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While speaking of Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre, Casino is often brushed aside with the usual “good, but not great” logic; the reason for that, of course, is attributed to its structural and thematic similarities with his earlier Goodfellas. I personally find that a flimsy argument. A spectacular tour de force from start to finish, Casino is a sprawling, visceral, glamorous and visually arresting epic gangster drama, bolstered by its hyperkinetic narrative and a terrific soundtrack that managed to provide a remarkable zeitgeist of the times. A ravishing behind-the-scenes look at the mob-controlled circus called Las Vegas, the story has been presented through its three principal protagonists – Sam “Ace” Rothstein (the virtuoso Robert De Niro in his last collaboration with Scorsese till date), a shrewd bookie who’s given charge of a huge Vegas casino; Nicky Santoro (the mercurial Joe Pesci in a slightly toned down version of his bravura turn in Goodfellas), his childhood pal and a volatile, psychopathic mobster who meets with a truly poetic justice; and Ginger (arguably Sharon Stone’s finest performance), a stunning beaut and a self-destructive hustler. Though around 3 hours long, the incredible performances, the raw energy of Scorsese’s storytelling, voiceovers with shifting perspectives, and darkly humorous dialogues punctuated by moments of thumping violence, have made this a compelling and explosive though heavily underrated crime saga.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster Drama/Film a Clef
Language: English
Country: US
Bloody Sunday might not be a great work of art per se, but believe me, it’ll get your blood boiling. On January 30, 1972 – a day that will forever be etched in collective and popular conscience as ‘Bloody Sunday’ – the British army and paramilitary forces opened fire on a civil rights march and murdered 13 unarmed people including 9 teenagers! This dastardly and gruesome act of violence not only shattered any hopes of peaceful resolutions, it scarred a generation of people who started joining IRA in greater numbers than ever before. Filmed in cinema vérité style, with terrific use of mostly short and medium long takes, the movie brought in a kind of hot-blooded, in-your-face kind of immediacy that made this a gripping, angry, explosive, unnerving, visceral and a deeply provocative movie. Very well dramatized, the movie is at once a powerful look at the tragic events that unfold on the screen, and a strong John Lennon-esque statement against the arrogance and high-handedness of so-called ‘Democratic Governments’. The largely non-professional cast has been led from front by James Nesbitt, as Ivan Cooper, the man who had organised what was supposed to be just a peaceful protest march on that fateful Sunday morning. The confrontational style of direction and pitch-perfect editing are really laudatory.
Director: Paul Greengrass
Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docu-Drama
Language: English
Country: UK/Ireland
Watching a universally renowned movie like L’Avventura –Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking masterpiece – can sometimes be a discomfiting experience. The reason is simple, you watch with huge expectations and the viewing experience might sometimes just fail to scale the stratospheric heights you’d hoped it would; something of that sort happened with this movie for me. While a group of blasé, affluent jet-setters is vacationing in a yacht, a successful but jaded architect’s neurotic fiancé goes missing, and during the process of searching for her, he ends up developing a relationship with a beautiful but emotionally fragile lady who also happened to be his fiancé’s best friend. A complex examination of human behaviour and a sharp critique of the shallow decadence of wealthy socialites, it isn’t really difficult to understand what made this the archetypal ‘Art Movie’ – especially given the deeply ambiguous ending. However, on the flip side, the slow, lumbering narrative, numerous moments of seeming inaction, and the long running time, were factors that slightly alienated the movie from me. Further, the acting, though good, in my humble opinion, isn’t great. Perhaps I shouldn’t be expecting a crackling movie like Breathless, 8 ½ or Shoot the Piano Player every time I watch a European movie from that golden era, irrespective of how acclaimed it is.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Avante-Garde
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was tailor-made to be a typically maudlin ‘triumph of human spirit over gargantuan adversity’ kind of tale. However, in the same way that an American director making a movie in French is something completely out of the ordinary, so is this heartfelt and surprisingly unsentimental movie. Jean-Dominique Bauby – high-flying editor of Elle in the mid-90's, womanizer, and doting father – suffered a massive stroke one not-so-fine day, to be left with ‘locked-in syndrome’; his body was completely paralyzed but for his left eye and his ability to think and imagine. However, despite this crushing and debilitating blow, he managed to compose his memoir through the mere blink of his eye! This amazing story of Bauby has been presented with a touching concoction of poignancy and beauty, and brought to life by Mathieu Amalric. And Schnabel added to that just the right amount of irreverence, mordant wit and dry humour, thus making this moving story an absolute delight to watch. Interestingly, a major portion of the first half of the movie, in an inspired choice of action, has been presented from Bauby’s point of view – with the audience literally placed inside his fecund brain!
Director: Julian Schnabel
Genre: Drama/Biopic
Language: French
Country: France
I might not have watched many Romanian movies, yet the few that I’ve seen are so good that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu might earn the least cookies of ‘em all. Yet, I must add, it is still good enough to be called a brilliant work of art. There aren’t any surprise endings in this movie, the title is clear enough. As soon as the movie begins, we see a lonely, cat-loving, hard-drinking, and slightly grumpy but otherwise good natured old man, suffering an apparently not so serious bout stomach and headache. And thus starts a deeply distressing odyssey where the titular Mr. Lazarescu is shuttled from one hospital to another, as his aches slowly and gradually start taking life threatening proportions. Shot in real time, the movie is a marvelous albeit documentary-style look at an otherwise mundane and unspectacular person living in Bucharest, which, like any teeming metropolis, is filled with cynicism, red tapism, insensitivity and hopelessness. Like its Romanian New Wave contemporaries, the movie is filled with unflinching, grim realism, and yet contains subtle doses of black humour, pathos and a deep sense of humanism. This exceptionally detailed and brilliantly enacted slice of life is at once a subversive and a humanitarian social commentary.
Director: Cristi Puiu
Genre: Drama/Slice of Life/Social Satire
Language: Romanian
Country: Romania
In an age of hyperkinetic narratives, the Austrian movie Revanche, with its leisured pace, might appear anachronistic to many. A character drama of the first order, the movie is about a former convict’s inner turbulence as to whether he should (or should not) seek revenge against the cop who accidentally killed his fiancé. Where revenge flicks go, it is absolutely antithetical to the likes of such explosive movies as Oldboy and A Bittersweet Life. Rather, what we have is an implosive character study of a man, stuck by a stroke of sudden misfortune, waiting to explode with cold, simmering fury. At the backbone of this extraordinarily gripping drama lie solid performances, grim realism, bleak, deglamourised vignettes and a deep sense of tragedy pervading the characters – factors that have made it structurally very similar to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (interestingly, like the Romanian masterpiece, this movie too is nearly completely bereft of any background score). Though never overtly expressive, the movie, nonetheless, is emotionally charged, with violence almost bursting through the seams. This brilliant, gloomy crime drama has really upped my interest for Gotz Spielmann, the movie’s director. By the way, on hindsight, the first half of the movie might appear to be a MacGuffin to many, but I feel it acted as a vital driver to what followed – both plot-wise and character-wise.
Director: Gotz Spielmann
Genre: Drama/Crime Drama
Language: German/Russian
Country: Austria
Memories of Murder is a rarity in that despite being a ‘based-on-real-events’ movie, it has still managed to go beyond the mere facts on which it is based. A very well made policier – it is about South Korea’s first recorded case of a serial killer – the movie meticulously follows two foe-turned-friends cops – a veteran, sardonic street-smart officer for whom end justifies the means, and a smart young rookie who dares to be different – trying to get hold of the slippery culprit. However, the actual tracking process fades in comparison to the gradual transformation of the characters revealed through deft change in mood and tone of the narrative. Despite the seriousness of the plot, the director has never shied from including darkly comic moments of near absurdist proportions at various instances of the fluid structure. One of the most striking aspects of the movie lies in its exceptional cinematography – the lush, panoramic outdoor shots have been perfectly juxtaposed with the decrepit squalor of the interiors. Never afraid of depicting the nastier sides of crime investigation, this wonderfully enacted movie has manage to pull surprises at nearly every turn of its crisp length.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Genre: Crime Drama/Black Comedy/Mystery
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea
In between the assembly line of mindless, glossy Hollywood sci-fi flicks with SFX worth millions and actual content not worth more than a dime, once in a while we get to experience movies as audacious in ideation, as thrilling in content and as terrific in execution as the first two Terminator movies (the low-budget cult Terminator and its gargantuan blockbuster sequel Terminator II – Judgement Day). With their spine-chilling tales of cyborgs sent back in time to kill (and protect) Sarah Connor who would give birth to the future leader of the resistance against world domination by robots, and the teenage video-game punk John Connor who would actually lead the struggle, respectively, the movies present terrifying, apocalyptic futures where the world is reduced to killing fields dominated by cold ruthless machines. Containing jaw-dropping special effects way ahead of their times, fantastic plots, spectacular action sequences that have become ingrained in every movie-goers’ minds, and themes that doomsday sci-fi writers have always been predicting, the movies also introduced the world to a new superstar in the form of the Austrian hunk Arnold Schwarzenegger. Linda Hamilton is especially memorable as the sexy, muscular mom striving to save her son. Dialogues like “I’ll be back” and “Hasta La Vista, Baby” are stuff that legends are made of. The fact that these two iconic James Cameron classics are still as popular among movie lovers as they were when they were released, and that they have inspired a whole generation of inferior imitations, is a testimony to their place in the pantheon of the most ground-breaking and trendsetting movies ever made.
Director: James Cameron
Genre: Action/Science Fiction
Language: English
Country: US
We now know what the world will look like once the Judgement Day has arrived – cold and heartless like this movie by McG, director of the Charlie’s Angels series. To be honest, the movie isn’t really bad per se, only that it falls way below the kind of expectations that this particular franchise makes the audiences harbour. John Connor, played by Christian Bale (still suffering from an overdose of Batman hangover), has finally taken over the mantle of resistance against the machines unleashed by Skynet – but it’s a battle whose losing side he seems to be a part of. And then arrives a mysterious former death row inmate who might not really be what he seems. As a standalone movie it is a decent popcorn summer blockbuster – the dystopian future, presented through steel-gray washed cinematography, looks well etched out. However, but for one moment of inspiration (watch the movie and you’ll know which), the action sequences and the special effects are just about decent without ever being jaw-dropping or spectacular. On the whole, the only real good thing that probably came out of it is that it made me want to revisit the iconic first two movies of the series.
Director: McG
Genre: Action/Science Fiction
Language: English
Country: US
Broken Flowers, whose simple exterior belies its profound depth, is a contemplative dramedy from indie legend Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch once stated that he is rather “interested in the non-dramatic moments in life”; this low-key comedy managed to emphasize essentially that. Starring Bill Murray, the uncrowned king of deadpan emoting, the movie is about a rich, bored and emotionally detached middle-aged man, who one fine day, after his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) leaves him, is informed by an anonymous letter that he has a son. That, and his neighbour’s coercive persistence, forces him to look up all his old flames to determine who might be the mother of his son. The quasi-mystery nature of the plot, however, is in complete to what the movie actually is – right from its minimalist composition to its subtle character study of a man who was once a modern day Casanova (his name Don Johnston is a play on Don Juan) – after all he had to be one in order to successfully woo a stunner like Sharon Stone, that too in her prime. This is a nice movie that has relied more on silences than on words to communicate the various shades of Murray’s character to us.
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Social Satire/Psychological Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
The Darjeeling Limited is the kind of movie the world wouldn’t rant over, yet this underrated gem from Wes Anderson has the strange ability to endear itself to the viewers without much of a hullabaloo. Nearly every aspect of the movie – direction, acting, screenplay, story, music, characters et al – may be described by the epithet ‘quirky’ or any of its synonyms. The film is about three semi-lunatic brothers – played superbly by Owen Wilson (he is especially brilliant), Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman – belonging to one hell of a dysfunctional family, taking a trip across India to bridge their love-hate relationships, and to undergo some sort of quasi-spiritual awakening. The delectably comic script, with terrific aid from the equally mad-cap style of camera work, managed to make this a bittersweet, humorous, whimsical, colourful, satirical and intelligent comedy, with a subtle layer of poignancy just beneath the surface. And the most interesting aspect about the movie is that, its background score is filled with, among others, music from various Satyajit Ray movies (for those uninitiated, barring his first few films, music for most of his movies were composed by the great man himself).
Director: Wes Anderson
Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
If I were to describe Layer Cake in one sentence, it would have to be ‘Guy Ritchie movie minus the black comedy’. Given that it was made by the guy who has produced all of Ritchie’s movies, that's understandable I guess. Of course that doesn’t mean this Brit thriller isn’t good; rather it’s far from it, it’s a pretty darn engaging piece of work all right. Set in the high-flying dog-eat-dog underworld of drug marketeers, this is as stylized a film as it is mind-bending, what with its labyrinthine plot filled with double-crosses and twists galore. And at the centre of the plot is a cool, suave, soft-spoken middleman, expertly played by Daniel Craig, who has decided to quit while he is on top (no pun intended). And, to put it mildly, that’s when the trouble starts – after all he is in the kind of business where nobody gets out alive, even if he has the smarts for it. Sleek, fast, snazzy and entertaining – this is the kind of movie you’d enjoy watching, but not the kind you’d like to ruminate over a drink. The photography is good and the background songs are well chosen. Watch the movie with an empty mind, and you might even end up enjoying it.
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Gangster Movie
Language: English
Country: UK
No Country for Old Men, a bleak, disturbing and brooding thriller, nearly managed to outclass Fargo, the Coens’ greatest movie – it is that good! When Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam War veteran and a man straight out of wild west, stumbles upon 2 million dollars of dirty drug money, he unwittingly sets off a chain reaction whose repercussions sets him on an insane collision course with Anton Chigurh (James Bardem), a laconic psychopath – a relentless force of insurmountable evil who deposes his victims with a hydraulic cattle gun with cold, chilling efficiency. Meanwhile, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), an old-timer, laments at the uncontrollable escalation of violence engulfing human society. Spectacular photography, aided by near deathly silence and a terrific screenplay, managed to make this dark, gripping thriller a disquieting meditation on the inescapable nature of fate, and a good versus evil tale of biblical proportions. The acting of the superbly chosen cast is spectacular throughout – a quintessential aspect of Coens’ movies; Bardem is especially awesome as one of the scariest screen villains I've ever seen. Multiple viewing, by the way, is absolutely essential to appreciate the devastating power of this cinematic masterpiece.
Directors: Joel & Ethan Coen
Genre: Thriller/Crime Drama/Americana
Language: English
Country: US
Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir, released one year apart, provided the perfect one-two sucker punch to those who strongly believed animation movies are only for kids. While being told over a drink by an old friend of a recurring nightmare, Ari Folman, the movie’s director, suddenly realizes that memories of his military service during Israel’s war with Lebanon in 1982 are sketchy at best. Made in the form of a semi-documentary, what follows is a recapitulation of the disturbing events in an attempt to recover his lost memory. Right from the stunning opening sequence of 26 vicious dogs running through the streets, till the grim climax (though, in my opinion, the actual war footage could have been done without), the movie never ceases to enthrall. The arresting visuals – brilliant, heavily stylized artwork accentuated by bright, mesmerizing palettes – managed to juxtapose with amazing ease a sense of immediacy (of the on-field violence) with striking hallucinatory imagery (as a reaction to the characters’ memories of those events). The haunting and deeply surrealistic narrative has been superbly aided by an equally effective soundtrack. Waltz With Bashir is a truly unique and unforgettable piece of work.
Director: Ari Folman
Genre: Animation/Docu-Fiction/War Drama/Psychological Drama/Avante-Garde/Experimental
Language: Hebrew
Country: Israel
Directed by the legendary Robert De Niro, The Good Shepherd is an epic espionage movie, though very unlike most of its ilk. Through the eyes, life and personal choices of Edward Wilson – a mild mannered, quiet and intelligent man who makes the journey from being a poetry student at Yale to head of counter-intelligence at CIA, and through elaborate use of flashbacks to let us know how he became what he became, we are presented with a deglamourized picture of the murky and severely lonely world of covert operations. And in the process we are also told how OSS during World War II gradually evolved into CIA during the Cold War. The movie boasts of an all-star cast – Angelina Jolie, John Turturro, Alec Baldwin, Willian Hurt et al, and even the likes of De Niro’s old buddy Joe Pesci and De Niro himself in cameos; however the low-key approach of the script never allows them to be spectacular or to grab attention. Through exceptionally detailed in its recreation of a lost era and Matt Damon’s precision portrayal of the emotionally distant protagonist, the movie managed to go places where most cloak-and-dagger movies fail to. However, given a choice, I would pick De Niro the actor over De Niro the director on any given day.
Director: Robert De Niro
Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Spy Film/Epic
Language: English
Country: US
Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, an immensely enjoyable light-hearted dramedy, is completely antithetical to the ones sandwiching it – the terrific modern noir L.A. Confidential and the brutal underground hip-hop flick 8 Mile. Though filled with characters with completely messed up personal lives – a shaggy middle-aged professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) going through a severe case of writer’s block, a young student (Tobey Maguire) who happens to be a compulsive liar and a closet prodigy, a PYT (Katie Holmes) besotted with Grady, an editor (Robert Downey Jr.) who’s career depends on Grady completing his much awaited book, and the university Chancellor (Frances McDormand) going through mid-life crisis and in an extra-marital affair with Grady – and told over a particularly messed up weekend, the movie, however, is far from being one itself. Douglas, as a cynical but otherwise likeable individual whose only way seems to downhill, is the most impressive among its well-rounded cast. Filled with sharp wit, wry humour and bittersweet moments, the quirky movie deserves wider appreciation than it has received. And the OST, by the way, boasts of a great original number by Bob Dylan - played during the beginning as well as end credits.
Director: Curtis Hanson
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Coming of Age
Language: English
Country: US
Directed by militant feminist Catherine Breillat, Anatomy of Hell doesn’t really deserve a review (by a professional, or as in my case, otherwise), even though the French lady has earned a certain reputation for her dare where tackling controversial subjects and depicting explicit content are concerned. Fat Girl, for instance, was a reasonably compelling watch. With Anatomy of Hell, however, she didn’t just blur the thin line between art and pornography, she crossed it with some distance to spare. The meeting of a bored lady and a misogynist gay guy, who she has paid to “watch” her, over a period of four nights, turned into a fest of one-upmanship where pretentious pseudo-philosophical rambling is concerned. It was in fact difficult for me to decide which was more intolerable – the director’s tawdry sermonizing (indeed, feminism has got to be a leading contender for the worst of all ‘ism’-s) or the nauseous flesh parade that would put even a porn director to shame.
Director: Catherine Breillat
Genre: Drama/Erotic Drama/Feminist Movie/Experimental
Language: French
Country: France
The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers’ followup to their greatest masterpiece, Fargo, was a movie as markedly different from its predecessor as there can be – the kind of parallax shift they repeated later with No Country for Old Men and Burn after Reading. The movie can be considered a cornerstone for the kind of unapologetic irreverence and humour they have become legendary for. When Jeff Lebowski, perhaps the biggest slacker in the whole of Los Angeles, and who prefers to be called by the epithet “The Dude", is visited upon by a couple of thugs, one of whom relieves upon his rug, what ensues is a madcap comedy with a serpentine plot that is as skewed and hilarious as its utterly wacky characters. Jeff Bridges as the eponymous bum-cum-stoner, and John Goodman as his gleefully neurotic bowling buddy, headed a terrific support cast, including the likes of the histrionic tycoon David Huddleston, the comically unctuous Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the "vaginal" painter Julianne Moore, the exceedingly demure Steve Buscemi and the impossibly profane John Turturro, to provide a memorably idiosyncratic ride through mistaken identity, double crosses, embezzlement, kidnapping and the porn industry. Watch out for a surrealistic song-and-dance sequence on, know what, bowling!
Directors: Joel & Ethan Coen
Genre: Comedy/Crime Comedy/Buddy Film
Language: English
Country: US
One of the highest rated Italian movies of last year, Gomorrah is a bleak, stark and an unflinching look into the crime-ridden underbelly of the Province of Naples. Through five loosely connected stories – a teenager getting seduced by the crime culture around him; two neurotic guys thinking they are beyond the Mafia’s reach; a haute couture tailor trying to earn some extra money by working with a Chinese cloth manufacturer; a young guy getting acquainted with some harsh reality while working for his boss whose business it is to dump toxic industrial wastes; and a money runner trying to survive the clan wars around him – the director has provided a detailed documentary-style exposé of the Camorra, one of the most feared organised crime syndicates of Italy. Filled with grim realism, the movie has a neorealist feel about it, with its mostly outdoor shoots, natural lighting, characters enacted with spontaneity that gives a non-professional feel to the performances, and a complete lack of any high drama, showmanship or ostentation. Viewers might find it slow and difficult, but this deglamourized gangster movie is a fine no-nonsense work all right.
Director: Matteo Garrone
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster Drama/Slice of Life/Ensemble Film/Docu-Fiction
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
A post-apocalyptic world where humans have taken to cannibalism for survival, is tailor-made for a gore filled horror flick. Instead what we have here is a darkly comic fantasy fable filled with bizarre visual beauty, and a fascinating work on absurdism (in a way, cinematic version of nonsense verse) – aspects which earned it cult status. The first feature film of French wunderkinds Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, Delicatessen is a fairy tale turned on its head. The entire story is set at a dank, derelict and dilapidated building, owned by a comically monstrous butcher, and filled with some of the most grotesque characters one can hope to see. And in this morbidly outlandish world develops a strangely touching romance between the gauche daughter of the butcher and a former circus clown (smartly played by Domique Pinon) who everyone wants to, well, eat. Like in Jeunet’s future solo films Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, it is filled with surreal imagery, pitch black humour, subtle pathos and enthralling visual beauty. The movie also boasts of one of the most brilliantly choreographed sequences that I've seen – watch the movie and you’ll immediately know which scene I’m referring to.
Directors: Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro
Genre: Black Comedy/Fantasy/Absurdist Comedy/Avante-Garde/Experimental/Cult Movie
Language: French
Country: France
Anjan Dutt, one of my favourite troubadours, has finally become his own man as a filmmaker, and in glorious fashion. Bow Barracks Forever was good film albeit for a niche audience; Bong Connection and Chalo, Lets Go showed promise, but didn’t really deliver as much. With Madly Bengali he has created a movie that is as much filled with nostalgia as it is with humour. The movie is broken into 4 chapters, with each dedicated, in turns, to one the four members of the eponymous Bengali rock band – Pablo, Benzy, Neon and Baaji, struggling to make music in a world full of noise. Though distinct in character and background, and each with a baggage of their own, they however are united by friendship and their common passion for music. Set against themes ranging from marital problems and religion to juvenile sex and drug abuse, the movie indeed manages to capture the pulse of today’s Kolkata. The songs composed by Neel Dutt, the director’s son, are terrific, more so given that music is essentially what the movie is all about. And whenever the beautiful vignettes of the city made me a tad sentimental, the awesome screenplay, replete with dry humour as well as good situational comedy, had us all laughing like maniacs. The director himself has played a pivotal role as a drifter who becomes the band’s manager-cum-mentor. Lew Hilt, as a former musician and the owner of a dilapidated garage where the band jams, Chandan Sen, as a foul-mouthed local goon, and Saswata Chatterjee, as an alcoholic father, are especially brilliant in the acting department. The movie has its negatives, I agree; but the positives outweigh them handsomely, making this a far more definitive chronicle of the underground rock culture in India vis-à-vis the Hindi flick Rock On.
Director: Anjan Dutt
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Musical/Ensemble Film
Language: Bengali
Country: India
If you ever want to witness an archetypal example of an actor/actress playing against type, watch this erotic thriller by Jane Campion. Meg Ryan, forever typecast as the cute girl next door in such enormously popular romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail and French Kiss, shed her clean girl image and inhibitions in this dark atmospheric cat-and-mouse tale set in New York, starring as a beautiful English teacher who gets entangled in a relationship with a mysterious homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo) investigating a series of brutal murders in her neighbourhood. The forty-something Meg Ryan didn’t just bare her luscious ageless body in the graphic nude scenes, but also her soul in her bravura turn as a severely lonely, emotionally fragile woman who experiences sexual liberation for the first time in her life during her torrid affair with a younger man, amid the suspicion, squalor and violence in her surroundings. The tone of this moody thriller might appear ambiguous for many, the characterization of Ruffalo’s cop not chiseled very well, and the constant blurring in and out of images a tad irritating, but superb turns by the two leads and the digressive narration of an otherwise straightforward plot managed to make for an interesting viewing.
Director: Jane Campion
Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Detective Movie/Mystery/Erotic Thriller
Language: English
Country: US
My Blueberry Nights, the latest from acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai (i.e. if you don’t take into account the redux version of his Ashes of Time), is his first movie with English as the spoken language. Grammy winner Norah Jones starred as heartbroken young woman who sets off on a cross-country road journey across the US, and in the process befriends a motley of distinctive characters – an introverted café owner (Jude Law) who serves her blueberry pie for free, a lovelorn cop who has taken to alcohol to get over the memories of her ravishing albeit philandering wife (Rachel Weisz), and a cocky but fragile compulsive gambler with demons of her own (played exquisitely by Natalie Portman). The movie has all the hallmarks of the director – dazzling visual beauty, existentialist theme, rambling narrative, an array of lost souls, and a beautiful soundtrack that kept growing on me. However despite all his signature touches and the soothing flow, it somehow lacked that extra spark present in his masterpieces like Chungking Express and 2046. Consequently, I liked the movie, but it failed to stay with me.
Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Existentialist Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: China (Hong Kong)
We saw the latest from Tom “Run Lola Run” Tykwer, The International, at a theatre with poor sound quality. This proved to be doubly unfortunate because, in contrast to what we had presumed, it is a verbose thriller with an exceedingly meandering plot. On first glance, the tale of a super-rich bank playing the role of a vital keg in promoting international terrorism and chaos might seem straight out of a Robert Ludlum thriller, and hence ticket to a perfect summer popcorn-churner. Perhaps precisely for that reason, the director tried raising the movie a couple of notches above the daily diet of slick thrillers by adding complex layers of corruption, deceit and conspiracies – that too on a mega-global scale. Unfortunately much of it failed to make sense, and to top that it failed to thrill as well, apart from the bloody Guggenheim shootout scene that is. Naomi Watts, who is compelling as always in the role of an asst. DA, and the polished vistas of places ranging from Berlin to Milan to New York City to Istanbul, are perhaps among the few positives for the movie. Clive Owen, though an Interpol agent, never really seemed capable of kicking the bad guys’ asses, and the loose script too didn’t help Tykwer’s ambitious causes.
Director: Tom Tykwer
Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller
Language: English
Country: US
Often considered the last great film noir (going by the classical definition of the genre), Touch of Evil is a nightmarish ride through the dark realms of society as well as the human mind. The movie opens with its legendary opening sequence – and source of endless ‘inspirations’ – a long take tracking a car fitted with a timed bomb, from its planting to its explosion. The iconic first three minutes was enough to make this Orson Welles classic a breathtaking and a disturbing movie. What follows, both literally and figuratively, is a game unto death between an honest Mexican cop (Charlton Heston in a largely forgettable role) and the local American police chief (Orson Welles). Janet Leigh, as Heston’s gorgeous wife, in a role that preceded her iconic turn as the infamous “shower scene” lady in Psycho, was at her seductive best. The movie, however, fairly and squarely belonged to Welles. Not only did he present a glimpse into what hell might look like – augmented by the incredibly dark atmosphere, serpentine narrative and oblique camera angles that seemed to penetrate right into the psyche of the characters, but also, as the sleazy, grotesque, corrupt and scheming Captain Hank Quinlan – a screen villain like few others – he gave a performance even more sinister and magnetic than his memorable turn in The Third Man. Though it was callously edited, and massacred in the process, by the studio, fortunately for us cinephiles the noir masterpiece has been restored to the version that Welles perhaps had envisioned while making it.
Director: Orson Welles
Genre: Film Noir/Crime Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Mystery
Language: English
Country: US
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