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…

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…

News: Mark Wahlberg

Though only taking a supporting role in Scorsese’s The Departed, Wahlberg will soon be back in the lead.

First up is We Own the Night, alongside Robert Duvall, Joaquin Phoenix and Eva Mendes, with Wahlberg playing a New York nightclub manager trying to save his family from hitmen from the Russian mafia. After that, Wahlberg will turn hitman himself for director Antoine Fuqua (King Arthur) as an assassin set up as the fall-guy for the attempted murder of the US Presdent US President in Shooter.

The less said about the announced sequel to the abysmal remake of the Italian Job, provisionally titled The Brazilian Job, the better, but Wahlberg will be returning to do yet more damage to the memory of the Michael Caine classic some time in 2008.

Review: Children of Men

UK Release: 22nd September 2006

England, 2027: this green and pleasant land is now a dirty dystopia in which humanity has become infertile and its childless society is crumbling as refugees and terrorists fight the fascist powers that be. Submerged in this chaos is alcoholic former activist-turned-bureaucrat Theo Faron (Clive Owen), who watches from the sidelines until a surprise visit from an ex-lover (Julianne Moore) offers an unlikely glimmer of hope.

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También) here delivers a truly startling take on PD James’s downbeat novel, reworking its apocalyptic theme through the cracked prism of the post-9/11 era. Owen is excellent and there’s a glorious turn from Michael Caine as an ageing, pot-smoking ex-political cartoonist.

But it’s Cuarón’s film: his hand-held camerawork aping news broadcasts as it records nerve-shredding action set pieces in tense, unbroken shots. True, the proceedings are occasionally marred by a surfeit of plot exposition, yet the stark triumph of Children of Men lies in how its visceral vérité style brings the realities of a War on Terror fought in distant lands crashing back onto British soil.

Radio Times rating:

****

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 109mins

Review by Jamie Russell