Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 January 2009

Venues:Prince Charles (London)

Distributor: Revolver

Director: Mabrouk El Mechri

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Franí§ois Damiens, Karim Belkhadra, Saskia Flanders

Belgium/France 2008

93 mins

As an international movie star, Jean-Claude Van Damme is something of a contradiction: his name is synonymous with popular action cinema, yet his last major theatrical release was Universal Soldier: The Return in 1999. The distinction between fame and actual success lies at the heart of JCVD, an intermittently inventive cross between Being John Malkovich (1999) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) in which Van Damme plays himself, a fading celebrity with money problems, who arrives home in Belgium after a humiliating custody hearing in Los Angeles, only to discover that bad events really do come in threes. Firstly, he learns that he has lost a role to Steven Seagal because his long-time rival has agreed to cut off his pony-tail. Secondly, his credit cards are rejected when he attempts to withdraw some cash. Thirdly, he wanders into a Brussels post office during a robbery and is taken hostage, with the villains forcing the jet-lagged Van Damme to pretend that he is actually committing the crime. The situation escalates into a stand-off between the robbers and armed police, with cheering fans clamouring for a glimpse of their hero.

Appropriately enough for a film named after its leading man, the greatest strength of JCVD is Jean-Claude Van Damme himself. Performing largely in his native tongue, Van Damme delivers a surprisingly naturalistic and often vulnerable performance, maintaining his affable public persona as he poses for photos with his fans, but projecting genuine frustration when realising that custody of his pre-teen daughter is slipping away, or when his agent offers him yet another direct-to-DVD project to be shot on the cheap in Bulgaria, crushing his hopes of a comeback in a studio film. The hilarious opening sequence finds the Mussels from Brussels on set, kicking and punching his way through an army of disposable extras, before telling the unsympathetic Hong Kong director: ‘It’s very difficult for me to do everything in one shot, I’m 47 years old!’ A later scene breaks the fourth wall, as Van Damme delivers a monologue directly to camera, admitting to his personal and professional failures, which include drug abuse and broken marriages.

The film falters whenever Van Damme is not centre stage, as his fellow hostages and the police officers are not fully developed characters and, of the robbers, only lookout man Arthur registers thanks to his childish enthusiasm for Jean-Claude’s oeuvre – a scene in which he coaxes his idol to perform one of his signature high kicks is a comedic highlight. Writer-director Mabrouk El Mechri adopts the ‘answers first, questions later’ structure favoured by the American independent filmmakers who tried to ape the success of Quentin Tarantino, attempting to build tension when he should be mining the satirical potential of his casting coup. However, his script plays knowingly with the conventions of the action genre, while his downbeat 70s-style soundtrack selections are just right for a movie about an ageing martial arts star exiled from the Hollywood mainstream in the digital effects era.

John Berra

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 January 2008

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Writers: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix, Sachiko Tanaka

Cast: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Inowaki Kai, Kôji Yakusho

Japan 2008

119 mins

You can’t put Kiyoshi Kurosawa in a box. Never content to stay in the same genre for very long, his work as a whole is resistant to interpretation, but it is possible to perceive certain patterns in his films, such as a preoccupation with borders. In Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001), a serial killer movie and a ghost story respectively, it’s the border between the natural and the supernatural. In Tokyo Sonata, the story of a typical Japanese family, Kurosawa is concerned with the borders between people, both on a domestic and a national scale.

First among equals in a great cast is Teruyuki Kagawa as Ryuhei Sasaki, a director of administration who is fired as soon as he has successfully completed the outsourcing of most of his company’s labour to China. Unable to face the shame of telling his wife and children that he is unemployed, Ryuhei dons his business suit as usual and kills time during the day by hanging out at the library or joining the queue of an outdoor soup kitchen along with a surprisingly large number of similarly attired unemployed men. In this way, Kurosawa taps into the contemporary Japanese fear of neighbouring China’s economic boom.

But Ryuhei is not the only family member who is lying. The youngest son, Kenji (Inowaki Kai), wants to learn to play the piano. However, Ryuhei, in light of his secret unemployment, refuses. Therefore Kenji uses his lunch money to pay for lessons, often skipping school to attend. Similarly, it is implied that the oldest son, Takashi (Yû Koyanagi), is not going to classes either – an implication that is supported by Takashi announcing suddenly that he is going to join the US army as an overseas volunteer. Ryuhei’s wife Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi) can only wish someone would lift her out of the domestic depression she finds herself in. That is, until she comes home one day and surprises an unemployed locksmith turned burglar, played by the great Kurosawa regular Kôji Yakusho, and decides to run away with him. In a meta-filmic move typical of Kurosawa, it seems that none of the Sasaki family are sticking to the roles he has cast them in. All of this is filmed in Kurosawa’s trademark voyeuristic style, through windows and doorways or from the vantage point of a bridge. These framing devices both create a sense of unease and suggest an additional border: the cinema screen itself.

However, the disparity between the cinematography and Ryuhei and Megumi’s comic behaviour is resolved pretty quickly, and after their respective escapades, both parents are back home in time to attend Kenji’s audition for music school. As a child prodigy, Kenji is something of a deus ex machina, the only character with the insight to see through the borders that people erect around themselves. His beautiful rendition of Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune suggests that Kurosawa perceives some sort of essential harmony in the universe and that these borders are illusory. However, Kurosawa cannot resist a last minute undermining of this interpretation as Takashi, the only character to have crossed any geographical borders, writes that although the Japanese volunteers have been sent home from the Middle East, he has decided to stay and fight alongside the locals. Kurosawa, enigmatic and therefore appealing as ever, declines to say which side Takashi is fighting for.

Alexander Pashby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 January 2009

Venues: Vue West End (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Universal

Director: Ron Howard

Writer: Peter Morgan

Cast: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen

USA/UK/France 2008

122 mins

Ron Howard’s latest film, an adaptation of Peter Morgan’s successful 2006 stage play Frost/Nixon, was an intelligent, entertaining and ultimately riveting choice to kick off this year’s London Film Festival. The screenplay, penned by Morgan, dramatises the events that led up to a series of notorious interviews held in 1977 between the celebrity talk show host David Frost and the disgraced president Nixon – interviews that garnered a record television audience and landed Frost on the cover of Time magazine.

Frank Langella, who won a Tony award for his part in the Broadway production, reprises the role of the president, delivering what is undoubtedly one of the performances of his career as the ousted, almost fanatical politician hell-bent on using the interviews to clear his name and stage a political comeback. Langella’s performance is so impressive that it tends to over-shadow that of his British co-star Michael Sheen, who, although he was also an original cast member in both the UK and American productions, doesn’t quite possess Langella’s stature.

Sheen’s David Frost is a likeable but lightweight entertainer (rather than a journalist), with a playboy reputation and a television career on the brink of imploding. Morgan imagines the interviews as a gloves-off contest between two men both desperate to come out on top, and in the process salvage their reputations and careers (as well as make a wad of cash). It’s one of Frost’s researchers, the author James Reston Jr, (Sam Rockwell), who passionately demands that Frost use the interviews to secure an admission of guilt over the disgraced president’s role in the Watergate scandal, rather than merely as a vehicle to restore his faltering fame.

The witty, insightful script is handled deftly by an impressive ensemble cast that also features Kevin Bacon as Nixon’s Chief-of-Staff and the always engaging Oliver Platt as the journalist Bob Zelnick. While some theatre-goers may see little point in watching the adaptation on the big screen, the medium offers Langella the perfect opportunity to really capture up close the physical weaknesses (a sweaty upper lip, for example) that so famously made Nixon unsuited for television – a victim, in Reston’s words, of the ‘reductive power of the close-up’. It’s only a shame that more time isn’t devoted to the blistering interviews; instead, a little too much attention is paid to Frost’s vanity and personal life, including a distracting, seemingly unnecessary love interest (typical of Hollywood).

Ultimately, it’s the film’s parallels with the current Republican administration that make it such a powerful political work. Nixon’s attacks on the ‘liberal’ media – in a great scene he refers to them as the ‘sons of whores’ – were being repeated across America in the run-up to the 2008 election. And Nixon’s abuse of executive privilege (‘if the president does it, it’s not illegal’) has been more than matched by the secretive Bush/Cheney team. While the film is undoubtedly a slick, commercial feature, it’s encouraging to see successful directors like Howard use their influence to take aim at the White House in a smart, captivating way.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 January 2009

Venue: ICA Cinema, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Duane Hopkins

Writer: Duane Hopkins

Cast: Tara Ballard, Betty Bench, Frank Bench, Emma Cooper, Liam McIlfatrick

UK 2008

93 mins

Emotional depth comes wrapped in bleakness in Better Things, a visually striking and thoughtful feature debut by the British writer-director Duane Hopkins. Just as in his award-winning short films (Fields, Love Me or Leave Me Alone), the former artist and photographer devotes most of his filmmaking energy to unfolding a fragmented narrative through a lucid and almost nightmarish pace, with the aim of creating a film that ‘truly evokes rural England’. However, although Better Things reaches for the sort of complexity demonstrated in the director’s shorts, it doesn’t quite manage to convey the same poignant intensity.

Somewhat prudently, the film has been billed in its journey around the international film festival circuit as a painterly view of rural existence rather than as a drama about substance addiction, yet at its heart lies the shattering impact of a young woman’s death from a heroin overdose. Much of the story follows her boyfriend Rob, a junkie himself, who, like most of his friends, uses drugs to escape the unbearably grim monotony of everyday life while his little brother experiences the equally devastating very few highs and many lows of first love. The multi-layered narrative also encompasses the parallel stories of an elderly couple unable to forgive each other for a stale betrayal, and of a girl named Gail who struggles to overcome her agoraphobia and her addiction to the romance novels that keep her safe from the harsh world outside.

Switching between several plot strands set during the same miserable days and nights in the rural boredom of the Cotswolds, Better Things follows innocuous and utterly repressed characters pushed to extremes of emotional despair, tracing their personal journeys through very little dialogue and a lot of moody posturing. Rob’s existential crisis, for example, is hinted at but never properly explored, which makes his character increasingly irritating, especially as he is – more or less – the leading role in the ensemble. The result is a series of character snapshots enhanced by Hopkins’s ability to capture the essence of unhappiness in this particular setting with impressive exactitude. But the film’s style, located somewhere between a poetically shot documentary and the observational approach of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers, isn’t backed up by enough substance. There is a strong suggestion that fertile associations connect scenes together but key details that would help tighten the links and elucidate the mystery at the heart of the film are withheld, preventing the film from ever developing into something more than the sum of its parts.

From an aesthetic point of view, Better Things is intoxicating and haunting in equal measures for the austere, self-enclosed world Hopkins creates with a palette reduced almost to monochrome. There is an aching, yearning quality mixed with pent-up frustration and anger, much of it communicated through an impressive sound design and the world of stillness and near-silence, of forbidding yet alluring landscapes.

Better Things is a problematic film, in its structure and narrative approach, but it carries a great deal of the directorial strength and emphasis of Hopkins’s earlier work, most notably, a devotion to form over narrative. Although the film is flawed and may be too stark to convey Hopkins’s poetic-realist style in a convincing way, it offers a powerful evocation of the desperate, tongue-tied helplessness that sets its various characters in motion, and which, in the film’s riveting moments, echoes uneasily in the mind.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 January 2009

Venues: ICA (London) and key cities

Distributor: Terracotta Distribution

Director: Yim Pil-Sung

Writers: Yim Pil-Sung, Kim Min-sook

Original title: Hansel gua Gretel

Cast: Cheon Jeong-myeong, Sim Eun-kyung, Jang Yeong-Nam, Kim Kyeong-ik, Park Hee-soon, Eun Won-jae

South Korea 2007

117 mins

Sensible kids know that some of the scariest stories come in the form of fairy tales. In the original Brothers Grimm story, Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their starving parents in the woods where they encounter a cannibalistic witch who fattens them up with cakes and sweets. This South Korean adaptation recasts the children as the villains of the story, making them the cake suppliers who dispose of unwary strangers unlucky enough to chance upon their home in the forest. Cannibalism only gets a slight (visual) mention in this modern retelling, in the form of a dubious, bloody joint of meat in the over-stocked fridge, but the other memorable elements of the story – the house full of cakes, the abandoned children and the impenetrable woods you cannot escape – survive intact.

Creepy children are a safe bet for horror movies, as are crash victims who foolishly wander away from their wrecked cars instead of waiting for emergency services. These two horror staples have been over-used, and combined with such a well-known fairy tale, could have made for a film too familiar to be engaging. But Hansel and Gretel comes in a decade that has seen a renaissance in Korean fantasy cinema, and these elements have been remixed and given new vitality by a modern Asian sensibility. Appropriately, director Yim Pil-Sung starred in The Host (2006), a sort of Korean retelling of St George and the Dragon that mixed fairy tale tropes with modern concerns about pollution and eco-terrorism. Here, alongside the expected elements of witchcraft and hauntings we have child abuse and a paedophiliac priest.

At 117 minutes, the film is overlong and the script could have been sharper, but the atmosphere, the direction and most of the performances keep the audience engaged even during the longueurs. The paedophilia subtext is not entirely successful; the dodgy priest is the least convincing character in the film and sticks out like a sore thumb. However, Deacon Byun and the extended running time are the only weak aspects of Hansel and Gretel, and throughout the film there are enough remarkable images – the bucolic cottage surrounded by snow, an attic that extends further than the eye can see (reminiscent of JG Ballard’s short story ‘The Enormous Space’) and a toy angel that comes to life and flies away – to make this a memorable, unsettling film that will disturb adults who only vaguely remember the creepy fairy tales that scared them as children.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 January 2009

Venues: London and key cities

Distributor: The Works

Director: Sean Ellis

Writer: Sean Ellis

Cast: Lena Headey, Richard Jenkins, Asier Newman

UK/France 2008

85 mins

The British-born writer and director Sean Ellis made a name for himself with his 2006 debut feature Cashback, which he adapted from his funny, original and slightly disturbing 2004 Academy Award-nominated short of the same title about an art student working in a Sainsbury’s who can stop time. His second feature, The Brí¸ken, is a stylish psychological thriller set in a chilly, grey London that wears its debt to Edgar Allan Poe on its sleeve.

Lena Headey (who proves that she can excel at serious, thoughtful roles after her B-movie turns as the matriarch in 300 and Sarah in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) stars as Gina McVey, a composed, elegant woman working as a radiologist at an anonymous London hospital. At an intimate birthday party for her father, an American diplomat played by Richard Jenkins, a mirror suddenly crashes to the floor, with the promise of bad luck setting off a frightening chain of events. The next day, Gina sees a woman who looks like her drive by in a car identical to hers. She follows her doppelgänger to a flat where she is shocked to find a photo of the mysterious woman with her father. The film cuts to a horrific car crash, with Gina waking up in hospital, lucky to be alive, but unable to remember any of the events leading up to the accident.

As Gina tries to piece together fragments of the events, and as mirrors continue to shatter all around her and her family, she realises that reality – and the people closest to her – may not be what they seem. Ellis keeps the audience wondering whether Gina is mentally damaged or possibly the victim of some kind of sinister conspiracy, with her enigmatic father and boyfriend (played with icy stillness by the French actor Melvil Poupaud) somehow privy to the dark secret that she’s trying to unravel.

There are a few false notes in the film; writing dialogue is not Ellis’s strong point and the movie is at its best when he lets the visuals do the talking. Much of the film’s strength lies in its measured pacing and perfectly composed shots, and Ellis uses Gina’s job at the hospital as a source for the sterile atmosphere and clinical colour palette of steely greys and flickering green hues. The film is given a retro feel by its impeccably stylish use of mansion blocks as locations, and by details like old rotary phones that suggest a 50s, Hitchcockian sensibility (a tribute made all the more obvious by a seriously disturbing take on the shower scene). Scenes shot in an impossibly empty London help reinforce Gina’s feelings of terror and isolation, while the score crucially creates a palpable sense of tension, with shrill strings and white noise often reaching an ominous crescendo.

Ellis has successfully crafted a grown-up, sleek thriller that explores the sinister side of split personalities, using suspense rather than gore to frighten his audience. Refreshingly ambiguous, the film doesn’t provide any neat answers to its supernatural questions.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 December 2008

Venue: Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Béla Tarr

Screenplay: Béla Tarr, Lí¡szlí­Â³ Krasznahorkai

Based on: novel by Georges Simenon

Original title: A Londoni férfi

Cast: Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton, Erika Bí­Â³k, Jí¡nos Derzsi

France/Germany/Hungary 2007

133 mins

‘Please sit down and be patient’, is a request addressed by a stone-faced police investigator to the distressed wife of a murder suspect in The Man from London. The Hungarian director Béla Tarr asks the same of his audience, as his first feature in seven years is a deliberately paced formal excursion into film noir that is ultimately more interested in the emotionally debilitating effects of daily drudgery than it is in the mechanics of genre.

Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) is a lowly night switchman at the local railroad whose interest in life is slipping away between arrivals and departures. His relationship with his wife Camélia (Tilda Swinton) consists of mundane exchanges regarding money and food, punctuated by aggressive arguments. His teenage daughter Henriette (Erika Bí­Â³k) has undertaken a menial job at a grocer’s, which Maloin perceives to be demeaning as the patrons can see too much of her legs. He seeks solace in alcohol, which numbs his disenchantment as much as it keeps the cold at bay, and in games of chess with the owner of the town inn. One night, Maloin witnesses a clandestine business transaction, which results in murder and the loss of a suitcase containing í‚£600,000, which he retrieves from the neighbouring harbour in an effort to better the lifestyle of his family. However, matters become complicated when an inspector arrives to locate the missing money and arrest the man who has stolen it. Maloin maintains his anonymous existence, eavesdropping on the investigation, whilst gradually developing a guilty conscience that will cause conflict in his home.

Although filmed in France, the unforgiving atmosphere of The Man from London is more suggestive of a town in Eastern Europe that has been omitted from the map. Indeed, the community that Tarr depicts is one that is so bereft of wealth, that when Maloin stumbles on to the fortune, he hides it in a locker, not knowing what to do with it. Shot in stark and simple black and white by Fred Kelemen, whose monochrome compositions often achieve a still life quality, this adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel adheres to the noir template despite its digressions, and Tarr delivers several quietly bravura set pieces. The ill-fated money transfer is shot in one extended take from Maloin’s point of view, and there is a later scene in which the central character awakens at nightfall, only to discover that he is being watched from below.

However, whenever the narrative appears to be gaining a modicum of momentum, Tarr’s camera pans away from the principal players to an extended shot of a group of drunkards balancing billiard balls on their heads, or focuses on an elderly man slurping from a bowl of soup. Such carefully crafted depictions of squalor have much in common with the cinema of Emir Kusturica, but they are less emotionally resonant, and Tarr’s reliance on a foreboding chamber score by frequent collaborator Mihí¡ly Vig suggests a lack of confidence in aligning pulp source material with his own social concerns.

John Berra

Read this review and more in our winter print issue, which is explores celluloid snow with articles on Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Aki Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Christmas slasher movies and cult Japanese revenge tale Lady Snowblood. You can buy the current issue online, order back issues, or subscribe to the magazine at Wallflower Press. Subscription is í‚£12 UK or í‚£15 overseas for four issues of Electric Sheep (incl. P&P) – buy online from Wallflower Press and get a 15% discount! For gift subscriptions please email Wallflower Press.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 19 December 2008

Venue: Cineworld Haymarket, Odeons Camden + Covent Garden (London)

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Alex Gibney

USA 2008

120 mins

You’ve probably seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you may have even read the book, but did you know that in 1970 Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen on the platform that no drug worth taking should have to be paid for? How about that in 1972 he single-handedly dashed the presidential hopes of the candidate for the Democratic nomination, senator Ed Muskie, by starting a rumour that Muskie was addicted to the exotic Congolese drug ibogaine? The latest documentary from writer-director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) rewards the Gonzo initiate and uninitiated alike by presenting the events of Thompson’s life in linear order so as not to spoil any of the surprises for those new to his work, but with enough detail to keep even the biggest fan happy.

Gibney’s great advantage over Thompson’s other cinematic biographers is the unprecedented access he was given to Thompson’s estate. What he found was a fascinating collection of previously unseen home movies and unpublished material. It also doesn’t hurt that he managed to get Johnny Depp to reprise his role as Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, only without the make-up, to read this material along with excerpts from Thompson’s major works. Gibney then couples Thompson’s home movies and Depp’s narration with archive footage and new interviews with Thompson’s wives, his bosses at Rolling Stone magazine and his high-ranking political subjects such as senator George McGovern and president Jimmy Carter. The picture of Thompson that emerges is a man who was happiest in the 60s, surfing the wave of the hippy movement, and whose suicide was not only contemplated, but also decided upon the moment that wave broke. A life member of the NRA, Thompson always planned to blow his head off with a shotgun, which he did in 2005. Everything prior to this was just a series of temporary reprieves while he used his typewriter in the service of people he thought might be able to revive his particular version of the American dream.

Drug-fuelled, partisan and irreverent was how Thompson’s gonzo style of journalism was most often described, and these qualities were represented at his elaborate funeral, which Depp paid for and Gibney shows here – the writer’s ashes were fired over Aspen from a rocket launcher mounted in a giant two-thumbed fist holding a peyote button. However, it’s easy to forget that beneath his wit, which Gibney demonstrates by the Cadillac trunk-load, Thompson saw his work as a means to an end. As far as he was concerned, this end wasn’t achieved, so suicide was a natural choice. Gibney, on the other two-thumbed hand, argues that if Thompson found himself lacking, he was just about the only one who did, and that by taking his own life, the good doctor deprived the world of a voice that was still powerful enough to bring about change for the better.

Alexander Pashby