The Winslow Boy (12) Selected cinemas
Set in 1912, Terence Rattigan's factually-based play, The Winslow Boy might seem like an unlikely subject for writer-director David Mamet, who eschews expletives for once in this respectful adaptation of a compelling moral drama, first filmed in 1948 from a screenplay by Rattigan himself. Mamet's sixth film as a director taps into the contemporary resonances of the play's theme - that it is easy to do justice, but not so easy to do right.
Nigel Hawthorne is aptly authoritative as the London paterfamilias, Arthur Winslow, who challenges the Lords of the Admiralty in his quest to clear his 14-year-old naval cadet son (Guy Edwards) of the charge that he stole a five-shilling postal order. The boy swears he is innocent and his father believes him, taking on the astute attorney, Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam), who explains the legal assumption that the Admiralty and the Crown can do no wrong and cannot be sued. Morton, however, becomes determined that "right be done". The case on which Rattigan based his play became a cause celebre, the subject of widespread political and public discussion, news coverage and cartoons. The film acutely catches the temperature of its time and the reserve of its emotionally repressed protagonists, who are galvanised into action. Mamet's elegant and respectful adaptation makes little attempt to open out the drama beyond its theatrical confines, eschewing the opportunity for a showy courtroom drama, which it relegates to the sidelines as it explores the characters itself, their milieu and their motivations to telling effect.
Hawthorne and Northam are outstanding in a commendable cast that also notably features Rebecca Pidgeon as Winslow's suffragette daughter and Gemma Jones as his wife. The film's aptly claustrophobic confines are subtly lit by Benoit Delhomme, and the impeccable costumes are the work of the accomplished Irish designer, Consolata Boyle.
Pushing Tin (15) General release
Forget novels, plays or (God forbid) original ideas. These days, apparently, magazine articles are the base metal from which Hollywood feature films are forged. Pushing Tin is one such artefact, based on a 1996 New York Times Magazine article about the strange world of the New York Terminal Approach Radar Control (TRACON), an anonymous building on the fringes of New York where air traffic controllers marshall the world's busiest chunk of airspace under incredibly stressful conditions.
Mike Newell's black comedy takes this material as the setting for an anti-buddy movie, charting the rivalry between two controllers, played by John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton. Cusack is the brash local boy whose feathers are ruffled by the arrival of Thornton, a cool, arrogant Texan, who beats Cusack at every game of chicken to which he is challenged. The conflict widens when Cusack has an inopportune fling with Thornton's wife (Angelina Jolie), an event which has dramatic repercussions on his relationship with his own wife (Cate Blanchett).
The theme of self-destructive male rivalry in the workplace is relatively unusual in mainstream movies (there aren't too many films with the word "tin" in their title either, but by a remarkable coincidence, Newell's film most closely resembles Barry Levinson's Tin Men). There's a sense at times, therefore, of genre confusion: is this a movie about stress in the workplace, is it about masculine stupidity, or is it a romantic comedy? In fact, it's all of these, and the confusion makes for a more interesting and entertaining, if flawed, film.
Cusack is one of the most interesting stars around these days, but his performance here is oddly uneven, probably because of the film's uncertain shifts in tone. He does have some excellent moments, though, and is ably supported by Blanchett. Thornton is more of a cliched cipher, and the sultry Jolie gleefully hams it up as his sexpot Goth wife. Newell showed in Donnie Brasco that he has an excellent eye for the detail of American bluecollar life, and there are some similarities between his depiction of the Mafia in that movie and the air traffic controllers here - both are tightly-knit groups of working-class macho guys made good in a secretive industry. Despite his best efforts, though, he fails to find a cinematic language for the actual job they do. We know it's incredibly pressurised, and that one mistake could cost hundreds of lives, but at the end of the day it still involves staring at a small green radar screen for hours on end, which is hard to find exciting. It also has some avoidable longueurs in its first hour, and a ridiculous ending that makes Sleepless In Seattle look like Ken Loach.
Head On (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The provocative, aptly-titled Australian movie Head On is directed by the Greek-Australian former solicitor, Ana Kokkinos, who made an auspicious debut with the short 1995 lesbian feature, Only The Brave. Set in presentday Melbourne, Head On charts an eventful and often traumatic 24 hours in the life of Ari, a handsome and voraciously sexually active 19year-old coming to terms with his homosexuality and his rigidly conservative Greek immigrant parents. "Proud to be Greek? I had nothing to do with it," Ari insists. Kokkinos employs newsreel footage to document the arrival of Greek immigrants to Australia after the second World War and to illustrate how prevailing attitudes led to them being ghettoised. The film also deals with the dilemmas of Ari's sister (Andrea Mandalis) who is secretly involved with a Lebanese boy and Ari's cross-dressing friend (Paul Capsis), who's rejected by his father.
Head On is powered by an intense and uninhibited performance as Ari by Alex Dimitriades, a young veteran of Neighbours and Heartbreak High, who, like Guy Pearce before him, proves there is life after soaps. This strong, illuminating drama is unflinchingly direct, and not just in its sensually photographed sexual explicitness but also in its depiction of a sadistic Melbourne police force and its picture of the city as a racial melting pot positively simmering with tension. "That's what's wrong with this country," observes one character. "Everyone hates everyone."
John Carpenter's Vampires (18) General release
If you like your movies seriously trashy, and your vampires with tequila, then John Carpenter's heavy metal, Tex-Mex take on the hoariest of movie genres might just be for you. However, if you prefer a little subtlety in your horror, and especially if you have a problem with misogyny, then stay away from this very gory spaghetti Western-influenced bloodfest.
Since revolutionising the horror genre in the 1970s with movies like Halloween, Carpenter has seemed content in recent years to recycle past glories (although he's still regarded as bankable enough to get his name incorporated in the title). Here, he's not even recycling his own back catalogue - the basic schtick of Vampires is more than a little reminiscent of Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn (still banned in Ireland, though those who care to can see it on Channel 4 this weekend).
Shot in classic spaghetti-style widescreen, with a soundtrack heavily doused in feedback guitar, Vampires stars James Woods, going merrily over the top as the leader of a sort of anti-vampire SWAT team, employed by the Catholic Church (in the form of an unctuous cardinal played by Maximilian Schell) to track down the creatures of the night and destroy them. This the team does in various colourful and imaginative ways, until faced with a new threat which decimates the squad, and leaves Woods and his sidekick, Daniel Baldwin, along with bite victim Sheryl Lee, to face down an army of bloodsuckers in a Gunfight at the OK Corral-style final showdown. Vampires doesn't have the inspired silliness of From Dusk Till Dawn, but it's pretty darned silly all the same. There's something engaging, though, about its total lack of pretension, even if its target audience is likely to be composed of terminally arrested adolescents (of the male variety, of course).
