Reviewed by David Levinson

IN The Dark Knight – Christopher Nolan’s second outing at the helm of the Batman franchise – the caped crusader may sport a fetishist’s dream of high-tech, tailor-made weaponry, but nothing unleashed on Gotham’s crime populace proves more alluring than the film’s grim publicity-hook: Namely, the fact that it marks the final complete performance by once-rising star Heath Ledger, whose career was tragically cut short by a sleeping pill overdose on completion of filming.

Reviewed by David Levinson

EVERY YEAR parental-advice columnist Dan Burns (Steve Carell) migrates North to Rhode Island with his three daughters in tow, where they take part in a family get-together at their grandparents’ lakeside home.

Back in New Jersey though, Dan is left (thanks to the loss of his wife four years prior) unattended in the threatening landscape of the opposite sex – one prone to stony coups of silence; tectonic hormonal-shifts; and the sudden emergence of skimpy underwear atop the family washing pile. In the case of the latter, they belong to 15-year old Cara, contrary to Dan’s hopeful (and totally misguided) assumption that they’re 17-year old’s Jane’s; same goes for the boy who shows up to walk Cara to school, and who, vying to plug the welling threat of her sexuality, Dan warns she’s incapable of loving, given the nearsightedness of her age.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

TODD HAYNES seems to be in a constant quest to not be pinned down to a particular style. He can move from the icily brilliant Safe, to the overheated Sirkian melodrama (the masterpiece Far From Heaven) with absolute ease. However, I’m Not There is quite something, the ultimate post-modern exercise chock-full of pastiche, myths, parodies. The film is a parade of chameleon identities, of musical and visual samples, a freewheelin’ farrago through time and space. The film works because of the sheer chutzpah of Haynes’ vision, even if it’s a vision that will infuriate many Dylan fans and non-fans alike.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

TAKING this film seriously is as futile as a non-descript Asian-citizen taking on John Rambo in this, Sylvester Stallone’s latest 80s revivalist project. But I will anyway. And for the multitudes who will see this and applaud the outrageously enjoyably fascistic violence, of course it’s just a movie. No-one would have expected otherwise. But Rambo 4 (aka simply Rambo) with the curious working subtitle, To Hell and Back might as well be a recruitment poster for the American army.

Reviewed by David Levinson

AS A TRAGIC survey of the tolls of the American Dream (God, sweat, oil ‘n’ all), There Will Be Blood locates its essence in Daniel Plainview – a self-made “oil man,” ripped from the pages of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!. More than a tacky imprint of the rural huckster though, Plainview enters the West askew: As both a family man – seeking out the promises of modern living –, as well as the victim of a more sinister drive – one that clots his ambition with episodes of abject hatred.

Reviewed by Jacob Powell

WHAT DO YOU do when you realise you don’t really know the person you love? Or worse, when you have yet to truly open yourself up to that person? What will it cost to expose the all of who you are – the not so attractive fears and insecurities alongside the better bits? 2 Days in Paris sees writer/director Julie Delpy wax lyrical (and humorous) upon the complexities of cross-cultural couplings, and how people deal with their own neuroses in the context of relationships.

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

AFTER stunning documentaries The White Diamond and Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog returns to feature film with Rescue Dawn. Rescue Dawn fictionalises the story of pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), whose real-life story Herzog previously documented in Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

JAVIER BARDEM is a Mexican sent from the future in this vicious, tactile masterpiece of the Southwest, a film about doomed opportunism and its ceaseless hunter whose only conception of mercy is the flip of a coin. Bardem’s breezy Hispanic locks frame eyes of unforgivable blackness, and there hasn’t been an assassin this callous or unrelenting since The Terminator. Like a cyborg programmed to kill, his circuitry is exacting, near-infallible, and ruthlessly precise. Similarly, Joel and Ethan Coen direct with seasoned accuracy and efficiency, their filmmaking marksmanship now a sight to behold after so many good, but never quite great collaborations. Shot with devastating rhythm and uncharacteristic simplicity, the film is formally, a marvel, yet also the Brothers’ least showy and most nihilistic feature to date – humourless as a counterpart to Bardem’s grim reaper, unremittingly bleak as an itinerary of death’s pursuit.

Reviewed by David Levinson

STUBBORN and declamatory, like a tombstone, the title card to Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford doesn’t appear until the film’s end, shovelling the last 160 minutes into a single dry-retch of historical detail. But then again, like Dick Liddil (one of the “petty thieves” enlisted by Frank and Jesse James) says early on: “You can hide things in vocabulary.” In the case of Dominik’s prim mouthful, what’s hidden is trauma – the way Jesse, beyond being the merely assassinated, burned through Ford’s consciousness with such force that in the end he had to be put out. By reinvoking both men for the sake of The Assassination..., Dominik, who last courted celebrity killer Chopper Reed, isn’t hoping to penetrate the flame of their existence – only to stand close enough to feel its heat.

Reviewed by Darren Bevan

EVERYONE who’s been to see this low-budget, shot-on-handheld-in-next-to-no-time tale of a friendship between an unnamed busker and an immigrant girl has raved about it – and sadly I’m no different. I had been expecting very little and came out feeling like my entire world view has been changed from its usual skewed point of view, with songs in my heart and a silly grin on my face (something which anyone who knows me would say is a distinctly uncommon disposition for me).

Reviewed by Darren Bevan

WHEN YOU think serial killers, I’m willing to bet a number of iconic figures spring to mind – Hannibal Lecter, Freddy, Jason etc – but I’m also willing to bet you don’t think any character played by Kevin Costner. (Although you probably would be forgiven for thinking he’d murdered a lot of his own characters as he portrayed them in his previous celluloid efforts.)

Reviewed by David Levinson

AS A SUBMISSION of star vanity to global wear-and-tear, A Mighty Heart falls somewhere between the moronic campaigning of The Kingdom (where nothing comes between Jamie Foxx and his shades, yo) and the cool trance of The Bourne Ultimatum (whose kinetic submergence of Matt Damon led David Denby to compare him to a “bullet”). Of course, the million-dollary baby floating Winterbottom’s dip into a cracked melting pot is none other than Angelina Jolie – here doing her best to hide her public image behind a tangle of black jerri curls, unshapely frocks, and the quiet commitment to a serious starring role.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

A SCRAP YARD of subgenre and pop-cultural hoardings, Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre resembles a scavenged cinema. Bookmarked in films of incessant referential worship, his findings, in the trappings of Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and especially Kill Bill, make for hyperbolic, at times exhilarating expressions of film obsession; as fan-boy compendiums, they’re also responsible for the thousands of impressionably bad student movies to emerge since. What’s ironic is that Tarantino should look to turn over a new leaf within the skin of the now-defunct Grindhouse double-bill – a two-for-one throwback to the exploitation programmes of American drive-ins and seedy Times Square theatres – because Death Proof, for all its retrograde gestures, distinguishes itself as his most authentic feature to date.

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

THIS NEW Kiwi film is released nationwide November 8. And you need to see it. Why? Because you’re a New Zealander and this could have happened to you! Or because you’re a New Zealander and this could happen to someone you know! Thank god the director didn’t take that approach. But it could have been one way to present the material.

Reviewed by Darren Bevan

Venus is not what you’d expect – written by Hanif Kureishi who caused outrage with the Buddha of Suburbia back in the UK, it’s a bittersweet tale of a dying actor who manages to find some solace in the folly of youth.

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.

Reviewed by David Levinson

AFTER floundering through arrested development in this year’s Knocked Up, Seth Rogen has handed the baton over to a new wave of dropout with Superbad – a high school comedy all about (duh) getting laid. Co-written by Rogen (along with Evan Goldberg), the movie tempers its sharp guy-girl dynamics with liberal fixes of crudity, in a way that doesn’t really differ from the “new sincerity” of Judd Apatow (who produced). But where as Apatow’s manchild odysseys are so obsessively rooted in the now (Spider-Man 3, anyone?), Superbad takes aim in a bonghazy past: Closing the gap between the single-day rigour of Linklater, and the fluffy liberalism of American Pie, it arrives at a view of the teenage libido that’s always amusing, but too contrived to really nail the zeitgest.

Reviewed by Robert Metcalf

Joy Division is a promising debut feature from British director Reg Traviss; a mixture of sixties spy story and the brutal recreation of the Second World War’s Eastern Front, with the narrative shifting between the two. These settings are so different, and the central character so changed, that the two strands of the narrative at times feel like two separate films.

TIM WONG and KATE BLACKHURST offer duelling perspectives on Taika Waititi’s new New Zealand comedy, Eagle vs Shark. Illustration by ADDOLEY DZEGEDE and LYNDON BARROIS.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

The Simpsons is the greatest TV show of all-time. No question. Not a doubt about that statement. No television programme has matched it for longevity, layered humour or social commentary, and all the other comedy greats in recent times have been left scrambling in its wake. Admittedly, the show has peaked, and current seasons are pale shadows of what they once were, despite still maintaining the occasional moment of hilarity. And the movie unfortunately as a result, is simply ten years too late. That’s not to say this movie isn’t funny though – it most certainly is. But we are so used to the purposefully two-dimensional characters by now, especially since the show has rung humour out of their two-dimensionality for years – Homer does stupid things, Moe is a loser, Grandpa is senile etc. – that this big screen version suffers from over-familiarity. Ardent fans of the show will be able to point plot structures and characters to older episodes – Spider-pig replaces Mr. Pinchy, Russ Cargill is a Hank Scorpio etc. Or how many times have we seen Homer do something stupid, Marge get angry and threaten to leave, and Homer tries to make amends (essentially the plot of this movie)?

Reviewed by David Levinson

EXTOLLING the sentiment behind Richard Connell’s short story, The Most Dangerous Game, the uncaptured Zodiac Killer, who, across Northern California drew a known body count of five (in addition to other, “inconclusively proposed” killings), explains that he kills for much the same reason Connell’s character does: “[B]ecause it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all...” The message is delivered via cipher to The San Francisco Chronicle, decoded by an elderly couple from Salina, Kansas, and, as far as psychological profiles go, is about all you’ll get in Fincher’s own hand-wringing of history’s threads (aside, of course, from one reporter’s suggestion that the killer is a “latent homosexual”).

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

WOODY ALLEN’s latest movie has something of an uphill battle of expectations to climb. His last film, Match Point, was very close to being a career high point; it’s certainly the only Woody Allen effort that even the most fervent of Allen non-appreciators could list on a film favourites list. It seems slightly unfair, but then, the only fitting way to compare and rank Woody Allen films is to measure them against former glories and former flops by the same man.

Reviewed by Darren Bevan

THE FIRST FILM, 28 Days Later, was such a seminal redefinition of the Zombie genre that it seemed like real madness to tamper with the formula – although to its credit not once does this film refer to those hit by the plague as Zombies (and henceforth neither will this review). But the signs weren’t good with director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland disappearing off to take on Sunshine – in fact they even took their star Cillian Murphy with them. And yet 28 Weeks Later, with little known Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto) at the helm, is actually as gripping – and in parts sickening – as the first film.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

Part way into The Host, when a grieving Nam-il lands a dropkick on his dofus-of-a-brother Gang-du, it is clear that we are watching a Bong Joon-ho movie. As a strategically placed signpost – a rather sly directive to Bong’s serial killer subversion Memories of Murder (where said wrestling move was the retaliation of choice) – it completes a brief but remarkable series of events: the Park family, having just witnessed a giant mutant tadpole devour their beloved Hyun-seo, arrive at a makeshift shrine, mourn her apparent death, before collapsing to the floor in a hilarious seizure of blubbering tears and despair. How Bong achieves such a dramatic and invisible tonal shift – from the depths of genuine pathos, to an outbreak of well-timed comedy, and all within the space of 24 frames – is surely alchemy, and is something to behold.

Reviewed by Darren Bevan

IN ALL THE pre-publicity leading up until the launch of Spiderman 3, stars Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and director Sam Raimi said they felt like they were done with the franchise. While that sent worrying ripples throughout the fan world, having now seen the film, it’s understandable how – and why – the gang want to move on. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with it – it’s just that it feels distinctly unsatisfactory and is lacking the rich complexity of its predecessors.

Reviewed by Darren Bevan

WHEREAS Sin City posed a fresh visual assault, 300 feels forced, shallow and vacant by comparison. Drawing from the original source material of the historically inspired comic book written by Frank Miller, it’s a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. Faced by a marauding takeover by the Greeks and their leader Xerxes, Sparta found itself on the brink of disaster. But given the chance to surrender and submit to the rule of the invading forces, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) decides to take on the 200,000 forces with 300 of the best handpicked men.

Reviewed by Glen Maw

MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM and co-director Mat Whitecross’s docudrama, The Road to Guantanamo, is unavoidably political. Rather than being politically didactic, the film shows us how political actions affect real people; its subjects are not the politically powerful, but the politically powerless. It is a film about intolerance, ignorance and fear, but equally about friendship and the endurance of the human spirit. The docudrama genre allows it to have the sobriety of documentary, but the empathy of drama. It is a film about the state of humanity and it deserved to be made – if only because it tells us a story from a perspective that we do not hear in the western media. Political films are often hard to watch because they try so hard to convince us of their truths that they lack an aesthetic component. Fear not, The Road to Guantanamo is innovatively shot and beautifully constructed.

Reviewed by Nicholas Butler

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’s Pan’s Labyrinth follows his earlier The Devil’s Backbone, also set during the Spanish civil war. The common thread that runs through both films is of fantasy placed within the grimness of a twentieth century war. It is a war that many people from outside Spain may know little about it – perhaps simply because it doesn’t have the same currency as Vietnam or WWII. In the case of Pan’s Labyrinth this is a refreshing change for the viewer who sees a sinister Spanish officer in place of the usual suspects. More romantic and accomplished than The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro mixes realism and fantasy in the parable of a young girl, Ofelia, who purveys a wonderful imaginary world as she is lead into zones such as a labyrinth where she meets a faun Pan. Pan is somewhat ambiguous in his intentions, as he seduces her to partake in various tasks, whereas some other creatures are obviously more sinister. Ofelia has to contend with a duality of challenges provided by fairytale creatures and of real life – such as her evil stepfather who is an army officer.

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

AH, THOSE cheekbones. Scrupulously lit and elegantly shot in dappled chiaroscuro, Lena Brandt’s face appeals. Brandt (Cate Blanchett) is a complicated, comely Berlin prostitute. Cynical war correspondent Jake Geismar (George Clooney), the Humphrey Bogart to Blanchett’s Ingrid Bergman, comes back to Berlin ostensibly to cover World War Two’s climactic Potsdam Conference. It’s the girl he’s after. She’s fallen on hard times since he’s been gone, and is now tied up with a young louse Tully (Toby Maguire). Among Berlin’s rubble, various American and Russian (“Why not? They took all the bullets”) factions are carving up the action. Nazi rocket scientists like Lena’s husband are up the top of the list. Scriptwriter Paul Attanasio (Donnie Brasco) works from Joseph Kanon’s novel. The pacing’s pokey, but Attanasio crafts a dose of snappy, cynical one-liners, finessed by Clooney’s delivery. “Millions of people didn’t disappear because the elves came out at night.”