Review: Miss Potter

UK release date: 5th January

Beatrix Potter (Renée Zellweger) didn’t just write and illustrate world-famous children’s books, she was a protofeminist — making a fortune in a man’s world — and an early environmentalist — saving her beloved Lake District from property development. That’s the spin of Babe director Chris Noonan’s heart-warming but overly sentimental costume drama, in which Zellweger gurns a lot through her portrayal of the creative Victorian free spirit.

What makes the film work is Ewan McGregor’s effortless charm as the timid publisher who shares her vision of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and becomes her first romance in the bestselling process, and a sparkling Emily Watson as his spinster sister, who eventually befriends Beatrix.

Directed in picture-postcard style, with occasional flashes of cartoon animation depicting Potter’s creations and inner emotions, this is a sweet and lightweight treat.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate PG
Running time 92mins

Review by Alan Jones

Review: A Prairie Home Companion

UK release date: 5th January

The final film from one of Hollywood’s best-loved mavericks, the late Robert Altman, is a gentle, affectionate salute to Garrison Keillor’s equally gentle and affectionate radio show of the same name.

Keillor plays himself, the genial, unflustered host of a long-running live public radio show that is about to be closed down. Ruthless Texan millionaire Tommy Lee Jones has bought the theatre, and it will be demolished after the final performance. The film shows the action on and off stage, although not a lot actually happens and a sub-plot involving a mysterious woman (Virginia Madsen) is just daft.

However, the joy comes from the relaxed interplay between the show’s troupe of regulars and some great country music performances from the likes of Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin and John C Reilly. A fine way for Altman to bow out.

Radio Times rating:

****

UK cinema certificate PG
Running time 105mins

Review by John Ferguson

Review: The Prestige

UK release date: 10th November

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige manages to seem both highly original and slightly old-fashioned at the same time. Its Victorian English setting is familiar from Hammer horrors but, while there have been many films with an element of magic, few have been set in the world of the professional illusionist.

Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are two magicians whose intense rivalry dates back to a time when they were both apprentices and Angier’s wife died after a trick went wrong. Fuelled by professional jealousy and personal hatred, they dedicate their talents to destroying each other.

The film is told largely in flashback, as befits a director whose previous work includes the reverse-ordered Memento. Nolan constructs a fascinating tale that twists and turns at every opportunity, although there is perhaps one twist too many in a slightly overbaked denouement. But the film is grounded by the seriousness with which he treats his material and by fine performances all round.

Radio Times rating:

****

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 130mins

Review by Brian Pendreigh

Review: Breaking and Entering

UK release date: 10th November

Writer/director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) has assembled an impressive international cast for this thoughtful adult drama. The film captures the cultural and social maelstrom of the King’s Cross area of London, while probing the emotional confusion of a young architect working on its regeneration.

After opening an office in the heart of the district, Will (Jude Law) is infuriated when two break-ins occur in quick succession. Meanwhile, his long-term relationship with his Swedish-American partner Liv (Robin Wright Penn) is in difficulty. He mounts his own night watch at the offices and follows one of the young thieves home — the rooftop acrobatics of the young thief are especially impressive, albeit that they are laboriously counterpointed with the gymnastics of Liv’s troubled daughter. Instead of reporting him to the police, Will begins a tentative relationship with the boy’s mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee who works at home as a tailor.

This is an intelligent and articulate drama, but it is weighed down by an excess of metaphors about breaking (and mending) things, and ultimately seems cold and overly contrived.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 118mins

Review by Brian Pendreigh

Review: Scenes of a Sexual Nature

UK Release: 3rd November 2006

Ewan McGregor and Sophie Okonedo are part of an ensemble cast in this multi-stranded tale of Londoners indulging in relationship angst (and a bit of something else) on Hampstead Heath. Sexually-charged interactions add to the heat of a summer afternoon, but first-time director Ed Blum spares us the graphic details and instead focuses on the characters’ emotional dysfunctions.

Scenes work best when aiming for laughs, like Tom Hardy striving to be a cockney Casanova or Gina McKee in stilted conversation with Hugh Bonneville during a blind date. At other times, Blum shoots for a melancholy tone but given that he’s juggling over ten minor intrigues, there isn’t enough time to really feel for any of the characters.

That said, the performances are glowing all round and enhanced by lots of casually amusing dialogue. Overall there’s a free and easy ambience about the film that proves quite seductive.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 91mins

Review by Stella Papamichael

Review: Little Children

UK Release: 3rd November 2006

With his debut feature, In the Bedroom, director Todd Field explored the darker side of middle-class suburban angst, and he’s still in the same territory for this follow-up.

The setting is a tight-knit American community, into which convicted sex criminal Ronald McGorvey (an extraordinary turn by Jackie Earle Haley) has been released. He fades into the background quickly, as we’re soon introduced to Sarah (Kate Winslet), a married mother who becomes fascinated with a charming — and equally married — father (Patrick Wilson) at the local playground.

Passions flare, but before you can say “American Beauty” McGorvey bubbles back to the surface as the stories mesh together, leading to an implausible finale that’s not quite as profound as it thinks it is. Though its production values are impeccable and its performances pitch-perfect, Little Children feels intellectually hollow and more than a little exploitative of a hot-button subject.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 136mins

Review by Damon Wise

Review: All the King’s Men

UK Release: 27th October 2006

In his role as wily politician Willie Stark, Sean Penn does a lot of shouting and grand gesticulating, but fails to bring this remake of the 1949 Oscar-winning drama to life. Writer/director Steven Zaillian seems overawed by the task of adapting Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which shows Stark (a character inspired by real-life Louisiana governor Huey P Long) gradually being seduced away from his populist ideals by the lure of power.

Jude Law plays Stark’s right-hand man Jack Burden, who tries to avert scandal while battling his own inner demons. Unfortunately, Zaillian’s script becomes so tangled up in numerous subplots — Burden’s relationship with an old flame (Kate Winslet), to name but one — that supposedly significant revelations have little impact, and so Zaillian is forced to rely on endless talky scenes and a ponderous voiceover to explain the story. And the performances of the undeniably A-list cast, which also includes Anthony Hopkins, seem affected thanks to the ostentatious direction.

Radio Times rating:

**

UK cinema certificate 12
Running time 127mins

Review by Stella Papamichael

Review: Marie Antoinette

UK Release: 20th October 2006

Director Sofia Coppola’s modernist take on the life of the infamous 18th-century monarch who said “let them eat cake” plays like an extended 1980s pop video.

Although based on Antonia Fraser’s respected biography, hard fact gives way to a stylised portrait of the naive 14-year-old Austrian princess (a coquettish Kirsten Dunst) as she heads to Versailles to marry the shy Dauphin (a blank Jason Schwartzman). The seven years it took before the consummation of her marriage meant navigating ruthless court protocol, manners and diplomacy, and it’s the pressures of privilege that interest Coppola more than any revolutionary incident.

Historical authenticity is undercut further by bursts of anachronistic pop music (including a masked rave to Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Hong Kong Garden). The film is ravishing to look at, thanks to the production team’s unprecedented access to Versailles, but its frothy charm eventually wears thin.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 122mins

Review by Alan Jones

Review: I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed

UK Release: 20th October 2006

The mysterious fate of Moroccan activist Mehdi Ben Barka, who was kidnapped in 1965, has already informed Yves Boisset’s 1972 thriller The Assassination. In this historical drama, Serge Le Péron is less concerned with his disappearance and the attendant world of espionage than the Left Bank scene in mid-1960s Paris, where opportunistic ex-con Georges Figon (Charles Berling) seeks to make his name as a film producer in collaboration with screenwriter Marguerite Duras (Josiane Balasko) and director Georges Franju (Jean-Pierre Léaud).

Atmosphere is everything here, as Le Péron draws on the noirish precedents of Jean-Pierre Melville to create political, criminal and artistic milieux that are contrastingly sinister, scurrilous and self-servingly pretentious. But he does speculate intriguingly about Figon’s relationship with Ben Barka and its consequences for a nation teetering on the brink of implosion.

Radio Times rating:

****

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 102mins

Review by David Parkinson

Review: The History Boys

UK Release: 13th October 2006

Alan Bennett’s hit stage play, about a group of Sheffield grammar school boys being drilled for their Oxbridge entrance exams, makes an efficient transition to the big screen.

Utilising the original stage cast, director Nicholas Hytner wisely opts to change as little as possible, resisting the urge to open up the material cinematically. This brilliantly serves Bennett’s screenplay, which is a masterpiece of wit and intellectual erudition worn feather-lightly; a perfectly balanced blend undercut with the darker subject of history teacher Hector (Richard Griffiths) and his sexual attraction to the boys.

Which leads to this thoroughly enjoyable film’s only flaw: there’s something slightly implausible about these pupils who combine a kind of romanticised notion of male adolescence extracted from Goodbye Mr Chips with an incredible nonchalance towards the subject of homosexuality and their teacher’s repeated attempts to cop a feel. Still, it’s not a documentary, and this niggle is more than made up for by the performances, which are uniformly first-rate.

Radio Times rating:

****

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 109mins

Review by Adam Smith

Review: The Plague

UK Release: 3rd October 2006

With its abrasive blend of council-estate attitude, scally wit and hip-hop cool, 23 year-old Greg Hall’s directorial debut feels like a cross between Lock, Stock… and Bullet Boy rather than the British La Haine. Considering it was produced for just £3,500, this is a laudable achievement that keeps its quartet of mixed-race London lads one step ahead of the dealers, neo-Nazis and cops who threaten to ruin their weekend.

Although it occasionally paints a very bleak picture of a juvenile underclass, it also packs the action with edgy humour and a communal vibrancy that is spiritedly conveyed by newcomers Samuel Anoyke, Brett Harris, David Bonnick Jr and Nur Alam Rahman. The ending falls a bit flat after so much lively incident, but the only major misjudgement is the series of rap monologues delivered directly to camera by Skinnyman, as they jar badly with the film’s otherwise naturalistic feel.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 18
Running time 103mins

Review by David Parkinson

Review: World Trade Center

UK Release: 29th September 2006

Oliver Stone uses all the tricks in the modern Hollywood film-maker’s book to convey the enormity of the attacks on New York, using disaster-movie effects and one breathtaking, digitally-created aerial shot.

With four times the budget of Paul Greengrass’s United 93, which dramatised the events of 11 September 2001 in a hand-held, documentary style, Stone’s film takes us deep into the rubble of the collapsed buildings, as two Port Authority cops (Michael Pena and an admirably subdued Nicolas Cage), await their rescue. Meanwhile, their wives, a tightly-wound Maggie Gyllenhaal and a stoic Maria Bello, play their own fraught waiting game as they watch the disaster unfold on television.

In focusing on the real-life experiences of the McLoughlin and Jimeno families the film switches from spectacle to close-up human drama — and sidesteps the politics. The outcome, though based on fact, might seem a bit contrived, and there are inevitable moments of sentimentality. But overall, Stone brings restraint to this portrayal of real-life heroism and fortitude in America’s darkest hour.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 129mins

Review by Andrew Collins

Review: Life & Lyrics

UK release: 29th September 2006

Former So Solid Crew rapper Ashley Walters delivers a smouldering performance in this likeably ambitious attempt to relocate the rap battles of Eminem’s 8 Mile to the south London “’hood”. Walters plays Danny “D-Biz” Lewis, a DJ who’s about to compete in an “open mic” competition with his crew of mouthy MCs.

As the title suggests, it’s a film of two halves: acid-tongued rappers fight scathing lyrical battles on stage (“She looks suicidal/She’s only here ‘cos she got lost on the way to Pop Idol”), while Danny struggles to avoid the dangers of the ghetto between the breakbeats. Its street cred never entirely convinces — soap opera melodrama undermining its location-shot authenticity — but Walters is a powerful presence, his brooding manner occasionally hinting at a heart of urban darkness beyond the reach of this movie.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 99mins

Review by Jamie Russell

Review: Nina’s Heavenly Delights

UK release: 29th September 2006

A unlikely concoction of Indian cuisine and issues of ethnic and sexual diversity is served up in this Glasgow-set comedy that’s as light as a soufflé. Nina (Shelley Conn), a young Scottish-Asian woman, returns home for the funeral of her father, with whom she fell out over her last-minute refusal to marry the son of his rival restaurateur Raj (Art Malik) and unite the city’s two great curry houses. She soon forms a close bond with Lisa (Laura Fraser), who is now part-owner of the family restaurant, and the pair compete in a prestigious cooking competition against Nina’s former fiancé Sanjay (Raji James).

With its many diverse elements and subplots — including Nina’s friendship with a cross-dressing Glaswegian/Bollywood choreographer — director Pratibha Parmar’s film seems determined to challenge expectations and stereotypes at every turn. Yet the basic philosophy of this inoffensive tale — “follow your heart”, no matter which unlikely direction it takes — will probably appeal to the same audience that made Billy Elliot and Bend It like Beckham into major hits.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate PG
Running time 94mins

Review by Brian Pendreigh

Review: Echo Park LA

UK release: 29th September 2006

This touching rites-of-passage drama from co-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer) has undoubted charm, despite the shortcomings in its storytelling. The Spanish title — Quinceañera — refers to the traditional Mexican celebrations held for teenage girls to mark their 15th birthday.

Magdalena (Emily Rios) is a young Mexican-American girl whose own festivities are thrown into turmoil when she reveals she is pregnant — without, she claims, having had sex. Banished by her ultra-religious father, Magdalena goes to live with her great-uncle Tomas, who is already playing host to her gay cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia).

The film shows how LA’s Echo Park neighbourhood has become increasingly gentrified, with the old ways of the Mexican community changing for the better — and for the worse. A heavy-handed gay subplot briefly skews the story’s direction, but when the closing credits roll all that really matters is the young cast’s passion and vivacity; shame we couldn’t see just a little more of it.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 90mins

Review by Damon Wise