UK Archives - Page 12 of 32 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hammer Horror – DVD

December 14, 20101950s, 1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Vampire

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews
screenplay by John Elder
directed by Freddie Francis

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B
starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
***/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to be the good guy: when he wasn’t baring plastic fangs or crusted over with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee’s unmasked performances were assertions of will–his Dracula, for instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or humanitarian ends as needed.

The Tourist (2010)

December 10, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, France, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes
directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

by Ian Pugh The loss of Bond 23 to MGM's umpteenth bankruptcy drama was just one of the many disappointments in the cinematic year that was–but an even bitterer pill arrived in the films that took 007's place. With neither Daniel Craig nor Matt Damon to keep a perpetually-ailing genre on its feet, 2010's triumvirate of identical spy thrillers (Knight and Day, Salt, now The Tourist) represents a return to the cozy arms of irrelevance. Sexpot secret agent Elise Ward ("Salt" herself, Angelina Jolie) leads her superiors on a wild goose chase through Venice in search of American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom they believe to be her mysterious fugitive beau, Alexander Pearce. Unfortunately, this little game also garners the attention of a gangster (Steven Berkoff) to whom Pearce is rather severely indebted. The Tourist is not a daring picture by any means. The most unconventional thing about it, other than the casting of Depp, is the oddity of hiring Timothy Dalton to play a version of "M" when this is so clearly a Roger Moore movie: a romantic trip across Italy in a white tuxedo, peppered with stunts that border on slapstick.

Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

December 6, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, UK, ZERO STARS

LOST IN TRANSLATION
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

ANYTHING ELSE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Danny DeVito
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw It feels a lot like life is an endless succession of heartsickness and anticipation of heartsickness. After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it's hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is about the wear of time and the unbearable burden of experience–it's about how even what's new and fresh is darkened by the ghosts of regret and time. When Bill Murray's fading star Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to lend his image to a top-shelf whiskey, he is suffused with so much of the sadness of living that the surprise of life has become something to be viewed with suspicion. Newness fades and that familiar malaise, weary and grey, inevitably takes its place, sometimes even before the exhilaration of newness can reinvigorate. Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in the hotel bar; she's in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), and together Bob and Charlotte paint the town blue.

Red Riding (2009) [Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 15, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, UK

RED RIDING
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1974
**½/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Seventy-Four David Peace
directed by Julian Jarrold

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1980
***/****
starring Paddy Considine, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Sean Harris
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty David Peace
directed by James Marsh

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1983
**/****
starring Mark Addy, David Morrissey, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty-Three David Peace
directed by Anand Tucker

by Bryant Frazer Red Riding, adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni into three movies from four novels by David Peace, is an awfully downbeat thing that's difficult to classify. It's not really a mystery, because the central crimes are barely the point (at least in the first two films), and the question isn't whodunit, but who among all those involved is not yet corrupt. It's not a police procedural, because the only effective police work we see is of the thuggish, back-room variety. In its specificity of time and place–nine years in Yorkshire, a county in northern England–it recalls James Ellroy's novels about Los Angeles cops in the 1940s and '50s. But Ellroy's stories were bracing because their point of view came from inside a department dominated by bigotry and machismo and tormented by its own failings. Each of the Red Riding stories comes at the situation mostly from an outsider's perspective, elevating a principled crusader to the high ground, then having the corrupt institution take potshots at him, decimating his footing.

Dead Cert (2010) – DVD

November 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

*/**** Image B+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Craig Fairbass, Dexter Fletcher, Lisa McAllister, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Ben Shillito
directed by Steve Lawson

by Jefferson Robbins That single star is for the concept–London gangsters vs. vampires–which, apart from some very fine lensing and decent actors, is probably the only thing that got Dead Cert any kind of release. In a genre thickly dotted with piles of shit, this thing is shit stacked high but glazed with modest visual sugar and a great high-concept. It barely merits a single viewing, yet you keep hoping something will switch on and provide a reason to persevere.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) [Blu-ray + DVD] + The Fourth Kind (2009)

November 9, 20102000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis

THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort–what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one–correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express–a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis's own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.

Let Me In (2010)

October 1, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

**/****
starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas
screenplay by Matt Reeves, based on the novel Låt den rätte komma in by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Matt Reeves’s redux of Swede Tomas Alfredson’s lovely, understated, doom-laden Let the Right One In finds magnification in the wrong places while betraying what seems to be its better nature in order to present something more “palatable” to a popular audience. Wrong to call it a “dumbing down”–better to say that elements left unspoken or at arm’s length in the original film are presented in Let Me In in as confrontational, uncontroversial a way as possible. More’s the pity, as the movie begins with Ronald Reagan quoting Alexis de Tocqueville in his “Evil Empire” speech (delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983) on a television in a snowed-in New Mexico E.R.: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America… America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” It’s a thread of Christian fervour that weaves through much of the first twenty minutes of the picture, through the introduction of our hero, Owen (a tremendous Kodi Smit-McPhee), suffering an extended Grace delivered by a faceless mother (Cara Buono) and, later, an admonition by an also-faceless father over the telephone that Owen’s mother is unbalanced and should stow her Christian shit a bit more tightly. The lack of the father as a physical presence in the film becomes a poignant elision in this respect: in a film about good and evil, the divorce between Father and Son, as it were, is a pithy one.

TIFF 2010 Day 2: Jack Goes Boating; Curling; Never Let Me Go

September 11, 20102010, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10, UK

by Bill Chambers Friday began with Jack Goes Boating, the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars as the title character. Jack is an airport limo driver who’s been the third wheel in the lives of his married friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Ruben-Vega) for so long that they’ve decided to intervene by setting him up with the mousy but receptive Connie (Amy Ryan). The movie, adapted–and, one suspects, significantly “opened up”–by Bob Glaudini from his own Off-Broadway play, casually parallels their burgeoning romance with the evaporation of Clyde and Lucy’s relationship. In a fall preview on his delightful blog, Nick Davis summed up his level of anticipation for Jack Goes Boating thusly: “Loved Synecdoche but can’t take much more schlub.” Truer words, etc. Jack isn’t just a schlub, he’s the ur-schlub, a maddeningly static individual who has to be nudged into action like a soccer ball, and Hoffman lights and poses himself to look as appetizing as Grimace from the Happy Meals. I much prefer another passion project of Hoffman’s, Love Liza: although it operates on the same demented frequency as Jack Goes Boating, there’s a whole slew of theatrical affectations to contend with this time around. (You can eventually set your watch to Jack’s nervous throat-clearing.) Ortiz is tremendously winning, though, in a bromantic role that reveals a lot more range, not to mention teeth, than Hollywood’s ever given him a chance to show. Jack Goes Boating reminded one woman I spoke to of Rocky; I can see it if I squint.

Hamlet (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

September 5, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Shakespeare, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B-
starring Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Kenneth Branagh, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Jefferson Robbins You could tell it was an epic: it had an intermission. Kenneth Branagh's four-hour version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet may be the last mainstream film to feature an honest-to-goodness, seriously-I-gotta-pee-now pause-point in its theatrical release.¹ How daring was that, in a period when studios demanded 90-minute runtimes to crowd more asses in seats? When just a year later, people would unironically say "epic" and mean Titanic?

Animal Kingdom (2010) + Valhalla Rising (2010)

August 11, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ANIMAL KINGDOM
***½/****
starring Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Luke Ford, Guy Pearce
written and directed by David Michôd

VALHALLA RISING
****/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown, Andrew Flanagan
screenplay by Roy Jacobsen & Nicolas Winding Refn
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom respects its audience, a rare commodity during the best of times. The film flatters us by leaving exposition and backstory to our knowledge of anthropology–in fact, Animal Kingdom is best indicated by its unwavering reserve–a reluctance, almost–to say too much when slow, fluid tracking motions and static, medium-distance establishing shots may suffice. Consider a frankly gorgeous tableau late in the film as three people meet in Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria: framed against an open space, Michôd allows an extra beat, then another, before continuing with his family gothic. The story isn’t an afterthought, but the dialogue, however minimal, seems to be. The picture’s told through its actions and its images and, in that way, reminds of a Beat Takeshi film, of all things, what with its focus on criminality and its enthralling slowness. If there’s another indie demiurge to which Michôd pays obeisance, it’s Michael Mann–and the success of the picture (as shrine to masculinity, as introspective character study) suggests that cribbing from Kitano and Mann, if it’s as successful a larceny as this, can be successful in no other way.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [Special Edition] + Deathdream (1972) – DVDs + Uncle Sam (1997) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 7, 2010****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Canada, Comedy, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by John Frankenheimer

Dead of Night
***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Richard Backus, Henderson Forsythe
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Bob Clark

UNCLE SAM
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Isaac Hayes, Bo Hopkins, Timothy Bottoms, Robert Forster
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the zeitgeist is one of those things we tend to discuss in the past tense, you have to wonder whether it's a vacuum or a barometer. In other words, the point at which culturemongers finally lunge at a craze is usually once it's begun shrieking its death rattle, and yet a post-mortem of said craze invariably divulges a complex tapestry of art and politics, the ascription of happenstance to which seems preposterous. Our own Walter Chaw brilliantly observes in recent omnibus reviews pairing Love Me If You Dare with Valentin and Dodgeball with Napoleon Dynamite that leitmotifs are emerging at the box office free of predetermination, and I myself got a faint chill when I became cognizant of having consecutively watched the upcoming DVDs of John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, Bob Clark's 1972 Dead of Night (a.k.a. Deathdream), and William Lustig's 1997 Uncle Sam. The Manchurian Candidate is getting reissued because MGM wants to piggyback the P&A for this summer's star-studded remake, Dead of Night because it's a perennial cult fave, and Uncle Sam because Lustig owns the company; three separate objectives, then, for putting out three different pictures all concerning shell-shocked war veterans bringing the violence home with them. Considering the length of time it must have taken to prepare these beautifully mastered, supplement-rich discs, that they coincide with not only each other but also the cooling of patriotic fervour (coupled with the spontaneous theatrical release of Michael Moore's anti-Dubya Fahrenheit 9/11) is like getting the rare privilege to see the forest for the trees.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania – Creepy

June 12, 2010****/****, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Czech Republic, Film Festivals, Short Films, UK

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival's official website.

by Bill Chambers Back in my early-twenties, there was one summer job I had where I found myself doodling animals saying inexplicable–and, needless to say, often repulsive–things. It started out as an effort to break the ice with my only co-worker (we spent most of our time locked in a makeshift editing bay together), then escalated into a constant test of her boundaries. I happened across some of these drawings recently, and they are resolutely unfunny: a bunny threatening to kill your mother with an axe, a frog telling a fart joke; in retrospect, I wonder why said co-worker eventually invited me to her wedding. Stockholm Syndrome's my best guess. Nevertheless, during the subterranean Looney Tune that is Everybody (animated; ds. Jessie Mott; 4 mins.; ½*/****), I began to feel grateful that there was no real public forum to display those cartoons back then, because all I'd really be doing is inviting some asshole on the Internet to dismiss it as adolescent shit. This is adolescent shit. Rendered in crude, impatient watercolours, various deer, bats, goats, etc. are anthropomorphized via cheaply cryptic remarks like "I'm too small in the necessary spaces," and "You paralyze me with disgust. You're spilling open like a gelatinous achin' belly." To which I reply, by way of Al Pacino in Heat, "Don't waste my motherfuckin' time!"

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania – Freaky

June 4, 20102000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Film Festivals, France, Israel, Japan, Norway, Short Films, Spain, Switzerland, UK

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival‘s official website.

by Bill Chambers It’s tempting to say that pop already ate itself, leaving a vast wasteland of remakes and reboots that can’t possibly be fertile enough to cultivate imaginations; I sometimes lie awake worrying that one day all we’ll be left with is the vultures and their Jane Austen mashups, their homemade Lord of the Rings prequels and Sweded Rambo movies. Should such a Doomsday scenario come to pass, let’s hope it occasionally yields something as whimsical and obviously heartfelt as France’s The Little Dragon (Le petit dragon) (animated; d. Bruno Collet; 8 mins.; ***/****), in which a magical force brings a Bruce Lee action figure to life, seemingly with the legend’s identity, if not his soul, intact, as it is his impulse upon encountering a Chuck Norris cut-out to kick it down. (He also recognizes his name and image on other collectibles.) Decked out in his yellow Game of Death jumpsuit, he navigates a maze of cobweb-strewn movie memorabilia that appears to be some Harry Knowles type’s bedroom; in a moment of quintessentially French cinephilia, Bruce, having been passed the torch (the Statue of Liberty torch from a Planet of the Apes model kit, that is), stumbles on a makeshift crypt lined with dolls of Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Louise Brooks, Robert Mitchum, and, erm, Robert Taylor. The stop-motion animation is charming–this scrappy little guy may actually be the ne plus ultra of Lee imitators, who are of course legion–and the tone is deceptively irreverent. This is fan art, executed with gusto–but does it have a function? Collet could be the next Nick Park–but is he hurting for inspiration?

Vampyres (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

June 3, 20101970s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, UK, Vampire

a.k.a. Vampyre Orgy, Daughters of Dracula
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Marianne Morris, Anulka, Murray Brown, Brian Deacon
screenplay by Diane Daubeney
directed by José Ramón Larraz

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One of the hallmarks of Eurohorror is brightly-lit sex scenes. Rather than reveal nudity in chiaroscuro, or in the kind of colour-gelled Hollywood glow meant to suggest candlelight or moonlight, cinematographers working in this mode step right up and wash light over their actresses to ensure that no detail is lost in shadow. This tableau looks a little strange from a contemporary vantage–off the top of my head, I don't think anybody but Paul Verhoeven and maybe the mumblecore crew shoots sex scenes so plainly these days–but it's a stylistic disconnect and a marker of a sense of time and place that makes these films a conduit for nostalgia among cinephiles of a certain age. José Ramón Larraz, a Barcelona-born director working in England, doesn't let Vampyres out of the gate before staging a bedroom scene involving two young, completely naked women. The sleepy brunette Fran (Marianne Morris) and the pale blonde Miriam (Anulka, a former PLAYBOY centrefold) are rolling around in bed before a killer in a top hat arrives in silhouette and fills their nubile bodies with bullets. (Were the title not Vampyres, you'd be forgiven for assuming the film had just announced itself as a giallo.) With that violent flourish, the opening credits begin.

Robin Hood (2010)

May 14, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Brian Helgeland
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Predictably, achingly, perfectly okay, Ridley Scott into his dotage has produced a string of absolutely unsurprising, overlong, uninspiring-if-occasionally-visually-striking films, of which Robin Hood is only the latest. An attempt to “reboot” the Robin Hood legend with a “prequel” that shows how a middle-aged Robin (Russell Crowe) meets his Merry Mystery, Alaska Men, woos freshly-widowed “maid” Marion (Cate Blanchett), sort of composes the “Declaration of Independence,” directly influences–it’s implied–the signing of the Magna Carta (in the completion of which the film’s real hero, William Marshal (William Hurt), was instrumental) not long after the events of the movie, and enters into a life of sylvan banditry at the prodding injustice of ineffectual King John (Oscar Isaac, doing his best Russell Brand). It also suggests that Marion is a Maid of Orléans figure who rides into battle alongside the menfolk to repulse an inexplicable French invasion shot in such a way as to suggest a Gallic D-Day landing (or an attack on Northern England by the New Orleans Saints)^*–marking the second time Blanchett’s done this exact scene after the admittedly-worse Elizabeth: The Golden Age. All of which is portrayed in so exacting and expository a way in that inimitably stately Ridley Scott style that the picture’s bumfuddling 140-minute runtime feels like a couple of torturous days spent at a Renaissance Fair. Maybe it’s the complete lack of stakes that hamstrings the production–the surety that no compelling issues will be broached, despite all the posturing about Robin Hood being Thoreau over six centuries before Thoreau (or Thomas Jefferson five centuries before Jefferson) in a deeply stupid town-centre meeting that more closely resembles the Endor council in Return of the Jedi than it does the requisite stirring centrepiece monologue in this prestige epic lost without an awards season.

Edge of Darkness (2010) + When in Rome (2010)|Edge of Darkness – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

EDGE OF DARKNESS
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, based on the television series by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Martin Campbell

WHEN IN ROME
*/****
starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman
directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Ian Pugh Allegedly a radical departure from the BBC miniseries upon which it's based, Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness works because there's nothing typical about it. Boston PD detective Tom Craven (Mel Gibson) naturally blames himself when his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down by a masked man with a shotgun, but his private inquiry into the matter reveals that Emma herself was the more likely target: it had something to do with her job at a nuclear R&D lab run by sadistic creepshow Jack Bennett (an almost-ridiculously slimy Danny Huston). The trick to Tom's subsequent trip down the rabbit hole is that he never stops blaming himself, even once his quest is validated by the trail of bodies left by both him and the mysterious conspirators pulling the strings. This is Gibson's first starring role in eight years following a lengthy trek through Crazytown, and he might be the only actor who could have pulled it off so flawlessly–simply because there's always been something slightly terrified about his specific brand of martyrdom, something that points to it all being painfully unnecessary.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

*½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Sam Spruell, Peter Stebbins
screenplay by Christopher Kyle
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a false alarm because drills are how all cookie-cutter closed-vehicle thrillers begin. Screenwriters free of the limiting bonds of imagination call it "foreshadowing"; critics forced to watch at least one film that begins this way per year prefer "tedious." K-19: The Widowmaker (hereafter K-19) has a tedious narrative married to vein-swelling performances presented in that frank gracelessness indicative of director Kathryn Bigelow's sledgehammer-chic since long about Point Break, brought together under the steady hand of a legendary editor (Walter Murch) that only just guides this behemoth of conflicting ideas and wet (and drunken) Russian submariners into the dry dock of coherence.

An Education (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She's Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she's distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures – DVD

April 19, 20101950s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

by Jefferson Robbins We're all mutants now. Those of us who weren't literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we've built better ways to destroy ourselves, we've also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer, but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

The Lord of the Rings (1978) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 20101970s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Spain, UK

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
**½/****
DVD – Image C Sound C-
BD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Rings" books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien's novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.