• Friday 31 March for 2 weeks

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (15)

(US 2005) dir.Tommy Lee Jones 121m.

Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, Melissa Leo, Levon Helm, Mel Rodriguez, Cecilia Suárez, Ignacio Guadalupe, Vanessa Bauche, Irineo Alvarez, Guillermo Arriaga, Josh Berry, Rodger Boyce.

"Cut from the same bloody cloth as the recent THE PROPOSITION, Tommy Lee Jones's directing debut is a far superior, superbly performed and smartly written tale of companionship, male impotence and revenge in the face of institutional injustice. We find ourselves in frontier country, that parched and scrubby land where Texas meets Mexico. Jones's opening shot draws a broad portrait of a small, rural community. It's from this motley, sad crowd that Jones's story emerges at the deft, controlling hands of Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (AMORES PERROS, 21 GRAMS). In the first scene, a pair of huntsmen fire at a grazing coyote which was chomping on a rotting human body. The film then cuts sharply to a sterile mortuary and the rough face of ranch foreman Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones). The corpse is that of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), Pete's Mexican friend. Promise me, Melquiades implores Pete, that if I die here in America, you'll take my body back to Mexico. Pete tracks down the culprit, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), and forces him to dig up Estrada's stinking body. Together, this strange pair set out into the dark night. It's a journey of redemption for Mike, a journey of loyalty for Pete. A big-hearted, grand and noble study of broken men and broken dreams, THREE BURIALS is cruel and comic, exquisitely photographed by Chris Menges and pleasingly old-fashioned in its commitment to elemental, vital storytelling. Tommy Lee Jones has delivered a great American tale."
(Dave Calhoun, Time Out)

PARADISE NOW (15)

(Neth/Isr/Ger/Fr 2005) dir.Hany Abu-Assad 91m. Subtitles.
Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel, Hiam Abbass, Ashraf Barhom.

“A taut, ingeniously calculated thriller, PARADISE NOW fixates on the flashpoint where psychology and politics ignite in self-destructive martyrdom. Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), best friends from childhood, belong to a terrorist cell in Nablus on the West Bank that is about to undertake its first suicide mission in two years. The film, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, an Israeli-born Palestinian, follows them over the two days leading up to the climactic deed. Along the way, the film sustains a mood of breathless suspense. Politics aside, the movie is a superior thriller whose shrewdly inserted plot twists and emotional wrinkles are calculated to put your heart in your throat and keep it there. Given the explosive political climate in the Middle East, humanising suicide bombers in a movie risks offending some viewers in the same way that humanising Hitler does. Demons make more convenient villains than complicated people with their complicated motives. But Said and Khaled are never less than fully human characters. They have their doubts and anxieties about carrying out their mission, although for the sake of morale, they keep those doubts mostly to themselves. The movie carries off two tricky balancing acts. One is to give the story a political context without bogging it down in essayistic debate and laborious historical background. The other is to maintain a balanced political perspective given the one-sided views of these all-too-human terrorists. It does this by shoehorning in a strong, alternative Palestinian point of view in the person of Suha (Lubna Azabal), an attractive young woman Said meets. Although the terrorists regard her father as a martyr his daughter abhors violence. In an emotional confrontation with both men, she articulates the arguments against suicide bombing. What happens to those left behind, she asks? Her humane voice becomes the movie's moral and emotional grounding wire.”
(Stephen Holden, New York Times)

• Friday 21 April for 1 week

COCKLES & MUSCLES (15)

(France 2005) dirs.Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau 95m. Subtitles.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Gilbert Melki, Jean-Marc Barr, Jacques Bonnaffé, Édouard Collin, Romain Torres, Sabrina Seyvecou, Yannick Baudin.

“After the thoughtful and provocative DRÔLE DE FÉLIX and MA VIE, French filmmakers Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau shift into a much more mainstream style with this hugely crowd-pleasing romp, which brilliantly combines two French movie traditions – the holiday drama and the romantic farce. Béatrix and Marc (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Gilbert Melki) head off to the Riviera for the summer as usual, with their quiet teen son Charly (Romain Torres) and their independent-minded daughter Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou). Béatrix and Marc both wonder about Charly's sexuality, especially when his summer friend Martin (Édouard Collin) arrives. But Charly's not the issue here; actually, everyone else is up to something. This film is so jammed with delightful little touches that it keeps a broad smile on our face from start to finish, due to the clever filmmaking, witty script, insightful observations and, mostly, a shimmering performance from Bruni-Tedeschi. And she's well-matched by the lively Melki, who's both repressed and out of control at the same time. Newcomers Torres and Collin are terrific, and Jean-Marc Barr is superbly cast in a pivotal supporting role as a fateful plumber. This is a thoroughly engaging romp with a little kick. And a lot of heart.”
(Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall)

• Thursday 28 April for 2 weeks

LEMMING (15)

(France 2005) dir.Dominik Moll 130m. Subtitles.
Laurent Lucas, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, André Dussollier, Jacques Bonnaffé, Véronique Affholder, Michel Cassagne, Florence Desille, Emmanuel Gayet.

“The team behind HARRY, HE’S HERE TO HELP is back with another deeply seductive dramatic thriller. Alain and Bénédicte (Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are the model couple: young, beautiful and successful. Alain is developing a complex system to keep an eye on household problems; Benedicte is taking time off to settle into their new home. They have Alain's new boss Richard (André Dussolier) and wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) over for dinner, but Alice's terrible behaviour shocks everyone. Over the next few days, Alice worms her way into both Alain's and Bénédicte's lives, causing almost as much havoc as the tiny lemming Bénédicte finds in the kitchen drain. This is slick, insinuating filmmaking, with music, camerawork and a screenplay that are loaded with subtext, hints that reality is bending in the minds of the characters, odd coincidences and beautiful settings that take on a freak-out feeling. We are as disoriented as Alain is, and Lucas is terrific as a guy whose world is subtly upended around him. Meanwhile, Rampling thunders through her scenes like a force of nature – her still, steely destructive power is absolutely terrifying.”
(Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall)

• Friday 12 May for 1 week

BRICK (15)

(US 2005) dir.Rian Johnson 110m.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Segan, Noah Fleiss, Emilie de Ravin, Meagan Good, Matt O'Leary, Richard Roundtree, Brian White, Lucas Babin.

“The best high school films make you remember what it was like to be there, how every aspect of your teenage life seemed like a matter of life or death. BRICK achieves this by transplanting the world of film noir detective stories to a modern high school, making the life-or-death struggles literal rather than figurative. Paradoxically, the effect of all this seriousness is that we are amused, and writer/director Rian Johnson works this to his advantage. Bringing ‘Maltese Falcon’ dialogue into a high school setting is inherently funny. We have a reluctant anti-hero, informants, femmes fatales, '30s slang and plenty of shady characters, all to be found in the microcosm of high school. Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an outsider at his Southern California school. He is forced into action when he receives a panicky phone call from his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie DeRavin) and subsequently finds her dead in an irrigation canal. The mystery of her death unfolds as a complicated, twisty story that involves the school's toughest thugs and their hired goons, and Brendan trudges from one thorny situation to another in his quest for the truth. The femme fatale comes in the form of Kara (Meagan Good), a drama queen who in this case actually is a drama student. She points Brendan toward a party being held by the wealthy Laura (Nora Zehetner), and the clues begin to emerge from there, ultimately leading to The Pin (Lukas Haas), the school's central crime figure. Johnson's smartest move is that the kids don't seem to ‘know’ that they're in a Dashiell Hammett-style detective story. There is no winking self-awareness, and so the gimmick feels entirely natural. The young actors, many of them with very brief film resumes, do a fine job carrying out Johnson's vision. The underrated and underused Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets it exactly right, playing the cynical, world-weary outsider so that he is both a tribute to the Humphrey Bogart prototype and a modern improvement on it. While BRICK maintains the old-school style of profanity-free dialogue, it does feature one instance of violence that is far more graphic than anything Bogart ever starred in – a reminder, maybe, that the real world is more startling than the romanticised movie versions of murder and intrigue would suggest.”
(Eric Snider, e-filmcritic.com)

• Friday 19 May for 2 weeks

THE DA VINCI CODE (*)

(2006) dir.Ron Howard length tbc
Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Paul Bettany, Jean Reno, Etienne Chicot, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Clive Carter, Seth Gabel.

Here comes from director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer and writer Akiva Goldsman – the Oscar-winning team of A BEAUTIFUL MIND – the film version of Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code', one of the most popular and controversial novels of our time, with a cast headed by two-time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno, Sir Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina and Paul Bettany. While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. Solving the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci – clues visible for all to see, and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) and learns the late curator was involved in the ancient secret society the Priory of Sion. In a breathless race through Paris, London and beyond, Langdon and Neveu are embroiled in a battle of wits with a faceless powerbroker who appears to work for Opus Dei – a clandestine, Vatican-sanctioned Catholic organisation that will stop at nothing to protect a secret that threatens to overturn 2,000 years of dogma. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's secret – and a stunning historical truth – will be lost forever.