Reviewed by Gautaman Bhaskaran

OFTEN, Ken Loach has been labeled a Leftist. Now he is now being lambasted as anti-British for his Cannes winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a mind-boggling work on the Irish resistance.

Loach’s cinema has always fought for the underdog. It could be an out-of-work former alcoholic in My Name is Joe, an illegal Latino immigrant janitor in America in Bread and Roses, or an unemployed man deeply attached to his family and desperately trying to get a new dress for his daughter’s communion in Raining Stones. Or, Loach’s hero can even be a young Communist fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War in Land and Freedom, or a doctor opposing the Irish peace treaty in the 1920s in The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

CERTAINLY the most hardened New Zealand film to emerge since Once Were Warriors, Out of the Blue is signposted by a series of innocuous coastal panoramas that belie its underlying trauma. At regular intervals, director Robert Sarkies reverts back to these sites of tidal calm – idyllic shorelines, undulating landscapes, blazoned sunsets on the horizon – as if to provide respite amidst the unfurling tragedy of November 13, 1990. But as touristy images synonymous with the ‘greenbelt’ of New Zealand cinema, they are in their postcard ubiquity a timely reminder of the darker stories that remain hidden and untold. In its scarcity, a film of this nature also highlights a reluctance to tell such stories, if not an unwillingness to abandon the safety net of ‘regionalism’ in favour of a less conservative, more divisive filmmaking – the kind freely divorced from a pervading national stereotype of scenic beauty and perpetually friendly people.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

THOUGH of comparatively sane disposition, Junebug’s Ashley Johnsten shares a certain commonality with 3 Women’s Pinky Rose: both diminutive, redheaded Southern Belles, each happen upon a thoroughly modern woman who is to become the object of their obsession. In the Robert Altman film, Sissy Spacek’s idolization of Millie Lammoreaux goes beyond appreciation, culminating in a spell of attempted suicide and identity theft. Smitten with new sister-in-law Madeleine – a high-society art dealer visiting her low-brow in-laws for the first time – Ashley’s enthusiasm for her gal pal’s cosmo chic doesn’t quite pledge her to the alumnae of cinema’s most fanatical females (Sandra Bernhard being the queen bee of that sorority), but she’s got a screw loose all the same. Not unlike Pinky’s eagerness for all things childishly mundane – idle wheelchairs, miniature golf, bubbles in soda – Ashley’s inner little girl, of coltish fascination with African merekats and toenail polish, makes for a somewhat unbalanced mother-to-be, a woman on the verge of something, one minute adorable, the next downright irritating.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

WITH Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater resumes his journey to the center of the earth: an ugly America of franchise eyesore, prefabricated sprawl, and hamburgers made of shit. Reupping the doom and gloom of not-so-distant future noir A Scanner Darkly, his new film lays forth an alarming tableau that’s cause for concern. Grafted from Eric Scholosser’s bestselling expose are the underpaid teen minions beneath the golden arches; the corporate operatives who serve the almighty dollar; the notorious meat factories, grind houses closeting sub-human work conditions and unsanitary health practices; and the assembly line drones, border-hopping immigrants exploited in the name of the quarter-pound patty. Goaded by the book’s muckraking precedent – of scandalous malpractice in an industry high on greed – Linklater aims to spread onto hamburgers the same guilt-factor currently smearing the likes of Burberry fur and diamonds from Sierra Leone. Given fast food’s ubiquity, his narrative adaptation has the potential to turn legions of carnivores off flesh altogether. Not only is it a vegetarian conversion tool, but an appetite killer on par with Salo.