• Wednesday 17 December for 22 days

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (12A)

(US 2003) dir. Peter Jackson 201m.
Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Brad Dourif, Bernard Hill, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, Viggo Mortensen, John Noble, Miranda Otto, John Rhys-Davies, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Karl Urban, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Elijah Wood.

"Majestic, moving and immense, THE RETURN OF THE KING is about as awesome as cinema gets. Combining the 'ooh' factor of FELLOWSHIP with the zippy action of TOWERS, Peter Jackson's monster epic sees Frodo (Elijah Wood) and friends continue their quest to destroy the all-powerful One Ring, and free Middle-earth of evil. It's an astonishing piece of storytelling, sacrificing little of the novel, as it nimbly switches between several story strands without becoming confusing or dull. The first film's Fellowship is still split. Pint-sized Ring-bearers Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin) are being led by the grisly Gollum (Andy Serkis) into the dark heart of Mordor; Gandalf (Ian McKellen) needs to deal with the off-his-chump Steward of Gondor (John Noble); while the kingdom's rightful king, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), must walk the Paths Of The Dead (oooh!) and muster an unearthly army. And there's fighting. Lots of fighting. Even after TOWERS' spectacular scrap at Helm's Deep, the battle for Minas Tirith is astonishing. Dragon-like nasties join with thousands of foul-faced orcs and troll-powered catapults to attack the city. As the tagline proclaims, "the journey ends". But you'll want to take it again and again. And if your eyes leak along the way... well, as Gandalf says, "Not all tears are an evil."
(Nev Pierce, BBCi)

• Friday 9 January for 2 weeks

LOST IN TRANSLATION (15)

(US 2003) dir.Sofia Coppola 102m.
Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Akiko Takeshita, Ryuichiro Baba, Akira Yamaguchi, Catherine Lambert.

"Bob Harris (Murray) is a movie star in Tokyo to shoot a lucrative whisky commercial. Charlotte (Johansson) is a Yale philosophy graduate in town with her celebrity photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi). Left behind at the hotel, Charlotte reflects on how her husband has changed during two years of marriage and how her own life lacks direction. Adopting the same dreamily lyrical approach that distinguished her 1999 debut THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, Sofia Coppola generates an even further out-of-body feeling with LOST IN TRANSLATION. A reflection on the way alienating environments can throw unlikely people together and forge unexpected, intense relationships, this teasing seductive drama displays perceptiveness and maturity, coaxing an evocative sense of the sweet agony of unarticulated sentiments.

Very much a mood piece, the film's deft balance of humour and poignancy makes it both a pleasurable and melancholy experience. There's nothing laboured or forced in the exploration of the undefined yet intense relationship and the insights about this type of brief but indelibly memorable bond emerge quite casually. In her second film, Coppola consolidates the impression of her promising debut that she's a filmmaker confidently forging her own style."
(David Rooney, Variety)

• Friday 23 January for 1 week

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (15)

(US 2003) dirs.Shari Springer Berman/Robert Pulcini 100m.
Harvey Pekar, Paul Giamatti, Shari Springer Berman, Earl Billings.

"What a sad, tender, wise and beautiful film co-director/co-screenwriters Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have made from Harvey Pekar's life and his American Splendor comics. Like Terry Zwigoff's equally superb GHOST WORLD, this is a film about the kind of people most movies never bother about. It's a profound tribute to lives lived on the fringes of society – to the introspective loners who are the most observant chroniclers of our times. AMERICAN SPLENDOR represents a bold deconstruction of the fatigued biopic form. Not content to present the Cleveland-based Pekar's life as anything resembling a straightforward narrative, Berman and Pulcini – who have previously made only documentaries – wildly jiggle around the raw materials of their film until they're left with a freewheeling phantasmagoria of dramatic scenes, documentary interviews (with the real Pekar) and crazily inspired animated bits drawn by the likes of R. Crumb and Joe Zabel. The result is a vibrant, untamed film that stubbornly refuses to fit into any prefigured category. Above all, the film is a bittersweet and delicately rendered love story about the ramshackle, picture-imperfect family Pekar assembles after years of loneliness and failed marriages – comprising wife Joyce (an unrecognisable and thoroughly wonderful Hope Davis) and foster daughter Danielle (Madilyn Sweeten) – and how his comics inadvertently lead him to it."
(Scott Foundas, Variety)

• Friday 23 January for 1 week

COLD MOUNTAIN (15)

(UK/Rom/It 2003) dir.Anthony Minghella 155m.
Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Donald Sutherland, Ray Winstone Brendan Gleeson, Kathy Baker, Eileen Atkins, Charlie Hunnam.

"1864. Inman (Jude Law) has had his fill of civil war. Wounded he deserts the military hospital and sets off on foot for home – and for Ada (Nicole Kidman). It's a long, arduous odyssey across the Carolinas. Only Ada's cherished love letters keep him. The country is sick, starving and tyrannised by Confederate Home Guards. Back at Cold Mountain, gentle Ada is orphaned and alone, until ruddy Ruby (Renée Zellweger) comes along and puts the farm to rights. Beautifully crafted, the film establishes its chaotic and hazardous time with complete conviction, and the opening battle scene is masterly stuff. Layering flashbacks of the lovers' decorous courtship three years previously with Inman's painful progress and Ada's straitened circumstances, the storytelling is never less than compelling. It's episodic, of course, but many of these Homeric interventions have a searing intensity and probing moral engagement unusual in blockbuster entertainment. There's vivid work from a stellar cast, notably Natalie Portman as a war bride and Philip Seymour Hoffman as an unconventional priest. If the love story is asked to carry more weight than it can bare, at least this is a film of rich measure and ambition."
(Tom Charity, Time Out)

• Friday 30 January for 2 weeks

ELEPHANT (15)

(US 2003) dir.Gus Van Sant 81m.
Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell.

"Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT is a record of a day at a high school like Columbine, on the day of a massacre much like the one that left 13 dead. It offers no explanation for the tragedy. It simply looks at the day as it unfolds, and that is a brave and radical act; it refuses to supply reasons and assign cures so that we can close the case and move on. Van Sant seems to believe there are no reasons for Columbine and no remedies to prevent senseless violence from happening again. Many viewers will leave this film as unsatisfied and angry as Variety's Todd McCarthy, who wrote after it won the Golden Palm at Cannes 2003 that it was "pointless at best and irresponsible at worst." I think its responsibility comes precisely in its refusal to provide a point. Van Sant's ELEPHANT is a violent movie in the sense that many innocent people are shot dead. But it isn't violent in the way it presents those deaths. There is no pumped-up style, no lingering, no release, no climax. Just implacable, poker-faced, flat, uninflected death. Truffaut said it was hard to make an anti-war film because war was exciting even if you were against it. Van Sant has made an anti-violence film by draining violence of energy, purpose, glamour, reward and social context. It just happens. I doubt that ELEPHANT will ever inspire anyone to copy what they see on the screen. Much more than the insipid message movies shown in social studies classes, it might inspire useful discussion and soul-searching among high school students. The movie is told mostly in long tracking shots; by avoiding cuts between closeups and medium shots, Van Sant also avoids the film grammar that goes along with such cuts, and so his visual strategy doesn't load the dice or try to tell us anything. It simply watches. Van Sant would have found it difficult to find financing for any version of this story (Columbine isn't ‘commercial'), but to tell it on a small budget, without stars or a formula screenplay, is unthinkable. He found the freedom to make the film, he said, because of the success of his GOOD WILL HUNTING, which gave him financial independence: "I came to realize since I had no need to make a lot of money, I should make films I find interesting, regardless of their outcome and audience.""
(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

• Friday 6 February for 1 week

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (12A)

(UK/Lux 2003) dir.Peter Webber 100m.
Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson,Judy Parfitt.

"GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING is an exquisitely understated period drama rich in atmosphere and emotion. A faithful adaptation of the Tracey Chevalier best-seller, this marks an auspicious feature debut from director Peter Webber. Set in the Delft of 17th century Holland, it tells of a young servant girl Griet (Scarlet Johansson) who is sent to work in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth). Unfolding with an economy and subtlety that is hard to fault, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING looks an absolute treat. Vermeer's paintings come to life in the dappled light of wintry landscapes and the dusty darkness of candle lit interiors. The film's strength lies in a mesmerising recreation of the period that is allied to emotions that are timeless. An artist torn between his dutiful wife and a servant girl with a much more profound understanding of his art, Vermeer becomes an entirely human figure even as we also learn of his painstaking technique and a life spent at the constant mercy of a rich patron. Distinguished by glorious cinematography and production design, this is a film that deals in the implicit rather than the explicit. In this respect, Scarlet Johansson's central performance is a revelation. As luminous as pale moonlight, she has the ability to let her features become a map of her character's emotions, registering wide-eyed wonder, shame, enchantment or scalding injustice with little more than a hint of a smile or a modest look."
(Allan Hunter, Screen International)

• Friday 13 February for 2 weeks

DOGVILLE (15)

(Den/Fr/Swe/Br/Ger/Hol 2003) dir.Lars Von Trier 178m.
Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Nicole Kidman, Chloë Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård.

"Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier doesn't make bold statements or push the envelope – he hurls cinematic hand grenades. Every film he's made has been nothing short of explosive, but Von Trier isn't just all bombast and shock tactics. That's why it's been so hard for his detractors to write him off. For every shocking ripple, there's a bruising, galvanising moment that says something painfully honest about the human condition. From THE IDIOTS to DANCER IN THE DARK, the power to shock has always been there, but never without something more meaningful behind it. The very set-up of DOGVILLE is a shock: it's all set on a soundstage that doubles for a small town in The Rocky Mountains. There are chalk lines where there should be houses, a black backdrop where there should be a sky, and a spatial simplicity so stark that it almost burns. Into this town comes Grace (Nicole Kidman in one of her finest and most committed performances), who's on the run from the mob. The townsfolk generously take her in, but they soon start to take their favours out in trade, working Grace to the bone as the town slave, and then turning on her with genteel ugliness. DOGVILLE is loaded with subtext: Von Trier seems to be laying waste to the sentimental hokum that surrounds smalltown America, and striking right at the heart of this most ambiguous of nations. But he also delivers a stunning piece of cinema, driven by painfully real characters, a compelling narrative and an unforgettable climax. In short, it's something close to a masterpiece."
(Erin Free, Filmink)