Eyes Wide Shut
Directed by Stanley Kubrick Starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Thomas Gibson, Marie Richardson, Alan Cumming
Kubrick's posthumously released final film transposes a Freudian novella by Arthur Schnitzler to present-day New York for an entrancing, dream-like picture which reflects on the secret desires, guilt and jealousy of an ostensibly ideal couple (played by Cruise and Kidman) and the masks people wear even in their most intimate personal relationships. Set over one eventful long night's journey into day, it founders only in an over-extended late encounter which, most unusually for a Kubrick opus, seriously underestimates the audience's intelligence.
Beautiful People
Directed by Jasmin Dizdar Starring Danny Nussbaum, Linda Bassett, Charlotte Coleman, Edin Dzandzanovic
The first film from the Bosnian-born, London-based writer-director Dizdar is set a dextrously structured multi-charactered scenario which, though set in 1993, bristles with an urgent topicality. While it deals persuasively with themes drawn from English life - overworked hospital staff, Tory lifestyles, class divisions, soccer hooligans - it's at its most effective, and chilling, when a stoned young Londoner (Nussbaum) finds himself detoured into the terror and chaos of the Srebernica conflict.
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
Directed by George Lucas Starring Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Jake Lloyd, Natalie Portman, Pernilla August
Set about 32 years before the original Star Wars, the first film in the prequel trilogy is excessively consumed by expository plotting of the back story to characters and events already so familiar. Lucas eventually delivers a number of dazzlingly shot and edited set-pieces which catapult the movie out of its inertia, especially in the vigorous extended finale. Of the new characters, the computer-generated, jive-talking Jar Jar Binks is, in a word, jarring