Reviewed by Tim Wong

LIKE A FINELY sheathed blade, Eastern Promises conceals a deadly weapon: not just the grisly body horror we’ve come to expect of any David Cronenberg film, but a screen stealth so loaded with malice and intent, there’s no escaping its quiet assault. Supplanting the hallucinatory Americana of A History of Violence with a shady London milieu, Cronenberg reveals a closeted, seldom intimated subculture in the Russian mafia – or vory v zakone in native tongue – through a masterfully administered course of events. Firstly, the throat slitting of a Chechen gangster; secondly, the death of a haemorrhaging 14-year-old, whose newborn baby is saved; thirdly, the cutting of its umbilical cord, juxtaposed against the severed fingers of a to-be-disposed of corpse; next, one of several hushed encounters between vory ‘cleaner’ Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) and Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife who seeks the baby’s biological father; later, a sex scene voyeured by the spectre of Vincent Cassel, whose greasy Russian mobster ushers the film’s latent homoeroticism into the open; and climatically, a much talked about knife fight of gruesome, inerasable proportions.

Reviewed by Diane Spodarek

La vie en rose recalls France’s most well-known nightclub singer, Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow. Piaf was only forty-seven years old when she died in 1963. Marian Cotillard, a beautiful and versatile actor captures Piaf’s genius, gestures and her drugged and drunken life. Olivier Dahan writes and directs, matching the unique sound of Piaf’s voice with brilliant cinematography lush with detail and colors that make you feel as if you are plunged into a deep womb. The film is beautiful, a sensory experience about love and music that arouses laughter and tears.