Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 January 2008

Venues: Curzon Soho, London, and nationwide

Distributor: Universal

Director: Ang Lee

Screenplay: James Schamus, Hui-Ling Wang

Based on story by Eileen Chang

Original title: Se, jie

Cast: Tony Leung, Wei Tang, Joan Chen

USA 2007

156 mins

It would probably be a mistake to read too much into Ang Lee’s decision to follow up Brokeback Mountain with a film focusing so explicitly on heterosexual relationships. But this is by far the most overtly racy film in the director’s canon thus far, making all the bed-hopping in The Ice Storm look positively tame. Lust, Caution is a film about sex as communication, as struggle, as apology, even as torture. A shame, then, that there is so little genuine warmth and humanity to back it up.

The first section of the film is by far the strongest. Student Wang Jiazhi flees her rural home for Hong Kong, escaping the Japanese invasion. There she meets Kuang Yu Min, a dashing and charismatic playwright dedicated to the patriotic cause. After a soaring success on the stage, Kuang decides to use his acting troupe in the services of something more concrete – the entrapment and murder of Japanese agent Mr Yee. Wang Jiazhi agrees to act as a honey trap, luring Yee into her home so the others can finish him off.

This first act is pacy, sharp and exciting, as Wang Jiazhi grows into her role as an actress and a seducer. Tension is skilfully maintained, and the characters of Kuang and his fellow students are superbly delineated and genuinely likeable. Two key events have a shattering effect on Wang Jiazhi – firstly, an awkward and tentative bout of deeply unprofessional lovemaking with one of her fellow students, to ready herself for Mr Yee. And secondly, the startling, bloody and horrific communal murder of the traitorous Tsao, who uncovers their plan.

But after Yee’s escape and the group’s disbandment the film begins to falter. Wang Jiazhi moves to Shanghai and picks up her studies, when three years later Kuang contacts her again, asking her to resume her relationship with Mr Yee, now a key figure in the Japanese secret service. But as the two grow closer, and engage in extended bouts of explicitly depicted coupling, Wang Jiazhi begins to have doubts about her impending betrayal, culminating in a rash and drastic act which dooms her, and her fellow conspirators.

Lust, Caution was adapted from a short story by Eileen Chang, but unlike the similarly sourced Brokeback Mountain there isn’t enough plot here to sustain the film’s epic runtime. The characters, while complex, are difficult to sympathise with – we actually seem to know less about Wang Jiazhi as the film progresses, and she makes choices which seem to conflict with everything we’ve previously learned. One scene in particular, a near-rape which Wang Jiazhi seems to enjoy, is particularly perplexing, and borderline offensive. And while the more traditional sex scenes are admittedly eye-opening, one is forced to question whether it was strictly necessary to include quite so many of them.

Perhaps Lust, Caution suffers from comparison with Paul Verhoeven’s trashier, but ultimately more intelligent and entertaining Black Book last year. Or perhaps it’s a cultural divide – the film draws on an Asian tradition of erotic cinema with which Western audiences may be unfamiliar. But in the end, however beautifully shot and acted Lust, Caution undoubtedly is, the film leaves the viewer cold and unsatisfied.

Tom Huddleston

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 December 2007

Venues: ICA and Cine Lumiere, London

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Brice Cauvin

Screenplay: Jérôme Beaujour, Brice Cauvin, Pierre Schí¶ller

Original title: De particulier í­Â  particulier

Cast: Laurent Lucas, Hélí­Â¨ne Fillií­Â¨res, Anouk Aimée

France 2006

93 minutes

Brice Cauvin’s feature debut as director is an exercise in social exploration that succeeds in excavating an uneasy channel into the psyche of bourgeois society. Deliberately cryptic, Hotel Harabati charts the somewhat befuddling journey of a young French couple into the realms of urban disquiet and delusion. Cauvin’s vision is hypnotic and, at times, haunting in its depiction of an austere city slowly engulfing the young family in the wake of post-9/11 paranoia.

Philippe (Lucas) and his wife Marion (Fillií­Â¨res) begin their journey awaiting a train from Paris to Venice for an apparently long-overdue honeymoon. After Marion strikes up an innocuous conversation with a middle-aged Arabian man the couple discover that he has left behind a large holdall with a label for the Hotel Harabati.

The bag acts as a catalyst, propelling the young couple into a story where their relatively quiet lives are turned upside down. What happens on the honeymoon is never touched upon except that, despite telling family and friends otherwise, they never made it to Venice. In many senses the bag is the physical embodiment of urban paranoia over the threat of terrorism. Philippe becomes obsessed following the discovery of a bomb in Paris and his daily life becomes punctuated by constant radio bulletins on the looming terror threat. While Marion, in contrast, opts for reclusively barricading herself and her children in their apartment, Philippe embarks on a faintly homoerotic friendship with a young man he meets at a local synagogue.

Cauvin’s intentionally immersive mise en scí­Â¨ne lends a sense of suffocation to the couple’s struggle. But the deeply fractured narrative, overtly nonsensical in places, leaves so much open to audience interpretation that it proves slightly frustrating. There are certain instances in the film where the mystery seems unnecessarily opaque. The couple’s flight from Paris to Syria in search of the Hotel Harabati is beyond comprehension considering the psychosis they were both seen to develop over the threat of attack from Islamic nations. The sheer inscrutability of the picture is its one fault, and it is difficult to accept that the couple’s regression and eventual downfall from normal urban life are solely due to finding a strange bag while on holiday.

In Lucas and Fillií­Â¨res, the director finds a perfectly balanced chemistry and the picture benefits richly from both their performances. While so much of the plot remains unexplained, the characterisation is splendid and a short yet regal turn from Anouk Aimée is the icing on the cake. The dialogue is also one of the high points of the picture where, unlike the title, there is very little lost in translation.

The events of September 11, 2001 have had a pervading effect on cinema and art as a whole, and have spawned a predictable spate of pictures from Hollywood. With Hotel Harabati, Cauvin succeeds in bringing an exceptionally fresh and original take on the subject and offers a very thoughtful meditation on the lasting impact of terrorism on our lives. While repeat viewings are essential to fully appreciate both the plot and inventiveness of the film, Hotel Harabati has a boldness that is instantly captivating.

Merlin Harries

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 December 2007

Venues: Empire Leicester Square, London, and key cities

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Rigoberto Castaí±eda

Original title: Kilí­Â³metro 31

Cast: lliana Fox, Raíºl Méndez, Adrií­Â  Collado

Mexico 2006

103 minutes

Supernatural horror thriller KM31 became a huge hit at the Mexican box office after its release in February this year, grossing an impressive $15 million. Its success was due in large part to the production company, Lemon Films, who set out to make a commercial film that would raise the profile of the Mexican film industry and compete confidently in the International market. In that respect, KM31 demonstrates what a relatively small industry can achieve.

The film marks Rigoberto Castaí±eda‘s debut as a director and as such serves as a showcase of his diverse horror influences. The story revolves around twin sisters Agata and Catalina, who have possessed a strong psychic link since an early age, which enables them to communicate without speaking. One night Agata is involved in a serious car accident which leaves her in a coma. Visiting her sister in hospital, Catalina experiences Agata’s anguish. This urges her to investigate the scene of the crash, the marker KM31 on a local highway, a place she soon realises is haunted by ghosts of the past, spirits that claim their victims on the road. As the psychic link between the twins intensifies, Catalina, with the help of her friend Nuno and Agata’s boyfriend Omar, attempts to uncover the secrets of a local legend that has trapped her sister between life and death, between reality and a world of unearthly terror. But the further Catalina delves the more she uncovers long repressed secrets of their past, endangering both Agata’s life and her own.

Castaí±eda enhances the ghostly atmosphere of the film with lush hues and stunning locations. The dense forest that borders the road is ambiguously enchanting, a place simultaneously magical and sinister that invokes curiosity and a sense of foreboding. The house Catalina is drawn to in the depths of the forest is the stuff of fairy tales, replete with a wise and benevolent old lady and childhood toys. The film reinvents ancient Mexican folklore for a modern audience, lending an air of authenticity, a sense of place and tradition.

But despite some interesting stylistic flourishes and an intriguing premise the plot of KM31 is somewhat convoluted, and seems to spiral out of control towards the end. It feels like there’s too much going on within an incoherent structure, making the film difficult to fully engage with. The relationship between twins, and more specifically the unique psychic link between Agata and Catalina could have been genuinely interesting but instead feels underdeveloped, usurped by cheap shocks and an unruly use of special effects that feel showy rather than thrilling. Such devices just end up making the finale inevitably flat.

Castaí±eda clearly loves horror, and perhaps this is his homage to such modern classics as The Grudge and The Ring. But KM31 doesn’t add anything new: instead it feels like the director is fastidiously regurgitating aspects of the genre, sticking strictly to convention and budgetary demands. Any attempt to contend in an increasingly competitive international market demands a certain amount of conformity, but it is sad that invention and originality are inevitable casualties. The results make KM31 feel like a victim of Hollywood’s domination. One can only hope that the film’s success will give Castaí±eda the freedom to rein in his enthusiasm and unleash his creativity.

Lindsay Tudor

Read the interview with Rigoberto Castaí±eda.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 November 2007

Venues: London West End and Nationwide

Distributor Pathe

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Christian Bale, Zach Grenier, Marshall Bell

US 2006

126 minutes

Rescue Dawn is an unlikely adaptation: Werner Herzog has made a feature film based on one of his own documentaries. Viewers may forgive him this unusual act of recycling insofar as his documentary films are already widely known for blurring the boundaries between facts and fiction. ‘It’s all just movies’, he has famously declared. Both films concern Dieter Dengler, a German-born US pilot who was shot down in the early stages of the Vietnam War and held prisoner in a POW camp in Laos until he made a daring escape. Dengler tells the story in his own words in the memoir Escape from Laos, and Herzog, charmed by Dengler, subsequently filmed the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

What comes across most profoundly in that earlier film is Herzog’s affection for his subject. Dengler has a fascinating way of narrating events and is clearly motivated by an attempt to make the most of life’s difficult circumstances. This admiration also comes across in Rescue Dawn, which Herzog wrote and directed. Even in the POW camp, Dengler, played here by Christian Bale, finds ways to make a feast from a plateful of maggots and encourages his fellow prisoners’ fantasies about the foods they once loved to eat. As he appears in both films, Dengler not only needed to fly, but needed to flee as well. It’s difficult to imagine a camp that could have contained him.

Bale cleverly underplays the part, diminishing the real Dieter’s quirks and Germanic speech patterns. It is an astonishingly restrained performance, which is all the more unexpected given the fact that this is a film made by a director who descended several times into jungles with Klaus Kinski. Jeremy Davies, on the other hand, goes a bit Kinski. Davies has always acted with his whole body (in films from Solaris to Spanking the Monkey). Here too, the actor’s emaciated torso is used to uniquely expressive effect. Gene DeBruin, the prisoner played by Davies, is presented as a reluctant participant in his own escape and is curiously antagonistic to the group’s aspirations to freedom. His real-life family has objected to Herzog’s account, and the director may indeed have taken liberties, but Davies’ character – as it is written and performed – cuts a powerful counterpart to Bale’s Dengler.

It may not have been necessary to have Bale eat maggots (as has been claimed) in order to achieve authenticity, but Herzog likes to film in tough circumstances so real stress and strain will pour through his performers’ faces and past the edges of the cinematic frame. He wants us to feel that we can, as he says, ‘believe our eyes again’. There are places in the film where less realism but more reality may have been called for. The Allied air war against Germany inspired Dengler to become a pilot, so it is more curious that he wanted to become a US pilot. Though this is discussed in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Herzog makes only slight mention of the point in Rescue Dawn. The film takes place during the Vietnam War, and not before or after. The images of the Asian jungle are lush, though they hardly reach the expressive heights of Aguirre, Wrath of God. The narrative too is a bit tidier than some of Herzog’s fans may expect. While the director had a love-hate relationship with Kinski, his feelings for Dengler are less ambiguous, which may account for the somewhat surprising straightforwardness of the film’s ending.

Brad Prager

The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth by Brad Prager is published by Wallflower Press.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 November 2007

Venues: BFI Southbank and Key Cities

Distributor Axiom Films

Director: Tsai Ming Liang

Title: The Wayward Cloud

Original title: Tian bian yi duo yun

Cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-Ching

Taiwan/France 2005

114 minutes

Title: I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

Original title: Hey yan quan

Cast: Norman Bin Atun, Chen Shiang-chyi

Taiwan/France 2006

115 minutes

Released simultaneously in the UK in November, Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud (2005) and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) are two disparate and challenging pieces of work from this Asian auteur. Well-established in art-house circles as a filmmaker with a unique style and vision, Ming-liang’s two recent films will inevitably alienate a large number of cinema-goers while delighting a smaller group of enthusiastic fans.

While both movies explore similar themes (loneliness, urban dislocation, desire, an obsession with water) The Wayward Cloud is the more immediately engaging film of the two. Set in a scorching, drought-ridden Taipei, it revolves around the irresistible attraction between a young porn star, played by Lee Kang-sheng, and an innocent, enigmatic young woman played by Chen Shiang-chyi (both also star in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) The film is part musical, part porn, utterly surreal, erotic and emotionally gripping. Ming-liang provokes his audience right from the first scene: a woman in a nurse’s uniform lies spread-eagled on a bed in a sterile white room, while Lee licks and fingers a ripe, hot-pink watermelon between her legs.

The camera is never far from the actors in The Wayward Cloud, wordlessly capturing their every nuanced emotion. Ming-liang’s long takes infuse the film with poetical lyricism, allowing the characters to develop naturally as they begin to bridge their terrible isolation. Despite the explicit intercourse with his co-stars, Lee is emotionally detached and painfully alone. He is a romantic, expressing his yearning through the bitter-sweet lyrics of ‘A Half Moon’, wondering what ‘can soothe my heart so blue’. A chance encounter with Chen blossoms into a tentative romance, their desire for each other swelling from small, tender gestures to a tumultuous, desperate climax in the film’s notorious finale.

After The Wayward Cloud, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone comes across as a self-indulgent, monumentally tedious film, lacking all of the charm and humour of the earlier work. Set in the smog-filled streets of Kuala Lumpur, the film revolves around the frustrations of two men, both somewhat confusingly played by Lee. One is a successful composer, now paralysed and possibly comatose, the other a homeless man brutally beaten and left for dead by a gang of grifters. Found by a group of immigrant Bangladeshi workers, he is taken back to their squat where he is lovingly nursed back to health by the devoted Rawang (Norman Bin Atun). The sparse film is infused with homoeroticism, setting the stage for a love triangle involving a lonely waitress at a seedy café, played by Chen, who is also forced to bathe and care for the paralysed man by his wife and her boss.

Ming-liang’s trademark static long takes, often lasting minutes, and the virtually non-existent dialogue are minimalist techniques that have earned the director a cult following. Pushed to the limit, they make I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone almost unbearable to watch. The director seems to do everything possible to prevent the audience from forming some kind of emotional bond with his characters, his nocturnal long shots keeping them at such a remote distance from the camera that for much of the film it’s virtually impossible to identify the character with the actor. While his shots may be perfectly and elegantly composed, they just aren’t enough to redeem a film that is so alienating to all but die-hard enthusiasts.

Tsai Ming-liang’s reputation is based on creating artistic works diametrically opposed to the bland, lowest-common-denominator junk churned out by Hollywood. However, while The Wayward Cloud is a piece of provocative, stimulating cinema, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is too mired in its own pretensions to be enjoyed simply as a film.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 2 November 2007

Venues: BFI Southbank and Key Cities

Distributor: BFI

Director: Terence Fisher

Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Melissa Stribling, Michael Gough

UK 1958

82 mins

What better way to mark the 50th anniversary of Hammer Horror than with the re-release of Dracula – not only Hammer’s first take on the Bram Stoker classic, but undoubtedly its finest. Thanks to the BFI National Archive, a new generation of cinema-goers can now enjoy director Terence Fisher’s vampire saga in a beautifully restored version. Blood and gore never looked more appetising.

UK critics had a very different opinion upon the film’s original release: ‘There should be a new certificate – S for sadistic or just D for disgusting’, warned an outraged Daily Telegraph, whilst the Daily Express branded it ‘one of the most revolting pictures in years!’ Mercifully, the public paid little attention and Dracula (shot on a shoestring budget of í‚£82,000) became a box-office smash.

So what was all the fuss about? Was it the fact that Hammer’s version took liberties with the original source material, upsetting Stoker purists? Or was it the film’s daring concoction of graphic horror and sex upsetting the moralists? The answer is, both. To begin with, Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay adaptation had to be cut due to budgetary restrictions. After a terrifying opening in Dracula’s castle (emphasised by James Bernard’s legendary score), the action switches to nearby Karlstadt as opposed to Whitby in Yorkshire. ‘I didn’t bring Dracula to England because we couldn’t afford a boat’, remarked Sangster. Insect-munching lunatic Renfield is completely absent, while high-flying estate agent Jonathan Harker is downshifted to a humble librarian.

None of these changes, however, do Hammer’s fast-paced version any harm, largely thanks to Christopher Lee’s menacing performance. Lee’s Dracula is not just a cold-blooded animal but also a skilled seducer – it is always clear how much his victims enjoy the Count’s nocturnal bites. Such scenes established the then 38-year-old actor as the new superstar of Gothic horror, and this first Dracula vehicle was to remain his favourite – ‘it would allow me to speak proper sentences’, Lee once remarked.

The action kicks off with Harker arriving at the castle, posing as a librarian but really on a mission to destroy Dracula forever. He is soon acquainted with a buxom beauty claiming to be the Count’s captive. Valerie Gaunt – Hammer’s original vampire babe – is truly mesmerising, playing out her wanton lust to the max. Unfortunately, her seductive powers will save neither her nor Harker from a sticky end, and soon Professor Van Helsing, whose character is given a clever twist by Peter Cushing’s fierce portrayal, sets off to search for his missing friend.

Meanwhile, the Count has discovered the Holmwood household and with it Lucy (Carol Marsh), his next victim. After Lucy’s gory staking at the hands of Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough), the Count moves on to seduce and kidnap Arthur’s wife. Melissa Stribling is terrific as Mina Holmwood, laughing off her husband’s concern about how ill she looks (we already know the reason for her deathly pallor). In a breathtaking finale back in the castle, Dracula and his opponents are drawn together in the ultimate showdown – at least until the next of eight sequels.

Claudia Andrei

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 November 2007

Venues: London West End and Key Cities

Distributor: Contender Films

Director: Allan Moyle

Cast: Scott Speedman, Matt Frewer, Joey Beck, Wes Bentley, Taryn Manning

US/Canada 2007

90 mins

The sign on the way into town reads: ‘Weedsville, pop: 490,000’. It’s a run-down, post-industrial city on a wrong turn somewhere off the interstate where disenfranchised youth get high in derelict factories and Satanists sacrifice virgins in the drive-in theatre on the outskirts of town. There are still nice parts of the city where the effluent discharge hasn’t fully polluted the river and where you can find nineteenth-century mansions lovingly restored, home to self-help gurus and their followers…

Director Allan Moyle has a love/hate relationship with cinema. After his first film in 1980, he was so disaffected that he didn’t make another movie for a decade. He returned with the blistering Pump Up the Volume, a showcase for rising star Christian Slater, which provided a voice for the fears of Generation X. He again articulated the concerns of the zeitgeist – in this case corporations absorbing small town life – with Empire Records, an endearing ‘dramedy’ that helped kick-start the careers of Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger.

So, what went wrong (again)? Certainly for the last twelve years, Moyle has made films that ended up in discount racks or were just plain embarrassing to watch. Whatever the cause, the director has finally made a terrific new film that follows up on the promise of his early work. Weirdsville takes a scattershot approach to its themes and subject matter – again looking at dissatisfied youth (his favorite and most successful theme) – mixing heroin abuse, murder, brain-washing and suburban ennui to delirious effect. His experiences in the movie industry may have led the director to absolve all credit for the success of this film, but the ease with which he keeps so many disparate plates juggling in Weirdsville shows a filmmaker at the top of his game.

Funny, moving, beautifully shot and above all bonkers, this is a film that is desperate for an audience, but no less likeable for that. Occupying the middle ground between turgid stoner comedies like Dude, where’s my car? and romanticized, stylish dramas such as Trainspotting, Weirdsville deftly moves from traumatic overdose scenes to the generic horror of Satanist rituals, from drama to outrageous comedy. This is a film made by people who love movies, acting as prospectors sifting through the detritus of modern filmmaking. Dream-like scenes of lead actor Scott Speedman skating a foot above the ground across the urban sprawl recall Renton’s journey to hospitalization in Trainspotting as much as Terry Gilliam’s magical realism.

Elsewhere, the preposterous idea of a medieval battle re-enactment society made up entirely of dwarves who travel around in a limousine, or Matt Frewer as a brain-damaged self-help leader strapped to a gurney and recovering from a giant icicle blow to the head recall John Landis at his most self-indulgent. Amazingly, in spite of all these outrageous conceits, the film somehow works thanks to excellent casting and performances, good pacing and the constant belief that all these incidents have a point and will make sense by the end of the movie.

The director hopes this likeable mélange about stoners and Satanists will garner a cult following and I for one am happy to sign up.

Alex Fitch

Read Alex Fitch’s interview with Allan Moyle.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 26 October 2007

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor: Pathe

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Vincent Cassel

UK/Canada 2007

100 mins

Like his contemporary David Lynch, David Cronenberg seems to be undergoing a radical shift in direction. But where Lynch’s films are becoming ever more oblique and personal, Cronenberg seems to be burrowing deeper into the heart of the mainstream, a subversive maggot in the multiplex apple. Cronenberg has never exactly been an obscurist, but it always seemed that the films that did serious business – most notably Videodrome and The Fly – did so in spite of, rather than because of his unique and unsettling preoccupations with sexual perversion, human frailty and corporeal decay.

A History of Violence changed all that. Cronenberg’s work had been getting ‘tamer’ for some time – the input sockets in Existenz were the last hint of body horror in his work – but this was his first fully realised shot at the malls of Middle America. You can say what you like about the subversion beneath that film’s surface – the way it plays with genre conventions, tests the limits of an audience’s sympathy, explores the meanings of words like ‘family’ and ‘violence’. Without all that, the film can still be enjoyed as a simple revenge thriller, an update of those gritty Charles Bronson pictures so popular in the mid-70s: indeed, it could be argued that all the lofty critical praise heaped on A History of Violence could just as easily be applied to Death Wish. It’s all just a matter of intention.

Eastern Promises takes the subsurface concerns of A History of Violence and brings them out into the light, bolting them to an even more hysterically entertaining narrative of gangs, guns, prostitution and murder. The film centres around the London branch of a Russian criminal organisation, a world of plush restaurants and grimy suburban slave brothels, where driver Viggo Mortensen is gradually attempting to work his way into the trust and affections of boss Armin Mueller-Stahl, via his alcoholic, sexually ambiguous son Vincent Cassel. Into this hermetic universe stumbles Naomi Watts, as a hospital midwife attempting to translate the incriminating diary of a 14-year-old East European prostitute who died in childbirth.

The first half of the film is surprisingly dour. The screenplay was written by Dirty Pretty Things‘ Stephen Knight, and expands upon many of the themes present in that film: the lives of immigrants in London, their attempts to assimilate or to avoid assimilation, the grim suburban reality of organised crime. Then, for a time, it seems as though Knight’s sensibilities and Cronenberg’s are beginning to go head-to-head, as the bleak authenticity of the script is subtly undermined by the playful genre trickery of Cronenberg’s direction. Reality begins to warp, and the movies gradually intrude. By the time we reach the already infamous Turkish bath scene – a titanic smackdown in which Mortensen brutally slaughters two would-be assassins clad only in a number of intricate prison tattoos – all semblance of veracity has long since flown out the window, and we’re back in Bronson country.

The Turkish bath scene also serves to illustrate Cronenberg’s newest and most playful preoccupation, one of the only major themes in Eastern Promises that was not also present in A History of Violence: the inherent homoeroticism bubbling beneath all such male bonding stories. Using Cassel’s conflicted character as his jumping-off point, Cronenberg examines (and pokes fun at) the seething sexual tension intrinsic to the gangster genre, and to any tight, all-male organisation, on screen or off. These characters’ hatred and fear of women – as evidenced by their treatment of the innocent Watts, as well as their helpless slave-prostitutes – is offset by a desperate need for trust and companionship in their ‘business’ relationships, a confused camaraderie that Cassel expresses physically, by constantly grabbing and touching Mortensen; even, in one scene, openly watching as he takes advantage of a young hooker.

It is these quirky fixations that make Eastern Promises such a joy to watch. In the hands of almost any other director (one can imagine Stephen Frears tackling the script, or even Anthony Minghella), the film would have become a worthy parable of exploitation and integration, further brutalising its characters while softening the bone-crunching violence. But Cronenberg has the ability to see beyond the narrative, to see all the different possibilities inherent in the screenplay – not just a gritty slice-of-life or a rip-roaring gangster thriller, but everything in-between: a family melodrama, a clash of cultures, a test of an audience’s sensibilities, a critique of generic traditions, of middle-class ignorance, of urban disaffection.

The cast are uniformly excellent. Mueller-Stahl reprises his Shine role as the brutal overbearing father, but this time his transgressions go beyond beating his son into statutory rape and murder. Naomi Watts makes the best of a rather thankless role as the hapless suburbanite thrown into a situation she doesn’t understand, but her character only really comes to life in the final stages as she struggles to protect the illegitimate infant. Vincent Cassel’s part seems tailor-made for him – the screwed-up son of a far stronger man, lashing out helplessly at an unforgiving world, losing himself in drink and forbidden fantasies.

But this is Viggo Mortensen’s show, and he commits himself totally. Always a little too earnest, a little too obvious an actor to be taken seriously, Mortensen has been consistently written off in serious critical circles. Eastern Promises is without doubt his career highlight to date, the complete inhabitation of a complex, unforgiving character. His Russian accent is faultless – his face even seems to become more Slavic, his gestures and mannerisms unerringly authentic. He also manages to reflect the growing conflict within the film itself – in the opening scenes he is terse, convincing, frighteningly real. But as the film lets rip, so does Mortensen, becoming an angel of righteous vengeance, expanding to fill the cinema screen.

It’s hard to predict how Eastern Promises will be received when it opens the London Film Festival on October 17. It seems likely that audiences will respond to its heady mix of social realism and celebratory blood-letting, but critics may prove more sceptical. The film walks a fine line, raising some very serious contemporary issues but consistently failing to engage with them, preferring to throw in a new plot twist or another bloody murder. It’s about as subtle as a brick, and perhaps not as deep or thoughtful as it thinks it is. But the fact remains that Eastern Promises is ludicrously entertaining, playful and rebellious, the most consistently enjoyable Cronenberg film in two decades.

Tom Huddleston

Format:Cinema

Release date: 5 October 2007

Venues: Curzon Soho, Electric, Everyman, Odeon Covent Garden & Key Cities

Distributor Momentum

Director: Anton Corbijn

Cast: Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Craig Parkinson

UK/US 2007

121 mins

It’s said that Ian Curtis wrote the line, ‘Here are the young men, a weight on their shoulders’, not out of some deep, existential Camus-fuelled angst but as a sly dig at fellow gloom-mongers Echo and the Bunnymen. A little joke if you like. It’s hard to imagine in a way, the arch-miserabilist having a chuckle at his contemporaries, a rare insight perhaps into another side of an icon from before the age when every two-bit minor celebrity’s every shag, shit or coke-fuelled bust-up was chronicled for our daily consumption. These days, the tabs would have him writing a blog from his hospital bed after every epileptic fit. But no, his short existence is frozen in aspic as a series of immaculate set-pieces: the moody black-and-white Anton Corbijn photographs, the elegiac Peter Saville sleeves, the desolate European bleakness of Joy Division’s meagre, curtailed output. It’s odd then that it’s Corbijn who really brings Ian Curtis to life for us in this biopic, even if he is still mooching around in highly stylised monochrome.

Based on the book Touching from a Distance by his widow Deborah, Control tells Curtis’ story from his teenage days in Macclesfield, portraying him as bright, funny and intense, if sometimes withdrawn. His romance with Deborah (an exceptional, tour-de-force performance from Samantha Morton) features heavily in these early years; by the time he’s nineteen, they’re married. After seeing The Sex Pistols play Curtis forms a band, soon signed up to Tony Wilson’s Factory Records label as Joy Division. Later, things take a turn for the worse when Curtis suffers an epileptic fit on the way back from a London show, and at the same time Deborah gives birth to a daughter, adding to his responsibilities. Curtis begins an affair with a Belgian girl called Annik after she interviews the band and he’s torn apart in trying to maintain two lives without letting anyone, band, wife, lover or child, down, unwilling or unable to relinquish any part.

Given the subject matter and the art-house photography (apparently Corbijn told the actors how to pose at the end of every scene) you could be forgiven for assuming that the film might be less than a barrel of laughs but it rivals 24-Hour Party People for hilarity, the Tony Wilson (RIP) character being little more than a reprise of Steve Coogan’s portrayal in that film. The real comic turn here though is manager Rob Gretton. As the rest of Joy Division flounder on stage following another of Curtis’ grand mal attacks Gretton bribes the lead singer of Crispy Ambulance to take to the stage in his place. After the predictable bottling off he returns to ask where his money is. ‘It’s in’, says Gretton, ‘my fuck-off pocket’.

If there’s a criticism to be made it’s in the pacing of the final third. We watch Curtis’ descent into depression, unable to overcome his guilt, all the while haunted by the possibility of further fits, and in essence we’re waiting for the inevitable grim ending. Perhaps a more experienced director than Corbijn would have played it differently. It’s a small gripe though when, with the aid of Morton and Sam Riley who plays Curtis, he so successfully brings his main characters to life. We feel Deborah’s pain equally as much as Ian’s, a tribute to Morton’s performance and the way she illustrates the crushing effect on her of Curtis’ behaviour. A visual treat then, but far more than mere iconography.

Sean Price

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 October 2007

Venue: Nationwide

Distributor Metrodome

Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky

Original title:Die Fälscher

Cast: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow

Austria/Germany 2007

98 minutes

In the dying years of World War II the Nazis launched the secretive Operation Bernhard, a last-ditch, desperate attempt to destroy the economies of the Allied countries by flooding their markets with forged bank notes. It was history’s largest counterfeiting operation, run out of barracks 19 and 20 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s compelling film explores the terrible dilemma that confronted the Jewish prisoners recruited for the operation. He has crafted a unique approach to the Holocaust genre, forsaking sentimentality for moral ambiguity, probing the motives of both the prisoners and their Nazi captors, in and out of the camps.

‘Sally’ Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a Russian Jew living in the decadent, bohemian Berlin of the pre-war years. A night club owner, loan shark, artist and counterfeiter, he forges passports for Jews trying to flee the country for financial gain or sexual favours, not solidarity. He is seemingly nonchalant about the anti-Semitism sweeping through Germany. When a guest at one of his parties derides him for being Jewish, he casually suggests that she might want to spit out the Rothschild champagne she is drinking. Finally arrested for fraud, Sally is sent to Mauthausen, a slave labour camp, where he paints portraits for the Nazis in exchange for food and a relatively comfortable existence.

Eight years later, the man who arrested him, Friedrich Herzog (the excellent Devid Striesow) – now an SS Sturmbannfí¼hrer – selects him for Operation Bernhard, along with a number of more respectable members of Jewish society – fellow artists, bank managers, craftsmen. They are isolated from the rest of the camp, given soft beds, hot meals, even a ping-pong table. But Sally’s willingness to collaborate with the Nazis is challenged by Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a young, idealistic printer who has also been recruited for the project. Fervently opposed to aiding the Germans with their war effort, he is determined to sabotage the operation, putting the lives of his colleagues at risk. He rejects Sally’s pragmatism, identifying solely with the suffering of the prisoners outside the barrack walls. Burger becomes the very embodiment of guilt, simply for being a survivor.

The casual brutality and ritual humiliation suffered by Jews under the Nazi regime never ceases to be shocking or repulsive. There are the persistent insults, the constant threats of violence, the sadistic guard who urinates on Sally while he’s forced to scrub toilets. However, Ruzowitzky does not confine his contempt to the Germans, but subtly explores the complexities that haunted Jews like Sally and his colleague Kolya (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a young artist and fellow Russian. They are caught between two impossible ideologies, National Socialism and Communism, embodied by two terrifying regimes. Sally speaks German rather than Russian, alluding to a life and a family in Russia that have been torn away from him. He is utterly contemptuous of Burger’s socialist ideals, his own destroyed, replaced by a selfish instinct for survival. Sally, like millions of others, has been utterly eviscerated by the twin horrors that raged through Europe in those pivotal decades.

Stylishly filmed and superbly acted, The Counterfeiters is a film that manages to be suspenseful, entertaining and provocative, perfectly capturing the agonising decisions that tormented the men in Sachsenhausen.

Sarah Cronin