Ice Storm, In Cold Blood, In a lonely place, Insomnia... Martin Paule's Micro Movie Reviews collection for Shelterbelt Cinema Channel, world cinema page; movies from india china japan; European films, African Cinema; top 10 cinema academic film journals sites

This troubling documentary examines the lives of several women who are among the ranks of the “invisible homeless.” The title refers to their former comfortably middle-class backgrounds from which they fell following divorce or illness. Most of them now live in cars and are not on public assistance.

Their inability to accumulate enough money to pay first and last month’s rent plus security deposits coupled with their lack of a permanent address and phone number creates a vicious cycle of homelessness and joblessness.

An opening scene in which our coming-of-age hero (Keiran Culkin) and his smug brother preside over their mother's (Susan Sarandon) assisted suicide suggests we're in black comedy territory. That suggestion proves false—this is a kinder, gentler film than it seems at first blush. Igby has been kicked out of all the best schools in America and harbors a self-destructive rage about his troubled upbringing. A perceptive script has the kids' spouting wryly-observant dialogue while the adults for the most part hew to platitudes and monstrously hypocritical dialogue. A game supporting cast includes a note-perfect performance by Jeff Goldblum as a family friend. I came away with the feeling that I had caught a glimpse of Holden Caulfield updated for the New Millennium.

Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek play a happily-married couple whose son becomes involved with an older, separated woman with two children who is being hounded by her abusive, menacing husband. To avoid turning this into a spoiler, suffice it to say that a tragedy occurs that shakes the foundations of the older couples’ marriage. The two leads are marvelous in this wrenching family drama.

Notable as Michael Caine's first star vehicle following his debut in Zulu, Ipcress, also incorporates a lot of the style and set pieces that became de rigeur in dozens of spy caper films that followed. Caine plays Harry Palmer, a myopic gourmand with a cockney accent and a cheeky way with his superiors and with the birds. Sidney Furie's director's commentary that accompanies the DVD release reveals that he was displeased with the original script and a new one was being written day by day during the shooting, leading to a lot of improvisation. This was a salutary thing; the film bristles with energy, terrific locations and unusual camera angles which takes full advantage of wide screen film and that are best appreciated in the DVD release with its restored aspect ratio. Aside from Caine's excellent, subdued performance, the film sports a first-rate cast of British character actors and much of its look and feel was carried over in the James Bond movies that followed, albeit more kinetically.

When a curmudgeonly farmer is murdered, his will leaves his entire estate to seven peasants who worked for him, thus upsetting the class structure in 1930s rural Austria. Though it is perhaps a bit simplistic, the film examines the changing world order on a very personal level and does a nice job of developing the characters of each of the peasants as they struggle to deal with their new circumstances and the village bourgeoisie arrayed against them. The filmmaking is virile and often gorgeous to look at compensating for a lame murder mastery tacked on to the plot.

While some may find this Paul Cox-directed story of lost love regained a bit too precious, I found it truthful and moving. A woman living out her latter years in Adelaide is contacted by the man with whom she had a passionate relationship when they were in their 20s. Long married to a stolid, unimaginative chap played by Terry Norris (Blake’s real-life husband), she resumes the relationship reluctantly and with trepidation. Their rekindled love quickly blazes forcing a strained triangulation. Unusual for its depiction of physical love between a pair approaching 70, the current developments are intercut with dialogue-less scenes of the couple when they were young. As with all of Cox’s films (including Cactus, A Woman’s Tale, My First Wife, Man of Flowers), his recurring theme that love is everything is strongly registered here. Though I found some of the dialogue a bit fatuous and tending towards psychobabble, the inherent truthfulness of the story overcame this defect.

It is interesting to compare the Danish original to the U.S. remake of this story about a cop investigating the methodical murder of a teenage girl. The ’97 film is set in a remote town in the frozen wastes near the Scandinavian arctic circle, the remake occurs in the town of Nightmute, Alaska. In both cases a pair of detectives have come in to help the local copy solve the case. Both stories essentially follow the same trajectory. One of the detectives is in trouble at home as the subject of a corruption investigation. His partner may cooperate in the investigation, dooming the senior cop’s career. During a stakeout in which the murderer has been lured to a remote, fog-shrouded shack, the accused detective shoots his partner and then manipulates evidence to make it appear that the murder suspect did it. The surviving detective embarks on a cat and mouse game with the murderer and also with a local cop as he attempts to bring the killer to justice while covering up his own actions. Central to the story is the cop’s inability to sleep in the round-the-clock sunlight of the far North summer. In both films the leads are excellent but take somewhat different approaches to telegraphing the emotional and physical exhaustion of their character. Al Pacino signifies his inner state with a great deal of physicality while Stellan Skarsgard’s approach is a more internalized and existential one. Likewise, the American remake often occurs in sunnier, more picturesque settings; the Norwegian movie’s settings are unremittingly bleak. There is also a tweaking of the plotline in the remake that makes more of the potential for conspiracy between the sleepless cop and his quarry. In the remake, Robin Williams proves to be superb foil emotionally and physically with the Pacino character. While the latter is haggard and teetering on the brink of breakdown, Williams is smooth and self-contained, failing to recognize his own psychosis and culpability.

This Danish comedy (coming from Hamlet Land does that sound like an oxymoron?) subscribes to the aesthetics of Dogma 95 dispensing with artificial lighting, dollies and the other slick niceties of modern, conventional filmmaking. Though some fine films have been made under these limitations (The Celebration being a prime example), I think this movie suffers from such constraints. I found the jerky camera movements and flat video images a bit distracting, giving the film the look of a TV soap. The script and acting on the other hand are a different matter. The story concerns a handful of Danes and an Italian immigrant, all seeking love and struggling to deal with loss and their own imperfections. Though their stories are hard-edged and include some nasty characters, (one of the key protagonists is a dislikable hothead), the realness of their plights and the wry humor imbedded in their stories make this an unusual and engaging film quite unlike the typical comedic froth from Hollywood.

Played by a quartet of actors, this account of the marriage and love that existed between writer/philosopher Iris Murdoch and her Oxford professor husband, John Bayley is infused with the love this couple shared. Told in episodes that cut back and forth between their courtship in the 1950s and the 1990s—the years in which Murdoch slowly deteriorated in the face of Alzheimer’s—the younger couple is played by Kate Winslett and Hugh Bonneville. The aged couple is portrayed by Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent. All four deliver the goods—particularly Winslet who does the best work of her career. While the story is ultimately a tragedy primarily concerned with the sad decline of a great mind as its focal point, much of their early years is filled with happiness and it is great fun to witness the free-spirited Murdoch bringing the virginal, stammering Bayley around to her way of seeing things. My only reservation with the screenplay is the perception it creates that Bayley was a bumbling, often idiotic presence. He was in fact a brilliant lecturer, essayist, and critic in his own right.

Based loosely on Christopher Isherwood stories set in 1930s Berlin, Julie Harris paints a vivid portrait of a free spirit that even the Nazis can’t affect.

Marcello Mastroianni in this, one of his last films, plays a highly-cultivated Casanova who is romantically drawn to a dwarf whose shrewish mother has her own aims. Not quite a success, the film rewards us with lots of strange moments and of course a large helping of Mastroianni’s charm.

Apparently quite autobiographical, this is director Jim Sheridan’s (My Left Foot) story of an Irish émigré family trying to make a new start in 1980s New York after suffering the devastating death of their son. Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton as the mother and father are good while real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger are even better as their children. Though the films skids perilously close to sentimentality, it manages by dint of a good story and fine acting to arise above that.

Based on the life of Barbara Graham, a California party girl who was put to death in San Quentin’s gas chamber, Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her balls-out performance as the troubled protagonist. Robert Wise’s direction is sure-handed and is especially strong in the early going in which he establishes the boozy milieu in which Graham lived. By today’s standards, Hayward’s performance lacks nuance, yet it still packs a punch. Wise spends the last 15 minutes of the film dissecting the process of execution by gas in infinite detail that leaves a strong impression.

Recalling such Brit gangster fare as Get Carter and Sexy Beast, director Mike Hodges’ revenge story is long on atmosphere and a bit short in the plotting. A young low-level drug dealer apparently commits suicide after being anally raped by parties unknown. This brings his older brother (Clive Owen in a quietly effective performance) who has been retired from crime for the past three years following some sort of breakdown back to London to discover the truth behind his brother’s death. Shot almost entirely at night, the film bristles with menace, yet there are a few dots that remain disturbingly unconnected at the end.

This old-fashioned farce stars Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci as a Laurel and Hardy-like pair and has lots of great physical comedy. Likely to be appreciated best by fans of silent-era films.

A decade after its debut, Pulp Fiction continues to have a powerful influence on young filmmakers. Intermission is proof of that with its breathless pacing, wacky dialogue, and intersecting storylines. Set in modern-day Dublin, with a love story at its core and a rock-tossing kid as connective tissue, this is gentler storytelling than the sort practiced by Tarantino. A game cast, some well-staged stunts, some poop jokes recalling Trainspotting, and above all, smartly structured pacing make this a satisfying sit.

Director Paul Weitz has demonstrated a trend towards ever-increasing sophistication as he has transited from the grossout humor of American Pie to the cleverly observed About a Boy and now to In Good Company, his most accomplished film to date. Leading man Dennis Quaid showing a new-found level of gravitas, plays a magazine ad executive who suddenly finds himself demoted to being the assistant to his new boss, a clueless kid young enough to be his son. Weitz’s deft script is full of gentle humor that is well integrated with believable drama and arch observations about modern corporate life. Topher Grace as the young pup and Scarlett Johnannsen as Quaid’s daughter who falls for Grace both hold up their ends admirably.

Director Michael Winterbottom’s story about two young Afghani refugees crossing the Middle East and Europe to get to England is a synthesis of various refugees’ accounts of their perilous journeys. Shot digitally with a tiny crew, the film achieves a remarkable level of cinema verité with events tumbling forward in a chaotic and often incomprehensible manner that suggests the bewilderment of the protagonists in a dangerous and uncaring world. The handheld camera is used to good effect with night scenes full of smeary, wraith-like images. Winterbottom worked with a non-professional cast letting the actors improvise dialogue by supplying minimal scenarios to drive the action. In Jamal Torabi, a teenaged Afghan with an impish smile and solid survival instincts, he has found a tremendous natural actor. Frequently harrowing and always involving, this is a powerful statement about the experience of displacement.

It is hard to imagine anyone other than Clint Eastwood playing the principal character in this film; a leathery Secret Service man haunted by his failure to prevent the JFK assassination years earlier. John Malkovich is a psycho bent on killing the current president who taunts the agent with cat-and-mouse games. Wonderfully tense and well directed by Wolfgang (Das Boot) Petersen.

Co-directed by Noel Coward and David Lean, this stirring World War II drama tracks the lives and perils of a group of British sailors aboard a destroyer. A tremendous cast of English stalwarts coupled with exciting battle sequences and highly detailed depictions of the naval war make this far superior to most similar fare of the era.

In 1968 the titular artist nearly died when attacked by the delusional Valerie Solanas whose story this is. Lili Taylor is exceptionally good playing the wacko and the period detail as well as the rest of the cast is excellent. Bizarre and involving.

This beloved 1934 Frank Capra film continues to delight audiences seven decades after its creation. Clark Gable plays a reporter who tails an heiress (Claudette Colbert) with delightful and ultimately romantic consequences. It contains the blueprints for hundreds of less successful romantic comedies that followed.

An all-star cast frenetically races to find buried treasure in this 1963 Stanley Kramer comedy epic. Not all the gags are successful and it is overlong, but the sheet scale of the film and its brilliant cast mostly prevent sagging.

Alan Arkin plays a thriving Manhattan dentist whose daughter is about wed the son of Peter Falk, an idiosyncratic man with a vague career that obliges him to travel overseas frequently. This odd-couple pairing is the fuel for an unpredictable story line that veers all over the map and keeps the laughs coming. Note that there is a sort of remake of this film made in 2003 that I havenâ€™t seen that has garnered mixed reviews.

Sean Penn directed this intensely sad film about two brothers who in many ways are polar opposites. The screenplay was inspired by the Bruce Springsteen song, "a Highway Patrolman", and has rather obvious correspondences with the Cain and Abel story. David Morse plays a good cop and family man while Viggo Mortensen, just back from Vietnam, plays his deeply-troubled sibling. The film is flawed with slow and pretentious bits, but striking performances and a heated sense of realism outweigh them.

Tom Hulse plays a simple, innocent Kremlin film projectionist who screens the movies that Stalin loves. An interesting if somewhat overlong look at revolutionary Russia in the 1930s, parts of the movie were actually shot on location in the Russian palace and at KGB headquarters.

Based on actual events, this is the story of a low-level Irish crook (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is wrongly arrested along with members of his family for terrorist attacks. Both Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite who plays his father deliver stunning performances.

This tortuously plotted whodunit concerns an average Joe who is called upon to protect a beautiful women from ruthless killers. Its primary appeal for film fans are the many cameos by Hollywood directors. John Landis who directed also does a memorable turn as an Iranian hitman.

In The Soup
Steve Buscemi plays Adolfo Rollo, a lachrymose would-be screenwriter with a
massive and pretentious 500-page script that, in financial desperation, he
offers for sale. A career criminal (Seymour Cassels in a scenery-eating
performance) says that rather than buy the script he'll raise the $250,000
Rollo reckons is needed to produce his movie. Rollo finds himself an
accessory in a variety of criminal acts, all the while furiously attempting
to court a fiery Latina neighbor in their unspeakably grungy N.Y. apartment
building. For once, Buscemi is cast as the straight man playing things rather
flatly against a far more animated supporting cast. Ranging in tone from
quirky to downright silly, this should appeal to devotees of director Jim
Jarmusch's (who has a brief cameo) work and other denizens of out-there cinema.

Impromptu
Rather messily constructed, the central pleasure in this portrait of the
iconoclastic British writer, George Sand is Judy Davis' cigar chomping
performance. Sand was the subject of great controversy across Europe with her
multiple affairs, masculine dress and generally outrageous behavior. The film
explores her relationship with several men, especially the neurasthenic
Fredric Chopin played with febrile gusto by Hugh Grant.

A crackling good tale of suspense is extracted by director Michael Mann
from the true story of Jeffrey Wigand, (Russell Crowe) a tobacco executive
who blew the whistle on his industry empowering a wave of lawsuits. In this
dramatically amped account, Wigand is hired by "60-Minutes" producer Lowell
Bergman ( a fiercely believable Al Pacino) as a consultant in a related
story. Bergman slowly wins Wigand's confidence leading to an interview and
deposition ruinous to the executive's life. But just when they've got the
goods on Big Tobacco, CBS chickens out killing the interview fearing a suit
that will queer its impending sale to Westinghouse. Though we know the
ultimate outcome of these events, the story generates great tension while
raising thoughtful concerns about media and journalistic ethics. Crowe is
superlative playing the much older, stocky and emotionally opaque Wigand.

Steve Buscemi plays Adolfo Rollo, a lachrymose would-be screenwriter with a
massive and pretentious 500-page script that, in financial desperation, he
offers for sale. A career criminal (Seymour Cassels in a scenery-eating
performance) says that rather than buy the script he'll raise the $250,000
Rollo reckons is needed to produce his movie. Rollo finds himself an
accessory in a variety of criminal acts, all the while furiously attempting
to court a fiery Latina neighbor in their unspeakably grungy N.Y. apartment
building. For once, Buscemi is cast as the straight man playing things
rather flatly against a far more animated supporting cast. Ranging in tone
from quirky to downright silly, this should appeal to devotees of director
Jim Jarmusch's (who has a brief cameo) work and other denizens of
out-there cinema.

Rather messily constructed, the central pleasure in this portrait of the
iconoclastic British writer, George Sand is Judy Davis' cigar chomping
performance. Sand was the subject of great controversy across Europe with
her multiple affairs, masculine dress and generally outrageous behavior.
The film explores her relationship with several men, especially the
neurasthenic Fredric Chopin played with febrile gusto by Hugh Grant.

Family dysfunction 70s style in suburban Connecticut is the fodder with
which Taiwanese director Ang Lee chronicles the lives of a handful of
troubled people. A remarkably knowing look at the dark underbelly of the
Ozzie and Harriet exemplar, there is a biting wit running through this
serio-comedy.

A biting black comedy about a philandering pizza shop owner whose wife
catches on to his infidelities and enrolls their dimwitted delivery boy in
a plan to kill him. Though the action doesn't quite maintain its ferocity
to the end, the performances by Kevin Klein and Tracey Ullman as the
husband and wife and Joan Plowright as the ditzy, Slavic mother-in-law are
top drawer. Based on actual events.

A meticulous recreation of Truman Capote's book detailing the brutal
slaughter of a family that took place in 1950s Kansas. Told in
semi-documentary form we come to understand something of the events and
lives of the two murderers that led to their savage attack and the manhunt
and eventual arrests that followed. I believe a made-for-cable TV remake
was produced, so be sure to insist on the genuine article.

Two thirty-something corporate executives on the rebound from being dumped
by women decide to target a vulnerable deaf coworker by wooing then dumping
her in this pitch black comedy/drama. This is an uncomfortable and
involving film that barely qualifies as entertainment and which is unlikely
to generate ambivalence-you'll either love it or hate it. Made on a tiny
$25,000 budget the film is attractively shot but its sometimes muddy
soundtrack reveals its shoestring status.

Perhaps my favorite 50s sci-fi movie, this was done on a tiny budget yet
features some convincing special effects. A man is caught in a strange mist
and proceeds to shrink over a period of weeks until he becomes so tiny that
he becomes lost in the basement of his own home. The intelligent script
raises existential questions that are rarely the fodder of this genre.

Sharing style and substance with the foregoing "Handbook", this too is a
true story that was fodder for the sensationalistic arm of the English
press. Harold Guppy is a slightly odd young man with a troubled past who
takes a room with a middle class family. The middle-aged wife, despite a
public show of prudery and abhorrence for any sort of sexual hijinks,
almost immediately begins to make moves on him. Before long he finds
himself sharing his bed with both the wife and her teenage daughter. Each
principal character seems to have a full quotient of craziness in this
study of madness and debauchery that takes a decidedly grim turn at the
end. Unspeakably vile and funny.

Two films with a connection by the British director, Lindsay Anderson. They
both star Malcolm McDowell, the first being a disturbing look at a British
boy's boarding school in which sadism and oppression abound. All hell
breaks loose in the last third of the film as fantastic elements come to
the fore. The second film is a sort of latter day Pilgrim's Progress about
a coffee salesman who rises to the top, suffers a great fall, then rises
again. Full of allegory and surrealism, it ends in swinging 60s London.
Watch for a number of cast members playing multiple roles.

A novel take on the vampire story. Anne Parrillaud of "La Femme Nikita" is
the neckbiter who infects a gang of Mafioso-and they actually like their
new vampire status since they're now twice as mean and just about
invincible. Robert Loggia is outstanding as a Mafia chief who revels in
this new level of bloodthirstiness.

The story of two Irish boys and their magical white horse on the run from
the police, this sounds like strictly kiddie fare, but it's far more than
that. Written by Jim Sheridan who wrote and directed "My Left Foot", there
is an important subtext about the lives of the Gypsies called Tinkers in
Ireland, and of a profligate father who comes to terms with himself and his
sons in the course of the chase. Another film that offers rewards to
viewers of all ages.

This is a spirited indy comedy about a streetwise Latina woman from the
Bronx whose love-hate relationship with her spouse takes unusual turns when
she lands a job in the music business. A pervading, gritty realism infuses
this comedy with a feeling of truth and bite.

One of my favorite Peter Sellers movies in which he plays a tightass L.A.
lawyer whose life is invaded by a hippy chick who rocks his world with
peace, love and dope. Not to be missed is the scene in which he
inadvertently gets his inlaws-to-be stoned on pot-laced brownies.

Sellers creates a comedic gem of his role as a union boss in this story
about a young man who causes havoc when he goes to work in his uncle's
business and stumbles over a crooked scheme. Full of sly pokes at the
labor-management antipathy that often sabotaged the post-war British
economy.

Fans of Federico Fellini will probably enjoy this mockumentary about the
making of a film about him; others may be nonplused by the proceedings.
Rife with in-jokes about the director's body of work, it is also a tribute
to the Cinecitta studio where he created many of his masterpieces.

The organizationally-impaired should find particular resonance in this
Canadian movie about a young woman who lands a job with a chic art gallery
owner after a lifetime of mucking up everything she attempts. Wry and often
touching, the story meanders a bit but finds its way at the end.

A case could be made for this being Fellini's greatest achievement, it is a
sharp-eyed yet loving comedy-drama about a group of five adolescents coping
with emerging adulthood in their backwater Adriatic town. There are echoes
of this superb film in "American Graffiti" and the director's own
"Amarcord" which he made twenty years later.

One of Humphrey Bogart's less celebrated efforts, I find his performance as
Dixon Steele, a hotheaded, cynical screenwriter suffering through a slow
spell, among his most memorable. Steele is accused of murdering a young
woman and is rescued by his glamorous apartment neighbor (Gloria Grahame)
who supplies an alibi. Sparkling, snide dialogue and terrific interplay
between Bogart and Grahame make this exceedingly watchable.

Opening with hyperkinetic shots of a brutal murder and the killer
methodically erasing all forensic evidence from his victim's corpse, our
attention is immediately riveted to the screen. A Swedish policeman
(Stellan Skarsgaard) is dispatched to investigate the crime committed in a
Norwegian town near the arctic circle. When he botches a trap laid for the
killer he tries to cover his tracks and becomes enmeshed in a web of
deceit. This brooding, unconventional whodunit's title refers to
Skarsgaaard's inability to sleep in the land of the midnight sun. Or
perhaps it is his inflamed conscience that is the cause of the insomnia.

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