Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Film: best of 2006
From grizzly bears and French colonial guilt to dancing penguins and Irish Republicanism, Time Out‘s film reviewers pick their favourite movies of the past 12 months
The New World
Geoff Andrew
Surpassing
metaphysical fables of contemporary life like ‘L’Enfant’, ‘Hidden’ and
‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ only through its remarkably Romantic and
visually magnificent transcendentalism, Terrence Malick’s retelling of
the Pocahontas tale embraces Wagner, Heidegger, Emerson and various
19th-century painters, and is as enthralling as ‘Days of Heaven’or ‘The
Thin Red Line’. A meditation on political and personal paradises lost
(and, for Pocahontas, refound), this woefully under-seen, underrated
and, it must be said, misunderstood American epic mixes myth, history
and poetic mystery to exhilarating effect. Christian Bale is dependably
good, Colin Farrell well cast, Q’Orianka Kilcher a distinct
bonus.
The Death of Mr Lazarescu
Wally Hammond
You
can imagine the Hollywood pitch. Aspirant filmmaker: ‘It’s about a
62-year-old man who complains of a stomach ache. He’s ferried around a
few hospitals. Then he dies.’ Studio honcho: ‘Is that it?’ Filmmaker:
‘Yup!’ Like all great movies, Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s
devastating, socially scathing, profound and movingly funny drama is
based around an idea so devastatingly simple, you’re sure somebody must
have used it before. The film’s low-key performances are excellent, but
Ion Fiscuteanu’s as the increasingly objectified one-time engineer
could be the finest this year. Finally, what makes ‘The Death of Mr
Lazarescu’ the film of the year is how it makes something
transcendental out of the phenomenon of audience participation and
privilege – we know the poor man’s looming fate, he doesn’t; and,
unlike him, we get to live, and think, after the movie. A sublime, if
demanding, example of the ‘active’ film/viewer experience that gives
heart attacks to today’s studio moguls.
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| Home to roost: Haneke's 'Hiden' made for characteristically uneasy viewing |
Hidden
Dave Calhoun
This
year, I was struck dumb by ‘A Lion in the House’, an astonishing near
four-hour documentary about five American kids with cancer that played
at the ICA in June. But, for me, the year’s fictional masterpiece was
Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’, a brilliant refinement of his earlier
harnessings of bourgeois guilt and audience complicity in films such as
‘Funny Games’ and ‘The Time of the Wolf’. The director’s latest film
transplants French national shame over the massacre of scores of
Algerians in Paris during a demonstration in October 1961 to the person
of Georges (Daniel Auteuil), a smug television arts personality, whose
past comes to roost in the Paris of the present. Haneke uses elements
of the thriller – who sent the tapes?! – to create a tense, stimulating
dialogue with the viewer and to provoke a debate that continues long
after the credits roll.
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| Holding on: Penélope Cruz reteamed with Pedro Almodóvar for the stunning 'Volver' |
Volver
Chris Tilly
When,
in early 2005, Penélope Cruz told Time Out that she was working on a
ghost story with Pedro Almodóvar, it seemed like an unlikely choice of
genre for director and muse. As it turned out, the supernatural element
was little more than a maguffin in ‘Volver’, Almodóvar’s sumptuous
celebration of his favourite subject – womanhood. The title literally
means ‘to return’, and this was a return to form for both star and
director after relative misfires, Cruz delivering a performance of
warmth and wonder as the put-upon Raimunda, and Almodóvar embracing
substance rather than style to produce a film of immense compassion and
humanity.
Grizzly Man
Ben Walters
There’s
never been a film quite like this, and it’s hard to imagine there being
another. Constructed by Werner Herzog largely from the footage recorded
in Alaska by renegade naturalist Timothy Treadwell, including copious
video diaries, this is a remarkable nature doc (that bear-fight on the
beach!); a quintessential addition to an auteur’s oeuvre (another
monomaniac at loggerheads with both civilisation and nature); a
fascinating case study in camera behaviour (Treadwell’s self-shaping is
all too deliberate); and a lip-biting exercise in dramatic irony and
inadvertent character comedy. A roaring success...
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