I went to see this mainly because of heart throb Tony Leung. He plays a chinese collaborator with the occupying Japanese in world war 2 Hong Kong and Shanghai, opposite screen newcomer Tang Wei. He is meant to be a hard and cruel man and at times he acts this out in steamy sex scenes with Tang Wei but we know, partly because he is cast in the role, that underneath really he is sensitive and sad. The thin violin melodies that play through much of the film are reminiscent of In the Mood for Love and the ‘forbidden love’ theme is similar to both films. At 2 hours 40 minutes or thereabouts the film is long. The pace is slow and sometimes lugubrious, the sex scenes perhaps indulgent and the period street scenes rather staged but the acting of the leading couple is strong and holds the film together as it did in Mood for Love. There is a short trailer here. The film is worth seeing.

This is a strong film (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765443/) both in terms of its physicality and blood – as a film about the Russian mafia that isn’t suprising – and strong in performances. Viggo Mortensen plays probably the central character a hard man and driver who is working his way into the elite of this organisation (they have tatoos of stars done on their knees to symbolise that they bow to no one). The lead female role is played by Naomi Watts (she is an ‘innocent’ midwife) and her perhaps rather wishy-washy playing is a deliberate foil to Mortensen. I was suprised that Cronenberg made such conventional and linear films nowadays after enjoying Naked Lunch and Videodrome but its no less powerful for that. For me it is the strength of character and depth of that central character and the way that, the morning after seeing it, I am remembering small points about his actions that I missed at the time that explain so much. There is also a gay attraction hinted at between the two leading men – quite a lot of hints, actually.

This is certainly worth seeing.

Nice French thriller with all the right ingredients, red-herrings that throw you off the track, a twist at the end then another twist. Its pulse quickening. However, it lacked the aesthetic vision of films like Diva which another director could have brought.

Last night I saw The Lives of others, the much acclaimed debut feature film of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Maybe because of the last vestiges of jet lag I found all the preceeding adverts and trailers boring and tiring so that by the time the film started I was already flagging. It played in a packed screen 1 at the cambridge picturehouse i.e. lots of people.

Its a good film, very plot and character driven, exploring the reign of the Stazi, state security surveillance in former East Germany during the 1980s before the wall came down in 1989, the year of my older son’s birth. The plot centres around a writer and his girlfriend (who is signalled to be sensuous in virtually everyshot). The real focus is around one Stazi surveillance expert who is detailed to listen in on their bugged flat and record any incidents of transgression on a nice old manual typewriter in the block’s attic (echoing Casablanca’s radical idealist couple, the operation is called ‘operation Lazlo’). Like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, the interloper, Weisler, becomes drawn into the values and lives of the couple, and eventually sabotages the Stazi’s final plan to arrest him. Finally we see him in post-reunion Germany but I won’t say too much. The best and most poetic moments for me are when we see Weisler reading from a Brecht volume that he has stollen from the writer’s flat, and later see him moved to tear’s by the writer’s playing of Beethoven (I think) on his piano after a director friend has committed suicide. In a largely plot driven film, I found there was little poetry and economy and sometimes things felt rather laborious. However, overall this was a moving film and probably worth seeing.

Starring Gael García Bernal who I think should know better and Charlotte Gainsbourg, this film about French (and Mexican) youth in Paris somehow completely missed my sensibility. The dream scenes were whimsical and a moment of GGB’s acting reached the passion we know he is capable of, but the script and Gainsbourg’s acting irritated me. Not a memorable film for me. (Unlike Tarkovsky’s The Mirror which I bought on DVD yesterday… )

Venus with British veterans Peter O’Toole and Leslie Phillips and younger Jodie Whittaker. A clever piece of direction draws you into immense sympathy and identification with Maurice (he and Phillips had me in fits of laughter within seconds of the film’s opening and Maurice is played with immense warmth). But as his obsession with the young niece staying with Ian (Phillips) deepens and her response is to lure him on while keeping strict limits (‘don’t you dare touch me with your slug-tongue’) and as we discover he has many years ago deserted his wife with 3 under fives, we start to become increasingly uneasy. His interest in the young girl is made understandable but exactly what she thinks and feels is always ambiguous and troubling. Eventually Maurice gets his come-upance and perhaps (or perhaps he doesn’t learns something about himself. In the meantime he has fallen out with Philips and by the end no one is left looking very good with the possible exception of niece Jessie. So as one reviewer on IMDB wrote, its a film that leaves you feeling that you need a shower.