I Am Love
Starts Friday, September 10th
Rated R; 104 minutes
Damon Wise, Empire Magazine,
Tilda Swinton unleashes her diva and Italian cinema gets a powerful new voice in this operatic melodrama. Recalling Luchino Visconti's classic The Leopard, I Am Love stars Swinton as Emma, a Russian-born woman who has married above herself into a wealthy Milanese family. Falling out of love with her stern husband, Emma embarks on a mad fling with an immigrant chef her son has befriended. Inevitably, her privileged world unravels...
This stately film never descends into formula, using John Adams' score to great effect and boldly utilising the flourishes of '70s Italian genre cinema (zooms, handheld camera) to create something original, refreshing and really very moving.
"It's an exquisite, all-enveloping feast of sensual pleasures. It's almost certainly the most elegant piece of cinema you'll see this year." - Wendy Ide, The Times of London
Micmacs
Starts Friday, September 17th
Rated R; 105 minutes
Pam Grady, Box Office Magazine,
It's been five long years since Jean-Pierre Jeunet's last film, but the wait has been worth it. Micmacs, the story of a man who seeks revenge against the munitions makers who have ruined his life may begin from a more serious premise, but it is as whimsical as the filmmaker's wonderful Amelie.
A landmine robs Bazil (Dany Boon with charm to spare) of his father when he is just a boy. Years later, a stray bullet catches him square in the forehead, lodging there precariously where it might kill him at any moment. The wound also costs him his home and his job. His future looks bleak until a quirky band of second-hand dealers take him into their glittering wonderland of junk. This world of outsiders offers Bazil friendship and family, and something more. When he resolves to get even with the weapons companies that have cast their shadow on his life his new pals join forces with him, using their talents for elaborate invention and intricate plots to help him achieve his goal.
The film is a love letter to the movies. There are shades of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, as well Pixar's Toy Story. The whimsy does not stop with homage -- it's in the many wacky traits that embellish all of the characters, even the villains. Like Amelie, Micmacs is visually dazzling, the ravishing images courtesy of cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata. But strip away all the oddball touches and visual splendor and what is left may be Jeunet's most compelling movie yet, witty, poignant, and altogether magical.
Winter's Bone
Starts Friday, September 24th
Rated R; 100 minutes
Sundance Film Festival
~ Winner: Best Picture (Grand Jury Prize); Best Screenplay
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly,,
Winter's Bone is one of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see. Like Daniel Woodrell's commanding novel from which the story is adapted, the movie is set in Missouri's secretive Ozarks, and it was shot there as well. It sings the ballad of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a proud, poor teenager with problems too big for most adults: She's responsible for the welfare of her two kid siblings and her mentally ill mama, and her father is on the run from the law (he cooks meth, often in concert with kin). He's also promised the family house as collateral for a bail bond. If Ree loses the house, her family loses their scrabbly hold on the world. She won't let that happen. Winter's Bone follows Ree as she looks for her daddy in a community where oaths of silence are as serious as any Mob omertà.
Lawrence is the movie's blooming discovery, a mesmerizing actor with a gaze that's the opposite of actress-coy and a voice modulated in the low, almost monotone cadences of local ways. But the greater triumph of director and co-writer Debra Granik (fine 2005 indie Down to the Bone) is how the filmmaker seamlessly knits her star talent into a community that existed perfectly well before the crew arrived there. Many of the vivid supporting players are non-pro locals. And the piercing music is straight from the heart, hands, and mouths of Ozark women and men with something hard-learned to say.
South of the Border
Starts Friday, September 24th
Not Rated; 102 minutes
Matthew Turner, View London,
Attempting to counter the US media's rabid demonisation of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, South of the Border, directed by Oliver Stone, begins as a series of interviews with Chavez himself, intercut with particularly offensive examples of propaganda and outright lies from the US media.
However, during the course of the film, Stone decides to talk to seven other South American presidents in the region, seeking their views on both Chavez and the US. He duly interviews Bolivia's Evo Morales, Brazil's Lula da Silva, Argentina's Cristina Kirchner (and her husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner), Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Cuba's Raul Castro and the results are both surprising and ultimately uplifting.
Chavez comes across particularly well, driving Stone to his hometown and joking around with a child's bicycle. There's a fair amount of humour in the film too, whether it's Chavez joking that “That's where we're building the Iranian atomic bomb” (Stone's panicked reaction: “Don't say that!”) or a rather formal-looking kickabout with Evo Morales.
Aside from the riveting interviews, South of the Border is equally strong on documenting the political changes that have taken place in South America in the last ten years, to the point where a common currency and the setting up of the South American equivalent of the European Union are now tentatively under discussion. Most importantly, the film establishes that, far from being enemies of America, Chavez, et al want to be treated as equals to the US, to strengthen their own regional ties, control their own resources and become financially independent of the IMF.
It's fair to say that South of the Border offers very much a president's-eye view of the countries concerned, but the film stands as a necessary counterpoint to the shocking propaganda perpetrated by the US media and any film that will piss off Fox News deserves to be seen as widely as possible. Highly recommended.