Complex thoughts on AFTER THE HUNT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 6

Director Luca Guadagnino redeems himself after a run of mid films, not least QUEER and CHALLENGERS, with the adult, nuanced, tricksy and provocatively brilliant AFTER THE HUNT.  It’s based on a script by Nora Garrett and deals in shades of grey and ambiguity. It reminded me of the best of those ethical dilemma dramas that Woody Allen made in the mid to late 80s, not least because Guadagnino pays homage to Woody with the style of his credits.  It also reminded me of the iconic ALL ABOUT EVE in its depiction of a rather spiky marriage and the disruptive interloping of a young rival.

It is far from a perfect film. I felt that Andrew Garfield's performance went from depicting an obnoxious character to just being obnoxious. Whenever he's faced with a choice he always tends to go too big.  I also didn't feel the epilogue was necessary or additive. So why have I given the film five stars?  Because I have spent much of the hours following the screening discussing its choices and themes and debating what was actually happening. I love it when films provoke debate and withhold easy answers.  I also think that Nora Garrett has pulled off a rare feat in so evenly balancing the accusations that Gen Z and Gen X have of each other. 

The movie is essentially a four-hander battle of the wits between two generations.  In the older cohort we have Julia Roberts’ Alma, a Yale University Philosophy Professor who specialises in teaching virtue ethics.  Alma is cool and calm, perhaps too well-put together and unflappable. Her sense of style is assured and unique and easily aped.  Early on we discover that she has some kind of secret from her youth, and that she withholds a lot from her husband.  We feel that it must be traumatic and yet she seems to regard its artefacts with fondness. The deepest level of the film is concerned with uncovering her attitude to this event. 

In contemporary life, Alma seems to attract acolytes, and has a dangerously unboundaried relationship with her star students and her younger colleague Hank.  She somehow holds this all in a fragile equilibrium that the movie will shake. The fascinating and unresolved side-issue that we get no clear answers on is whether Alma has a problem with drug addiction or if she really is just treating excruciating pain. Did the drugs cause the ulcers or the other way around?  What we do know is that Alma is a career woman and deeply ambitious. She wants tenure. She has battled her way through the misogynistic world of academia and wants her just desserts.  

This may well be the role of Julia Roberts’ life, and certainly it’s her greatest role and performance of her later career.  She is on screen for almost every scene and she carries the film. Alma is enigmatic, infuriating, arrogant, makes terrible choices, and yet I found her to be real and sympathetic. 

Alma is married to a psychiatrist called Frederick, played by the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg.  It's a small role, even a cameo, but as in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, in some ways it's Stuhlbarg's character that carries the emotional heart of the film. Frederick can be theatrical and immature and petulant. But he truly loves his wife and understands something profound about her childhood trauma that she cannot see. He also understands something profound about her relationships with Hank and Maggie.  He is flawed but wise.

In the younger cohort we have adjunct professor Hank who is also battling for tenure.  His students love him, he flirts with everyone, and he is an obnoxiously large character, played to the limits of largeness by Andrew Garfield. I suspect some of this is a necessary choice. His career will be ruined by a graduate student, Maggie, who accuses him of sexual assault right after he accuses her of plagiarism. We will not know if he did it, but we have to see his largeness, his physical presence, his lack of self-control, to feel that he might have done.  It's a slippery role. His first reaction is hurt and entitled and arrogant. That does not mean he did it, of course. 

And finally, in real opposition to Alma, we have The Bear's Ayo Edibiri as Maggie, her young PHD student, acolyte, and mentee.  She is a young black female philosopher at Yale, so one might imagine she is already on the back foot. But screenwriter Nora Garrett complicates Maggie by making her incredibly wealthy: the daughter of major donors.  Does Alma suspect she is a plagiarist? Is she? Yes she does dress like Alma.  Did she steal her mother's Bulgari ring to wear as a pendant, copying Alma? Is her accusation of trauma replicative of Alma's?  Is the accusation an attempt to discredit Hank? Is she dating a trans man for the optics?  It's a good performance from Edibiri, every now and then hinting at satisfaction at getting a certain reaction from Alma, but I felt that of the four actors she was the weakest. Perhaps because this is by far the largest and more complex dramatic role she has been given.

The wonder of this script and film is that both Maggie and Alma are right. Maggie is right to say that Alma has let her down, both in her reaction to the assault but more broadly.  Maggie is right that first-wave feminists did not adequately support the struggle of women of colour, and too often tried to get what they could within the existing patriarchal structure rather than challenging it. Alma's life has been one of not compromising her ambition by upsetting the apple-cart. Maggie wants to destroy it.  But Alma is also right in how she skewers Maggie's generation for its virtue-signalling progressive illiberalism: its need for the safety of a lukewarm bath when university in general, and a philosophy class in particular, should be all about debating uncomfortable subjects. 

Like I said, this is far from a perfect film. But it is an ambitious and provocative film. I love that it centres a middle-aged complex woman and is willing to confront and interrogate shifting inter-generational attitudes to difficult issues. The running time is long but I was not bored for a minute.  This is grown-up cinema at its best.

AFTER THE HUNT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London. It opens in the USA on October 10th.

QUEEN & SLIM

QUEEN & SLIM is a powerful and moving film - at turns hilarious and unbearably tense. It stars Daniel Kaluuya (GET OUT) and Jodie Turner-Smith as a young black couple who go out on a tinder date. He drives her home, a cop pulls them over, she tries to assert their rights (being an attorney) and ends up being shot.  He kills the cop in self-defense.  This is all done in the first fifteen or so minutes. The tonal shift is beautifully handled. We go from a beautifully observed first date between an odd couple so ill-matched that they barely occupy the same frame, to a moment of violence that's genuinely frightening.  We've all seen the video footage of real life policy brutality and racism. But in that slow build-up to the shooting I had a glimpse, for just a nanosecond, of what it must feel like to be pulled over as a black man.  It was terrifying and deeply affecting.

The rest of the film is a road movie, beautifully shot by cinematographer Tat Radcliffe.  The south has never looked so empty and so vivid and so gorgeous.  They visit with her uncle, hilariously played by Bokeem Woodbine (TV's FARGO), in a role that rises above absurdist pimp and hustler. We learn that he was deeply fucked up by Iraq and that their family history is deeply scarred. I also love the cameo role from Indya Moore (POSE) - who with barely a look can steer her supposedly macho lover into doing the right thing. It's quite the demonstration of power. 

Their journey continues. On the way we'll get one of the most sensuous joyous road-house scenes since Lynch - and it's worth saying that the music in this film is brilliantly chosen and even allows an hilarious Fat vs Skinny Luther Vandross debate. 

We also get to see both sides of the argument.  Screenwriters Lena Waithe and the notorious James Frey show us the true cost of being runaway heroes - the danger of inspiring young black kids to stand up to violence - that violence begets violence -and somehow in a world where there are black cops too, it always seem to be black people who end up dead.  

The screenwriters also pose provocative questions.  Should we really make an analogy between Queen and Slim and Bonnie and Clyde?  The movie does - riffing on the iconography of that movie - and in a meta way the kids in the film do too. But Bonnie and Clyde were genuine criminals.  Queen and Slim are law-abiding citizens in a world where the law has been made corrupt and racist. They are criminals because they are black.  

Another provocation is who we should trust.  There's a fantastic scene in a supposed safe house owned by Flea and Chloe Sevigny.  He wants to help them. She is more reluctant. Should we believe that she is tempted by the bounty on their heads? I love the ambiguity that the screenwriters are willing to make us endure.  We never know why the husband and wife are so well set up for smuggling. Or why the husband has a preternatural sensitivity to seeing the shadows of a SWAT team on his dining room wall. I almost wish that the screenwriters had left the question of whom to trust open at the end. 

Overall, QUEEN & SLIM is a truly intelligent and beautifully handled film.  Kudos to first-time feature film director Melina Matsoukas and to Lena Waithe and James Frey for their nuanced and challenging script. But most of all, kudos to Daniel Kaluuya, who goes from puppy-dog naivety and goodness to something wiser, tougher, and more fulfilled. It's an astonishing performance. First time feature actor Jodie Turner-Smith holds her own too.  But it's Kaluuya, and Woodbine in support, who really deserved the award-season recognition and I'm saddened this film hasn't received the marketing push to facilitate that. 

QUEEN & SLIM has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. The film was released in the USA last November and will be released in the UK on January 31st 2020. 

THE DEAD DON'T DIE

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is an unashamedly indulgent movie who's success relies on the audience wanting to be in on the joke.  I went along for the ride and found it to be uproariously funny, silly, shaggy and joyful - and hands down one of my favourite films of 2019.  This isn't a film for those over-obsessed with tight-plotting, consistent pace or an aversion to jump the shark moments. But as I said, if you go with the silliness, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The film opens in small town USA, reminiscent of original Twin Peaks. There are some slow-witted nice cops, played by Bull Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny. And there's policing a dispute between Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) and MAGA-supporter Farmer Frank (Steve Buscemi).  There's pace is lackadaisical and their hearts decent.  It soon becomes apparent that polar fracking has caused the earth to move off its axis resulting in whacky daylight hours and a zombie apocalypse. The rest of the film sees how our heroes cope with the impending doom ("kill the head") - not to mention the newly arrived Scottish mortician with hardcore Samurai skills (Tilda Swinton). 

We get lots of references to George Romero, including an update on his consumerist satire, as zombies wonder round in desperate search of wifi.  We also get a hopeful message about how "the children are our future". But mostly this is a film of supreme visual comedy - a shot of Adam Driver pulling into a diner parkway in a tiny red convertible Smart car - a shot of Tilda Swinton applying 1980s New Romantic makeup to a corpse - or a re-animated Iggy Pop hunting for coffee.  

Any film is worth watching that gives us even one of those things. So yes, I get all the critics and I see the film's weaknesses but I just dont' care, because when it delivers it's absolutely hilarious!

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Cannes 2019 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK on Friday.

LIZZIE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Eleven

LIZZIE is the latest retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, from a feminist queer perspective.  Although Craig William Macneill's direction is pretty workmanlike, a  tightly written script from Bryce Kass and a very strong central performance from Chloë Sevigny make this film memorable, sensitive and provocative.

As all of us know from our playground nursery rhymes, Lizzie Borden hacked her her father and stepmother to death. But the reality is far more interesting.  She was put on trial but acquitted, although she was later estranged from her sister and died a spinster. This film assumes Lizzie's guilt, as most people do, but seeks to tell us why and how she committed the murders.

As the film opens in 1892 New England we learn that Lizzie's father is wealthy but is channelling the family's wealth to her hated stepmother's family.  This was true, and indeed a motive for murder.  The rest is assertion. The film asserts that the father was serially raping the family's maids - and that the latest maid, Bridget (Kristen Stewart) was having an affair with Lizzie (further motive).  The film further asserts that Lizzie was subject to seizures and lived under the threat that her father would have her institutionalised (yet further motive).  But beyond all of this, surely as an intelligent curious woman there would be great appeal in simply living free from the constraints of society.  On this point, Bridget seems more realistic than Lizzie about how far they can escape.

BEATRIZ AT DINNER

Directer Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White follow their collaboration on THE GOOD GIRL with this hamfisted painfully earnest take on the class divide in contemporary America.  Salma Hayek plays Beatriz, a massage therapist and earnest do-gooder who treats both suffering cancer patients and rich capitalist bastards.  As the film opens, there's a chance it might be a comedy.  Beatriz is quirky!  She keeps goats in her house and has a habit of saying socially inappropriate things and invading people's space.  But that isn't what this film is.  When Beatriz' car breaks down at a client's (Connie Britton - NASHVILLE) house in Newport Beach, that client invites her to stay for dinner - a small celebration of future profits on a real estate development.  The rich guests (Chloe Sevigny, Jay Duplass) proceed to ignore Beatriz, then assume she's the help, then ignore her disquiet at their development.  But when the richest and most evil of the men (John Lithgow) reveals he also hunts rhinos, Beatriz really loses it.

The problem I have with this film is that it isn't a biting political satire or a nuanced portrait of class or race relations. Rather it's a pantomime filled with caricatures.  The bad guys here are truly bad.  The airhead dippy wives are just that.  And Beatriz is ultimately a Christlike martyr of zero flaws and faults. This makes for dull, dumb, simplistic storytelling.  The audience deserves far more.

AT DINNER has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Sundance 2017 and opens in the USA on June 9th.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - BARRY MUNDAY aka THE FAMILY JEWELS

I rather liked THE FAMILY JEWELS, although I must admit it was rather betrayed by its marketing. I was rather expecting it to be a gross-out frat-boy comedy in the manner of a Judd Apatow flick. After all, the central conceit is that Patrick Wilson's character - Barry Munday - is a promiscuous, misogynistic David Brent-style loser who gets his balls cut off by the vengeful father of a teenage girl. Just as he realises he can't father children, he's told that a plain-jane one-night stand (Judy Greer) he can't even remember fucking, is knocked up.  What then follows is actually a rather sweet, rather earnest little romantic drama, in which Barry comes to accept fatherhood and his baby-mama, Ginger, comes to accept his attentions. The movie may be rather predictable and the direction is certainly workman-like, but it's also peppered with some delicious cameos from the likes of Billy-Dee Williams as Barry's boss; Malcolm McDowell as Ginger's dad; and Cybill Shepherd as her mum. Overall, the movie is not particularly memorable but it was enjoyable enough at the time, and Patrick Wilson is so funny and convincing as Barry Munday I would love to see him do more out-and-out comedy. 

THE FAMILY JEWELS played a bunch of minor festivals in 2010 and had a very limited US release in October 2010. It is available to rent and own.

Late Review - MR NICE

Director Bernard Rose takes a break from contemporising Russian literature, with his straight-ahead adaptation of Howard Marks' autobiography, MR NICE. The charm of Marks' story is that he stands against the cliché of the drug dealer typically seen in films. He doesn't grow up in a mean urban setting - he doesn't push drugs to survive - he isn't particularly flash - he doesn't do whores - he's faithful to his wife and kids - and he studiously avoids Class A drugs - both dealing them and taking them. In fact, he is rather more like a hero of an Ealing Comedy - stumbling into drug dealing quite by accident and permanently amused that he is getting away with it.

Marks was basically just another middle-class kid studying at Oxford and smoking hash when a mate asked him to do a favour and drive a car stuffed with drugs back from Germany. Marks was quite happy to quit teaching for easy money-making and soon hooked up with the Provos to bring his hash into UK airports without the inconvenience of customs checks. Before long he's got the biggest outfit in the UK and tries to crack America. Moreover, he's been recruited by his old college chum to be a spy in Kabul - after all, he moves in circles they can't penetrate! The first time he's busted for dealing he gets off on grounds so spurious he seems to be amazed, but he does eventually serve time - and not because of hubris, or narcissism, or betrayal - but basically because he was too bored to quit.

The film is charming and fun, and uses a deliberately lo-fi amateurish style, with live action footage digitally inserted into grainy old vintage footage of the 60s and 70s. Rhys Ifans is suitably bumbling and charming as Marks and he and Chloe Sevigny as his wife seem genuinely in love. I also love David Thewlis - who has just that edge of danger required to play the Provo, Jim McCann. The charm and the fun is entirely in keeping with Marks' carefully cultivated persona as Mr. Nice. Yes, that was his real alias, but he also wants to be seen as basically a good guy. To that end, this movie drips with family values, and to watch it, one would think that his wife and daughters never blamed him for one second for being absent from their lives. The film also refuses to question how far his involvement with the Provos was morally pretty nasty - after all, the dodgy money they were earning wasn't going into real estate, was it? And there is a deliberately cultivated equivocation about how far he ever really did any spying for the British.

So, MR NICE is basically a rather fawning film - frothy, light, charming, disposable. It doesn't get to grips with Howard Marks - but provides him with a yet another self-justificatory platform. Is that bad? Who knows. But there is something rather, well, distasteful in an international drug dealer who consorted with the IRA palming himself of as a charming rogue.

MR NICE is currently on release in the UK.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE?

You go in to a movie directed by Werner Herzog and produced by David Lynch with a certain expectation of Weird. You come out thinking, “What just happened here?” You struggle with your own feelings – did you enjoy the film? Is that even a possible outcome here? Maybe it’s just about levels of being unnerved? We’re not in Kansas anymore.

The story is simple enough. Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon – in serious danger of being typecast) is an actor who has become so obsessed with Elektra that he has murdered his over-protective mother. His girlfriend knew he was becoming increasingly unhinged, but the fact that she was with him at all, given his weird emotional tics, shows that she’s no judge of character. But then again, a Herzog film is often peopled with characters who are weird without being sinister – without there being a narrative purpose to it. Udo Kier’s theatre director is certainly strange and bizarre and unnerving, but he’s not actually menacing. The same applies to Willem Defoe’s detective, who appears to be immune to the weirdness that engulfs him, and this immunity makes him as strange as the man he’s staking out. At let’s not even discuss the craziest character of all – Brad’s insane ostrich-farming Uncle Ted (Brad Dourif). It’s as though Herzog is making a point about the inherent oddity of suburban life. Yes, he’s saying, this shit may seem unutterably weird to you viewers, but if you look beyond those white picket fences, this is really the level of oddity on which we’re operating. And that brings us firmly into the realm of David Lynch.

And so you end up with a film that combines both Herzogian and Lynchian strangeness. An obsession with mutated chickens; aggressive ostriches; a random interlude in Peru; and endless tableaux vivants; put us firmly in Herzog territory. The casting of the default-crazy Grace Zabriskie; the inclusion of a milk-sop girlfriend; and the fetishisation of a food; put us firmly in Lynch territory.

How can you respond to a movie in which the plot is propelled by a murder and an abduction, but basically nothing happens? In which every crazy character is trumped by another? This movie isn’t so much an empathetic experience as a spectacle. I still can’t tell you if I enjoyed it. But I know I won’t forget it in a hurry.

Additional tags: Ernst Reijseger, Loretta Devine, Brad Dourif

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? played Venice and Toronto 2009 and was released in Portugal earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and Italy and was released on DVD in the US last week.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE KILLING ROOM

Director Jonathan Liebesman followed up DARKNESS FALL and TCM: THE BEGINNING with a quiet psychological thriller called THE KILLING ROOM. It's an austere, tightly made, well-acted film that, while mining familiar material, still manages to hold our attention. The movie takes the same kind of approach as DAS EXPERIMENT - creating a fictional exploration of a real psychological experiment - in this case, the CIA's infamous MK Ultra programme. In the real life version, "volunteers" were subjected to mind-control experiments, often drug-induced, of the kind that led to Manchurian candidates. In this fictionalised version, four men have volunteered for a medical experiment run by the ruthless Dr Phillips (Peter Stormare) and the ambitious but morally uncertain Miss Reilly (Chloe Sevigny). They have to solve puzzles, and the man with the least correct guess is summarily executed. The prisoners try to outwit the system, and even escape, while the audience try to figure out what purpose such a sadistic experiment could serve. I liked the stark production design, gathering sense of claustrophobia, and Timothy Hutton's performance as one of the "volunteers". This movie is well worth a watch.

THE KILLING ROOM played Sundance 2009 and went straight to DVD.

ZODIAC - frustrating on purpose...?

In the late 1960s a serial killer shot and stabbed random people in the San Francisco area. He then sent letters and encripted messages to newspapers and police departments taunting them to catch him. The self-appointed Zodiac killer was a fan of publicity. He must have been pleased to see himself portrayed in DIRTY HARRY. He may well have appropriated murders that weren't his own to boost his twisted kudos. The police didn't solve the murders but a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle started an ad hoc investigation that resulted in a paperback book. He posits a theory as to the killer, but a quick google search will show you that there are still several theories as to who committed the crimes.

All of which brings us to the central problem: how can a director film gather together the fragments of a serial killer story with no resolution and fashion an engaging linear narrative? David Fincher addresses this problem byruthlessly organises his material into three acts, signposted clearly with timelines, and by throwing people who absolutely need to have closure a bone.

The first third of the movie is the most like a conventional serial killer flick. Victims are off'ed in tense tableaux; cryptic letters are sent into the newsroom; and the cops and reporters go through their procedures. In the second act, fatigue and frustration sets in. The only real suspect is cleared; the cops are moved onto other cases and the lead journo gets the sack. Even the Zodiac himself seems fatigued: the killing and the letters stop. It's a stand-off. At this point, even the viewer might feel frustrated and tired of the story - I gave Fincher the benefit of the doubt and decided that this was a deliberate attempt to have us empathise with the bewildering...slipperiness of the case. If this really is Fincher's aim, I think it's rather brave in facing the difficulty of filming the case head-on.

The final act puts us back into classic Fincher territory. The newspaper cartoonist picks up where the coppers left off and starts tracking down old witnesses and suspects. There is almost unbearably tense confrontation with a suspected murderer in a basement and a final confrontation with the suspect he chooses to believe is the Zodiac. The ending of the film is, however, slippery indeed. On one level, the viewers have been presented with a hypothesis as to the killer's identity and the text at the end of the film suggests that we should walk out of the theatre happy that the whodunnit has been solved. But there are too many important threads left hanging - and at least two very strong suspects still out there. So, the viewer can choose to leave the film unsatisfied and frustrated - having truly experienced the manifold evasions of the Zodiac. Clever stuff.

So right about now, you know that I found this movie to be frustrating but strangely gripping nonetheless. It's also worth pointing out that in terms of pure cinematic technique, this is a must-watch movie. The production design and visual style of the film is mesmerising. It's all warm claustrophobic browns and greens. Often-times, the camera seems to record an atomsphere - an oppression - rather than document movement. (Perhaps this is just me reading the lack of progress with the case onto the film.) ZODIAC is also pioneering in that it's the first feature film in which the entire shooting process took place without film OR video but completely digitally. In other words, the images were shot with digital cameras and the data was sent to directly through cables to the editorial suite. The images were backed up digitally and loaded into the Apple FinalCut Pro programme for editing. The hard drives were then reused. In other words, the only time the film was put on video or celluloid was for distribution to conventional theatres. Truly a feat.

Set against this, the casting is sometimes weak, othertimes under-used. Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards are serviceable as the two investigating cops, but their motivations are unclear. In particular, it is not clear why the latter should drop the case in favour of a normal life. It's also not clear why a hitherto down-to-earth honest cop could have become so mesmerised by fame as to have faked fan letters to Amistead Maupin, leaving him open to accusations of faking Zodiac letters. Elias Koteas and James Le Gros are just fine in cameo supporting roles as provincial cops but I couldn't help feeling that more could've been made of the Brian Cox role. Cox plays a famous pyschologist who is called by the Zodiac live on air. The film-makers start to investigate the corrosive relationship between fame and crime, but leave that strand hanging.

Robert Downey Junior chooses to play his role as a brilliant but strung out investigative reporter by swallowing half his words and becoming no more than a handful of physical ticks. I remain to be convinced that Jake Gyllenhaal can act as opposed to look put-upon. And that's a major problem because when Downey Junior's character fades into alcoholism and the cops get reassigned it's Jake's character who fills the screen. He plays the boy scout-cartoonist turned investigator who runs around the Bay area like one of the kids from Scooby Doo, reading old files, re-interviewing suspects and generally running great risks. Moreover, in a two and half hour film spanning twenty odd years Gyllenhaal neither alters his physical presence nor gives a satisfying account of why such a "boy scout" would become so obsessed with a serial killer.

Still, it's a testament to the fascination of the case and the virtuosity of the production that ZODIAC remains a gripping and memorable thriller.

ZODIAC was released in Canada and the US in March and played Cannes 2007. It is currently playing in France, Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Egypt, Israel, New Zealand, Serbia, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the UK. It opens in Slovenia and Finland on May 24th, in the Philippines, Germany, Singapore, Brazil and Estonia on the weekend of May 31st. It opens in Belgium on June 6th, in Hungary on June 7th, Latvia on Juune 8th, Japan on June 16th, Hong Kong on June 21st and Russia on August 2nd.

Random DVD round-up 6 - THE BROWN BUNNY ****

THE BROWN BUNNY gets four stars for sheer bloody-minded commitment to the concept and the brave performances from writer-director Vincent Gallo and Chloë Sevigny. Gallo plays a motorcycle racing driver and the movie takes its title from his professional nick-name. For much of the film we watch without the benefit of dialogue or plot as he simply drives across country. It's like looking at the shot on the right, or at an extreme close-up of Gallo looking moody and intense. The first time I watched it, as much as I wanted to admire its perverse purity, I just found it rather dull. Even in the re-edited, shorter version, that I was watching. And then, the movie flips into something rather astounding. Gallo's character has an encounter with his ex-girlfriend in which he verbally abuses her and she mortifies herself by giving him a blow job.

THE BROWN BUNNY attracted a lot of flack for its unsimulated sex scene and partly beccause of Gallo's vicious response to Ebert's justified (and then re-formulated) criticism. But it has also attracted a lot of admiration. This is summed up by the citation accompanying the 2003 Viennale FIPRESCI (critics) award: "for its bold exploration of yearning and grief and for its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking." I guess I agree. This movie is admirable for going against the grain - and the final twenty minutes really are unforgettable and moving quite apart from the sensational sex scene. Chloe Sevigny and Vincent Gallo are outstanding. More to the point, once you see the ending unfold you sort of understand why the slow build-up was necessary and how it makes the movie what it is. And that is: a truly original and admirable - if painful - viewing experience.

THE BROWN BUNNY played Cannes 2003. It is available on Region 1 and 2 DVD.

BROKEN FLOWERS - beautiful, bitter-sweet comedy

I have to say that I was pretty much guaranteed to love BROKEN FLOWERS. It is directed by one of my favourite film-makers, Jim Jarmusch, and stars one of my favourite actors, "Bill Groundhog-Day, Ghostbustin'-ass Murray!" Throw in some nice support work from Jeffrey Wright (last seen in the flaccid Syriana), Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Chloe Sevigny and Tilda Swinton, and you have a recipe for an engaging, bittersweet comedy.

Bill Murray reprises his role as the professionally successful, world-weary, cynical romantic from the infinitely inferior flick, LOST IN TRANSLATION. His girlfriend leaves him on the grounds that he has commitment and emotional issues. He also receives a letter from an unidentified ex-girlfriend who claims to have fathered his child. Murray barely reacts to these events - his ennui prevents him from doing anything more positive than drifting to his neighbour's house for morning coffee. Indeed, Murray spends much of the film reacting obliquely to increasingly strange things happening to him. Therein lies the comedy. When a butt-naked teenage girl called Lolita walks past him, he wears a bemused smile. The "WTF?!" reaction we have is distilled into a slightly raised eyebrow. Brilliant.

Luckily for Murray, his neighbour Winston, played with great comic dash by Jeffrey Wright, is on hand to play amateur detective*, and sends Murray on a road-trip to visit all his ex-es and find his son. Wright's character, Winston, is the kind of stand-up family guy who reassures his kids that he isn't smoking tobacco but 'cheeba, and who always has a magnifying glass to hand. He genuinely cares that Murray should get ot of his funk. Anyhoo, Murray goes travelling; strange stuff happens. Maybe he meets his son, maybe he learns something about himself, maybe not. This is not the kind of film where you get trite answers. At the end of the movie, all that Murray's character can cobble together from his experience is that: "The past is gone, I know that. The future isn't here yet, whatever it's going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That's it."

What does Jim Jarmusch bring to his mix, apart from his genius in writing the part for Murray and the wry dialogue? Every single inch of every frame of this flick is wonderfully cosntructed. The production design, the positioning of the props, the camera angle - everything is just right. For instance, there is one scene where Murray is sitting alone looking mournful on a chi-chi designer couch in his well-appointed house. On the coffee table in front of him is a bottle of Moet and a full glass. Marvin Gaye is playing in the background. You don't get more tragic.

BROKEN FLOWERS may not be all bangs and whistles - and it may not have answers to all the key questions of life - but it does make you smile an awful lot. You can't say fairer than that.

BROKEN FLOWERS won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2005. It went on cinematic release in Autumn 2005 and is now available on DVD.

3 NEEDLES - don't be put off by the gruesome title

Without a doubt, if this movie had the backing of a major studio, it would be up for Oscars. But what am I saying? No major studio would back a movie that reads like such a “downer”. 3 NEEDLES tells three separate stories of people suffering from AIDS – a porn star in Canada, plantation workers in South Africa and villagers in China. There is lots of gruesome stuff – young African boys undergoing ritual adult circumcision for starters – but this is not a pretentious didactic grim mess. There are a lot of movies out there that you admire more than enjoy. But here you can do both. Many of the scenes are very very funny and the film wears its social message lightly.

3 NEEDLES is directed by a young American director - Thom Fitzgerald. Despite his relatively unproven track record, he has been able to attract a brilliant cast, including Chloe Sevigny, Sandra Oh, Olympia Dukakis, Stockard Channing and Lucy Liu.

In the Canadian strand, Stockard Channing ("Anything Else", "Practical Magic") plays the working class mother of a young porn star who has AIDS but is fiddling his blood tests so he can keep acting. He knows he is infecting his co-workers but needs the money. In the South African strand, Chloe Sevigny ("The Brown Bunny", "Melinda and Melinda") plays a novice who becomes a missionary to South Africa, working in a health clinic attached to a plantation where AIDS is pandemic, the plantation owner is reluctant to fund healthcare and the victims believe that they can cure the virus by sleeping with a virgin.

In the Chinese strand, Lucy Liu ("Charlie's Angels", "Kill Bill") plays a woman who is running an illegal blood supply business. Driving round villages in a white van she offers peasants five dollars for their blood, which is then sold on to hospitals. Her equipment is contaminated and infects whole villages. This strand is actually surprisingly funny and touching in how it depicts the relationship between a father and his young daughter who is a blood donor. The comic timing is all the more amazing given that this is a cast of largely untrained actors. Lucy Liu also gives an outstanding performance of real pathos. Who knew she could actually act?

This film was originally shown at the Toronto film festival in September 2005 and ran at 123 minutes. The version shown at the London film festival 2005 – the European premiere - was 15 minutes shorter for which we can “thank” the Canadian distributor. However, the Director intimated that a European release would have the extra footage restored. 3 Needles will get a limited US release in December 2006.