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: Rachel Weisz

Brit lovely Rachel Weisz is just one of the big names in this week’s kids’ fantasy Eragon, though she’s only on voice duties. We’ll soon be seeing a lot more of her, however, with a number of big parts in big movies due over the next weeks, months and years.

Due in January, after a perhaps appropriately insanely long wait, is oddball director Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain – a much-delayed, hugely ambitious sci-fi/fantasy romance spanning 1,000 years and three separate, if linked, storylines revolving around Hugh Jackman’s efforts to find Weisz, his one true love. It has been slated at least as much as praised by those who have seen it so far, so could prove interesting.

Then will come more standard fare, with Weisz’s turn in the comedy/romance Definitely, Maybe, written and directed by the writer of Bridget Jones 2 and Wimbledon. 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.

Review: The Holiday

UK release date: 8th December

Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet headline this romantic comedy for the festive season. Watching it is like unwrapping an attractively packed gift only to discover it’s socks again.

Writer/director Nancy Meyers should have observed the advice of her previous film, Something’s Gotta Give, and let a few scenes go. She spends far too much time lingering on humdrum episodes such as Diaz and Winslet emailing each other to arrange a house swap for the holidays. They’re both fleeing the fallout of broken relationships, but inevitably hopping across the pond leads both of them to unexpected romance.

Diaz and Jude Law make a fairly engaging couple, although sadly the early stages of their relationship are clumsily knitted together, while Winslet and Jack Black remain an awkward pairing throughout. But the film’s funny moments are as thinly scattered as the English snow, which mysteriously keeps appearing and disappearing throughout the movie.

Radio Times rating:

**

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 135mins

Review by Stella Papamichael

News: Jude Law

Law, with us again in this week’s The Holiday, has been churning movies out like nobody’s business, so to catch up on all his latest news, check out this earlier post.

News: Michael Caine

Fresh from his turn in this week’s The Prestige, genuine British national treasure Michael Caine is refusing to let his 73 years hold him back, and is on better form and harder-working than ever.

Next up for the veteran Knight of the Realm – before returning as Alfred in Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight – is Flawless, a 1960s-set heist movie in which Caine’s aging janitor teams up with high-flying American career-woman Demi Moore to rob his London-based diamond company employers of a few choice gems.

After that, he will be taking on the Lawrence Olivier role in the Kenneth Branagh-directed, Harold Pinter-scripted remake of 1972’s Sleuth, with the young Caine’s role taken on by Jude Law, who will hopefully be doing a better job of stepping in to Caine’s shoes than he managed with the remake of Alfie…

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

News: Jude Law

Having recently declared himself to be “skint” following his divorce from Sadie Frost, Breaking and Entering‘s Law is working overtime to pay the bills, so all his latest news was covered two weeks ago, on the release of his last movie, All the King’s Men.

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

News: Kate Winslet

Due out on 3rd November, All the King’s Men star Kate Winslet’s performance in Little Children has been earning her fresh Oscar buzz – perhaps it will be fifth time lucky, after nominations for 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, 1997’s Titanic, 2002’s Iris and last year’s The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Playing a married mother who ends up exploring the highs and lows of infidelity, reports from the film festival circuit suggest this is one of her most powerful performances, even if the actress herself has since complained about the graphic nature of the sex scenes, telling reporters “I must remember not to do this ever again”.

She will later crop up doing voice work on the Aardman rat-based animation Flushed Away – out on 1st December – and the animated Shakespeare adaptation Gnomeo and Juliet (due 2008), as well as in the flesh alongside Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Rufus Sewell and Jack Black in The Holiday, due on 8th December this year.

News: Jude Law

While not appearing in the gossip sections of the tabloids over the latest rumours about his relationship with rising starlet Sienna Miller, All the King’s Men’s Law has been a busy boy, having taken most of last year off. First up is The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering where, alongside Juliet Binoche, Ray Winstone, Martin Freeman and his King’s Men co-star Sean Penn’s wife Robin Wright Penn, Law will play a landscape architect to starts to reassess his life after a run-in with a young burglar.

Next up will be The Holiday, where Law’s King’s Men co-star Kate Winslett plays an unluck-in-love woman who does a house-swap with an equally unfortunate woman, played by Cameron Diaz, in an attempt to turn her life around. Law plays one of the bits of male eye-candy, alongside Rufus Sewell and, somewhat implausibly, scruffy tubster Jack Black.

After a small role in cult Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai’s American road trip movie My Blueberry Nights, hopefully due out in the UK sometime late next year, Law’s most promising – and at the same time most worrying – upcoming project is Sleuth. Starring alongside Michael Caine – who seems to have forgiven Law for destroying his classic character Alfie in the abysmal 2004 remake – this is yet another remake of a British classic, the 1972 flick of the same name in which the younger Caine entered a battle of wits with Laurence Olivier over a marital infidelity. We can but hope that yet more cinematic memories aren’t soiled in the process…