Olivia Glazebrook

In a change to the scheduled programme, I will not be reviewing Lady in the Water (PG) this week because it simply doesn’t deserve 800 words of either praise or damnation. Actually, I will just give it a little review: it’s ridiculous and awful. Mr M. Night Shyamalan, you should be ashamed of yourself. There. Nor will I be reviewing Nacho Libre (12A), since it’s another madcap, high-octane comedy (Jack Black as a wrestling champ) and I feel that over the past few weeks we’ve covered the blockbuster territory quite extensively.

I’m such a dunderhead. Everyone told me that Miami Vice would be rubbish, and I kept replying, ‘No, no it won’t; you see, it’s directed by Michael Mann and he’s brilliant. He made Manhunter, Heat, The Insider and Collateral...it’s going to be great.’ People said, ‘But it’ll be naff and embarrassing, with spivvy hairdos and loose-fitting suits.’ And I would reply, ‘No, don’t be silly, it’s not set in the Eighties. It’ll be cool, dark, gritty, urban...’ Well, don’t I feel like the prize banana. I think even subscribers to FHM magazine, at whom this film is undoubtedly aimed, will be hard pressed to enjoy themselves.

Ken Loach won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last month with The Wind that Shakes the Barley and has since been the object of several abusive articles in the British press. He will be unsurprised (and probably untroubled) — his films usually cause a rumpus. This one is set in Ireland in the 1920s, and it is, shall we say, a partial history. The film’s hero is Damien (Cillian Murphy), a young Irish doctor who takes the oath of the Irish Republican Army after witnessing two brutal attacks by the Black and Tans — one the murder of a close friend, the other the beating of an elderly train guard. The film describes the activities of the ‘Flying Column’, of which Damien becomes a member and then a leader.

Thank You for Smoking is a satirical comedy about the culture of spin, adapted from Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel of the same name. Its hero is the wolfish Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), chief lobbyist employed by cigarette company ‘Big Tobacco’. It is Naylor’s job to defend the company he works for (and its right to exist), and smokers (and their right to smoke). He is smart, attractive and exceptionally good at his job — more than a match for the saps pitted against him by his arch-enemy, Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy), who wants cigarette packets labelled with the word ‘Poison’ and a picture of a skull and crossbones.

Someone once had an excellent idea for a film to scare the pants off us: what if Gregory Peck (who represented nothing but good sense and respectability) adopted a baby boy, and that cute ickle shock-headed newborn turned out to be Satan? And Satan wanted Mummy and Daddy dead, so he could inherit everything they had — in fact ultimately inherit the earth and bring about his true aim, which we call Armageddon? What if the only thing Peck could do, to stop him, would be to murder him — or try to? Wouldn’t that be a great movie? Well, yes, it would and it was. The Omen has been making people jump out of their skins for 30 years. And now it’s been remade, but with one crucial ingredient missing: surprise.

Listing page content here As I’m sure you are aware, United Airlines’ Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 — the one that did not reach its target. I shall ignore the internet-based argument over what happened to United 93 in its final minutes (did it crash into the ground or explode in the air?) since this film is a telling rather than an investigation. We may ask questions when we emerge from the cinema, but no one is asking questions in the film. In fact, names you will not hear mentioned during the course of the film include Osama bin Laden, al-Qa’eda, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, Afghanistan. No one but the hijackers has any idea what’s going on; the attack, quite literally, falls out of the sky. ‘A hijacking?

Listing page content here I don’t know quite what came over me during the screening of Confetti. I was well prepared: I had curled my lip and rolled my eyes at the daft poster on the Tube; I had sighed and shaken my head over the British obsession with weddings — and films about weddings; before the lights went down, as I read about the concept in the production notes (three engaged couples enter a magazine’s ‘Most Original Wedding’ competition in the hope of winning a Dream Home), I felt my heart travel bootwards, and I checked the number of minutes I’d be expected to stay in my seat... ...But ten minutes later, I was laughing. And laughing a lot.

Listing page content here I have read all Raymond Chandler’s books, some of them several times, but if you asked me for a synopsis of any of them I think I’d be stumped. I can remember scenes (the stifling orchid house, the blanketed old man in the wheelchair) and dialogue (‘She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet’) but not the plot. This film has had rather the same effect: I watched the credits roll four hours ago, and already its plot is blurring at the edges. It’s not surprising: Brick is a detective story, a film noir, an homage to films like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown and The Long Goodbye.

In a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History in New York there is a diorama of a giant squid caught between the jaws of a whale. It is huge, vivid and quite alarming — two mighty beasts tussling, and never a victor. This is the spectacle which gives this film its curious title: as a young boy, Walt Berkman was taken to see it by his mother but he was too frightened to look, except through his fingers. At 16, he returns and gazes at it head-on. We are in 1980s Brooklyn. The aforementioned Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his younger brother, 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), are pitched into a crisis when their parents announce their separation. Joan seems already to have mourned her marriage, but her husband Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is furious, and blames his wife.

‘Syriana’ is ‘a term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East’, according to this film’s director. As the title of his film, he uses the word to describe a concept: ‘the fallacious dream that you can successfully remake nation states in your own image’. Just in case you were wondering. The biggest problem facing Syriana is to contextualise its events without losing its narrative drive. Of course we all need to know as much as we can about what is going on between the Middle East and America, but this is a motion picture, not a presentation.

It is hard to imagine the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood as the same man. In 1958, Truman Capote wrote the story of a social butterfly whose anxieties are banished by a trip to Tiffany’s; in 1959, he began his dark examination of a quadruple murder, In Cold Blood, a book he finished just before it finished him, in 1966. In Cold Blood was the first non-fiction novel, attaching skilful and superior writing to a sensational ‘real-life’ subject. Capote turns the microscope from the subject matter of the book on to its author, making a clinical study of his experience during these six years. Reading of the murders in the New York Times, Capote telephones his editor at the New Yorker, William Shawn, to tell him he has found his new subject.