London: Early One Morning, Snowtown and Last Screening

Craig here (writer of Take Three) reporting for Nathaniel from the BFI London Film Festival. Today's round-up features three dark explorations into violent minds. Perfect for Halloween week then!

If disquieting French drama Early One Morning were a comedy it would need to hijack the title of another recent office-based film: Horrible Bosses. The financial suits upstairs are the cause for middle-aged everyman-exec Paul’s (played to fraught perfection by Jean-Pierre Darroussin) consternation in Jean-Marc Moutout’s film. What a total bunch of bankers! But Paul takes matters into his own hands in an explosive, very personal way. It starts with a coldly curious, matter-of-fact sequence: Paul gets up and ready for work, kisses his wife, gets on a bus and arrives at the office. The immediately perturbing vibe suggests that something terrible is inevitable. As it turns out, he shoots his bosses dead and then sits down at his desk. The film then flashes back to an earlier time to try and work out why Paul goes full nutjob with a handgun. It's clear from the finger pointing at the highly unsporting, self-regarding pair of CEOs (one played with pompous relish by Xavier Beauvois, the director of Of Gods and Men) and the hot potato topic of the recession that the film is trading on being a seasonably pertinent and bold exploration of current themes people will feel a kinship for. The film’s drastic actions are worrying, but maybe the Pauls of the world need a vicarious fictional mouthpiece to do the undoable acts on their behalf. After all, we like a David vs. Goliath tale. This one just goes one furious step further and attempts to annihilate its Goliath for all previous unfair dismissal. Early One Morning is mostly gripping viewing. Best avoided by those who’ve just been fired, mind. C+

The terrible bursts of violence in Early One Morning came fast and furious, but that’s nothing compared to what we get sporadically, intensively and with gut-churning abstraction throughout bold Australian drama Snowtown. [More after the jump.]

Click to read more ...

London: W.E., Oslo and Japan

David here, reporting from the final week of the London Film Festival. If there's one name guaranteed to grab my attention, it's...

The sight of Madonna's name heading up movie credits is a slightly surreal one, and it's difficult to imagine the icon standing behind a camera, and so W.E.'s worst foible is an understandable one from such a deified person. Re-edited after a poor reception at previous festivals, there is a fair deal to admire here, but all those flashbulbs must have gone to her head, because the photography is stuffed with dramatically posed shots, as if its being filmed with a still camera. Yet it's in the camera work that the film digs up shards of emotional truth amongst the narrative cliches, suggesting that Madonna might prove a worthwhile director. When the camera moves, it does so with a defiant tactility, a visual sense alive with feeling and clarity. This story of a late-'90s neglected wife (Abbie Cornish) in New York turning to the story of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough, superbly poised) for comfort and reflection is the stuff of clunky parallels with little sense of historical ambiguity. The soundtrack is alarmingly overloaded. But the immediate, reactive sense of the photography delves through the physical to the emotional roots, scoring unpredictable truths. (C) more articles on W.E.

Oslo, August 31st is like two pages ripped from a diary; one covered with words, the second blank and sodden with tears. After his first feature, the textured novelistic Reprise, director Joachim Trier follows in Louis Malle's footsteps by adapting Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's Le feu follet, a melancholy tale of a man debating suicide. Anders Danielsen Lie, one of the two leads of Reprise, is given the luxury of a film to himself ...only his character, Anders, isn't one to luxuriate. The film's first half is full of words. Anders attempts to spread his wings, testing the waters of the outside world as he breaks from a spell in rehab. A discussion with his friend Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner) stretches imperceptibly to twenty minutes, dense with completely natural musings, arguments, and agonising admissions that absorb both characters and viewers. As Anders spirals into the night, and into August 31st, the film shifts into sensory expression, the lens focus shifting lucidly, the soundtrack slowly emptying to mournful desolation. Far from easy to watch, and tearfully inconclusive, this is nonetheless another quiet triumph from Trier. (A-) more articles on Oslo August 31st

two brothers in "I Wish"

Two brothers on a quest to repair their family. It's a story out of 1980s Hollywood cinema, and I Wish does ring with the cliches of quest narratives like Stand By Me or The Goonies. Hirokazu Kore-eda, a festival favourite thanks to films like Nobody Knows and After Life, directs this bright tale which centres around the supposed miracle that occurs when two bullet trains pass each other. Koichi and Ryu, each stuck with a parent on opposite sides of Kyushu, plot a voyage to witness the miracle and wish their family back together. Where Kore-eda betters his Stateside influences, though, is in his generous characterizations of the adult characters, who lack the intimacy we're granted with the vibrant kids but feel alive with both warmth and foibles. Inevitably, the film cycles through familiar ideas, but the wheels are so smooth it scarcely matters. The achievement of the quest isn't the thing, but the journey, and you're unlikely to find a more heartwarming, vibrant trip all year. (B+)

London: "Coriolanus", NYC, and an Oscar reject

David here with another report from the London Film Festival. First up, a Shakespeare adaptation with even more pedigree than usual.

"Anger is my meat. I sup upon myself." So proclaims Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) halfway through Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut Coriolanus. In person at the press conference, the raggedly bearded Fiennes' couldn't be more affable, but Caius Martius Coriolanus (Fiennes, following Olivier and Branagh by directing himself in a Shakespearian lead) lives, and perhaps fosters, a world of fearsome aggression. In both the narrative and the extra-filmic reality of the cast, the hierarchy makes itself apparent: as Redgrave powers her way through her titanic final monologue, her terribly veined neck strained upwards as she spits and crows at Fiennes, she burns through Fiennes' schizophrenic celluloid, a scorch mark on a scuffed rug. Redgrave outacts everyone in sight because Shakespearean dialogue is part of her bloodstream, but also because she is so precise in how much of herself she commits to each moment. Redgrave's vibrant poise and direct anger are graciously straightforward without compromising on character depth.

The remainder of Coriolanus cannot be gifted with such lavish praise.

Click to read more ...

London: "Like Crazy", A Conversation

Editor's Note: As a special treat for our London Film Festival coverage, I asked our correspondents Craig and David to share conversations about the movies that they happen to see together. Today, LIKE CRAZY and the Oscar buzz baffles them...

Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones are lovers in and out of it in "Like Crazy"

David: I think the first thing we should probably note about Like Crazy is how, well, un-crazy it is. 'Like Cute' would be a more fitting, if rather more nauseating, title. Perhaps I've just grown too cynical, but I don't think that's it. A piece of furniture tells us they love each other 'like crazy', but they don't. One of the few scenes I'd pick out was just after Anna (Felicity Jones) has introduced Jacob (Anton Yelchin) to her parents - they start kissing like mad, and for those few seconds I felt the heat between them, the flush of a youthful romance. But there wasn't nearly enough of that to establish the connection we're supposed to feel throughout the whole film.

Craig: I think the cuteness of the pairing was the thing director Drake Doremus seemed to want to eagerly translate the most, what with all the chair inscriptions and diary notes. (Clearly that chair wanted to be Like Crazy’s “Rosebud”.) Haven’t we seen this kind of meet-cute cinematic dalliance before, in things like Garden State, Elizabethtown etc? I was over quirk-filled romanticised moping the moment it began. Here it comes with a slightly dourer and artfully managed sense of itself – like a mini-me Blue Valentine... The Formative Years, yet without that film’s tender baggage.

Humor, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar buzz, after the jump...

Click to read more ...

London: "The Awakening", A Conversation

Editor's Note: As a special treat for our London Film Festival coverage, I asked our correspondents Craig and David to share conversations about the movies that they happen to see together. Today, The Awakening, a new British horror movie. One of them likes it a bit more than the other, but they agree that Imelda Staunton's delicious supporting turn keeps you fully awake...

I know this place and I don't hold with any ghostly nonsense."
-Imelda Staunton as "Maud Hill" in The Awakening.

Craig: A 1920s lady ghostbuster? Spooky mansions? Antique trip-wire traps and knitted-character dollhouse terror? And a twitchy Imelda Staunton as a housekeeper in period garb, topped with some fusty-dusty wig work?? I was fine and dandy with this one despite its flaws. It follows a somewhat shopworn, well-haunted pattern of housebound horrors quite fashionable in recent years (The Orphanage, The Others etc). Director Nick Murphy makes a few attempts at reminding us that The Haunting and The Innocents were key influences, too. It has one or two ripe, scoff-worthy moments but, on balance, it does contain some sneaky jumps and nocturnal bumps that – from the jittered reaction in the press screening – nobody could say they predicted. It has at its centre a solid enough feisty turn from a well-cast Rebecca Hall, too. This is scary movie territory that I’m gleefully at home with, so perhaps I can acknowledge its successes more readily than its few failings? It contains both, but I was never bored.

David: Aye, it's a fair enough yarn, but I can't really join you in the enthusiastic corner. There are a few jumps, but none of the sustained tension and ghostly atmospherics of a film like The Others. Bizarrely, the film charges up the haunted terror quickly, and it blows like a fuse halfway through, on a narrative passage that is effectively filmed but lacking in much power, since it's come around so soon. Afterwards, the characters are suddenly laying on wild emotional extremes, putting more weight on the relationships of the few lingering characters than seems comprehensible, as if we've been excluded from something. Naturally, we have; but pulling off a twist ending like these films usually do, requires a level of general believability beforehand, with just a sense of something being off.

The period details are exquisite - I have no idea how realistic - and all the equipment Hall's character carefully sets up is quite the kick. What I don't think it comes close to pulling off is the tortured soldier sideline, and not just because Dominic West continues being unfortunately stiff and awkward in every role on this side of the pond. And I have to cry wolf on Rebecca Hall, too, I'm afraid. For me, there was no steel there, no conviction, just a weak and crumbling voice and a pale figure. When her façade broke, I saw little difference. The major thing convincing me that this was a confident, modern woman was the fact that she wore trousers.

Sherlock Holmesian women and loopy hysteric performances after the jump...

Click to read more ...