In the weeks following the US Civil War, Colonel Morsman Carver (Liam Neeson) and a team of men attempt to hunt down a man he wants to kill (Pierce Brosnan).
Both leads are excellent. It’s probably the most actual acting Brosnan has ever done.
There’s a relentless quality as they survive a sequence of grim fates, but unlike its spiritual cousin Revenant it doesn’t become ridiculous or unbelievable.
Truly excellent drama set during the US civil war. It’s a war film, a love story and a historical epic.
When the war breaks out, the quiet, inarticulate Inman (Jude Law) is one of the young men from North Carolina who has to fight with the Confederate army. But he has just fallen for Ada (Nicole Kidman), the daughter of the preacher (Donald Sutherland), and has to leave her – just as their relationship is beginning. Injured in battle, he attempts to make his way back home to Ada while being hunted for deserting.
All of the leads are on excellent form. Renée Zellweger plays Ruby, a plucky free spirit who helps Ada salvage her farm and her self-respect. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a crooked preacher. Natalie Portman is a widowed mother. There are also parts for Jack White, Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy.
It’s an emotional and affecting work that avoids cliché, especially since the romance is unconventional to begin with. The couple barely know each other, but their connection is overwhelmingly powerful. As a result, the film is too.
During World War II, writer Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) falls in love with Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), the wife of a civil servant (Stephen Rea). But other forces keep the couple apart. Whereas the 1955 film is awkward and improbable, this remake comes alive as a psychological drama because the characters are three-dimensional and sympathetic. You can really believe that Sarah and Maurice love each other because the acting is so strong.
There’s also an excellent performance by Ian Hart as the detective assigned to follow Sarah’s activities.
Graham Greene’s somewhat overwrought handling of Catholic themes is softened here so that the character motivations become credible.
Foster and Gere are both excellent, juggling several plot threads: the story about who Jack is, the story of their marriage and the story of the town's agricultural fortunes. It’s moving and it keeps you guessing.
James Earl Jones has gravitas as a judge, even if I can only hear him as Darth Vader.
Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother live with the sadistic and psychopathic Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is locked in combat with the local resistance fighters. Ofelia finds herself drawn into a strange fantasy world by a faun who assigns her three challenges.
It’s deeply strange, working on the level of political allegory as well as being a sort of horror story full of symbolism that invites multiple interpretations.
I don’t usually enjoy “magical” or fantasy stories, but it’s so unusual and imaginative that it draws you in. Plus, there’s some pretty strong stuff – torture, maiming, close-range shootings and constant threat.
Josey Wales sees his family killed and sets out to get revenge. Along the way he meets some colourful characters, who join him despite his “wanted man” status. As bounty hunters track and trail him, you wonder if he can ever truly be free.
It’s superbly cast all round. Every character is perfectly drawn – especially Chief Dan George as Lone Watie. There’s a quietly comic aspect and a tenderness to his manner that makes him hugely appealing.
I like the way Wales uses his spitting as a form of punctuation during his various encounters and conversations. That tic forms a sort of running joke that gets funnier as the film progresses.
The landscapes look beautiful and even the music is strong, although you do wish they had booked Ennio Morricone to compose the soundtrack.
While it starts out as a simplistic tale of revenge, the film goes on to become something so much broader and richer. I'm looking forward to watching it again.
It’s more ambitious than A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More (with which it’s often grouped as a loose trilogy), with an ongoing, parallel narrative about the US Civil War. There are spectacular battle scenes involving a huge number of extras. It’s unclear whether you are supposed to take it as an anti-war film, or whether it’s again being morally ambiguous on purpose.
On the plus side, Lee Van Cleef (the “bad”) is charismatic as “Angel Eyes”. But the dubbed voices used for all of the actors – even the English-speaking ones – remain a barrier that prevents it from ever seeming even remotely real.
This clever melodrama toys with becoming a noirish, Hitchcockian thriller – there’s an endearingly silly detective played by John Mills – but is really a film about religious faith and morality.
A few things stand out as odd:
• The couple seem to go from meeting to being obsessively in love in no time at all, and yet there’s no real chemistry between them. What do they have in common? It’s as if a scene or two is missing, as their apparent attraction is never explained.
• When Bendrix first sees Sarah, she’s kissing another man. Who is he and why is this additional affair not explored further? Was it simply there to indicate that she was unhappily married?
• If Bendrix is American, why is he writing a book about the English civil service?
It was remade in 1999, with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore in the lead roles.
David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel is a lavish but disjointed epic that grinds on for 200 minutes. Omar Sharif stars as the doctor of the title, who falls in love with young Lara Antipova (Julie Christie). The film takes in World War I, the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War with a plot that’s too meandering to summarise neatly. Sometimes it races through events briskly, while at other times it appears to linger on scenes that don’t warrant being stretched out – a problem with pacing.
On the plus side, the colours are rich and the all-star cast is uniformly excellent. It’s nice to see Julie Christie and Tom Courtenay back together again two years after Billy Liar, even if they don’t have much chemistry this time around. Omar Sharif is charismatic, with twinkling eyes and an undeniable presence, while Alec Guinness has a certain authority as the doctor’s brother. Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger and Ralph Richardson are all compelling, too.
On the down side, sometimes the narrative signposting is muddled. For example, when Lara cannot find her husband after the battle, we assume he’s dead but she neither mourns him nor asks about him. It’s simply not clear how she feels or how we’re meant to respond. I wondered if this was because the plot had to be condensed to work as a film, but if that’s the case maybe it could have added some simple explanatory sentences to bridge chunks of narrative that had to be cut. And if that is the reason, it’s ironic that they still ended up with such an incredibly long film (it takes up both sides of a DVD) that often feels slow and cumbersome.
