Film Reviews by Kurtz

“Brick Lane” is a fair attempt at bringing Monica Ali’s brilliant, sprawling novel to the screen; at its heart is the heroine’s efforts to make sense of her life as she is uprooted from rural Bangladesh and plonked into an arranged marriage to an older man in a grim East London tower block. In the novel, Ali is able to make use of numerous sub-plots to broaden the canvas, while the film concentrates almost exclusively on the marriage of Nazneem and her blowhard husband Chanu, which leaves us, like Nazneem, stuck in her flat most of the time watching the world go by. There are good performances all round in the film, but it only provides a hint of the delights that the novel offers.

“R-Point” is a standard “lost platoon” story with a mis-matched band of South Korean soldiers dispatched into the Vietnamese wilderness to track down a patrol of their compatriots who everyone believes to have been wiped out, but who appear able to send spooky radio messages to their base. These messages and occasional appearances from the ghost soldiers are the most effective features of the movie, but the director eventually settles for depicting the descent of the search party into madness and their own personal hell, and this involves a lot of goggling into the middle distance at unseen horrors, and unhinged reactions without satisfactory explanations, rather like the Sunday night TV series that has been entertaining and frustrating us for the last three years.

Despite the rush you get from seeing indie kings Dandy Warhols make the big time before your very eyes in this film, it’s Anton Newcombe, frontman of Brian Jonestown Massacre, who represents the artistic heart of the movie. It is put together from seven years spent with the bands, filming them in performance, in conversation, in conflict and occasionally in trouble with the law. Newcombe produces heady sixties-inspired music and a mesmerising stage presence, but his talent has to battle against his self-destructive nature, be it in the form of drug abuse or his penchant for an on-stage punch-up (both unflinchingly shown here.) It’s immensely watchable and an awesome labour of love by director Timoner.

I liked this film although it was only partially successful in merging the two distinct storylines. Whilst the camera lingers predictably on the Winslet/Wilson affair, the more compelling story is that of the community's treatment of Jackie Earle Haley's sex offender, who is living with his doting mother having served his prison sentence.

Todd Solondz did a much more satisfying hatchet job on the lives and mores of the same middle-class America in "Happiness", and "Little Children", though entertaining enough in its own right, suffers by comparison with that work of genius as it purports to say the same things but ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions.

"Adapted from the play" always means cinematic death- the result is stagey dullness and a complete lack of that zest that real films have.This film is one up from that, but the fact that it's "Adapted from the short story" should ring alarm bells. And sure enough it spends much of its time wallowing in its literary traditions,(God, it's tough being a writer) and meticulously building atmoshere whilst neglecting to actually make anything happen on the screen.The usually effervescent Williams is virtually catatonic here, affecting a gravelly whisper to remind us that his character's a sensitive artist, and the central "mystery" is solved in 30 seconds by a secondary character. Oh, and did I mention NOTHING HAPPENS? Well, Williams does have to run away from security guard at one point, and Toni Collette gives him a couple of funny looks.(Probably the beard).

Michel Gondry tries to bring dreams to the screen and he certainly nails the anything-goes visual world of our sleep; cuddly toys take flight, cityscapes of cellophane and corrugated cardboard rise and fall and the hero battles his squabbling co-workers with an outsize pair of hands.

His characters are far less arresting when they are awake, though. The central love story misfires and although Bernal brings his usual charm to the role, his character is such a big petulant kid that it's a relief when he decides to head back to Mexico. Charlotte Gainsbourg is equally irritating- and it's significant that despite his cack-handed wooing of her, it's her mate Emma de Caunes' number that Bernal really wants... and who can blame him?

Uhhh... no, sorry Dave, you've lost me there.

I enjoyed Lost Highway and was prepared to go with Mulholland Dr. but this is a whole different league of weirdness.Lynch jettisons minor considerations such as plot, characterisation and story development in favour of... well... talking rabbits, people arguing in Polish, grainy black and white footage of an old gramophone, death by screwdriver and huge close-ups of the less decorative members of the cast-and it's all topped of some three hours later with an unaccountably upbeat song-and -dance number.The only bright spot is Laura Dern, who throws herself fearlessly into all her multiple roles.

"What the bloody hell is going on?" barks Jeremy Irons,the director of the film that Dern is starring in before it all goes haywire. Well, if you don't know, mate...

A heartfelt and moving account of life in the DDR. Stately and impresive rather than a gripping Bruce-a thon, it boasts nonetheless some intensely watchable performances from top German stage actors. The fact that some people had the courage to speak out against an all-seeing, all-knowing regime who had the power to ruin the life of anyone who stood against them is hard to take in when you've grown up taking everyday freedoms for granted, but the key message of "The Lives of Others" is that the desire for personal freedom is contagious and that no-one is immune.

Three, according to this rather overheated tale.Elisha Cuthbert of "24" fame, Camilla Belle and Katy Mixon all turn the pout factor up to eleven and vamp for all they are worth without ever producing convincing performances. Belle does a good middle distance stare, while Mixon overcompensates wildly for her unrequited crush on Cuthbert. Cuthbert herself must have the best-pressed cheerleader's outfit in the States considering the number of times she whips it off to go over those awkward creases with a steam iron. If you have a thing about doing household chores in your underwear, this is the film for you! The story itself gallumphs about in family secrets/adolescent angst/mistreatment of the disabled territory and although it wraps itself up nicely at the end there's nothing here you haven't seen done better elsewhere.

Volver provides proof, if it were still needed, that the battle of the sexes has been decisively won by the girls' team.The women in this perky comedy-drama are all glamorous,resourceful and spunky, while the men are almost without exception feckless, venal and lazy and in some cases a lot worse besides. Any film made in the last twenty years that attempted to present women in such sweepingly negative terms would have been met with howls of protest.Perhaps Senor Almodovar didn't want his star turn Penelope Cruz to have to compete for the audience's sympathy with a mere male.In fact she does a great job here, and is far more appealing and less irritating in this film than she is in her Hollywood adventures.

This film really does set out to provoke, and the black humour is often grating- take your pick from sexism, racism, homophobia, paedophilia, and good old teen nastiness- it’s all there! The result is that the film varies wildly in tone, with some decent performances lost among all the PC-bashing. I particularly liked the hopeless lawyer who appeared to have wandered in from “Dude, where’s my car?” while everyone else thought they were re-making “Heathers” and James Woods… well God only knows what he thought he was doing!

General de Gaulle’s appeal to the French colonies to help liberate France from German occupation in the Second World War was answered by thousands of men who had never set foot in France and who came to learn at first hand about the ambivalent attitude of the colonial powers towards the “foreign” soldiers who fought alongside their men. It’s an excellent film which takes a cool look at notions of equality and race whilst delivering some gripping battlefield sequences amid the shattered landscapes of occupied Europe that echo the ending of “Saving Private Ryan.” At first the men are anonymous in their battle fatigues but by the end, as the unit is thinned down in time-honoured style, you care much more about their fate than their military masters seem to.

First, the bad news- though billed as a Swedish horror comedy, "Frostbiten" is neither particularly scary nor laugh-out loud funny. It suffers a bit too from some poorly edited stunt work (although the ceiling creepers are pretty cool)and from some clunkiness from the "Before-I-kill-you-I-will-tell-you-all-our-secrets-oh-damn-she's-got-away" school of exposition.However, it does still have a lot going for it- the story moves along at a cracking pace, the young cast make up for any technical deficiencies (no acting masterclass, this),with some committed performances, and there's a vein of twisted humour running throughout that cannot fail to please. It's never easy to meet your girlfriend's parents for the first time, for example, but when you're going through the early stages of vampirism, the encounter is doubly hazardous, especially when trout in garlic is on the menu. Should have stuck to meatballs.

Director Andrea Arnold doesn't stint on the "local colour" in this slow-burning thriller: she devotes a lot of screen time to those parts of Glasgow where the sun don't shine; trash eddies in the breeze, concrete soars over urban wastelands, and lost souls sidle from bleak flatlet to sticky-carpeted boozer and back again. This downbeat setting, sparse dialogue and an apparently emotionally stunted heroine make this film heavy going for a while, but it rewards patience- as we are drip-fed information about the story we gradually come to understand some of her seemingly random actions, and the final scenes, with a detour for some pretty full-on bedroom gymnastics, pack a powerful emotional punch and a chance for redemption for more than one character- and looking at the lives they have to lead, I reckon they deserve a chance more than most.

"Inside Man" clearly wants to be more than a standard bank heist movie, taking time to show shadowy forces manipulating events surrounding a daring bank raid by Clive Owen and his ruthless band of robbers, and the excellent Denzel Washington's attempts to prevent a bullet-fest as the beleagured hostage negotiator.These background scenes can drag, though; they give the movie a bloated two hours plus running time and distract from the compelling clash between the two principals. It's worth a watch just to see who comes out on top, but having opened up several cans of political and social worms, director Spike Lee seems unable to wrap things up satisfactorily.