Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 February 2009

Venue: Apollo Piccadilly Circus, BFI Southbank, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: New Wave Films

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Writer: Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ercan Kesal

Original title: í¼í§ maymun

Cast: Yavuz Bingol, Hatice Aslan, Rifat Aslan

Turkey 2008

109 mins

In just five films, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become one of the most intensely discussed directors and every new work he brings out sparks debate as to whether he excessively favours style over substance. Even though his 1997 debut The Small Town and the follow-up Clouds of May (1999) were for a long time unavailable to UK audiences (in addition to his 2006 film Climates, Artificial Eye released a double-disc set of Ceylan’s early work on DVD in May 2007), his third, award-winning feature Uzak (2002) propelled Ceylan to fame beyond the international film festival circuit. An individual stylist determined to make a mark on the viewer’s consciousness, he composes avowedly personal and sombre meditations on human alienation and the fragile temporal nature of even the most intimate relationships. However, as is often the case when a work is so stylistically distinctive, Uzak and his fourth feature Climates (2006) divided the audience into those who were seduced by the poetry and artistry of the imagery and those who were left cold and unsatisfied by it.

With Three Monkeys, Ceylan takes things a step further, pushing forward into much darker, more expressionistic territory in an intoxicating tale of bad faith, deceit, murder and simmering fears and desires. He maintains an orchestration of motion and stillness that feels more claustrophobic than in his previous films although here again, suspense is mainly built upon the character’s inability to communicate in moments of visual ecstasy that come close to repealing the cinematic laws of gravity.

Three Monkeys is much more obviously dramatic than Ceylan’s preceding works: the story starts with driver Eyí¼p (played by Turkish singer Yavuz Bingí¶l) being asked by his boss, a local politician facing elections, to take the rap for the killing of a pedestrian who was run over by his car one night. Eyí¼p agrees to go to prison for a brief period of time in exchange for a pay-off to his wife Hacer and his only son ísmail. During the hot summer of Eyí¼p’s incarceration, Ismail drifts into dubious friendships while Hacer strays into an affair with the politician after requesting more money from him. Although ísmail discovers his mother’s betrayal he is unable to act, but when Eyí¼p returns tension erupts, revealing an almost unbearable lack of understanding between the three tortured souls who have never been entirely comfortable in their roles within the family.

Seemingly intent on reviving the spirit and film language of the ‘greats’ such as Tarkovsky, Antonioni or Ozu for the 21st century, Ceylan’s work has always been remarkable for its sheer ambition and cinematographic proficiency. His win of best director award for Three Monkeys at the Cannes Film Festival last year is entirely justified for this angst-ridden drama is perhaps his most accessible as well as most consistent film, revealing an impressive maturity and a rigorous visual sense to match it. Three Monkeys is not without certain melodramatic flaws, but they are absorbed by the film’s stylistic plausibility, by the way the framing and the stunning use of digital photography creates its own sort of psychological reality. It is in the long pauses between words that the film creates tension, in the anxious, sorrowful glances subtly reinforced by the irruption of the ever-present soundscape that mixes thunder, train signals and cell-phone ring tones. Those who go beyond the film’s imperfections will find an exquisitely composed cinematic experience that offers as many wonders as subjects for debate.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 February 2009

Venue: London and key cities

Distributor: Contender Films

Director: Gerald McMorrow

Writer: Gerald McMorrow

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley

France/UK 2008

95 mins

Young British director Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature certainly does not lack ambition, with an intricate plot that mixes a fantasy world with the multi-stranded reality of modern London. Franklyn opens as Preest, a mysterious masked vigilante, is searching for his nemesis amongst the seedy bars and dark, neo-Gothic streets of a sprawling cyber-metropolis called ‘Meanwhile City’, which is run by an í¼ber-religious/totalitarian state. These ‘future’ fantasy sequences are inserted into a realistic story involving three present-day characters; Esser, who is looking for his missing son amongst the homeless of London; Milo, a heartbroken, idealistic young man who is searching for his one true love, and Emilia, a nihilistic artist whose masochistic and extreme ‘art installations’ involve multiple, failed suicide attempts.

These two parallel strands/universes are meant to mirror and affect each other in a variety of ways, but it is only in the last quarter of the film, and with the final twist that concludes the story, that we begin to ascertain what has actually been going on. This is a major problem with Franklyn: it is too fashionably, willfully obscure throughout most of its running time and it flaunts its over-stylised Gothic renderings – in the future sequences – too obviously; these reminded me of other, slightly pretentious and flawed cyber-noirs like Brazil and Dark City. Franklyn is undeniably original, thanks to an experimental narrative that (albeit unsuccessfully) blends four separate plots and characters together, the most powerful and affecting of which involves the luminescent but neurotic Emilia (Eva Green) and her bizarre suicide rituals. The other characters just don’t pass muster though, and you never feel any empathy for what are, essentially, cyphers for the writer-director’s cod-philosophical musings.

The fantasy scenes appear to be a slightly camp pastiche of film noir, with a grizzled, over-emphatic voice-over spoken by Preest, immediately recalling the Chandler-esque private investigators of the 40s and 50s (or indeed the inferior, ‘studio-cut’ version of Blade Runner). It is not made clear – until the very end – that this self-consciously narrated segment is meant to be clichéd, ironic and flimsy – and because of this, we don’t take the realistic, present-day sections of the film seriously; the ‘Preest’ sequences don’t add resonance to the other integrated plot-strands, they just bleed incredulity into them. It would have helped the overall suspension of disbelief if this conceit had been more clearly signified earlier on in the film.

Perhaps Franklyn deserves – and needs – to be seen more than once, to glean something deeper from its many facets. At least, it tries to be inventive and to do something different, fusing fantasy elements with current social concerns such as schizophrenia, depression, suicide, post-traumatic stress, homelessness and the striving for love. Rarely do British films attempt to mix genres in this way, and for this Franklyn should be applauded, even if ultimately, it just tries to hard. Here’s to hoping that this promising writer-director will mature and fine-tune his vision for his next venture.

James DC

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