Reviews
Film round-up
Jeremy Clarke
Perhaps for the first time in 22 films, Quantum Of Solace (cert 12a; 105 mins) hints at a real sense of regret that 007 should leave a trail of deaths in his wake. A Bond movie with a conscience?
In the thriller Body Of Lies (cert 15; 128 mins), Russell Crowe's high tech savvy CIA boss contrasts with his on-the-ground wunderkind operative Leonardo Di Caprio. The narrative grapples with moral arguments, and chucks in one deeply upsetting, violent (though not gratuitous) set-piece, but it's the detail that really impresses. Visual stylist Ridley Scott delivers a lovingly researched Middle East and proves equally attentive to the finer points of surveillance hardware.
Computer game adaptation Max Payne (cert 15; 100 mins) has the wooden cop Mark Wahlberg, obsessed with his wife and child's deaths, pursue the quasi-supernatural powers responsible. Neither Bond girl Olga Kurylenko nor misguided visual style and winged Valkyrie demons can save it.
Dealing the death blow to the misconception that animation is a children's medium, Waltz With Bashir (cert 18; 90 mins, pictured below) is the director Ari Folman's highly personal exploration of his own and fellow Israeli soldiers' repressed memories of the early 1980s' first Lebanon War, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It's a mixed bag: tedious animated talking heads are punctuated by arresting graphic imagery. Dog packs ravage deserted urban landscapes, troops party to OMD on a boat (one swims atop a beautiful nude giantess), a gunman dances in a hail of bullets in a concrete no man's land. It's not particularly rational and the historical facts are difficult to follow, but that's probably what it felt like to the soldiers.
This month's politically incorrect entry Choke (cert 18, 89 mins), from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), has the sex addict and costumed tour guide Sam Rockwell staging death by choking in restaurants to scam money to pay for his dying mother Anjelica Huston's care home. Not good, not bad, but strange: it fails to do for sex what Fight Club did for violence.
Also worthy of note: Quarantine (cert 18; 89 mins) is a halfway decent Hollywood rehash of the effective, rolling camera Spanish horror [REC]. The likeable British comedy drama Special People (cert 12A; 80 mins) concerns disabled people on a DIY film course with a hapless tutor. Michael Radford's decent period caper Flawless (cert 12A; 108 mins) has Demi Moore as a London diamond corporation employee hitting the glass ceiling and Michael Caine as the bin man planning to rob the company blind.
And What Just Happened? (cert 15; 102 mins – see October's Third Way) appears after two months in distribution limbo.
Jeremy Clarke
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