miscellaneous factZ – The online home of Rufus Pollock

6.5/10. Builds to a powerful climax from a rather ropey start — continually improving largely thanks to an excellent performance by Winslet. It would have been even better but for a script that occasionally slews into bathos (perhaps the fault of the original book which is rather old) and a very weak performance by DiCaprio. (As time goes by, it becomes increasingly apparent that he, like Tom Cruise, is not an actor. He possesses only a limited repertoire of facial expressions and modes of speech which are trotted out performance after performance have in the process becoming both predictable and monotonous).

It was also a shame that the final two minutes weren’t cut so that the film ended on DiCaprio’s twilight running. This marks such a natural endpoint that I even wonder whether the final 2 minutes were tacked on at studio insistence to soften what would otherwise have been a rather harsh ending — but one which would have been all the more powerful for that.

7/10. Still fairly unrelenting in his doom and gloom (cf. Requiem for a Dream) Aronofsky returns with a star turn by Mickey Rourke as an aging wrestler. More engaging than previous Aronofsky outings — in part because we were given some grounds for hope (even if they were later taken away) — this was definitely worth the watch.

7/10. The first section of film was excellent. This was the part covering our hero’s life story up to the present via the (nice) conceit of explaining to the police of how he knows ‘all the answers’. Unfortunately, the second part, which takes place in the present was much less good. Not only was the gangster aspect of it cliched and rushed but the love story — supposedly central to the film — had little time to develop and remained unconvincing.

As a result rather than ending at a climax the film felt like it had been gently deflating for the final 20 minutes or so. Nevertheless, even if it coasted up to the buffers, the start was more than strong enough to ensure this held the attention and overall this was good entertainment.

7/10. Unusual and powerful and moving.

5/10. Disappointing. Another competent outing from Eastwood but rather let down by Jolie’s performance which never convinced or compelled.

7.5/10. Beautifully shot and soundtracked as well as being elegantly constructed this film presents an unusual, and often troubling, combination of beauty and brutality, artwork and agitprop.

5/10. Mediocre Bond especially when compared to its predecessor (on which it heavily depends). Its makers seemed to think that they could make up for the total absence of coherent plotting by providing a set piece action scene or a killing every five minutes. Sadly action and violence, without a narrative to frame them, ultimately become both gratuitous and, worse, monotonous.

6.5/10. Intriguing, sweet (but not saccharine) piece featuring Nanni Moretti as a man who loses his wife in a freak accident and then spend the next couple of terms hanging out in the park outside his daughter’s school (ostensibly for her benefit but primarily for this own it would seem).

6.5/10. A compelling story of redemption driven by simple but solid story and excellent acting (esp. from Scott Thomas). The twist in the tail though was a great mistake.

7/10. Katyn, Andrzej Wajda’s latest film, takes as its subject the massacre by the USSR of several thousand Polish officer POWs in April 1940. While the film ends with a very graphic rendition of the killings, for almost all of its two hours the focus is on the fate of those left behind, with most of the attention centred on three women — the wife of a general, the wife of a major and the sister of a pilot/engineer.

Cumulatively, the film builds a devastating portrait at a very personal level of the impact of the war and its aftermath. Implicated here are not just the Katyn massacres but the Nazis brutality and the repression of the Communist regime in the early post-war period when it ‘rewrote’ the events of Katyn (blaming the massacre on the Nazis) and acted vigorously to silence those who spoke out against these distortions.

While not quite a match in its narrative sweep for Man of Marble, or in its photography and style for Ashes and Diamonds, this was still very powerful filmmaking whose impact on the viewer was commensurate with its subject matter — you will leave this film sadder than you entered it.