"Welcome To Sarajevo" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI, Dublin
A serious, heartfelt denunciation of the mindless horrors of war - and of the fence-sitting posturing of world leaders while the death toll escalated - Michael Winterbottom's haunting Welcome To Sarajevo bristles with anger and energy.
The movie has come under fire from war correspondents because Winterbottom and his screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce, stayed away from Sarajevo even though the war was still raging while they were developing the screenplay. Fair comment, but there remains an undeniable sincerity about Winterbottom's intentions, and the film is as restrained and wholly unsentimental as the director's uncompromising work on Roddy Doyle's Family and most recently, the Thomas Hardy adaptation, Jude.
As the credits roll and Van Morrison's Young Lovers Do soars on the soundtrack, the film opens on a family's joyous wedding preparations - a sequence which ends abruptly when the mother is shot dead on the street by a sniper. The time is 1992, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo.
Like so many movies set in war zones, the events are viewed through the eyes of a reporter, in this case a British television reporter played by Stephen Dillane. He is based on the ITN correspondent, Michael Nicholson, whose book, Natasha's Story - chronicling his impulsive decision to smuggle home and adopt Emira (Emira Nusevic), an orphan apparently abandoned by her mother - drives the screenplay. Nicholson discovered the young girl when he turned to human interest stories to reach his British viewers, and he reported from the beleaguered Ljubica Ivezic orphanage, while castigating the UN for leaving its hungry, ailing young inhabitants in such mortal danger. Winterbottom chooses a similar form of reportage as he employs this personal story as a way of illuminating the broader picture, while cutting regularly between his own material and shocking actuality footage. Welcome To Sarajevo persuasively deals with the working conditions of the international war correspondents, their responsibility to objectivity, their response when they themselves become the story, and their frustration at being shoved off the headlines by ephemeral stories about, for example, the Duke and Duchess of York seeking a divorce. And its depictions of the sheer senselessness of random violence and destruction are startling and often powerful.
Stephen Dillane's understated central performance sets the tone for the film's international cast, which includes Woody Harrelson, Kerry Fox, Marisa Tomei, Goran Visnjic, Emily Lloyd and James Nesbitt. It is an impeccably crafted film, particularly in the cinematography of Daf Hobson, the editing of Trevor Waite and the production design of Mark Geraghty.
Welcome To Sarajevo does not purport to be the definitive film on the Bosnian conflict, and it is neither the first on the subject - coming after Ulysses' Gaze by Theo Angelopoulos, Underground by Emir Kusturica and Vukovar Poste Restante by Boro Draskovic - nor is it likely to be the last.
Michael Dwyer
"Inventing The Abbotts" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI, Dublin
Prior to directing Dancing At Lughnasa on Wicklow locations this summer, the accomplished Irish director Pat O'Connor worked in the US on Inventing The Abbotts, an engaging coming-of-age story fraught with class divisions. Adapted by Ken Hixon from a short story by Sue Miller, the film opens in the small Illinois town of Haley in 1957, where a tent is erected for the engagement party of Alice Abbott (Joanna Going), the eldest of three daughters in one of the wealthiest families in town.
The guests include the Holt brothers, Jacey (Billy Crudup) and Doug (Joaquin Phoenix), who live with their widowed mother (Kathy Baker) who has raised them on her income as a teacher and who, Jacey believes, was swindled out of a patent by the Abbotts. Jacey becomes sexually involved with the most outgoing of the three Abbott sisters, Eleanor (Jennifer Connelly), which incurs the wrath of her father (Will Patton), while Doug falls for the youngest sister, Pam (Liv Tyler). All of their lives and relationships become more complicated as the film follows them over the next three years. A tender, sensitive and beautifully realised picture of adolescent longing and rebellion, Inventing The Abbotts is a handsome, lovingly-handled romantic drama which establishes a firm period feel. Refreshingly, it achieves this without recourse to the cliche of turning the soundtrack into a jukebox of old hit singles - Michael Kamen's unobtrusive score makes for a much more effective option.
Pat O'Connor once again shows his skill for eliciting credible, natural performances, and his exemplary cast features glowing portrayals from Kathy Baker, Billy Crudup, Liv Tyler and, in a star-making role, Joaquin Phoenix, who displays a depth and maturity not seen in his earlier work.
Michael Dwyer
"Seven Years in Tibet' (PG) Nationwide
The French director Jean-Jacques Annaud's taste for dramatic, large-scale compositions has been seen before in films such as In The Name Of The Rose and Quest For Fire, and he does some fine work again in this version of the true story of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountaineer who became tutor to the Dalai Lama in Tibet after escaping from a POW camp in India during the second World War. In fact, there are moments in Seven Years In Tibet which wouldn't look out of place in one of David Lean's epics. It's not all just pretty pictures, though - despite some difficulties towards the end, Annaud manages for the most part to deliver a moving story which avoids most of the pitfalls of "worthiness".
In this he's helped by his leading actor, Brad Pitt, who provides a surprisingly strong central presence as the story winds its way from Vienna to Nepal to India and finally to Tibet, covering a time span of more than 10 years (it almost seems like carping to point out that he doesn't seem to age a day, despite enduring all kinds of vicissitudes). Pitt plays Harrer, as an arrogant Aryan of the worst kind (revelations about the extent of the man's involvement with the Nazis in the 1930s led to some script additions in post-production), an egomaniac who deserts his pregnant wife to join a German team set on climbing one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. During the climb he treats the rest of the team, particularly his commander, (David Thewlis) with contempt - an attitude which doesn't change when the expedition finds itself imprisoned by the British following the outbreak of war, or when the two escape and make for Tibet.
Only when he arrives in the remote kingdom does Pitt's attitude slowly start to shift, and he is overcome by remorse for his earlier behaviour towards those who loved him. And it's through his relationship with the teenaged Dalai Lama (remarkably well played by Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk) that he comes to reconcile himself with his own past, just before the Chinese government brutally annexes the country.
There's a lot of storytelling to get through here, but Annaud manages it remarkably well - only a slightly sentimental subtext about Harrer's relationship with the son he has never seen is not quite successful, while Pitt's impressive performance is well balanced by Thewlis, a superb actor who has made some unfortunate career choices since his bravura role in Mike Leigh's Naked. Annaud's previous experiences of cinematically imagining distant, complex cultures stands him in good stead in his idyllic but persuasive portrayal of Tibetan society - not an easy thing to pull off in a big-budget English-language production. It's not surprising that the Chinese government has protested so vehemently about the film, which pulls no punches in portraying its brutal behaviour in Tibet, and sometimes the broader tragedy and Harrer's parallel personal odyssey seem yoked together, but this is a moving, intelligent and very beautiful film that feels less than its 140 minutes' length.
Hugh Linehan
"Lawn Dogs" (15) Nationwide
You can see what director John Duigan is trying to get at with Lawn Dogs, but somehow this idiosyncratic moral fable about the struggle between corrupt society and childish innocence never succeeds in making an emotional connection. Sam Rockwell plays Trent, a 21-year-old who mows the lawns for the rich inhabitants of Camelot Gardens, a brand new "gated community" with its own private police force on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky. Humiliated by the local children and spoiled adolescents, he strikes up a friendship with Devon (Mischa Barton), a new arrival with her family to the Gardens. Together they share secrets, especially Devon's favourite fairy stories of Baba Yaga's lair, which she equates with Trent's run-down trailer home in the woods. But the friendship frightens Trent's socially ambitious parents, and the wrath of the perverse community descends on Trent.
There are some good things here, most notably a remarkable performance from 10-year-old Barton, while Rockwell is also convincing. But the visual style, which could be characterised as generic American low-budget, fails to match up to the quirkiness and originality of the script. The switches from nightmare town to idealised country seem forced, as does the broad satire on suburban mores. Most importantly, the film's rhythms are strangely uneven, as though it had been edited by a novice (which Duigan is not), losing any real sense of tension or narrative drive. The overall effect is of distancing, preventing any real immersion in the story on the part of the viewer, which is surely the last thing one wants from a modern fairy tale.
Hugh Linehan
"Nothing To Lose" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI, Dublin
Yet another light caper movie which throws together two characters from sharply contrasting backgrounds only to have them bond in adversity, writer-director Steve Oedekerk's Nothing To Lose gets off to a jaunty start with some playful banter between an advertising executive, Nick Beam (Tim Robbins) and his wife (Kelly Preston). That atmosphere sours soon afterwards when Beam, convinced she is having sex with his boss (Michael McKean) storms out dazed and confused.
The other principal character in this opposites-attract buddy movie is T. Paul (Martin Lawrence), a desperate black carjacker who has the misfortune to target Beam as his victim on that fateful day. The antagonism between the two men gradually dilutes as the script contrivances have them joining forces against a couple of crooks played in over-ripe performances by John C. McGinley and Giancarlo Esposito. Director Oedekerk, on his second movie after Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, enlivens the proceedings in a zany cameo as a security guard who fancies himself as a singer and dancer, while the sharp performances of Robbins and Lawrence help elevate the picture above the routine nature of its familiar plotting. Unwisely, but probably inevitably, it all turns sentimental in the later stages before the upbeat ending when Coolio, accompanied by a heavenly choir, raps his way through Pachelbel's Canon on C U When U Get There.
Michael Dwyer
"Excess Baggage" (15) UCIs
A wilful young heiress is accidentally "kidnapped" by a naive, romantic young man, setting off the wrath of her uncaring tycoon father, who orders his minions to set off in pursuit . . . the plot may sound familiar, but this isn't A Life Less Ordinary, it's Excess Baggage, the latest vehicle for what it's now becoming clear are the modest talents of Clueless star and Batgirl Alicia Silverstone. If the latest film from the Trainspotting team was a mild disappointment, this similarly-themed romantic caper movie is an early turkey for Christmas, despite the presence of the elegant Benicio Del Toro (he of the peculiar accent in The Usual Suspects) and the always reliable Christopher Walken. Del Toro is the unwilling kidnapper who finds that Silverstone comes as an unexpected bonus when he robs her BMW, and Walken is the hitman uncle who sets out to get her back home to Dad (Jack Thompson). Along the way, there are several uninspired detours involving rednecks in a diner, dim Mafiosi and even dimmer policemen. None of it is particularly funny, but it's Silverstone's "look-at-me-ain't-I-cute" antics which make this one to steer well clear of.
By Hugh Linehan
"Plein Soleil" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Thirty-eight years after it was originally released, the late Rene Clement's absorbing thriller, Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) is reissued in a new print. The movie is based on Patricia Highsmith's 1955 suspense novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, which, incidentally, also serves as the source of the next film from Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient.
Clement's entertaining reworking of the novel was shot on the Mediterranean, in the village of Mongibello on the Amalfi coast and in Rome just months before Federico Fellini immortalised that city's decadence in La Dolce Vita. The narrative initially turns on an American industrialist, Hebert Greenleaf, who wants his dissolute son, Philippe (Maurice Ronet) to return home to San Francisco.
To this end he hires an old friend of his son, Patricia Highsmith's recurring character, the enigmatic Tom Ripley, who's played by the strikingly attractive 24-year-old Alain Delon. The simmering tensions between the two younger men surface on a boat trip on a boat trip with Philippe's girlfriend, Marge (Marie Laforet), whom Tom Ripley also desires. Philippe already has caught Tom borrowing his clothes and impersonating him while kissing himself in a mirror, and this has heightened his well-founded suspicions about Tom. Clement employs minimal dialogue as he methodically follows Ripley adapting and responding to an ever-more-complicated scenario of his own devising, and after a rather protracted first half-hour the movie settles into its pace as it begins to reveal the schemes of the charming chancer at its centre, Tom Ripley, played with teasing ambiguity by Delon. This cool, diverting exercise in role-playing is charged by sustained tension and gorgeously photographed by the great Henry Decae.
Michael Dwyer
