Leigh cleverly unpeels layers of the story, letting you know more about the characters and how they interrelate. It’s brilliantly shot, too. A party in the garden is framed like a play, with everyone in shot and everyone doing something at the same time. It’s fascinating to watch and definitely has the feel of a stage play. But, at the same time, the realism is such that it never seems “theatrical”.
Like most Streisand films, it’s a rich source of material for anyone wishing to psychoanalyse her. There’s lots about her childhood, her relationships with her parents (Lauren Bacall plays Rose’s stern mother), and her body image.
It’s flawed but fairly entertaining – especially if you’re already a Babs fan.
It’s a sort of grown-up “Brat Pack” drama following a group of friends based in Knight’s Ridge, Massachusetts, who come back together for a school reunion. There’s an intelligence lurking in the script but it’s also slightly muddled. Some of the performances are strong, but sometimes it’s unclear what point the film is trying to make. For example, Uma Thurman’s character – a random cousin called Andera – floats in and out of the story without much logic. And the thread about Willie (Timothy Hutton) developing an odd connection with 13-year-old Marty (Natalie Portman) raises some quite awkward questions that the film doesn’t really address.
The ensemble cast also includes Matt Dillon, Noah Emmerich, Lauren Holly, Rosie O’Donnell, Martha Plimpton, Michael Rapaport and Mira Sorvino.
It’s nearly there, but only nearly.
Michael Winterbottom’s skilful adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is a powerful and moving saga.
Christopher Eccleston plays Jude Fawley, the self-educated stonemason who falls in love with his well-to-do cousin Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet). In addition to the scandal of the couple being related (and both married to someone else), the story also addresses their conflicting class backgrounds.
There’s real gravitas in the performances and it ends up being moving without resorting to sentimentality.
June Whitfield is excellent as Jude’s elderly mother.
Touching family drama.
Two estranged sisters (Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep) get to know each other in the context of an elderly, unwell father and a troubled teenage son (Leonardo di Caprio).
It’s based on a play by Scott McPherson, and you can tell because the writing is so strong. Each of the characters is extremely well drawn and the relationships between them are explored with depth and empathy. Keaton is particularly strong as a woman with leukemia.
John Travolta and Christian Slater are military pilots testing a stealth plane armed with two nuclear missiles. But Travolta seizes the weapons and holds the world to ransom. The action plays out in the Utah desert (the scenery is stunning), where Travolta is helped by a gang of henchmen and Slater is joined by a friendly park ranger (Samantha Mathis).
The action is unrelenting. There are plenty of James Bond tropes – a ticking timer on a bomb, fighting on top of a train, macho feuding and plenty of helicopter explosions – but it’s all done with John Woo’s sense of heightened reality. Everything is turned up to 11, with a deliberately absurd element. It’s made even more exciting by Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, which incorporates motifs from westerns and clanking industrial interludes.
Neil Jordan directs, but it doesn’t feel like a Neil Jordan film.
For some reason, I found it difficult to sustain interest. The narrative didn’t make a strong enough case for why these events were important or why we should care. And it doesn’t explain how Collins, out of so many people, rose to prominence.
Liam Neeson wasn’t at his best. Julia Roberts has charm but was underused as his love interest. The accents were distracting – especially in the case of Alan Rickman’s awkward portrayal of Éamon de Valera. Only Stephen Rea, as Ned Broy, was truly convincing.
A girl (Anna Paquin) loses her mother in a car crash and goes to live with her inventor father (Jeff Daniels) in rural Canada. After some of his land is bulldozed by developers, Amy rescues several abandoned goose eggs and nurtures the geese to adulthood. Ultimately, she uses a microlight plane to teach the birds to migrate south.
Remarkably, this is based on true events.
It’s an ecological drama that could have ended up cutesy and trite but for the fact that it also addresses bereavement and family relationships.
The flying scenes are stunning and you can’t see how they were filmed.
It’s nearly brilliant, but the script just isn’t sharp or funny enough. The two leads are both excellent, and there’s plenty of chemistry, but even with their considerable talents the dialogue cannot sparkle and the humour cannot hit home. For example, a thread about the couple accidentally switching mobile phones isn’t sufficiently mined for comic effect. A more skilled writer (such as Nora Ephron) would have done so much more with it.
It’s a shame because Clooney and Pfeiffer exude charm and their performances are worthy of a better film than this.
It’s taut if trashy, and it keeps you engaged. Russo and Sinese are watchable, as always, but Gibson is oddly overwrought. It’s partly the character – he plays a loose cannon reckless enough to take the ransom process off-piste and gamble his son’s life in the process – but it’s partly just his odd acting.
There’s a sort of theme about macho behaviour, with the two male characters trying to dominate each other, but it’s not entirely believable. Gibson simply isn’t convincing as a dad or husband, and he has remarkably little chemistry with Russo. In fact, his character comes across as a total weirdo. (What kind of parent thinks he knows more about kidnap strategy than the FBI?) A plot thread about him having lied to his wife promised to take the film in a more interesting direction – i.e., with the criminal exploiting their divisions to play the couple off against one another – but strangely that possibility isn’t explored beyond an initial hint. Also, it fails my standard test of a film’s quality in that the minor characters are cardboard cut-outs instead of being developed and given their own motivations.
Slow-motion action sequences are never a good sign in a thriller, and there are too many here. I also found the black-and-white treatment applied to the closing moments a little naff and unnecessary.
Ron Howard is usually a dependable director, but you can’t help feeling that this one somehow got away from him.
It's a tightly plotted kitchen-sink drama with flashes of comedy and a very strong political message. McGregor delivers one of his better performances, although – as usual – he never sparkles. Fortunately everyone else does. Postlethwaite is charismatic as the band leader who cares so passionately about music that he overlooks other priorities. Fitzgerald is great as the crispy, pretty outsider who turns out to be “management”. And Tompkinson is believable as a desperate man whose problems keep piling up.
I was never a fan of brass, but the music sounds potent and poignant. It takes on greater significance as the story winds towards its moving conclusion, with no easy resolution.
A child prodigy, he struggles with an abusive, controlling father and mental illness problems that are presumably not unrelated to his difficult family life.
We see him as a boy (played by Alex Rafalowicz), a teenager (Noah Taylor) and as an older man (Geoffrey Rush). Each of these three actors tackles a complicated role brilliantly.
John Gielgud is funny and charismatic as his London tutor, guiding him through the seemingly impossible feat that is playing Rachmaninoff’s third concerto.
For a film about mental illness, it’s surprisingly uplifting and joyous – especially after he meets Gillian, played by Lynn Redgrave. If there’s a criticism it’s that this later part of his life is rushed through. A shame that the focus is on the unhappier times, although you can understand why his formative experiences would be prioritised. Plus, this is a pitfall of biopics in general: how do you cram a life into two hours without ignoring substantial amounts of it?
The first half is compelling. Director Barry Levinson brilliantly sets the scene and evokes both time and place perfectly. But in the second half, the film seems to lose its way. A lengthy courtroom segment takes the focus away from the themes of friendship and community that initially made the film so watchable. And something about that plot – the convoluted account of a faked legal hearing – just doesn’t ring true.
The cast is excellent, with memorable performances by Robert De Niro (reliably brilliant as a priest who befriends the boys), Minnie Driver (who falls in love with three of them), Dustin Hoffman (an alcoholic lawyer) and Kevin Bacon (one of the abusive staff at the Wilkinson Home for Boys). Brad Pitt is less convincing as the grown-up version of Michael Sullivan.
There’s overbearing music by John Williams.
The film is often disturbing, as you’d imagine from the subject matter – and all the more so because the 1995 novel it’s drawn from (by Lorenzo Carcaterra) is semi-autobiographical. It makes some profound points about how cruelty shapes and damages us, but somehow it still misses the mark.
