Ben X

Ben X is the story of a Belgian high school student with Asperger's syndrome who is persecuted mercilessly at school for being different. Outside school he plays a fantasy computer game called Archlord at which he excels. There's a lot I can't tell you about the film without ruining it for you, but I guess its really about what happens when Ben X the superhero meets Ben "the jerk I see in the mirror".

Bullying is big in the media right now and Ben X can give you an idea about how comprehensive the misery created by physical, text and internet bullying can be. It was traumatic to watch but was beautifully crafted and superbly acted. The school bullies are particularly good as is Ben's Mum who pulls off the harried but endlessly supportive parent role so well.

This film has a great plot and if you think you've got it sussed by halfway through, you're wrong.

Anne's rating 4/5
Ian's rating 4/5

Cargo 200

If you are too young to remember what it was like in the USSR when Russians thought that Ladas were flash cars, or if you think you do remember what it was like, perhaps you need to see Cargo 200 to disabuse you of any idea that 1984 was a golden year back in the USSR.

A Colonel's daughter's boyfriend earns more than he does. No-one respects the Professor of Atheism from Leningrad University. Rock bands are playing at ad hoc clubs. An illegal vodka still and bottling plant operates alongside a major road. The army has to try to co-opt the local police to bury a "Cargo 200" due to a man-power shortage. "Cargo 200" is a code word for dead soldiers flown back from Afghanistan. Society seems to be on the verge of crumbling.

But wait there's more. A local police chief, who lives with his senile mother is a violent psychopath with extremely perverted sexual tastes and, according to his mother, performance issues.

The humour here is as dry and black, as the police chief is vile and perverted. What else would you expect from a film chosen by Ant Timpson?

Ian's rating 3/5

In Bruges

The short story is I'm sure that In Bruges will come back on general release and be quite popular with people who like slightly quirky movies (e.g. Coen Brothers fans).

The longer story is that two Irish hit men from London have unexpectedly been sent to Bruges to wait for instructions. To make matters worse the young jumpy Ray (Colin Farrell) has to share a hotel room with older, laid back Ken (Brendan Gleeson). It initially the pair try to kill time in their new surrounds, mostly by arguing about things.

No-one is quite what they seem, something that gets Ray into a lot of trouble. Gradually the film moves from funny conversation spurred by boredom into action and finishes with a bang. The violence and body count should leave you in no doubt that this is a gangster movie. The gangster boss is played by Ralph Fiennes in best psychopathic form.

Like classic gangster movies both the baddies and goodies have strong moral codes. Which are not necessarily the same moral codes that you and I have.

Ian's rating 4/5

Jar City

A bad tempered detective investigates a murder of an old man with an interest in porn and a young genetics researcher and his wife sit by the bedside of their dying 5 year old. You get an initial feeling that this is going no-where nice. You'd be right, murder, rape, dead children, drug addicts and grungy houses this is not the view of Iceland that the tourist bureau would like you to see. Couple this with the Icelandic films I saw last year and I'm left with the opinion that Icelandic film makers don't care too much for their country's image. But on the plus side there are some great aerial shots of the countryside.

While the film is a serious crime drama there are some moments of humour, such as the young detective knocking on doors of old women and asking if they had been raped 30 years earlier. The one that got best audience reaction was when the detective in charge eats his take-home dinner of sheep's head starting with the eye-ball.

All in all, a good solid, well acted, crime drama with a couple of feel-good moments.

Ian's rating 3/5

The Counterfeiters

You could say concentration camp movies have been done to death and although it would be a pun in extremely bad taste, it would be at least partly true. And you would hope that The Counterfeiters, having won this year's Oscar for best foreign language film, would have something rewarding or refreshing to contribute to the genre and that hope is more than partly realised.

This movie is the story of how counterfeit pounds and dollars and other documents were produced by skilled Jewish labour in concentration camps for their Nazi oppressors. History buffs may know about this already, but I didn't so I learned something. The skilled workers in the story enjoyed vastly improved conditions relative to the average prisoner, partly due to the value of their skills and partly due to the management philosophy of the officer in charge of the operation. The the telling of the story was both factually and dramatically interesting. It was interesting to see a part of concentration camp life where suffering wasn't absolute and also to see how each worker coped with that. It was also interesting to see how the workers balanced the desire to stay alive with the desire not to aid the Nazi regime too much. Some characters were very open about their attitudes and other were more guarded - you had to make inferences from they way they acted.

The protagonist is a professional counterfeiter and it was fun to have a criminal not very jewish-looking character being the centre of the story. The officer in charge is a relatively jovial character who claims he was once a member of the communist party and again it was fun to have a not-quite-so-bad baddie. In echo of Black Book, the lines between the good guys and the bad guys were blurred just a little.

These fun aspects were counter-balanced by moments of absolute pathos - most notably when the new recruits are shown their bunks and touch their sheets in wonder and also when one worker finds his own children's passports in a pile of documents they are using to make replicas.

This movie kept my attention and I would recommend it unless you're too sensitive to watch any depiction of human suffering.

Anne's rating 4/5
Ian's rating 4/5

The Duchess of Langeais

The Film Festival programme says that this is a "tale of drawing room passion is superbly by two strikingly odd actors, Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu. She's the aristocratic Antoinette, a seasoned coquette who mocks the awkward courtship of her socially clumsy suitor, a Napoleonic General and war hero. Pushing him too far, she finds herself becoming the pursuer." The general and the duchess are almost sadistic and masochistic in the way they treat each other and themselves. It is an old fashioned story about social mores that are completely foreign to us today, but the two main actors do a great job of bring them alive and making them believable.

The film is in three acts and I think the middle act was way too long and bored the audience. Even though I know the length added to the tension, but even the endless parade of empire line dresses got repetitive.

I think this film would suit those want to see a costume drama that feels historic rather than being a modern style story set in beautiful old clothes and buildings. Or else it would suit someone looking for a tortured love story played out with 18th/19th century civility and length. In which case it would be 4/5, but for the rest of us it has difficulty scraping past 1/5.

Ian's rating 1.5/5
Anne's rating 2/5

Ashes of Time Redux

This is a review by our guest reviewer, John.

Magnificent, a wonderful experience. The programme quotes someone as having said of this movie "Memories should be made of this" and that is a good description.

Although not easy to follow the movie spans a year in the life of an agent providing mercenary/assassin services, and delves into the past lives and experiences of the agent, the agents customers (there are two, and these are the same person, who presumably is psychotic) the past lover of one these personalities who is the agent's brother (and a swordsman), his brother's wife, whom the agent also loved in his younger days when he too was a swordsman, and whom the agent asked to elope with him - on her wedding night.

A young poor woman (ie without the money to pay for mercenary services) whose brother has been murdered by local militia, another swordsman & his wife also feature, as does a sizable gang of bandits & said local militia.

There are a couple of fight scenes in the movie, when first the bandits then the militia are eliminated, but these scenes aren't really action, but rather are simply part of the story, and furthermore are shown as a graphic mish-mash of shots & short scenes (with perfect (for the lack of it) lighting) and feels much as it might for a participant rather than being shown to the viewer as an evidently
choreographed hollywood blockbuster might be.

However the strengths of the movie are its insights - a couple of episodes focussing of the thoughts / admissions of its participants about their lives and reactions to other happenings, combined with the richness of the movie's tapestry - music, camera, effects and acting are all profound. Direction is pretty good as well and overall the movie is fantastic.

4 1/2 *'s (+). Unmissable. I would happily pay to see this movie again and would recommend it to anyone mature.

Ian's view in the comment

Married Life

Married Life is loosely based on John Bingham's novel "Five Roundabouts to Heaven". The premise is that Harry (Chris Cooper), a middle-aged businessman looked upon as staid and boring, falls in love with Kay, a sexy young widow, and wants to leave Pat (his wife) without hurting her. The film is narrated by womaniser and Harry's best friend, Richard (Pierce Brosnan -- who else?). Chris Cooper plays Harry more diffidently than he played the extremely confident Robert Hanssen in Breach, but otherwise the slightly old-fashioned, serious, slow-speaking middle-aged man is the same, and Harry, like Hanssen comes up with a plan to do the unthinkable (in this case to kill his wife to save her from the pain of leaving her). Things are complicated by Richard's lust for Kay.

This film walks a fine line between thriller and comedy in a meticulous and lush late 1940s setting. The two male leads really run away with this film as the screen play puts the women into unfortunately passive roles. This is not the fault of the actresses as the film is told entirely from the male perspective. The main theme running through the film is that appearances matter even between husband and wife. This theme covers everything from Kay's always meticulous make-up and hairdo to those uncomfortable moments while everyone is pretending something didn't just happen. The final scene feels like a slightly drawn punch that only half worked for me as Richard's conversion is unconvincing (otherwise this would be a 4/5).

In the director's Q&A after the film I learnt that the original novel was written by John le Carré's mentor at MI5, who was also the inspiration for George Smiley.

Ian's rating 3.5/5

Night

The film festival guide says that Night is a symphony of music and images celebrating life and the world between dusk and dawn so I was expecting something like Koyaanisqatsi with fantastic footage and great music. There was some of that - a stunning moonrise over Uluru, fantastic fireworks at Sydney Harbour Bridge at New Year and sunsets with a great harp soundtrack. There was also a lot of time devoted to Australians talking about night and their attitudes to it and that ran the gamut from interesting to puerile to just plain weird. I'm not convinced that the taking heads added anything.

I wasn't taken with the fast forwarded footage either and the film maker seemed to want to fast forward everything. There was a night-time church service with lots of procession and incense waving, there were the footballers doing press-ups on the field under lights, there were ferries on Sydney harbour and there was a steel-works (or some similar industry) belching fumes, all of which were good images which didn't need speeding up.Quite a lot of the movie was a bit out of focus which is understandable for low light filming but rather annoying.

So there were flashes of brilliance but as a complete experience this movie was lacking.

Anne's rating 2.5/5

Vexille

The idea of a Japanese animation depicting a dark view of the future and negative relationship between Japan and the rest of the world (especially the USA) doesn't surprise me any more. In Vexille, Japan has dominated the world market for robots and having run foul of the UN over limits on robotic technology cuts itself off from the rest of the world. An American special forces team called SWORD gives itself the mission to penetrate the Japanese defences and find out what is going on there. Vexille, herself, is a member of the SWORD team along with her boyfriend, who was the last foreigner out of Japan 10 years before.

I expected something dark and confusing like Ghost in the Shell but in fact apart from the long opening sequence there is plenty of explanation about what is going on. It is a straightforward story with one big twist. The film is CGI style animation and has lots of explosions and wizz-bang stuff to entertain you with a thumping sound track to go along with it. Very stylish and entertaining. Who needs George Lucas?

Ian's rating 3.5/5

Son of a Lion

The amazing thing about Son of a Lion is not the cinematography or the acting but that the film was made at all. The Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan is effectively a war-zone and the Pakistani government is not keen on contacts between the local Pashtun tribes and foreigners. So it is pretty remarkable for an Australian film maker to go there and make a feature film in secret. Especially when the film maker is actually a paramedic and all the actors are local amateurs.

It is a simple story, a conflict between father and son, an illiterate gunsmith "needs" his 11 year old son to work in the family business but the boy wants to go to school. The father gets more stubborn as his brother, clan elders and other villagers advise him to send the boy to school. The story could be set anywhere in the Third World, but few places would have people casually test firing guns in the street and show a man having his armpits shaved at the barber. This film is more important as a reflection of ordinary life in a maligned part of the world than as a feature film.

Ian's rating 2.5/5

Forbidden Lie$

How easy would it be to write a piece of fiction and get reputable publishers to publish it as a non-fiction book? Apparently not difficult at all.

Norma Khouri wrote a book (Forbidden Love aka Honour Lost) about the honour killing of her best friend in Jordan and got it published by Random House as a non-fiction book. It seems that simple geographical mistakes like describing the river of Jordan flowing through the city of Amman and describing Jordan as bordering Kuwait didn't ring alarm bells, even when they were pointed out to the publishers by Jordanians. Of course such a book, published at a time when the Western World was hungry for negative stories about Muslims would be much more sensational (and profitable) as non-fiction than as fiction.

I would have thought that once the hoax was blown the publisher would back away from the author and apologised to the readers but not in this case.

In Anna Broinowski's documentary about this con job she manages to convince Norma Khouri to prove that she isn't the con artist that she now appears to be and Norma takes up the challenge with relish. Anna and Norma lead each other (and us) on an amazing dance of claim and refutation. Norma seems to have an inexhaustible supply of explanations for every refutation and for every time she changes her story. Anna and Norma follow the trail from Australia to the US and to Jordan and back. Norma is a pretty and charming, petite woman which probably helps tug our sympathies in her direction. I wouldn't blame you if you left the cinema wondering if you could believe what anyone says.

I was left with one niggling question: Broinowski went to the expense of flying her crew and Norma and Norma's body guard to Jordan, so why didn't she make things much easier for herself and take someone who could speak and read Arabic? Instead she relies mostly on Norma and her friends for translations of documents and what people are telling her.

Ian's rating 4/5

Redacted

Films done in a documentary style are fairly common these days and Redacted fits in the serious and political end of the spectrum of such films. There are interviews and bits of amature looking film and bits that looks like they have been taken from a French documentary about US forces in Iraq. But all this is just away of telling a story that is based on a real story of US soldiers who raped a 14 year old girl and killed her family.

It is pretty powerful technique as it makes the story look less like a feature film and more real.

The soldiers here are not cardboard cutout Bushites, but a bunch of people put together from different walks of US life and who have as many issues with each other as some of them have with the Iraqi civilians they deal with at the check points they man.

Ian's rating 4/5

Beauty in Trouble

Do beautiful women attract trouble? This is probably not a question you'd find as the theme of an English language film. But the Czech are not so politically correct. Marcela is a sexy mother-of-two whose beauty attracts trouble and provides escapes from trouble in equal measure. She is surrounded by a great cast of characters: an extremely pious mother-in-law, a sleazy, insufferable stepfather, an adoring hansom Tuscan-villa owning sugar-daddy, a sneeky priest and her unreliable husband.

This is a comedy about people taking advantage of situations in all sorts of (often illict) ways. From a battle of wills over biscuits between Marcela's kids and her stepfather, to taking advantage of a rich man's attentions to escape her husband, to taking advantage of dodgy bit of surveying to try and blackmail a land owner.

Oh, and Ana Geislerová looks very good in a bikini.

Ian's rating 4/5

In the Shadow of the Moon

In the Shadow of the Moon (ITSOTM) is a documentary and I'm not the world's greatest documentary fan. This lack of enthusiasm could be something to do with the facts often getting in the way of a good story but this could not be said about this film, perhaps because the story and the facts are so good. ITSOTM documents the Apollo missions to the moon, and is narrated by 10 of the astronauts who were on those flights.

The astronauts themselves are hugely entertaining. For guys who are mostly in their mid-seventies they appear in remarkable shape and are articulate, interesting and funny. The footage of the launches, the moon landings and the views from space and in space is all spectacular and apparently much of it hasn't been publicly screened previously. Other people may be deeply familiar with the events and the material but having grown up in a house with no TV I certainly didn't watch the events at the time they occurred (despite being just old enough) and haven't spent time watching the documentary channel since, so it was all very fresh for me. And despite having seen it before, I find the earth viewed from space particularly beautiful and I hadn't appreciated until watching this film that lunar landing modules and their little gold feet were so pretty. Men walking on the moon is just fascinating, even if you've already seen it and watching Buzz Aldrin descending the ladder to the moon's surface is now just that bit more interesting because he revealed he was having a pee just before he stepped off the ladder. I really liked the footage of the crowds at Cape Canaveral watching the launch of Apollo 11 - they look so different from crowds now. It was July in Florida and all the men are wearing shirts and ties, which I find incredible.

At the time space exploration was cutting edge, exciting and just plain cool. Men landing on the moon was an incredible feat and the fact that it was broadcast live on TV meant that large numbers of humankind got to watch, and celebrate. Almost forty years later In the Shadow of the Moon lets you share or maybe relive the sense of excitement that the Apollo missions engendered.

Anne's rating 4/5, Ian's rating 3/5