Review: Blood Diamond

UK release date: 26th January

A mercenary Zimbabwean diamond smuggler might seem a stretch for the once impossibly baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio, but this thought-provoking action thriller offers a superb showcase for his growing talents, despite an occasional lapse into Hollywood sentiment.

For a time it seems the film will be as good as DiCaprio, starting with the surprisingly savage opening scenes of a tiny fishing community being torn apart by guerrillas in war-torn Sierra Leone in the 1990s. A wonderfully low-key Djimon Hounsou plays survivor Solomon Vandy, whose discovery of a rare and priceless stone while working in the diamond fields attracts the attention of chancer Danny Archer (DiCaprio). Archer agrees to help Vandy find the family from which he was taken in return for recovering the diamond from its hiding place and, along with a crusading journalist (an effective Jennifer Connelly), they set off on a perilous quest.

Unfortunately, it’s here that a once provocative, uncomfortable film turns into a predictable and disappointing morality tale that does a sad disservice to its impeccable players.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 143mins

Review by Damon Wise

News: Leonardo DiCaprio

Up for the Best Actor Oscar for his work on this week’s Blood Diamond, DiCaprio is continuing his recent trend for tip-top performances in major movies, and beginning to well and truly shake off his late-90s useless pretty-boy image. If all goes according to plan he could be up for another Oscar nod for his fourth team-up with director Martin Scorsese, playing the titular future US President in biopic The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. With a backdrop of late-19th century New York politics and the Spanish-American War of 1898, it sounds like it has all the epic scope Scorsese will need to produce yet another film the Academy will find some excuse to overlook, and all the drama to allow Leo to run wild. It’d due 2008.

In the meantime, DiCaprio is also signed to star in Blink, based on a series of short stories about how first impressions
affect people’s judgement, for Syriana writer/director Steven Gaghan, which sounds both interesting and promising, and looks all set to start his own action franchise by taking on the mantle of Peter Chancellor in the big screen adaptation of Robert “The Bourne Identity” Ludum’s political thriller The Chancellor Manuscript. Looks rather like DiCaprio is going from strength to strength at the moment.

News: Jennifer Connelly

Connelly seems to have been taking it fairly easy of late, with this week’s Blood Diamond only her second film in the last three years. She still seems to be trying to pick her projects carefuly, though, with the only film she’s got in the pipeline sounding like a potential awards-winning corker.

Teaming up with Hotel Rwanda writer/director and two-time Oscar nominee Terry George for Reservation Road, it looks like this drama about the aftermath of a hit and run accident, and how it affects two families, could provide plenty of scope for the kind of acting that always gets the attention of the people who decide on award nominations. Joining Connelly to vie for acting acclaim will be fellow Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino, plus two-time Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix, and rising star Mark Ruffalo. It’s set for a US release in November – just in time to qualify for the 2008 Academy Awards…

Review: Bobby

UK release date: 26th January

Despite the title, this is not a biopic of US presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy but a snapshot of a precise time and place in history. The drama unfolds in a single momentous day in 1968 at the Los Angeles hotel that acted as Kennedy’s campaign headquarters.

Director Emilio Estevez personalises the story with glimpses into the lives of hotel staff, guests and members of the senator’s campaign team, played by a starry ensemble cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore and Elijah Wood. But it’s Sharon Stone who impresses the most, barely recognisable as the hotel stylist whose manager husband (William H Macy) is having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham).

With so many characters on show, the movie tends to lack a little in narrative drive (and the dialogue sometimes seems heavy and self-important), but what it does brilliantly is re-create the mood of the time. The real Bobby Kennedy is seen in archive footage and while he’s seemingly reduced to a supporting player in the film that bears his name, the promise he represented infuses everything. Of course most viewers will know how it ends, but that does not make those final scenes any less heart-rending

Radio Times rating:

****

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 116mins

Review by Brian Pendreigh

News: Anthony Hopkins

After taking on just one of the many interesting roles in this week’s Bobby, Hopkins will be taking a far more prominent position in his next outing – as writer, director and star of the wilfully experimental Slipstream, a surreal, existentialist Charlie Kauffman-style tale of an aging screenwriter whose characters start to appear in the real world, prompting much musing on the nature of reality, memory and death. Fun may not be the word, but it certainly sounds intriguing, with good reports this week from the Sundance Film Festival, where it’s just had its first screenings.

After that, it’s back to more familiar fare for Hopkins with Fracture (due in the Spring), where he’ll play a Hannibal Lecter-style intelligent murderer, as the wise older man in academia-set drama The City of Your Destination, and as yet another Butler, opposite Morgan Freeman, in Harry and the Butler (both due 2008).

Initially likely to attract most excitement, however, is the big budget adaptation of Dark Age classic Beowulf, where Hopkins will take on the put-upon King Hrothgar opposite Ray Winstone’s Beowulf and a monstrous Grendel voiced by Crispin Glover. And, in terms of full-on Hopkins-acting-his-guts-out potential, his turn as novellist Leo Tolstoy, opposite Paul Giamatti and Meryl Streep, in biopic The Last Station could prove one to excite the awards panels in a year or two, as the aging writer frets over combining his wealth and fame with his high principles. Not something, on the evidence of Slipstream, that Hopkins has much difficulty in doing.

News: Helen Hunt

Since making the swtich from the small to the big screen with As Good As It Gets nearly 10 years ago, Hunt’s been a surprisingly infrequent sight for an actress who had appeared to have made it to the big time, with this week’s Bobby her first cinematic outing in almost 2 years. For her next outing, though, she’ll be moving behind the camera, writing and directing (as well as starring alongside Colin Firth, Bette Midler and Matthew Broderick) Then She Found Me, revolving around a woman going throug a midlife crisis. It would, however, be churlish to suggest that Hunt will be writing from experience.

News: Heather Graham

Though once firmly an A-lister after her Austin Powers and Boogie Nights escapades, Graham hasn’t been seen much in the way of cinematic success in recent years, with this week’s Bobby being her highest-profile film since 2001’s disappointing From Hell. Still, judging by her upcoming movies, this looks like it could be entirely deliberate, as she seems to prefer her indy flicks these days – with Bobby itself, despite the insanely impressive cast, also being independently produced.

Assuming any of these get released on this side of the Atlantic, Graham will next be seen in romantic comedy Gray Matters, depressing-sounding drama Adrift in Manhattan, gritty LA-set thriller Broken, and 1960s-set family drama A West Texas Children’s Story, where she’ll play the high-profile-sounding character “Cassie’s Aunt”, with fellow former A-listers Val Kilmer and Matthew Modine in the leads.

News: Lindsay Lohan

This week’s Bobby is yet another step on the path to Lohan estabilishing herself as a serious, grown-up actress, rather than merely yet another former child star turned alcohol-fuelled tabloid-fodder, and most agree that she makes a decent job of it.

Just shown at the Sundance Film Festival is another grown-up movie, Chapter 27, which revolves around the life of Mark David Chapman, played by the often rather good Jared Leto, in the days leading up to his murder of ex-Beatle John Lennon in 1980 (a mere six years before Lohan was born), and she’s getting ready fortaking the lead in serious thriller I Know Who Killed Me, about a girl who develops twin personalities after avicious kidnapping.

She’ll also be going literary in her bid to be taken seriously, first cropping up alongside Sean Bean and Annette Benning in Oscar Wilde adaptation A Woman of No Importance, before starring alongside Keira Knightley in The Best Time of Our Lives, about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and opposite Oscar nominees David Strathairn, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margaret in The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a screenplay by Tennessee Williams – not to mention Cyrano de Bergerac-based romantic comedy Speechless.

First of all, though, she’ll star opposite Jane Fonda as yet another rebellious teenager in teen comedy/drama Georgia Rule – during the filming of which the youngster immitated her character by getting so out of control she was officially reprimanded by the production company for failing to turn up to shoots thanks to her all-night partying. Tut tut…

News: Sharon Stone

Stone’s attempt at a comeback in Basic Instinct 2 has just earned her her 7th Razzie nomination, this time for Worst Actress, so her good turn in this week’s Bobby should prove some cheer. Of her three upcoming movies, however, only one looks set to give her any more good notices, the first two – indy flicks If I Had Known I Was A Genius and When A Man Falls In The Forest – looking unlikely to attract much notice, even if they can secure a release on this side of the pond.

Much more promising is the post-Watergate political drama Dirty Tricks, in which she’ll star alongside Jim Broadbent (as disgraced President Richard Nixon), Annette Benning, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt and Meryl Streep. With a cast like that, it should prove something special – but will it be enough to get her career going on the right track again?

Review: The Fountain

UK release date: 26th January

You wait years for a film about ancient Mayans and then, like proverbial buses, two movies come along at once. Like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, The Fountain is one of the most original and extraordinary films of recent times — though a story that features not only ancient Mayans but also a bald man living on a little planet inside a snow globe with just a tree for company is bound to attract accusations of pretentiousness as well as claims of genius.

This third feature from director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) stars Hugh Jackman as a man on a thousand-year odyssey to save his beloved (Rachel Weisz, in multiple roles). In the 16th century, Jackman plays a conquistador searching for the fountain of youth in the Mayan Empire in order to save the Spanish queen from destruction. In modern-day America, Jackman seeks a cure for the cancer that’s killing his wife, and in the 26th century he sits like Buddha beneath his cosmic tree, trying to figure out what it all means.

Some of the audience may be doing the same, but those who stick with the movie will be rewarded with a profoundly rich experience about the meaning of life, death, love and immortality. The performances and music brilliantly complement Aronofsky’s philosophical musings in one of the most haunting, perplexing and visually stunning films since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey.

Radio Times rating:

*****

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 96mins

Review by Brian Pendreigh

News: Darren Aronofsky

Since being acknowledged as some kind of directorial genius with 1998’s Pi, Aronofsky has only managed to get two more films to the screen – 2000’s oddball Requiem for a Dream, and this week’s equally unusual The Fountain. The Fountain itself almost never made it, after a much-troubled shoot, and umpteen other projects have fallen by the wayside.

As such it should come as no surprise that he’s got no definite directorial projects in the pipeline – he is, however, currently peening an adaptation of Lone Wolf and Cub, the cult Japanese manga series about a rogue samurai single father. It has already made it to the big screen as Shogun Assassin in 1980 – notably featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill – although that was merely a re-edit of the first two of a trilogy of Japanese films made from the comics in the early 1970s. A proper big screen adaptation could prove interesting, especially with someone like Aronofsky on writing duties.

News: Rachel Weisz

After this week’s odd sci-fi, The Fountain, Weisz’s turn in the comedy/romance Definitely, Maybe, written and directed by the writer of Bridget Jones 2 and Wimbledon will come as a bit of a break. But then it’s back to the experimental, with a role in cult director Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, starring Norah Jones as a woman taking a road trip across the US, and co-starring the likes of Jude Law, Tim Roth, Natalie Portman and Ed Harris. She’ll be teaming up with Wong Kar-Wai again in 2008 for a remake of Orson Welles’ classic The Lady From Shanghai, with Weisz set to take the Rita Hayworth role.

Before that, though, it’s back to comedy, with a part in the Paul Giamatti and Vince Vaughan-starring festive bit of fun Fred Claus, due Christmas 2007, as well as another return to Africa following Weisz’s superb, Oscar-winning turn in The Constant Gardener. This time it’ll be a period piece, with Weisz playing the object of Colin Firth’s affections in the 19th century historical drama The Colossus,covering the final years of Cecil Rhodes’ regime in what is now Zimbabwe. Sir Ian McKellen will take on the role of the imperial hero/scoundrel.

News: Hugh Jackman

After this week’s The Fountain, and recent outings including Flushed Away, The Prestige and Happy Feet all having been released in the space of just a couple of months, Jackman’s really churning them out. His own X-Men spin-off, Wolverine, is due for 2008 as well – but it’s not all big blockbusters, as his lead role in Woody Allen’s Scoop (set in London but as yet not set for release in the UK) should attest.

Of Jackman’s other upcoming projects, most interesting are likely to be The Tourist, where he’ll play a lawyer who leads Ewan McGregor into a hidden world of sex and kidnapping, genius Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai’s 1930s-set The Lady From Shanghai (again opposite Rachel Weisz), and weirdo Aussie director Baz Lurhmann’s ambitious-sounding epic Australia, in which Jackman will star alongside fellow antipodean Nicole Kidman.

There’s also The Amateur, with Jackman playing a geeky CIA code cracker who turns himself into a killing machine when his wife is killed by terrorists, a small role in period piece A Plumm Summer, full-on action thriller Drive, with Jackman as a Hollywood stuntman trying to escape a hitman, romantic comedy Rebound Guy, and supernatural musical romance If You Could See Me Now – and that’s before you even start on the rumours of a remake of Oklahoma! with Jackman reprising the role that brought him such success on the London stage before Hollywood came a-calling.

Busiest man in Hollywood? He’s certainly a top contender. Does the guy even know how to say “no”?

Review: Babel

UK release date: 19th January

Acclaimed Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, working with regular co-writer Guillermo Arriaga, once again fashions an ambitious, harrowing narrative from seemingly unconnected stories. As if to top his debut Amores Perros (set in Mexico City) and English-language follow-up 21 Grams (shot in Memphis), Babel crosses three continents and employs a number of languages, including sign.

Two young goatherds fire a newly-acquired rifle from a Moroccan hillside, precipitating trouble for an American tourist couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) and a risky trip from San Diego across the Mexican border for their nanny (a formidable Adriana Barraza). Meanwhile, a deaf-mute teenager in Tokyo (Rinko Kikuchi) experiences familial, social and sexual frustration.

Deftly moving between these four strands, the film is grainily handsome, naturalistically acted (the Moroccans are non-professionals) and throws up assorted themes to chew on. But with one of the links predictable and another arbitrarily contrived, the whole isn’t quite as profound as it appears.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 143mins

Review by Andrew Collins

News: Brad Pitt

It seems Pitt can do no wrong these days. He’s got away with the divorce to become one half of yet another Hollywood golden couple, and now has a kid to go with it. But ignoring the tedious tabloid angle, his cinematic outings have been pretty impressive of late and all. After this week’s hotly Oscar-tipped Babel, he’s got an insane number of very pormising movies in the works, from The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button, alongside his Babel co-star Cate Blanchett and directed by his old Fight Club and Seven buddy David Fincher, to the much-anticipated western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where Pitt will play the legendary gunslinger James, complete with ‘tasche and stetson.

Then, of course, there’s Ocean’s Thirteen – which will see all the usual suspected added to by Al Pacino, and which all involved have promised will be much, much better than the really rather dire Ocean’s Twelve, before he goes from frivolous to serious and political for Dirty Tricks, set in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, and State of Play, based on the tip-top BBC political drama that aired back in 2003. He’ll be taking on the John Simm role as a crusadingjournalist trying to uncover a major scandal – although it’s somewhat likely that the action will relocate from Westminster to Washington.

Then there’s a bit more frivolity with Chad Schmidt – where Pitt will play both himself and the title character. Why? Because it’s set in 1980s Hollywood, just as Pit’s rise to fame began, and the Chad Schmidt of the title is a Brad Pitt lookalike – who rather resents his doppelganger’s success.

But keep your eye on Pitt in the run-up to the 2009 Oscars – he could be worth a flutter for Dallas Buyer’s Club, due next year, where he’ll play an AIDS victim in the late 1980s forced to experiment with black market drugs in the hope of finding a cure. If they play it right – which looks likely as they’ve got Monsters Ball director Marc Forster in to direct – it could well be one for the awards.