The Film Council’s new service, Find Any Film looks like it could turn into something rather good. At the moment it can tell you the nearest cinema that’s showing a film of your choice. This has been a feature of www.imdb.com in America for years now, but is apparently a first for the UK. It [...]

A seventies filmic retelling of Candide by director Lindsay Anderson, writer David Sherwin and star Malcolm McDowell, O Lucky Man! is a rare example of the picaresque in cinema. Starting as a coffee salesman, McDowell’s Mick Travis (the same name, but perhaps not quite the same character as he played in If….) journeys through Britain’s [...]

This is a low-key romantic drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, with a couple of good supporting turns from Isabella Rossellini and Elias Koteas. I expected a solid piece of drama, and that is what we saw. Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard Kraditor, a late twenty-something living in Brighton Beach, a far flung New York [...]

Or, in the original Swedish, Låt den rätte komma in is the sweet and troubling coming-of-age story of Oskar, a young boy who finds the confidence to fight bullies and assert his place in the world when he falls in love with the girl next door. However, as he gets closer to Eli he realises [...]

A fascinating documentary about the trial of superstar film director Roman Polanski on a variety of charges of sexual misconduct with a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s very sympathetic to Polanski, but it should be noted that the director/producer is a woman, and doesn’t ignore the suffering of the victim. The worst aspect of the entire case [...]

Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu pay the bills in this stylish French police suspense movie. Their collective star power almost diverts from the fact that they’ve both eaten too much foie gras to play active, hard-edged policemen. There’s plenty of double-dealing and blurred moral boundaries, but the script sets up the dead bodies a little [...]

Was I half-asleep or was it never adequately explained why “There can only be one?”

Highlander was a complete pile of nonsense, with a barely anglophone Belgian, Christopher Lambert, playing a Scotsman and Sean Connery playing a Spanish-Egyptian swordfighting dandy. Lots of latent sadomasochistic homosexuality and some utterly unreal lighting, including gutter-level strobe lights.
It was [...]