All 48 reviews in alphabetical order by title
Contents
"Advice And Consent" "All The President's Men" "The American President" "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" "The Battle Of Algiers" "Being There" "Bobby" "Bulworth" "The Candidate" "Carla's Song" "Che: Part One" "Che: Part Two" "The Confession" "The Contender" "Cry Freedom" "The Dancer Upstairs" "Dave" "Exodus" "Fahrenheit 9/11" "Frost/Nixon" "Gandhi" "Good Bye Lenin!" "Hotel Rwanda" "J.F.K." "Land And Freedom" "The Lives Of Others" "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) "Michael Collins" "Missing" "The Motorcycle Diaries" "Music Box" "Persepolis" "Primary Colors" "The Quiet American" "Reds" "Salvador" "The Seduction Of Joe Tynan" "Shooting Dogs" "State Of Siege" "Under Fire" "W." "Waltz With Bashir" "Welcome To Sarajevo" "A World Apart" "Young Mr Lincoln" "Z"
Otto Preminger directed this insight into Congressional affairs, examining how the Senate has to give 'advice and consent' in relation to the nomination by President (FRanchot Tone) of a new liberal Secretary of State (Henry Fonda) against the determined opposition of a southern senator (Charles Laughton). Based on a novel based Allen Drury, this is an unpleasant portrayal of American politics in which Laughton takes the acting honours.
“All The President’s Men” (1976)
It was “Washington Post” reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein who uncovered the connections between the Watergate ‘plumbers’ and the White House and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman respectively are excellent as the two young men who unravel the complex truth. Alan J Pakula was the director of this absorbing work, but it is not always easy to follow the dialogue or the plot and it is more about investigative journalism than politics as such. We still do not know the identity of ‘Deep Throat’.
“The American President” (1995)
This was produced and directed by Rob Reiner who struck gold with "When Harry Met Sally". Michael Douglas plays a widowed Democratic President romancing environmental lobbyist Annette Bening. It is light and amusing and politically liberal. The real significance of the film is its authorship - scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin was motivated by his work for this movie to go on and write one of the most brilliant television series ever, "The West Wing". Several of the actors in the film in fact turn up in the series, notably Martin Sheen who is Chief of Staff in the former and President in the latter.
“The Baader-Meinhof Complex” (2008)
Formally named the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion in German), this German urban terrorist group - at its height in the late 1960s and 1970s but only formally dissolved in 1998 - was more commonly referred to by the names of two of its leaders, Andreas Baader (played here by Moritz Bleibtreu) and Ulrike Meinhof (portrayed by Martina Gedeck). This is not an easy movement to represent, still less explain, partly because the events are so numerous, partly because the timescales are so long, and above all because the politics behind it and the state reaction to it are morally complex, but this German film makes a very commendable attempt, showing the narrative mainly from the perspective of the group without ever glamorising their actions which resulted in 34 deaths and many injuries.
The script is based on a best-selling book by Stefan Aust, Chief Editor of the German weekly news magazine "Der Spiegel", but considerable credit must go to Uli Edel who both co-wrote and directed this compelling work that tries to face up honestly to a terribly painful period of post-war German history. It is a long film (two and a half hours) and sometimes confusing, with plenty of graphic violence, hard language and some nudity, but it raises sharp questions that still resonate today about the idealism of the young, the expression of political protest, and the role of the media and the police in confronting such anger and disillusionment.
Link: Wikipedia page on the RAF click here
“The Battle Of Algiers” (1965)
This is a remarkable film in many ways. It was commissioned by the Algerian Government to record the war of independence against the French, but it was directed and co-written by the Italian Marxist Gillo Pontecorvo and it is a honest work that shows the conflict from both sides. Shot at the actual locations and not long after the actual events, Pontecorvo produced a black-and-while newsreel-like narrative with few professional actors, so that the whole feel of the work is one of brutal reality. The dramatic score from fellow Italian Ennio Morricone only adds to the gripping atmosphere.
Peter Sellers played an illiterate gardener whose banalities on gardening are taken as insightful aphorisms in this political satire which concludes with the simpleton being made the American president by manipulative powerbrokers. Maybe, after Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, this movie does not look so fanciful.
Robert Altman may now have shuffled off to the great director's chair in the sky, but his hallmark style of multiple storylines and well-known actors has been picked up here by Emilio Estevez who is writer, director and one of the stars of this compelling work which manages to be both hugely entertaining and strikingly political.
Although there are no less than 22 characters - the majority played by very well-known faces in a star-studded, ensemble piece - all the action occurs on one day (6th June 1968) and in one place (the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles) - the day and the location of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as he was winning the California Democratic primary in a race that might have taken him back to the White House, this time as president instead of Richard Nixon. Much use of archive footage almost makes RFK himself one of the cast.
The inter-related stories of the staff and occupants of the hotel are told so well that, by the time the movie reaches its inevitable conclusion, we care about the welfare of the fictional charcters almost as much as we tense up at the knowledge of the senseless slaying of RFK. This is one film where it pays to stay for the credits because there are so many interesting photographs of RFK and other historic characters.
In one sense, this is probably a work that resonates particularly powerfully with those who were alive at the time (I was 20 but Estevez was only six). On the other hand, the speeches of RFK referenced by Estevez sound astonishingly contemporary, as he laments America's involvement in a foreign war, the growing threat to the environment, the scourge of working-class poverty, and the divisions between racial groups in the USA. If anything, for a general audience, the political messages are bludgeoned a little too strongly in the final set of speech extracts, but this is a minor complaint.
Martin Sheen, Emilio's father and liberal activist, a man who played John F Kennedy in a television mini-series and fictional president Josiah Barlett in "The West Wing", and one of the wonderful ensemble cast in "Bobby", must be mighty proud of his boy.
There’s no doubting that Warren Beatty is a political animal. This is the man who gave us “Reds” (1981) with its sympathetic portrayal of communism. Now Beatty has co-written and produced a work which savages contemporary American politics in a bizarre, but comedic and effective, style. Beatty himself is Senator Jay Bulworth in the last stages of a re-election campaign backed by the necessary big business finance obtained in return for a cynical Bill-blocking operation, but the corruption of Congressional politics has now eaten so deeply into his soul that he makes some fateful decisions. Halle Berry – in a grittier role than her appearance in “The Flintstones” – plays Nina, a poor black American who helps to reshape his vision.
The message is uncompromising: US politics has been totally corrupted by the campaign funding of corporate America and neither Republicans nor Democrats are prepared to fund the programmes necessary for disenfranchised blacks to move out of poverty and crime. But the format is new: this revolutionary message – on two occasions, even the word “socialism” is used – is delivered in the main through rap music. The movie’s intention is honourable, but do we really believe that, if a senior American politician came out against corporatism and called for public funding of anti-poverty programmes, voters would give him landslide support? Bullshit, Bulworth!
This film ought to be much better known than it is. Robert Redford plays the idealist lawyer Bill Mackay who is persuaded by the political establishment to run for the Senate on the grounds that he cannot possibly win and so he can say what he wants. The trouble is, of course, that he starts to do much better than expected, he begins to compromise his political beliefs to win votes and, before he knows it, the machine has swallowed him whole.
The movie anticipates Clintonism in the States and Blairism in Britain – where the spin often means more than the substance – and the best scene is where the whole charade becomes so farcical that the candidate simply cannot stop laughing as he tries to record a television interview. Both the director Michael Ritchie and the scriptwriter Jeremy Lander were political campaigners in the 1960s and they have obviously brought some of their own experience to this incisive movie.
This is another polemical offering from British director Ken Loach (see “Land And Freedom”). This time the focus of attention is Nicaragua in 1987, a time when the CIA-backed Contras are attempting to overthrow the revolutionary government of the Sandinistas. Glasgow bus driver Bobby, played consummately by Robert Carlyle of “Trainspotting”, accidentally makes the acquaintance of Nicaraguan refugee Carla, portrayed by dancer Oyanka Cabezas, and, in helping her to confront her wartime traumas, embarks on his own journey of discovery. Often the Glaswegian accents are almost as hard to decipher as the Latin American Spanish, but at least the later comes with sub-titles. However, Loach is known for the realism of his cinema and this film is uncompromisingly worthy but much too one-dimensional. A better film on the war in Nicaragua is “Under Fire”.
A year after I visited Cuba, the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of its revolution and the week of that commemoration marked the release of the first part of this lengthy diptych on the most famous - indeed iconic - participant in that revolution, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. In Cuba even today, Che's image is omnipresent, with a particularly huge portrayal on the side of the Ministry of Interior, and in Santa Clara - the town where Che fought and won the last and decisive battle of the revolution - there is museum marking his life and containing his remains that projects the man as a secular saint. How would this film represent such a complicated and controversial character?
Picking up where "The Motorcycle Diaries" left off, the movie covers the period from Che's meeting with Fidel Castro in 1955 to the successful overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959 with interspersed black-and-white scenes of Che's visit to New York in 1964 when he spoke to a journalist and addressed the United Nations. The whole thing has the feel of a documentary, with director Steven Soderbergh also responsible for the cinematography, and the sense of verisimilitude is aided by use of Spanish and actors who pass quite reasonably for the real life Fidel, Raúl, Camilo and the asthmatic Che himself (an excellent performance from Benicio del Toro).
Shot largely in Puerto Rico, this a serious and worthy work that has obviously been the subject of meticulous research - it is based partly on Che's own "Reminiscences Of The Cuban Revolutionary War" - and many individual scenes are gripping and insightful. The problem is that the sum of the parts is strangely lacking. The narrative lacks form and flow so that the story jerks around rather than sweeps us along and, in the process, we learn little about Che's motivation and character and see nothing of his noted cruelty and arrogance.
Part One left Che on the road to Havana following the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship; Part Two jumps forward seven years, so that we miss out his time as a minister in Castro's government and his abortive adventures in the Congo. Compared to the earlier film, this second element of the diptych is much tighter than the first in narrative terms, focusing only on Che's year in Bolivia (1966-67) and takes a straightforward chronological approach.
It has some of the strengths of the first film: the cinematography and direction of Steven Soderbergh, which give the whole work a lifelike, almost documentary feel, and the superb acting of Benicio del Toro who - even more than before - is rarely off the screen. However, the narrative is less compelling this time with the guerrillas seemingly going from one place to another with no obvious strategy. The main criticism of both parts though is that we have over four hours of excessively reverential treatment of an immensely controversial figure with little acknowledgement of the egotism that was at the heart of the doomed Bolivian mission.
Links:
official web site click here
Wikipedia page on Che Guevara click here
Directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Yves Montand, this French film was the same team as for “Z” (1968) and did for Left-wing communist regimes what the earlier movie did for Left-wing fascist regimes, only this time the violence was psychological rather than physical. It was based on the experiences of Arthur London, one of the 13 defendants (10 of them Jewish) in the infamous Stalinist show trial of Communist Party General Secretary Rudolf Slansky and others in Czechoslovakia in November 1952. As politics, this is an interesting work, showing how committed communists can be made to sacrifice their lives for the cause, but as cinema it is quite frankly slow and boring.
"The Contender" (2000)
As a political animal who can’t get enough of the American television series “The West Wing”, I approached this political thriller with high expectations and, on the whole, I was not disappointed. Former film journalist Rod Lurie provides an accomplished debut as both writer and director of this dramatic account of the Congressional nomination hearings of the first woman to be put forward as Vice-President.
There is a sharp script and authentic sets, but what really makes the movie is a triumvirate of fine performances. Jeff Bridges is excellent as Democratic President Jackson Evans, exhibiting the charisma of a Clinton but without any women – even a wife – in sight; a barely recognisable Gary Oldman fills yet another bad guy role with distinction as the hard-line Republican Shelly Runyon; and, in a role specifically written for her by Lurie, Joan Allen is superb as the nominee Laine Hanson, facing allegations of sexual misconduct with a coolness only a few degrees above her performance in “The Ice Storm”.
It all becomes a little trite towards the end with some implausible plot twists and two grand-standing speeches, but one forgives this because of its uncompromising support for political liberalism and gender equality. Indeed a measure of the difference between British and American politics is that positions which are so commonplace in the former – support for a woman’s right to choose an abortion, opposition to the death penalty, abolition of possession of hand guns, and separation of church and state - seem so radical when espoused by Allen’s character.
Link: official web site click here
At the dawn of the 21st century, the apartheid regime of South Africa seems like an aberration or nightmare of history, but the first political demonstration I went on in the late 1960s was against the regime and, when Richard Attenborough produced and directed this film in 1967, the edifice of discrimination seemed all too entrenched. Shot mainly in Zimbabwe, it is the true story of the 1975-1977 relationship between the charismatic Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko portrayed by Denzil Washington and white newspaper editor Donald Woods played by Kevin Kline.
The film is a moving and powerful attack on the system of apartheid which opens with the raid on the Crossroads shanty town and closes with the Soweto riots and a roll call of those who had died in South African jails. The soundtrack by James Fenton is brilliant and I cried at the scene of Biko's funeral which features the anthem "Nkosi Sikelel Afrika". At the end of the showing I attended, the London audience applauded. Some months later, I chose the film as the first serious work of cinema to be seen by my son (then 11) and he cried at the Soweto shootings and, like me, still remembers the film with emotion.
It seems churlish to criticise such a worthy work, but there is more of Woods than Biko in the film and the Afrikaaner case is hardly stated.
Footnote: On the day that Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years of imprisonment, on 11 February 1990, I played Fenton's version of "Nkosi Sikelel Afrika" at full volume in triumphant joy.
Acclaimed actor John Malkovich has made his directorial début with an assured political thriller that combines tension and intelligence to make for a gripping two and a quarter hours. The setting is a South American country which is unnamed, but the clear inspiration for the storyline is the early 1990s experience of Peru (which I have recently visited) when the bizarre Abimael Guzmán led the murderous Shining Path movement, while the movie was shot in Spain, Portugal and Ecuador.
Javier Bardem plays Augustin Rejas, a former lawyer turned policeman who manages rare dignity and honesty as he battles with the interventions of a regime teetering on the edge of a military dictatorship and the pursuit of a fanatical revolutionary codenamed Ezekiel, while struggling with the varying emotions associated with a vapid wife, an adoring daughter, and his daughter's dance teacher, the eponymous and allurring woman upstairs (Laura Morante as Yolanda). Bardem - who reminds me of an early Raul Julia - gives a languid yet charismatic performance and hopefully we will see much more of this talented actor.
In some respects the work is reminiscent of Costa-Gavras's "State Of Siege", a clip of which is actually used here. However, the movie is based on a novel by the British writer Nicholas Shakespeare, who wrote the screenplay which features some conversation in Quechua (a native language of Peru and Bolivia), and this is a more personal examination of terrorism than the 1973 movie.
Link: official web site click here
This is a film with a political setting rather than a political message. When the President of the United States has a stroke, a lookalike Baltimore businessman (Kevin Kline) is drafted to stand in for him and manages to impress the previously estranged First Lady (Sigourney Weaver) at least. Although a comedy, director Ivan Reitman injects some liberal political sentiments into the tale.
When this film was first released (1960), I and the state of Israel were just 12 years old; by the time I finally caught up with it (2008), we were both 60 and I had just visited the country for the first time. The creation of Israel - the subject of the movie - was highly problematic and its survival and success over six decades are little short of miraculous, so this film, based on the best-selling novel by Leon Uris, ought to have been thrilling, but it turned out to be an exercise in dullness.
Set and filmed in Cyprus and Israel (Jerusalem and Acre), there is a good deal of historical verisimilitude here, especially in the treatment of the conflict between the Haganah and the Irgun (for my description of these organisations click here), but everything moves so slowly and so deliberatively, while much of the acting - especially from the younger performers - is dire.
The presence of stars Paul Newman and Eve Marie Saint cannot lift the work beyond the well-intentioned but mediocre and the love story between their chararacters is one of the weaker lines of narrative. At the end, Newman's character, a senior Haganah man, makes a graveside speech looking forward to Jews and Arabs living together in peace. Of course, sadly we are still waiting.
The whole epic runs an incredible three and a half hours. There's a story - possibly apocryphal - that, at a preview with the director Otto Preminger, the Jewish comedian Mort Sahl stood up after three hours and pleaded "Let my people go!" In short, very worthy, very long, very pedestrian.
This is a must-see movie whose images live long in the mind. Written, narrated, produced and directed by the maverick Michael Moore - who has, almost single-handedly, reinvented the political documentary - this is a tour-de-force which deconstructs the simple-mindedness, dishonesty and corruption at the heart of the Bush administration. It is not fair or balanced, it is frequently outright satirical, it is sometimes too personalised, and (at one point at least) it is frankly cheap (the effort to persuade Congressmen to send their sons to war). But we know before we go into the cinema that this is not a standard documentary but a personal polemic and it is all the more powerful and impressive for that.
From the opening scenes - where we are reminded of how differently it should all have been (since Al Gore actually won the Presidential election of 2000) - the visuals are captivating. So often, Bush destroys himself by his vacant stare or his banal comment or totally inappropriate behaviour. The testimony from a dead soldier's mother from Moore's home town of Flint is very moving and the footage from Iraq itself, obtained while with US troops, is deeply disturbing. It reveals the class divide in America - poor, often black, men fighting wars that make rich, white men even richer - in a political system that likes to deny the concept of class. Indeed this is a very a rare work: a political film that might actually influence politics.
Michael Sheen is excellent as British television interviewer David Frost while Frank Langella is outstanding as American President Richard Nixon in this recreation of the famous four interviews conducted in the summer of 1977, three years after Nixon was forced from office after the cover-up of Watergate. The strategy, the tactics, the mind games make for compelling viewing and the script - adapted by Peter Morgan from his own play - is razor-sharp. Ron Howard directed this in between "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels And Demons" and knowing that this particular conspiracy was the real thing and not the invention of Dan Brown makes the movie all the more chilling.
The life and death of Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi is inspirational material for a political movie and British producer and director Richard Attenborough spent a lot of time and money to bring this almost old-fashioned epic to the screen with wonderful locations and beautiful photography. Ben Kingsley gives a brilliant performance in the eponymous role and the rest of the cast includes a role call of fine (mainly British) actors including John Mills, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard and Edward Fox. However, at 188 minutes, it is somewhat ponderous and Attenborough's treatment of his subject is almost too reverential.
A little over a decade after its demise, communism in Europe is becoming an historical curiosity. In Prague, there is now a Museum of Communism (next door to a McDonalds) and here we have a German film which satirises the Honecker regime through an inventive storyline set just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A middle-aged woman - movingly played by Katrin Sass, a successful actress in the former East Germany - goes into a coma due to a heart attack and, when she resumes consciousness eight months later, her son (Daniel Brühl) is warned that a sudden shock could kill her, so - through increasingly complex contrivances - he has to maintain the fiction for her that communism is still thriving. This requires him not just to disguise, but ultimately to subvert, history by representing the pulling down of the wall as a kindly act by the Communist regime to admit West Germans disillusioned with the excesses of capitalism.
Perhaps one needs to have lived in an East European communist state (or at least to have visited one - as I did) to appreciate the bitterness of some of the humour and certainly this movie has done incredibly well in its native Germany. But anyone can enjoy this work, directed and co-written by Wolfgang Becker, for its mixture of quaint love of a son for his mother and sending up of some of the injustices and indeed absurdities of the former regime. The most memorable visual image is a brief, but somewhat surreal, one involving a statue of Lenin, seemingly bidding farewell to a failed system permeated by waste and deceit.
Link: official web site click here
Like most ethnic conflicts around the world, the divisions in Rwanda between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis have long antecedents, in this case the invasion of the Rwanda highlands by the Tutsis from Ethiopia in the 15th century. However, it was Belgium - who ruled the country under a UN mandate from 1918 to 1961 - who institutionalised the discrimination by favouring Tutsis and introducing identity cards which specified the holders ethnic group. The spark which lit the tinder was the shooting down of the aircraft carrying the Hutu President on 6 April 1994. In the next 100 days, there was a ferocious outbreak of genocide orchestrated by the Interahamwe militia and sanctioned by the Hutu government in which around 800,000 mostly Tutsis were massacred while the world community failed to intervene. A decade later, a kind of collective guilt sees the release of no less than four films about these events, the most high profile being "Hotel Rwanda" which garnered three Academy Award nominations.
Portraying death on this scale in a work of 'entertainment' almost demands that we observe the savagery through the prism of selected individuals and, in this case, Irish writer and director Terry George has chosen to use the real-life experience of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina and his family. Rwanda is often called 'Le pays des Milles Collines' (the Land of a Thousand Hills) and Paul worked at the Sabena-owned Hotel des Mille Collines, a four-star establishment in the capital of Kigali. A well-educated Hutu, he was married to a Tutsi and had three young children, so he was geographically and ethnically at the heart of the madness. Like a kind of Oskar Schindler, he used a mixture of simple bribery and his sharp wits, together with charm and even obsequiousness, to create a haven in the horror that enabled 1,268 mainly Tutsis to survive.
American actor Don Cheadle, who played a cockney fool in "Ocean's Eleven" & "Ocean's Twelve", gives a powerful and textured performance here which marks him out as someone who is going to become an A-list star, while able British actress Sophie Okonedo is his wife Tatiana (Tutsis are lighter-skinned and finer-featured), and it is such a change to see the leading roles in a movie taken by black actors. The fear and powerlessness of the hotel occupants - over a thousand men, women and children crammed into a 113-room establishment - is well created and sustained. The settings are very realistic, being largely shot in Johannesburg, and most of the technical and support crew were African. The focus of the action is the hotel itself and the violence is deliberately understated and left largely to the imagination.
While one does not wish to see killing portrayed gratuitously, this artistic decision runs the risk that a largely ignorant western audience fails to appreciate the true nature and scale of this machete-fuelled rampage of rape and murder but, this reservation aside, "Hotel Rwanda" is an important and worthy work that should serve as a political warning of the price of international inaction in the face of ethnic conflict. Paul Rusesabagina, now lives in Belgium with his family, and recently told the US "People" magazine: "What happened in Rwanada is now happening in Darfur, in the Congo, in all of these places they are butchering innocent civilians. It is high time we know that a human life in Africa is as important as a human life in the west."
Link: Paul Rusesabagina click here
Who killed John F Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963 and why? New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison – played by Kevin Costner – carried out his own investigations which drew very different conclusions than the official Warren Commission. This film was co-written, co-produced and directed by committed Oliver Stone and it is his 3 hour 10 minute demolition of the lone gunman theory. It is a powerful piece of film making with some fine performances – Joe Pesci, Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Oldman are among the other actors – but Stone’s alternative conspiracy theory casts a net that seems to include almost every American agency and institution. Basically the message is that ‘they’ did not want JFK to pull the USA out of Vietnam.
Directed by the committed British Ken Loach, this was a British/Spanish/German co-production about the Spanish Civil War with half the dialogue in English and half in Spanish with subtitles. The work demands a lot of the viewer with, at one stage, a prolonged political debate between the political factions, but there is some good acting – especially from Ian Hart as the unemployed Liverpudlian who volunteers for the International Brigade – and some dramatic action sequences. The viewpoint is that of the Republican side and It is fiercely uncompromising in its stance, claiming that the Stalinist Communist Party sabotaged the revolution by liquidating the Trotskyist POUM (and the anarchists). Although no doubt well-intentioned, the film is rather confusing for those who know little about the factional differences and too one-sided and simplistic in its support for the Militia viewpoint.
Commendably German cinema is not afraid to confront the ugly past of the country. We had "The Boat" and "Downfall" on the Nazi era and "Good Bye Lenin!" and now "The Lives Of Others" on the communist period. Like "Good Bye Lenin!" this newest film is set and shot in East Berlin and features the collapse of the Wall in 1989. However, whereas the former was a satire set mostly after the fall of communism, "The Lives Of Others" is a sombre work located overwhelmingly before the demise of the regime.
The film opens with the brutal facts on the formidable size of the secret police apparatus operated by the former East Germany: the Stasi employed 100,000 full-time workers and had an incredible 400,000 informants. In a country of just 17m, there weer 5M personal files. Playright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his lover, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedek), think that they can survive the worst of the surveillance machine but, when a Government minister decides that he wants Christa-Maria for himself, a chain of events is set in motion which changes everything and everybody.
Surprisingly the greatest changes occur with the Stasi agent assigned to bug the flat of Georg & Christa-Maria. Ulrich Mühe gives an outstanding performance as the intially cold and efficient Gerd Wiesler and the poignancy of his role is only heightened when one remembers that Muhe himself was married to a Stasi agent. At first utterly chilling, he and we are moved by the gradual transformation that goes on in his perspective and behaviour. The Stasi probaly had nobody like Wiesler but, as a cinematic device, the character works well.
It is remarkable that such an assured film could be the début work of 33 year old Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck who both wrote and directed it. Deservedly it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 2006.
Links:
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)
The 1962 version of "The Manchurian Candidate" - starring Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Harvey - caught the conspiratorial mood of the time when so many Americans saw a commie round every corner. John Frankenheimer's classic version of Richard Condon's 1959 novel - made in black and white - is memorable for its chilling narrative and original plotting.
“The Manchurian Candidate” (2004)
The current 'war of terror' might have seemed like an apposite time to attempt a remake of the 1962 original. I've been a fan of Denzel Washington since he played Steve Biko in "Cry, Freedom" and I regard Meryl Streep as the finest actress of her generation, so the chance to see the two starring together for the first time was an attractive one. Since I'm a political animal, the vehicle of a political thriller appeared to add to the attraction. But Jonathan Demme's remake, although it has a certain style, is overall a real disappointment. Frankly it is lacklustre when it is not simply silly.
Streep gives a bravado performance as the manipulative mother of the Vice-Presidential candidate who is under external control and Washington is always watchable, but Liev Schreiber as the brain-drilled war hero and politician is robotic even when he is not 'activated'. The 'up-dating' of the story to make corporations rather than Communists the enemy is a well-worn theme, ranging from the Peter Sellers' movie "Being There" to the more recent television series "24". What this new version tells us is that Americans are no less fearful and paranoid than they were in the Cold War and Hollywood is no better at remakes than it ever was.
Directed by Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”), this is a really excellent film: a serious and intelligent subject – the liberation of Ireland by the violence of the IRA between 1916-1922 – handled in a dramatic, even entertaining, but reasonably balanced manner. All the performances – minus the Julia Roberts role – are fine and Liam Neeson, rarely off the screen as the eponymous revolutionary, deserved an Oscar. It is incredible to think that the structure of Irish politics even today is that determined by the period depicted in this movie and that the partition of Ireland – which led to the assassination of Collins – is still causing death in Ireland and Britain almost a century later.
Following his three French-language political thrillers (“Z”, “The Confession”, and “State Of Siege”), Constantin Costa-Gavras made this his first English-language film. The territory is back – like “State Of Siege” – in Latin America, this time the American-backed coup against Allende in Chile in 1973. What made the film so compelling and so controversial is that it told the true-life account of American parents, played by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, to discover the facts behind the disappearance of their writer son Charles Horman in the aftermath of the coup.
Like “Z”, the music is memorable and this time comes from Costa-Gavras fellow Greek Vangelis. Overall it is a depressing work but, like all this director’s work, it forces us to face some uncomfortable truths. According to American documents declassified in early 2000, the CIA may have actually given the Pinochet Government the go ahead to murder Horman.
"The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004)
This is a very different kind of road movie: South America instead of North America, Spanish language instead of English, political consciousness rather than sexual liberation. It is the tale of an eight-month, 7,000-mile trip made in 1952 by Argentinean friends Ernesto Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal), then a 23 year old medical student but destined to become a revolutionary communist in Cuba, the Congo and Bolivia (where he was killed in 1967), and Alberto Granado Rodrigo de la Serna), then a 30 year old postgraduate in biochemistry and now (as the film shows in its final moments) an 83-year old still living in Cuba. The journey starts on a 1939 Norton 500 motorbike (hence the title), which they dubbed "The Mighty One", but the vehicle proved to be something less than almighty, necessitating less personal forms of transport.
The central performances are wholly convincing and the dialogue is crisp, credible and at times quite humorous. The film looks wonderful: shot largely in a documentary style, it features location shooting in Argentina, the Andes, Chile, and Peru and cinematographer Eric Gautier evokes a wonderful sense of time and place, while the use of non-professional bit players with marvellously expressive faces creates a real sense of authenticity. Above all, Brazilian director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera have ensured that the political messages are subtly understated. The viewer is left to observe the grinding poverty, yet quiet dignity, of the migrant workers, the itinerant miners, and the leper victims and sense - as young Guevera obviously did - the acute sense of injustice.
This is a movie which had resonances for my wife and me. She identified with the seriously asthmatic young Guevara, since her brother died of asthma when he was 21, and we have visited several of the locations featured in the film, including Cusco, Machu Picchu, and Lima. If this deeply impressive and memorable work has a fault is that that it treats its subject a little too reverentially. Guevara is portrayed somewhat one-dimensionally as uncompromisingly honest and almost saint-like in his concern for others and there is no hint of the ferocious rages and utter ruthlessness which was to mark his revolutionary leadership.
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This was directed by the Greek Costa-Gavras and, as with most films by this director, there is an interesting political theme. The script came from Hungarian-born Joe Eszterhas who went on to write such very different and more commercial movies as "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls". Oscar-nominated Jessica Lange (who had come a long way since the remake of "King Kong") is first-rate as an American lawyer who successfully defends her Hungarian-born father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) against war crime charges involving participation in the Hungarian wartime fascist movement the Arrow Cross. As the movie develops and she visits Budapest, she is forced to see events and her beloved father in a new, much darker, light.
Moviemaking is still overwhelmingly a male business with most directors being male and most films telling a male story, so it is a refreshing change here to see a female co-writer and co-director (Marjane Satrapi) telling a female tale (actually her own). Even more unusual is the setting (modern day Iran) and the format (black and white animation), so this a movie that is especially memorable and moving, by turns being tragic and amusing and at all times unremittingly political and feminist.
The original film is in French and based on a graphic novel written in French and drawn by Satrapi who has now lives in the Marais district of Paris with her Swedish husband, but the version I saw was dubbed into (American) English. This works well for a animated feature - there's no problem with lip-syncing and the technique allows one to concentrate fully on the impressive graphics.
"Persepolis" - named after the ancient capital of Persia that was ransacked by the troops of Alexander the Great - was nominated for an Academy Award in the section for Best Animated Feature and, while it never stood a chance against "Ratatouille", this is still an exceptional work that deserves a large audience.
This is a good film which follows closely a well-written novel of the same title, originally described as by “Anonymous” but later assigned to journalist Joe Klein. It is a parody of Bill Clinton’s successful bid for the White House in 1992 with the message: accept that your hero will be flawed and support him anyway for the greater prize. John Travolta and Emma Thompson are excellent as the promiscuous candidate Jack Stanton and his long-suffering wife Susan, but the ‘narrator’ character Adrian Lester is a bit weak.
Set in the French-occupied Vietnam of 1952, this is based on the 1955 novel by left-wing British novelist Graham Green and is a remake of the Mankiewicz anti-communist film issued in 1957. Coming out towards the end of 2002 as the United States prepares for a major confrontation with Iraq, this new version, directed by Australian Phillip Noyce, is not likely to appeal much to traditional Right-wing American sentiment and indeed the very limited release in the States means that few Americans will see it. But it is a compelling work which - unlike so much Hollywood fare - makes clear the moral complexity of one country intervening in the affairs of another and explores the origins of America's most serious foreign policy blunder.
Brendan Fraser is good as the eponymous aid worker whose life turns out to be somewhat less quiescent than at first appears. Do Hai Yen is beautiful as the Vietnamese girl who sees him as a route to the West. But it is Michael Caine, as the "Times" foreign correspondent Thomas Fowler, who is wonderful as the initially indolent, self-serving ex-pat who finds that, as he learns more about his new world, he has to make a moral and difficult choice. The film gains much by being shot on Vietnamese locations, including Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and the excellent soundtrack complements well the atmosphere of exotism and danger.
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How could a film about the struggles of the American far Left attract multi-million dollar finance from Barclays Bank and pull in large audiences in Reagan’s USA? “Reds” was a personal triumph for Warren Beatty - then aged 45 – who produced and directed this huge work, co-wrote the screenplay (with British Leftwing playwright Trevor Griffiths), and played the leading role.
At one level, “Reds” is a love story. It portrays the stormy affair and marriage between the American journalist, poet and playwright, John Reed (played by Beatty) – the author of “Ten Days That Shook The World” - and the feminist writer, Louise Bryant (played by Diane Keaton). But this grand romance is a Hollywood device to give popular flavour to the narration of the disintegration of the American Left and the birth of the Soviet Union.
It is a very long film – at 3 hours 19 minutes, just 21 minutes less than “Gone With The Wind” – and, in part, this is because it deploys the unusual device of intercutting throughout the movie interviews with 32 “witnesses”, people who actually knew Reed and Bryant or moved in similar circles. However, it is compelling viewing and the principal achievement is to present something of the excitement and idealism, as well as the factionalism and verbosity, of revolutionary politics.
"Platoon" and "Salvador" were both released in 1986 and both written and directed by the renegade Oliver Stone. The former won the Academy Award for Best Film, while the latter was a commercial failure. Clearly, "Salvador" - an examination of the poverty and carnage of near civil war in 1980-81 El Salvador - was just too political and too critical of American foreign policy for US audiences. However, James Woods gives an excellent and Oscar-nominated perforamce as a self-centred and hardliving American war photographer based on the real-life Richard Boyle who co-wrote the script. The anarchic violence is remiscent of "Missing", while the photographer at war theme reminds one of "Under Fire", two other political films about Latin America (it was actually shot in Mexico). The movie is fast-paced, powerful and committed.
“The Seduction Of Joe Tynan” (1979)
Charming and ambitious Tynan is a husband, father and US Senator, played by Alan Alda, who is seduced in two ways. He falls for an aide (Meryl Streep) and his is consumed by politics, as a result of which he loses his mistress and then his wife and children. Although the subject matter is familiar, the film is finely observed and very well written, by Alda himself. There are some excellent performances, especially from (then newcomer) Streep, and one of the other actors is the unlikely named Rip Torn.
In three months of sheer horror, some 800,000 Rwandans, overwhemingly Tutsis, were massacred by bands of Hutu Interahamwe militia, aided by the national army, in an orgy of violence that still shames the international community that failed to intervene. "Shooting Dogs" is centred on events at the Ecole Technique Officiele where, on day five of the nightmare, some 2,000 Tutsis (called "cockroaches" by the Hutu) were murdered, and the title comes from the willingness of the UN peacekeepers to shoot at the dogs consuming human corpses while being totally unwilling to take on the killers themselves.
It's good that a subject as serious as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda can be addressed by filmmakers, but whether the topic suddenly needs no less than four works must be debatable. However, from a cinematic point of view, it is fascinating to see how different filmmakers are addressing what is intrinsically an exceptionally sensitive and uncomfortable subject.
"Shooting Dogs" simply has to be compared to "Hotel Rwanda". Not only do they address the same issue, but essentially they do so in the same manner, by locating the horrors in a specific location (a hotel in "HR", a school in "SD"), in each case a place where the threatened Tutsis might have expected protection by UN troops (Canadian in "HR", Belgian in "SD"). However, the differences in approach are profound.
Whereas "HR" was shot in Johannesburg, "SD" was filmed on location in Kigali itself in the actual places where most of the events portrayed took place. Indeed thousands of local extras were used and a good number of the technical support crew were locally recruited. The end credits summarizes the losses of some of these crew members in a very powerful sequence. So, in a sense, "SD" is more authentic than "HR" and furthermore the violence - largely understated in "HR" - is more explicit in "SD" with the brutality of the machete made very clear. Certainly, for many of the local actors and ectras, the whole production was deeply traumatci.
However, for me, "Hotel Rwanda" is the better film. Whereas "SD" examines the situation through the eyes of two white characters - an elderly Catholic priest played by John Hurt and an idealist young school teacher portrayed by Hugh Dancy - at the heart of "HR" is the black (Hutu) hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina. Whereas "SD" is a throughly depressing work - narrating the slaughter of 2,000 Tutsis (many of them children), ""HR" seems to strike a note of hope in the human spirit by showing how a few potential victims were able to survive the barbarity. Above all, "HR" is much the more professional film and conveys the sheer fear involved the more effectively.
Neverthelss British director Michael Caton-Jones has produced a very worthy work and the BBC is to be commended for part funding it. It was co-written by David Belton, a former BBC Newsnight journalist who worked in Rwanda in 1994 and two of the minor characters are members of a brave BBC television crew.
Following “Z” (Greek fascism) and “The Confession” (Czech communism), this third French-language offering from the committed director Costa-Gavras examined Latin American politics through the conflict between Tupamaro guerillas and a CIA-back regime in Uruguay. Yves Montand - who was the star of the two earlier films - is back, but this time he takes the unsympathetic role of the meddling CIA agent. Although worthy, even courageous, the film has too much dialogue and is too one-dimensional.
This is a tension-packed, photographer’s view of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 which was actually filmed in Mexico. The director is Roger Spottiswoode and the stars are the always impressive Gene Hackman, a much improved Nick Nolte, and the beautiful Joanna Cassidy. It is really an astonishing film to come out of Hollywood: totally sympathetic to the Sandinista cause and arguably too ’black and white’ in its treatment of guerillas and government. What ultimately elevates the movie is its honest representation that the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Finally the photography and sound are superb.
To see a film on the life of America's 43rd president just four days after the election of the 44th president was a weird experience. Let's face it: George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama could hardly be more different - Republican and Democrat, shock and awe, literally white and black. Now radical director Oliver Stone (the same age as his subject and a contemporary at Yale) is not noted for always being subtle, but here he makes a real effort to be respectful and even understanding of Bush; yet the whole work teeters on the edge of parody - much more like "The Jon Stewart Show" than "The West Wing".
Josh Brolin is remarkably good as the eponymous president, looking and sounding as like Bush Jr as any actor could. Indeed several of the support roles involve very passable imitations of the principals, such as James Cromwell as Bush Sr, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, and Toby Jones as Karl Rove. The two black characters stand out for different reasons: Colin Powell (played by Jeffrey Wright) is sympathetically represented as warning against the invasion of Iraq while, by contrast, Condoleeza Rice (Thandie Newton) is portrayed as weak and sycophantic.
The eight-year presidency of Dubya is a rich source of momentous material, yet this movie comes across as surprisngly flat. The constant flash backs to Bush's youthful years do not help and a more chronological treatment would have worked better. The choice of songs and certain fantasy images show an unfortunate heavy-handedness. Above all, the central theme - that Bush Jr was always trying to impress and ultimately out do his unloving and unforgiving father, even to the point of toppling Saddam Hussein where the older man pulled back - is really just so much psychobabble.
The first time we see W. in the Oval Office he is discussing the use in his next speech of the chilling phrase "axis of evil". His Manichaean view of the world, underlined by his born again Christianity, was his fundamental flaw - and Stone's body of work too often suffers from the same fault.
Animation is not just for children - the French “Persepolis" (about a girl in Iran) made that clear and the Israeli "Waltz With Bashir" (about the invasion of Lebanon) dramatically underlines the point. The Israeli work was written , produced and directed by Ari Folman and is based on his experiences as a soldier and his video of his exploration of the traumatic events some 20 years later. Like any really powerful film, the opening and closing sequences are stunning - but the intervening one and half hours contain so many moving and disturbing images - some simply surreal - that the animation plays in the mind long after the credits have rolled.
The title is a reference to Bashir Gemayel, the newly appointed President of Lebanon, who was assassinated on 14 September 1982 following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 6 June 1982. The assassination led the Israeli command to authorise the entrance of a force of approximately 150 Phalangist fighters into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, resulting in a massacre of at least 800 civilians. It is this horrific incident that is the emotional heart of the movie and the cause of Folman's mental repression.
Link: Sabra and Shatila massacre click here
The wars in former Yugoslavia were prolonged and bitter and - need we remind ourselves - located in 'civilised' Europe, so it is surprising that the conflict has resulted in so few films. It's almost as if there is a collective guilt about the weakness of international involvement until the Serbs tried to subjugate Kosovo and NATO finally intervened. Hollywood still shows no interest in this topic - this movie is a largely British effort, although it features two American stars (Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomie) in support roles.
The narrative, most of which actually occurred, is set in the Bosnian capital Sarejevo and - like "Under Fire" dealing with Nicaragua - focuses on war as seen through foreign media correspondents. It is based on the book by the British ITN journalist Michael Nicholson entitled "Natasha's Story". The reporter Michael Henderson (played sensitively by little-known Stephen Dillane) finds himself unexpectedly involved emotionally in events to the extent of deciding illegally to bring supposed orphan Emira out of the war-ravaged country and to his own home in England.
British director Michael Winterbottom shot the film on location in Sarajevo itself and parts of Croatia and Macedonia and this, plus the semi-documentary style of filming, gives a powerful authenticity to the work. There is no political background or scene-setting: we jump straight into the carnage and are as confused as the Bosnians being shelled and shot at. The political messages come from short but effective news clips of quotes from international figures, showing the powerlessness and incapacity demonstrated by too many of them at the time.
Many of the images are bloody and graphic. More films should deal with real issues in such a powerful manner. Then maybe we would take more notice at the time of such conflicts and not wait for them to appear on the big screen.
Like "Cry Freedom" which was released in the same year, this is an examination of the South African apartheid system through the prism of a true life, very personal relationship, in the this case that between a mother and daughter. It is based on the experience of white African National Congress supporter Ruth First (played by Barbara Hershey) who suffered 117 days detention without trial in 1963. The events are seen largely through the viewpoint of her confused and hurt 13-year old daughter Shawn Slovo (played by newcomer Jodhi May). In fact, the screenplay was written by the grown up Slovo for the directorial debut of Chris Menges.
Inevitably, given the subject matter and time of release, "A World Apart" is bound to be compared with "Cry Freedom". While it does not have the narrative, pace, and power of Attenborough's work, it is a well-made and moving indictment of apartheid that stands up in its own right and poses the painful question of how much a political activist should sacrifice her own family's welfare and happiness for a greater good.
Footnote: Ruth First died in 1982, killed by a parcel bomb which exploded in her office in Mozambique.
Abraham Lincoln has an iconic status in American political history as the President at the time of the Civil War, so it is understandable that Hollywood would want to honour him, but this is a slow and sentimental portrayal of a slight storyline, centred on the aspiring politician's successful defence of two young men falsely accused of murder. The great director John Ford did the honours and 34-year old Henry Fonda managed to look remarkably like the clean-shaven Lincoln of the time.
This remains one of the most compelling political films ever made. Directed by the Greek Constantin Costa-Gavras in the language of his adopted country France, it is savage account of the colonels’ regime in Greece, centred around the murder of the politician Lambrakis (portrayed by charismatic Yves Montand) in 1963. It makes a powerful impact – aided by the music from Mikis Theodorakis - and, when I saw it at the National Film Theatre in London, there was applause at the end.
Incidentally, how many other films do you know that have a single letter title? The only ones I know are the 1933 classic “M”, its 1951 remake, a 1973 movie called “W”, a 2002 'Othello'-inspired film called "O", and the 2008 bio-pic of the 43rd US president "W.".
All reviews by ROGER DARLINGTON.
Last modified on 3 October 2009
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article on what was right and what was wrong click here
article on why it could never have really happened click here
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Graham Greene's Vietnam click here