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Film Reviews
One Day in Europe (15)
Published: 21 May 2006
There's more football in One Day in Europe, but here it's an extraneous frame for four separate stories, all of which are set on Champions' League final day, and all of which are variations on the same scenario, ie, a tourist going to the police to report that their luggage has been stolen. First there's an English businesswoman in Moscow, then a German student in Istanbul, then a Hungarian pilgrim in Santiago de Compostela, and finally a French couple in Berlin. It's a fairly amusing and unaffected comedy about how unified the continent has become and how far it still has to go, but by the fourth telling of the story you'll be glad there's not a fifth.
The King (15)
Published: 21 May 2006
In the wake of Broken Flowers, Transamerica and Don't Come Knocking, American independent cinema's long-lost-fathers-and-sons season takes a darker turn with The King, an unsettling Southern Gothic parable co-scripted by the writer of Birth and Monster's Ball.
Metropolitan (15)
Published: 21 May 2006
Whit Stillman's first film, from 1990, is a wryly sympathetic portrait of some aristocratic college students who attend nightly balls in Manhattan over their Christmas holiday. With glittering dialogue and lovely New York scenery, it's the film Woody Allen might have made if he'd been born rich.
Waiting (15)
Published: 21 May 2006
Kevin Smith gets a "thank you" at the end of Waiting, but it's hardly necessary. No one could possibly watch this low-budget, lower-brow comedy without realising that it's the work of someone who's seen Clerks far too many times, and been left under the misapprehension that if you stick some slackers in a dead-end job and get them to swear a lot, you'll be acclaimed as a cult writer-director. The dead-end job in this case is dishing out defrosted steaks in a theme restaurant, a function which Ryan Reynolds, Anna Faris, Justin Long and Luis Guzman carry out with varying degrees of rebellion and resentment.
One Day in Europe (15) 
Published: 19 May 2006
This pleasant, undemanding inquiry into European disunity comprises four vignettes set in different cities on the night Galatasaray play Deportivo La Coruna in the Champions League Final.
The King (15) 
Published: 19 May 2006
There are moments of genuinely disquieting strangeness in James Marsh's feature debut, a southern Gothic about secrets tragically withheld. Its brooding atmosphere can be partly attributed to co-writer Milo Addica, who also co-authored Monster's Ball and Birth; this guy is plainly a specialist in the dysfunctional American family.
Metropolitan (15) 
Published: 19 May 2006
It doesn't seem a minute since I was queueing to see this at the old Lumière cinema on St Martin's Lane. Whit Stillman's comedy of manners was actually released 16 years ago, and it's heartening to report that time has been kind to it.
Waiting (15) 
Published: 19 May 2006
A rancid slice of American Pie-style gross-out, Waiting tries to create hilarity from the daily grind of employment at a chain restaurant. But whereas other workplace comedies (The Office is the ne plus ultra of the genre) turn personal animosities and perpetual boredom into something true, and therefore funny, this just piles up a dungheap of witless riffs on food, sex and restaurant clientele that are either borderline racist or homophobic.
Brick (15)
Published: 14 May 2006
Who are you calling Bogie, kid?
Prime (12A)
Published: 14 May 2006
Prime is set in Woody Allensville, a half-Jewish, half-Wasp New York neighbourhood where the highbrow residents spend their days talking to their analysts and conducting troublesome romances with much younger partners. The difference here is that the age imbalance is tipped in the opposite direction from the one that Allen is so keen on: a 37-year-old woman, Uma Thurman, is dating a 23-year-old man, Bryan Greenberg. Caught in the middle is Meryl Streep as a therapist who's telling Thurman that she should revel in the relationship, while telling Greenberg that he should get together with a nice Jewish girl instead.
When a Stranger Calls (15)
Published: 14 May 2006
Remember Scream's opening set piece, with Drew Barrymore as a home-alone schoolgirl being phoned by a serial killer? The question is: can that 10-minute prologue be stuffed with enough padding to make a full-length film? And the answer is: no, it can't. Set in a stupidly vast modernist mansion where the stupidly well-groomed Camilla Belle is babysitting, this bloodless slumber-party fodder has no plot or character development, so while we're waiting for the killer to get around to attacking her, we have to sit through endless scenes of her being frightened by noises which turn out to be innocuous, and being phoned by people who aren't the killer. By the time Belle has been rung by a friend, a boyfriend, a prankster and the house's owners, I suppose we should be grateful that no one's called to ask if she's considered changing her electricity supplier.
Time to Leave (18)
Published: 14 May 2006
After the tricksiness of 8 Women, Swimming Pool and 5x2, France's most prolific young genre-hopper is in a more serious, personal mood in Time to Leave.
Brick (15) 
Published: 12 May 2006
School of hard knocks
Prime (12A)
Published: 12 May 2006
You may remember a few years ago the arrival of "middle youth", the women for whom 40 is the new 30, and getting older doesn't mean you stop having fun. Prime is aimed squarely at them. Uma Thurman plays a 37-year-old divorcée who falls for a handsome 23-year-old student (Bryan Greenberg). As if the generation gap wasn't enough - while her biological clock is ticking, he wants to pass the time playing with his Nintendo - there's a twist: his mother turns out to be her analyst; and while the analyst is encouraging her patient to forget about guilt, enjoy life, who cares if he's young, the mother is telling her son to drop this and settle down with a nice Jewish girl. How Meryl Streep got embroiled in that part, heaven only knows. The first half runs along smoothly enough, but when things turn more serious it gets over-sentimental and crashingly dull - I was alarmed, examining my notes, to discover I'd been covering the page with doodles.
Quo Vadis, Baby? (15)
Published: 12 May 2006
The title is a line from Last Tango in Paris: in this Italian thriller from the director of Mediterraneo, everybody speaks in film references - everybody except Giorgia, the heroine, a private detective who has set out to discover the truth behind her sister's suicide, 16 years ago. Giorgia never goes to the movies, and so doesn't realise that her lonely existence is an hommage to Chandler and Hammett. But where Brick really seems to absorb the genre's morals and conventions, and put them to new uses, this film does no more than refer to them. The characters are wan, the plot devoid of the density and unpredictability the genre demands.
Time to Leave (18)
Published: 12 May 2006
A curiously gentle, even uplifting film by François Ozon, who directed 8 Women and Swimming Pool - curious in part because it begins in a spurt of rage. Romain, a young gay photographer, discovers that he has only months to live, and sets about cutting all ties to the world - job, parents, sister, lover - in the most brutal manner possible. The only person he can tell the truth to is his grandmother (a cameo by Jeanne Moreau), because, he tells her, she is like him: she'll soon be dead, too. The second half of the film slowly finds a new tone: I'm tempted to call it "redemptive", but I think that would be jumping to a conclusion Ozon is eager to avoid; and, indeed, part of the film's attraction is a deliberate inconclusiveness, a refusal to tie up loose ends. I'm not sure the story is entirely believable, but it strains hard to say something beyond the obvious about love, sex and death.
Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price (PG)
Published: 12 May 2006
Robert Greenwald's aim is to do for Wal-Mart - America's, and therefore the world's, largest retailer - something approaching what Morgan Spurlock did for McDonald's in Supersize Me, but he doesn't bring a quarter of Spurlock's energy and sheer sense of fun to this documentary. The basic charges levelled against Wal-Mart are familiar: that it underpays its workers quite shockingly, in effect using America's welfare system to subsidise its pay-roll; that it is discriminatory, offering almost no prospects of promotion to women or workers from ethnic minorities; and that it uses predatory practices to drive small shops out of business. And all this, by the way, is coming here, courtesy of Wal-Mart's takeover of Asda.
When a Stranger Calls (15)
Published: 12 May 2006
Baby-sitter alone in a big house, mysterious phone calls - am I ringing any bells here? It can't have been easy to try to make something fresh out of a plotline that most of your audience will have heard as an urban myth when they were six, and which has already been spoofed to death in the Scream and Scary Movie franchises. All the same, I can't help feeling that this updating could have been a little more imaginative - the only wrinkle on the basic plot is that it uses mobile phones.
Initial D: Drift Racer (12A)
Published: 12 May 2006
A mystifying Hong Kong action film, based on a popular manga comic about a shy tofu delivery boy who is secretly the mysterious "Akina racing god" - the driver who is unbeatable on Mount Akina's hairpin bends. The film follows Takumi's struggles with his brutal drunken father - a former racing driver - his romance with the beautiful Natsuki, and lots of high-speed action against gangs of street racers who are determined to beat him. The racing action is fine, but the electro soundtrack, the primitive comic relief (including some prolonged and repetitive vomiting jokes) and the romance are all wearing; and if the film could be boiled down to a simple message, it would be "All women are whores, stick to your car". Sometimes what you need isn't a reviewer, it's a cultural anthropologist.