Thursday, February 28, 2013

Feb 25th
Lincoln** (12A)
(Odeon Colchester)                                       

(US 2012)
Twentieth Century Fox/Dreamworks/Reliance Entertainment/Participant Media. 150m. ws

The final months of Abraham Lincoln in his campaign to pass the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery.
Downplayed, liberal-minded Spielberg epic with a fine sense of period and perhaps the authentic voice (so it is claimed) of Abraham Lincoln, successfully capturing him as a family man and providing some interesting depiction of political machination, although lacking some outside perspective including the defeated South and, interestingly, Lincoln's assassination.

Written by: Tony Kushner, based on the book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg.
Director: Steven Spielberg.
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook, Jon Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Jared Harris (as General Grant), Lukas Haas.
Photography: Janusz Kaminski.
Music: John Williams.
Production Design: Rick Carter.



Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Feb 23rd
Cloud Atlas* (15)
(Barbican Cinema)                  

US/Ger/GB/Hong Kong,Singapore 2012. Warner Bros/Cloud Atlas.X-File Creative Pool/Anarchos/A Company/Art Degeto. 171m. ws

From 1849 to the post-apocalyptic future, successive generations are affected by the seemingly small but defiant acts of their ancestors.
Long, often unintelligible compendium, with the original novel's structure of one story recalled by the other interloped by irritating cross-cutting  of Intolerance-like intensity, but before the audience has been allowed to engage with the characters. The actors do their best to sustain the interest, despite a weird variety of guises and settings that vary from colonial drama to Star Wars-style fantasy.

Written and Directed by: Lana Wachowski, Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski, from the novel by David Mitchell.
Producers: Grant Hill, Stefan Arndt, Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski, Lara Wachowski.
Starring (in no particular order): Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Jim Sturgess, James D'Arcy, Zhou Xun, David Gyasi, Keith David, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon.
Photography: Frank Griebe, John Toll.
Music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer.
Editing: Alexander Berner.
Production Design: Hugh Bateup, Uli Hanisch.
Special Effects Supervisor: Uli Nefzer.


+ SONMI-451 (Doona Bae): "Truth is singular. Its versions are mistruths."

Philip French review

Roger Ebert review



Tuesday, February 19, 2013


Feb 18th
Doubt**

(US 2008)                             

Miramax/Godspeed Productions. 104m.

At a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, the head nun accuses the resident priest of indecently assaulting the school's only black child.
Thoughtful, nostalgically observed drama, a sort of ecclesiastical variation of The Crucible and Dead Poets Society, retaining most of the original play's tension, although the main character is still strictly one-dimensional, despite the best that Meryl can do.

Written and Directed by: John Patrick Shanley, from his play.
Producers: Scott Rudin, Mark Roybal.
Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Joseph Foster II, William London, Lloyd Clay Brown.
Photography: Roger Deakins.
Music: Howard Shore.


Thursday, February 14, 2013

Feb 11th
The Sea Hawk***   

(US 1940)            

Warner Bros. 122m. bw

A dashing pirate privateer plunders for Queen Elizabeth I in order to thwart the impending Spanish Armada.
Rousing swashbuckler, a quintessential Flynn vehicle blending all the elements of Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood together with a stirring anti-Nazi call to arms, and some of the best action sequences ever filmed by Warners, even if the plot languishes in mid phase, and the gunfire sounds more gangsterish than Elizabethan!

Written by: Seton I. Miller, Howard Koch.
Producer: Hal B. Wallis, Henry Blanke.
Director: Michael Curtiz.
Starring: Errol Flynn, Flora Robson, Claude Rains, Brenda Marshall, Henry Daniell, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Una O'Connor, James Stephenson, Gilbert Roland, William Lundigan, Montagu Love (as Phillip II), Victor Varconi, Fritz Leiber.
Photography: Sol Polito.
Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Preceded by:
Alice in Movieland*
(US 1940. Warner Bros. 20m. bw; A beauty contest winner on her way to Hollywood dreams of stardom.; w: Walter Crump, Cyrus D. Wood; d: Jean Negulesco; s: Joan Leslie, Clarence Muse, Nana Bryant, Clara Blandick, David Bruce, Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Alan Hale.)





Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Feb 8th
Spiceworld*

(GB 1997)                                 

Polygram/Icon/Spice Productions/Fragile Films. 93m.

The Spice Girls on tour.
90 minutes of them indeed, in what is effectively a music promo with a neat touch of self-parody (together with several vacuous celebrity guest appearances), quite engaging as people but barely one dimensional as characters, akin to The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, although compared with three decades earlier the musicality of the songs is - like the Spice Girls themselves - rather slender.

Written by: Kim Fuller, Jamie Curtis.
Producers: Mark L. Rosen, Barnaby Thompson, Uri Fruchtman.
Director: Bob Spiers.
Starring: Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell, Victoria Adams, Richard E. Grant, Roger Moore, Alan Cumming, George Wendt, Richard O'Brien, Barry Humphries, Michael Barrymore, and others.
Photography: Clive Tickner.
Music: Paul Hardcastle.


Sunday, February 03, 2013

Feb 3rd
Les Miserables** (12A)         
(Odeon Colchester)

Convicted criminal Jean Valjean and others suffer misery at the hands of tyrannical lawmakers.
The long running Cameron Mackintosh musical finally gets its cinema adaptation, quite successfully with the actors singing on-set (instead of pre-recording). Like Sweeney Todd, a musical which is an opera in all but name, marginalising its central plot strand of the pursuance of Valjean by Inspector Javert (an underrated and underused Russell Crowe). Good for fans of the stage musical, but the 1935 Hollywood version with Fredric March and Charles Laughton still remains the definitive article.

d: Tom Hooper
s: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Colin Wilkinson