Bit of a fan of Almodovar, even if his last film Broken Embraces wasn't quite up to scratch.
Leaving behind Penelope Cruz, who was becoming a regular, he's turned to Antonio Banderas as the big name actor on which to hang his new project The Skin I Live In.
Banderas plays Robert Ledgard a renowned plastic surgeon and skin graph scientist who's haunted by past tragedy. What his colleagues don't know is that he's been taking his work home with him using a mysterious woman as his guinea pig.
And that's about as much as I can say about this deliciously twisted and perverse film without spoilers. If you think about it too much it messes with your mind and for that I loved it. Almodovar is back.
It's getting 83% from me. It's not been widely reviewed and doesn't seem to have a US release date yet, other than playing at a couple of film festivals in the Autumn, so there is no metacritic rating but it has 79% from audiences on IMDb. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a critics rating of 93%, although there aren't enough reviews for it to be deemed a consensus yet and an audience rating of 87%.
Was drawn to this for the comparisons with In Bruges which I loved for its dark humour.
The Guard also stars Brendan Gleeson as Sargent Gerry Boyle, a policeman in rural Ireland who really can't be arsed with all that. So when the FBI role into town led by Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) because they've had a tip off that drug smugglers are going to be docking nearby Boyle couldn't be less interested.
Brendan Gleeson does an excellent job as Boyle who is ultimately bored by the banality of his work and life. He's a man with a penchant for prostitutes and secretly well read which is key to his character. If he was just stupid bumpkin policemen the humour would only half work but there is a hint that Boyle is far cleverer than all that and is being provocative for his own amusement.
And it is laugh out loud funny at times and a little bit obvious at times. It doesn't quite plunge to the dark depth of In Bruges but it does have a satisfactory ending and did put a smile on my face. Good friday night DVD fodder I'd say and I'm going to give it 60%.
On IMDb it's got a rating of 79% with the Metacritic score listed as 78%. While on Rotten Tomatoes it has an audience rating of 86% and a critics rating of 96% although that figure isn't classed as a consensus yet.
I do hope the people behind Norwegian film The Troll Hunter had their tongues firmly in their cheeks when they were making it.
Bought a ticket on a complete whim when I found myself at a lose end in Leicester Sq at 10.45 this morning (head into town to get day seats for a play and end up seeing a film at the Film 4 Fright Festival). I had vague recollection of a trailer with people running around in dark woods in a Blair Witch-style but other than that knew nothing about the film.
Now I scare easily but fortunately having spent a chunk of my life going to rock and heavy metal gigs, the presence of a predominantly male audience mostly wearing black didn't worry me. What did were the trailers - some french horror torture flick had looking into my lap almost immediately. The Woman in Black trailer seemed positively Disney after that but a worrying thought did start dancing through my mind: 'What the hell have you booked to see?'.
With visions of having to be enticed out from under my seat with a bag of marshmallows at the end I gritted my teeth and prepared to be scared.
But despite the fact that a large part of the film is set in woods at night - one of my biggest nightmare scenarios - I quickly started to wonder what nature of film I was actually watching.
It's mockumenatry style about a group of student film makers who stumble on national cover up, that there are trolls living in them there hills and there is one man, the troll hunter, who is employed to keep them under control, killing them if they get too close to civilisation.
They persuade the troll hunter to let them accompany him mainly because he's got fed up with the long, unsociable hours of troll hunting. Do you see where this is going?
The Best Foreign Film winner at this year's Oscars - In A Better World - is definitely a film to mull over. At its heart is the question of justice versus revenge and follows the story of two Danish families who become linked through the friendship of two of their sons.
Christian has just lost his mother to cancer and has a strained relationship with his father. He's just moved back to Denmark to live with his Grandmother as his father frequently travels for work. Elias's parents are getting a divorce. His father Anton also works abroad for spells as a doctor in an African refugee camp.
Elias is bullied at school but Christian, the new kid, steps in to help giving the ring leader a savage beating and threatening him with a knife. A firm friendship forms between the two. Elias's dad remonstrates the two boys saying that if you respond to violence with violence it solves nothing. While Christian continues in the belief that perpetrators of violence need to be taught a harsh lesson.
This is the second film I've seen in as many months about the round up and expulsion of French Jews during the second world war. The first was The Round Up and set predominantly during the second world war. Sarah's Key has two interlinked stories set during the war and in contemporary France.
At the heart of the film is the story of Sarah (Melusine Mayance). She is the young daughter of a Jewish family living in Paris and when the round up starts she locks her younger brother in a hidden cupboard so that he will be safe.
As her family are carted off first to a velodrome in Paris, then holding camps before the final journey to the concentration camps Sarah is desperate to get back to her brother and free him from the cupboard.
The contemporary story sees an American journalist, Julia (Kristen Scott Thomas) who is married to a French architect and living in Paris and is researching a piece on the round up. In the course of her research she discovers that her husband's family apartment, which he is renovating, belonged to a Jewish family who were sent off to the camps. Sarah's family in fact.
So as the story of Sarah and her attempts to get back to her brother unfold, Julia is slowly unearthing the story herself and the connection her husband's family have with that period of history.
It's nicely done but it is one of those films that you can't help feeling like the writers have come up with a good idea then gone beyond what is really necessary, diluting what is good source material.
The story of Sarah and whether she will or won't get back to her brother and whether he is or isn't still in cupboard, dead or alive is a compelling and deeply moving one. Julia's investigation into the story adds an extra layer of tension as she gets ever closer to discovering the truth.
*Potential spoilers* But does Julia really need to have marital and fertility problems? It is interesting to know what happened to Sarah after the war but does it need to go into quite so much detail about her family and the tension between Julia and the Sarah's grown up son just seems extraneous.
Sarah's key has some great moments and occasionally comes close to The Counterfeiters for dilemma and psychological trauma but its excess baggage weighs it down which is a shame. I'm going to give it 68%.
This Iranian film has one of those rare 'left hanging' endings that kept the entire audience in their seats while the credits rolled.
It's the sort of ending that isn't everyone's cup of tea - but I loved it because it gave me ample material to mull over and debate for days afterwards. And how many films can you say that about?
But I'm jumping to the end before I've even said what it's about. The film opens with married couple Nadir and Simin in front of a judge seeking a separation. Simin wants them to take their daughter Termeh to another country in order to pursue a better life while Nadir does not want to leave his father who has alhzeimers.
Simin moves out of the family home so Nadir employs a woman, Razieh, to look after his father and do the housework while he is at work. But soon everything begins to unravel.
A Separation is a fascinating tale, not least because it is so human, shot almost as if it's a fly on the wall documentary. It's engrossing and interesting, subtlely putting the bigger issues of every day life under a magnifying glass. I couldn't have imagined a better way of concluding it. And it will certainly be going on my Love Film list to watch again.
The last Holocaust film I saw was the Counterfeiters which is one of my all time favourite films. This French-made film is set in France and tells the story of the round up of French Jews in 1942 by the occupying Germans.
It follows a group of Jewish families living in an enclave in Paris as life gets more tough and restricted in the lead up to and after their incarceration before being transported to Poland.
Aside from the families' stories it also examines the politics of the time as French politician's negotiated the terms of the hand over and the numbers.
Naturally its an emotional piece both from the perspective of those whose lives as are destroyed and the non-Jewish French people who did everything they could to help them and ease their suffering.
This film packs an awful lot of action/thriller punch for it's 86 minute running time. OK so it stretches the suspension of disbelief quite a bit but it still has a pretty good grip.
Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) is a trainee nurse with a heavily pregnant wife who gets dragged into the criminal underworld. While on duty one night he sees a doctor he doesn't recognise with a patient. When confronted the doctor runs and he realises that the patient's ventilation tube has been cut.
He saves the patient and the incident is reported to the police and that is that. Or so he thinks only that evening, while at home with his wife, he is knocked unconscious and his wife is kidnapped. The 'ransom' is that he has three hours to get that same patient out of the hospital.
With their mother's unknown past hammering on their door, Jeanne decides to leave for the Middle East to search for her brother and father. Simon, who is having problems coming to terms with the situation initially decides to stay at home but as Jeanne starts to discover the truth is persuaded to fly out to help.
The film then interweaves the siblings search and the story of their mother's violent and heartbreaking early life from her teens at the outbreak of religious unrest and then civil war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country - most likely Lebanon. The two threads gradually draw together as Jeanne and Simon discover the truth.
And it is stark, shocking, intelligent and gripping. Beautifully shot and acted it is one of those films that lingers long after you leave the cinema.
This South Africa-set film has been sitting quietly at the Apollo Cinema, Piccadilly for a week or two now, and it's only through lack of obvious choices of other films to see that I decided to give it a go. And I'm glad I did.
It's about a girl, Chanda, played by newcomer Khomotso Manyaka and her relationship with her mother who has AIDS which culminates in a struggle to do what she believes is right in the face of prejudice.
The film starts with her visiting an undertaker to get a coffin for her baby half-sister who has died, her mother Lillian is too wracked with grief to leave the house. Her step-father is an alcoholic-waster who visits his wife and children full of promises and regret only to steal what little cash they have in the house and disappear again.
Chanda is bright, studious and takes on the role of parent to her two younger half-siblings as Lillian gets sicker. The community she lives in rally around to help Lillian when her baby dies but the truth about her illness is something that she must hide at all costs - only her neighbour Mrs Tafa (Harriet Lenabe) is complicit in her deceit and she has her own reasons for keeping the truth hidden.
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