Matt Ross is a genius who has found his voice and style in this film. The direction is just incredible. The script has all the fluff stripped out so it moves along at a great pace. It is edited to perfection so every scene draws you further in. It feels like "Into The Wild" as directed by Clint Eastwood. I have been going around telling random people about how great this movie is and how it will clean up at the Oscars.

I don't see it appealing to everyone however. That is what makes it such a great film because no one left the screening ambivalent. The open-minded Austin, Texas audience was vastly in the Fantastic camp, but I can see this film is not going to go down well everywhere with everyone. If it did, it would be some fluff piece and not the classic it is destined to be.

If the remake of Infernal Affairs (The Departed) won all those Oscars then a re-make of this movie will surely clean up. Its one of those movies that just doesn't let up. At any given time there are at least three threads to the story, each of which keeps you on the edge of your seat. I actually had to stop it at one point so I could calm down a bit.

The acting by everyone involved is very believable and that makes it quite harrowing at points. I don't want to give away a single thing about the story but what I can say is that its an absolutely brilliant twist on a story that has been done many times before.

If you are going to see just one foreign film this year then let it be this one.

Into the Valley of Elah takes us on a journey of discovery from the view-point of a father who wants to find out what happened to his son after returning from Iraq. If there is one thing these days thats guaranteed to drive the audience away from a movie, it must surely be if it has something to do with the Iraq war. The war reminds me of a line in Apocalypse Now about needing wings to fly over it. Having said that, if you are enticed by the incredible cast to see this movie then you won't be disappointed.

Haggis' last attempt at a war movie (Flags of our Fathers) was totally lame so I did have some reservations about going to see this one. In the Valley of Elah is full of insight, and humanity. Back to the old Haggis thank goodness! The cast and the acting alone make it worthwhile, I think that although Theron does a wonderful job here, she was way too pretty for the role. That can't be helped I guess so they should have given her a scar or something to make her look the part. Everyone else was just spot on and Tommy Lee Jones' stood out as special. Frances Fisher's sure does have some "equipment" worth seeing too.

I think in the end this movie does have something poignant to say about the US government's perennial sacrifice of our magnificent young men in the so called war for Democracy or against Terror or whatever. I am sure the Greeks who invented Democracy would have been overjoyed for people to be encouraged to adopt it. Encouragement, is one thing. Having Democracy shoved up your butt by a cruise missile is quite another.

If you've seen the trailers for this movie you've pretty much seen all the best scenes and figured out the story-line. In a nutshell, serial killer, bang bang, the odd witty line. Been there, seen that. I didn't really care if any of the characters lived or died. There were three good lines and one of them is in the trailer. There were no memorable scenes like in Blood Simple with the bullets punching light-holes in the wall. About half way through I got really bored and lost all interest. The Coen's have been going downhill since Blood Simple. This is better than their last few attempts but nothing special. The critics are of full of it as usual. In the cinema I could hear people yawning and fidgeting and I am thinking, this movie is just getting hyped up by some big marketing firm because it sure ain't what its cracked up to be.

I've seen many a movie I thought deserved an Oscar. Into the Wild deserves something greater. It would be like giving Jesus the Nobel prize for peace. If thats all you got, then it ain't good enough. Sean Penn has created a haunting masterpiece that is more akin to visual poetry than cinema. Christopher McCandless, the main character, leaves everything behind but what he can carry and embarks on a journey across America that takes him to the wilds of Alaska. His journey is as much spiritual as physical. You could well take any single frame of this movie and hang it as a prized photograph on your wall. Along the way McCandless deeply touches the lives of others he meets. I find myself to be one of them.

Although I was just happy to go see a movie where no one dies I was expecting something wishy washy and contrived. I am even happier to say this is a gem of a movie and a great advert for Ireland. The two main characters are musicians from very different walks of life. Music brings them together and through it they give each other the strength to face their demons. The characters are very real and endearing and the dialog is equally so and very far removed from the contrived half-witted witticisms of the Hollywood variety. Just as surprisingly everyone they interact with is a person I would happily share a few beers with. The whole movie industry these days seems to be about hate and death. I think this movie was made by people who loved the story and the characters and wanted others to feel the same. It is not often I walk out of the cinema wishing that the movie I just saw was longer. Twice please!

Definitely worth the money for a change. There are lots of great action scenes and amazing costumes and design work at every level. There is even some acting. Whether this movie is historically accurate or not is irrelevant. In brief, 300 muscular six-packed oiled-up Spartans whose society was based around war meet the evil hordes from Lord of the Rings aka the Persians. The battle that lasted 3 days took place in Thermopylae in Greece. There was a bottle-neck at which the Spartans made their stand and the 600K Persians tried to force their way through. What ensued was one of the greatest battles in human history that basically saved democracy.

This movie did come across a tiny minuscule little bit like an advert for white supremacy but I am sure that was not the intention. Case in point I was very proud to see Peter Mensah as a Persian. He was as always magnificent. The best thing about this movie was Kelly Craig who is the incredibly sexy Oracle girl. Ms. Craig seems to be an Internet ghost in that there are virtually no photos of her anywhere. Her agent should be taken out at dawn and shot with a disposable camera.

As a Persian I was of course not surprised that we were portrayed as evil hordes. I would have liked to have seen some Persians eating roasted babies (like we do) but well you can't have everything. Its not any kind of propaganda just historical fact really. After all my name is Evil. Axis of Evil. Oh yes and I drive a Ford Insurgent.

In brief, a ground-breaking work worth watching more than once. One of the best movies I've ever seen and definitely the best Brit movie I've seen for decades.

Based on P.D. James' book and set in southern England, Children of Men depicts a bleak future in which no children have been born for 18years and humanity is on the brink of extinction. Through a series of encounters Clive Owen's character is subtly drawn into the midst of a group who harbor probably the world's only pregnant woman. The two protagonists then set off to find a legendary sanctuary at sea where they hope to change the fate of humanity.

Yes its bleak, and yes its depressing, but it gets under your skin and its one of those movies that later, out of the blue, you'll crave to see again. This movie is actually special in so many ways its hard to list them all. Alfonso Cuarón direction is reminiscent of Kubrik at his best (Oscar 1). More than just having watched this movie you feel you lived through it. The camera work and cinematography in general are simply brilliant (Oscar 2). You see the action from the viewpoint of an observer who is right in the thick of it without missing out on the peripheral action. It really makes you feel you were there and are actually remembering what happened. The whole movie is shot in a kind of twilight that feels like natural light and reinforces how real everything feels. A 21st century Citizen Kane.

Whoever designed the sets loved their work (Oscar 3) because of the attention to every little detail. The Pink Floyd reference is a kind of icing on the cake. London is transformed into a vision of this bleak future so incredibly well it is hard to believe its all fiction. The trains and the various vehicles just fit in perfectly so you have no trouble believing that is what they are going to look like in this future.

The special effects are simply fantastic (Oscar 4). I just loved the subtle touches like the advertising on the side of the buses. In any other movie they'd force these things down your throat to show how clever they were, but here the special effects are done so well you don't even realize they are special effects unless you are looking for it.

Whoever did the explosions and coordinated the stunt work is a genius (Oscar 4). When you see so many explosions on TV it's easy to spot a fake Hollywood flame blaster. The ones in this movie are bang on.

There is this welcome trend in today's TV programs to have the dialog and action approach closely what people would actually do and say in real life (e.g. Entourage). This is the first full-length movie I've seen where the screenplay (Oscar 5) does the business.

After all the so so roles this is one in which Clive Owen really shines in the lead (Oscar 6). Michael Caine (Oscar 7) raises the bar as far as great acting goes.

The movie this reminds me of most is No Blade of Grass. Both get under your skin and both have a kind of inevitable quality about them in the sense that from one scene to the next things happen in a natural progression that makes the story truly harrowing. I can only hope that this movie wins an Oscar but somehow I think it will get short-changed primarily because it has mainly a British cast, but more likely because the material is not Oscar-compatible in the same way as Apocalypse Now. Ask any hundred movie buffs which they remember, Kramer vs Kramer or Apocalypse Now. Enough said. If it does win, I'll be 3 for 3.

Great director, great cast, great screenplay, great book, poor movie. The story-line is pretty complex as with all of PKD's works. In brief, its about an undercover cop trying to find the source of Substance D, a highly addictive and destructive drug. There are plot twists within plot twists which really work in the book and almost work in the movie. The down-side is the whole movie is shot as if it was put through the Artwork filter in Photoshop. Unfortunately, in complete contrast to Sin City, it just doesn't work. In Sin City the actors were real and the background was stylized so there was still the human touch and that made it special. Remove that and you are left with lots of pretty pictures. If The Scanner Darkly was shot normally it would have been a fantastic movie. If you are a PKD fan then it probably won't matter that much to you anyway.

In brief, Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly a big-time fashion magazine editor and Anne Hathaway, who has no fashion sense at all, manages to get a job as her second assistant. Emily Blunt plays her first assistant. There are a few love interests, mentors, and wheeling and dealing scenes thrown in for good measure but the movie is essentially about the interaction between Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. Sounds a bit lame, and it would have been were it not for Meryl Streep. She plays her role so perfectly that you can't imagine anyone else could even come close. Meryl Streep has truly created a movie icon worthy of an Oscar.

Anne Hathaway puts in a terrific performance and Emily Blunt, apart from being very pretty, adds just exactly the right amount of comic relief without being a caricature to make it all work. Blunt's facial expressions were so spot on and timed to perfection that they had everyone in the theater in stitches.

I highly recommend this movie, specially for the women in LA who have about as much fashion sense as any $20 color-blind hooker with massive silicone implants and a cellphone surgically implanted into her skull.

I just watched the first episode of this show and I can't remember when I saw a sitcom where I laughed so much. The characters are hilarious in a very real way. In virtually every sitcom the dialog is one amusing anecdote after another. No one talks like that. The only way anyone is going to talk like that is if they memorized a script. Although the dialog in the show is funny and anecdotal, its something that you can believe a real-life character would say. That makes it a work of genius because obviously many have tried and few have succeeded. There is plenty of swearing, and bedroom scenes with depiction of sex. That may put some people off. However these scenes feel very real as if you are spying on the couple next door. It makes you cringe but it makes you laugh like hell.

In this movie Al Gore presents us with his views regarding the issue of global warming and convincing evidence to back up his assertions. He does so earnestly and with great passion. The movie is very well crafted and keeps you interested all the way through. It is well worth seeing and hopefully it will lead the viewers to become more involved in the issues and investigate them for themselves.

Speaking as a space scientist, a skeptic, and a someone with an open mind I did not find any fault with his aims. The flaws in the movie are what he did not state, and that there is no counter-point. I would have liked to have seen a few interviews with people who disagreed with his main points. I also think he should have pointed out that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been historically preceded by an increase in temperature and not the other way around. Brushing this major issue under the carpet had me wondering what else he left out.

Although this movie is true to the book it has none of the excitement. I saw it with a friend who had not read the book and we both thought it was mediocre. The plot is too complicated to go into but basically its a combination murder-mystery and treasure-hunt centering around the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Its worth watching so, if you can, wait to rent it instead of paying more to sit and be mostly bored for two and a half hours.

The main problem is not the screenplay or the ensemble of truly great actors who do their best. Its the direction. There is no change of pace. Actually there is not much pace to speak of. The musical score, like the movie itself, is dulled down and monotonic. Whoever bankrolled this should have paid whatever Doug Liman or Jon Turteltaub were asking to direct it. This could have been a mammoth blockbuster with the right person at the helm. Instead its going to be mildly popular for a time simply because of all the hype.

This is a movie made with the confidence of one who knows exactly what she is trying to communicate. The problem is that what is being communicated is so far beyond the norm that it is not going to be easily grasped. Esther is a highly intelligent young woman. The main thread of the story begins when she accidentally injures herself. Through the injury she begins to see her herself as merely meat, an object. Meat can not suffer, has no emotions, has no ambitions, is immune to the pressures and pettiness of everyday life. She finds this release increasingly more fascinating and attractive. This is not something she can communicate to anyone around her so she explores it in secret attempting to finally exist as a mere object devoid of all humanity. Her loneliness adds a cutting edge of sadness to the story. If she found the right person to share her thoughts with we may have ended up with an equally bizarre love story.

I found it difficult to watch this movie all the way through without a break. Some of my friends have not even managed to watch it past the first twenty minutes. If you do manage to sit through this movie, I am pretty sure that not only will you thereafter remember it vividly, you will also find it hard to stop talking about it.

This version is reasonably different from the original but all in all it is not even as good as the many made-for-TV disaster movies. You never get to care whether any of the characters live or die. I also found the camera work incredibly annoying. There are hardly any scenes where the camera is more than 5 feet away from any character's face, so you never get any sense of scale. They could have filmed it all in a set the size of my apartment. I guess the intention was to make you feel claustrophobic or something "clever" like that.

The original version of this movie and other great disaster movies like Titanic, and Towering Inferno gave you a sense that you could see what was going on so you got involved by trying to figure out how to overcome the challenges the characters faced with them. More importantly in the first part of these movies you got to know the characters and care what happens to them. Instead we have "here are 5 or 6 people, now lets get on with the lame disaster scenes". It is a shame this movie was so poor because the acting was actually really great specially by Russell who hit the right tone.

I am giving nothing away that is not already in the trailers for this movie by saying Bruce Willis plays an aging cop who is asked to take a suspect (Mos Def) 16 blocks to the court house. The bad guys are basically trying to stop them getting there. If this sounds like the plot of The Gauntlet I don't think its just some wild coincidence.

Lets digress for a moment. If you have seen Dumb and Dumber there is a scene set in the truck where Jim Carey says "Do you want to hear the most annoying sounds in the world?" and then he makes a truly annoying sound. Thats how Mos Def speaks in this movie! I found his incessant nasal drawl utterly annoying. Mind you he could have been reciting Shakespeare for all I knew. I could barely understand what he was saying. English subtitles would have definitely helped.

In brief this movie could have really worked for me if Mos Def was battered to death by an angry cinema audience early on and Bruce Willis had to carry his body for 16 blocks.

When I saw the trailers for this movie I thought it was going to be yet another super killer assassin movie like Ulraviolently crap. This movie has all the action but its also moving, thought-provoking, wonderfully acted, and well lets just say absolutely brilliant and get it over with. The famous screen writers obviously had a vision and what you see on the surface portrays that vision well. However, just as with the Matrix and its subtle references to Jesus, if you pay close attention there are many underlying messages that make this movie really special for buffs like me. I am sure somewhere on the Internet there is, or will be, a web site that will point them all out. To mention them in detail would mean including spoilers here and anyway its worth digging for the gold.

Natalie Portman's performance was a real eye opener for me anyway. There is about a ten minute stretch after she receives her famous hair cut where I was moved to tears and the only other thing that does that to me is a red hot poker in the eye.

If you like great feel-good movies like Notting Hill, The Full Monty etc. this movie is for you. I hope it makes it to BFI's top 100 list. The finale makes you want to get up and clap. Chiwetel Ejiofor is just amazing. He brings much humanity and sheer style to his role and this movie in general. He reminded me of Gael García Bernal. Not just as an actor of similar stature but as an equally special actor.

I am particularly happy that the British movie industry still has a soul. I find Hollywood's love of death and body counts exceptionally pathetic. You know the "I can take on a hundred people and kill them all in 20 seconds because I am a frigging killer robot soldier assassin of some stupid century" movie. Yawn! Skip that crap and go see this instead.

This is a truly wonderful movie. It surprised the hell out of me. I was all prepared to be bored out of my skull having to sit through one of those "war is bad for you" Hollywood movies. Instead the time flew by and I found myself deeply touched.

Danny Glover plays a Vietnam war veteran hiding away from the world whose life, and the lives of those around him, gets transformed by a young Vietnamese girl (Zoe Weizenbaum) who is left with him by an old army buddy. Linda Hamilton plays a store keeper who is their point of contact with the "real" world. Sounds a bit wishy-washy but believe me its not. There is some kind of comfortable chemistry between Glover, Weizenbaum, and Hamilton that draws you in and makes you really care. Linda Hamilton says more with just the expressions on her face than any number of words. I think of all the movies I have seen Glover and Linda Hamlton perform in this is the only one that proves them as truly great. As for Weizenbaum, well I don't know if someone that young can win an Oscar, but I hope so. The rest of the supporting cast were spot on too.

Having said all that, the movie as a whole is flawed by old-fashioned poorly constructed flash-backs and some useless scenes in the middle that could be cut and more scenes added at the end to add more impact. I have the feeling that if a surgeon like Kieslowski made this movie it would end up as a classic. Flawed and yet I gave it 10/10.

In closing my advice is to go see it and tell your friends about it so hopefully it will get distributed more widely.

This is a wonderful movie not to be missed. On the one level its about a young woman's battle against her fear of inheriting her mathematician father's insanity. On another level its about proof as we apply it in our lives. As a drama the plot flows beautifully keeping you interested to the very end.

I don't know who did the casting for this movie but they certainly struck gold. All the characters fit their roles immaculately. Paltrow however is exceptional as Catherine. Maybe she has suffered in some way the same trials as Catherine, and that is what she drew on to play the role. Or maybe she is just one incredibly brilliant actress. Probably both are true. I certainly hope she gets the acclaim she deserves.

At another level I think this movie is a subtle investigation of what is proof. All the evidence in the world does not add up to a proof. If you observe billions of gray elephants, it does not prove there are no white elephants. In real life there is no absolute proof. It is more a matter of trust. If mathematics is the language of the Universe then mathematicians are the Universe's linguists studying individual letters of the language. Granted every now and then they connect the dots and hit on a whole word, but thats a far cry from understanding what is being said.

In brief, just a lot of Hollywood and fan hype about a second-rate sci-fi flick.

I am a Firefly fan and I looked forward to seeing this movie for about six months. Great SFX, witty dialogue, but mediocre script, lack-luster direction and whoever edited this movie should be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Actually I got so bored when watching this movie that I kept fidgeting in my seat to keep the blood flowing. I wondered afterwards why I couldn't get into it. After all I am a big Firefly fan so they had to work hard to make *me* get bored.

The first problem is definitely the script. It is clever with the dialogue, but it is simply not very interesting.

The second problem is the editing. You get a feeling this was a longer movie thats been cut. I can just imagine what went on. OK we're over time so what shall we get rid of? Well we can't get rid of all the SFX and fighting scenes cause marketing will go nuts, so lets just drop the scenes to do with any kind of character development. What was great about Firefly was the affection between the characters. There is none of that in this movie. You actually have to care what happens to the characters to give a hoot if they live or die. Doh!

I remember something Spielberg said about not being able to get away with too many surprises in a movie. I mean after the fifth or sixth time something "surprising" happens, you start expecting it and then you stop caring altogether.

Finally, this movie is oh so predictable. Not on a scene by scene basis, but in general. Surely I was not the only one who figured out all the so called "secrets", and ending about one third of the way.

Sadly Christina Hendricks who is the most beautiful woman who has ever walked the Earth was missing from this movie or I would have thought it worth the money.

Before seeing this movie I had never heard of Paul Haggis. Now, if he puts his name to a movie as far as I'm concerned they won't need to advertise it. The plot revolves around the lives of separate groups of people living in Los Angeles whose paths cross in part because of car accidents. We start in the present day and the movie takes us back to show us how things came to be. There are many parallels between this movie and Amores Perros. However, unlike Amores Perros where there is no apparent point, Crash examines attitudes towards race and how it affects people's behavior. The characters are as varied as the sub-plots. There are cops and robbers, rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, "good" and "bad", men and women from different races and walks of life.

The magic is in the fact that you find yourself judging the characters by what they do in a scene, but as the movie progresses, you find there are no sinners, there are no saints, there are no neat little boxes you can fit people in to. The very act of judging and categorizing denies how just plain complicated life really is. You'll leave this movie feeling good about life and your fellow man.

As someone who lives and works in LA I found the characters very believable. All the actors are wonderful and Sandra Bullock is specially so. This movie made me see her in a different light. A genuinely great actress with a deep side that you would never expect from all the trite trash she has been starring in. More movies like this one please Ms. Bullock. All credit to Mr. Haggis as scriptwriter for the wonderful natural dialogue and as director for making you relate to the characters as real people and not the usual manufactured personalities.

10/10 Excellent