Oldboy

A cinder-block shaped Josh Brolin grunts and groans his way through this fine remake of Park Chan-wook’s Korean-Wave favourite. He plays Joe, a despicable drunk ad-man who is framed for his wife’s murder and left in single room confinement for twenty years before being mysteriously released. Lee took a mighty risk taking on such a beloved cult hit but fans can breathe a collective sigh of relief. He keeps it visceral and strange while, quite remarkably, upping Park’s wicked videogame violence. He even gives a short cameo to a certain squid- and a slightly bigger one for a certain hammer…

  

The Counselor

Like a penalty skied over in the Champions League final, the shear catastrophic calibre of this film is a sight to behold. Michael Fassbender stars as a legal aid to the criminal elite who finds himself in hot water when a sewage truck full of Heroine goes missing on the U.S.-Mexico border. Fassbender is just one of many glittering names responsible but, regretfully, much of the blame must rest on the weighted debut screenplay of Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy- or perhaps whomever let him loose... Oh, and Cameron Diaz has sex with a Ferrari.

Carrie

Chloë Grace Moretz takes on the infamous roll of a teenage social outcast with supernatural powers for the third adaptation of Steven King’s debut novel. Ms. Moretz leads a strong female cast with Judy Greer as her supportive teacher and Julianne Moore playing mother dearest as director Kimberly Pierce takes aim at a younger demographic. The results are decent despite lacking the strangeness of Brian De Palma’s classic but- in light of recent events- seeing kids get mowed down in a U.S. school gymnasium just doesn't sit right. 

Back to showcase their picks from the international film community’s elite festival circuit is Berlin’s increasingly sleek looking Around the World in 14 Films and following on from a rather high calibre year, the self-proclaimed festival of festivals has found a selection worthy of such a title with 4 continents and 15 countries represented over this terrific program. It all kicks off in Kino Babylon with A Separation director Asgahr Farhadi’s The Past. Tahar Rahim and Bérénice Bejo both star as Farhadi swaps Tehran with Paris for another familial drama. Legendary space cadet Alejandro Jodorowski will be in attendance as the festival screens his understandably surreal autobiographical film The Dance of Reality. Jem Cohen mixes a visual poem on Vienna with a charming peripheral love story in his quietly beautiful Museum Hours. Out east, Jia Zhangke expresses the bitterness and disillusionment in Chinese society with his violently subversive A Touch of Sin while Hirokazu Kore-Eda continues to find great young performers with his latest effort Like Father, Like Son. Both picked up gongs at Cannes last May. Screening in Thalia Potsdam, Inside Llewyn Davis- the Coen’s wonderfully lonesome take on the pre-Dylan folk scene in New York- offers the festival’s biggest hitter but if there’s one film to seek out, it comes from a little further north as Toronto born Sarah Polley examines our relationship with fatherhood and memory in her soaring documentary heartwrencher Stories We Tell.

Oh the mountain of must see movies and my humble attempts to scale it...

Progress will be compiled at the end of each month and the films are listed in order of preference.

Blissfully Yours

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2002)

We begin by following a young Burmese man’s efforts to gain a work permit but when the man picks up his girlfriend from a local factory Weerasethakul, in his now signature move, decides to veer the whole film off course. We’re 40 minutes on when out of nowhere a Thai version of Summer Samba plays on the radio and the opening credits roll. We attempt to regain our footing but as the couple enter the forest- an often spiritual place in the director's films- the man suddenly begins to narrate. Then everything gets sexual. It should be gratuitous but it’s not. Both wonderful and baffling, it started a fruitful relationship between the Thai director and Europe's premier film festival.

Rosetta

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (1999)

We meet Rosetta: a 17 year old girl with an alcoholic mother and a caravan home. Deeply ashamed of it all Rosetta wants nothing more than to find a job, have a friend and be a ‘normal person’. The Dardenne Brothers handheld shot most of the film over their young heroine’s shoulder in order to plunge the viewer in a pool of empathy. This fresh technique coupled with Émilie Dequenne’s staggering debut performance and the realist subject matter at its core affected people to such a degree that Belgium established a teenage minimum wage as a result. It also bagged the brothers their first Palme D’or.

Blow Out

Brian DePalma (1981)

Brian DePalma transports Antonioni’s Blow Up to the sultry world of 80’s New York noir for this cheeky effort. John Travolta plays a slasher movie sound guy who witnesses a car crash into a river while out recording some samples. He bravely dives in to save a young woman’s life but emerges embroiled in a political conspiracy with the only clues to solving it on his rolls of tape. DePalma often looked the brat of New American Cinema and with Blow Out he seems to be relishing in that role. Murals of America’s forefathers seem to look down disapprovingly as a “Liberty Bell Strangler” kills off women. What’s more the film’s biggest sleaze ball- and that’s saying a lot- has his final moment shot from above as he lies in the position of the crucified Christ. Class-A messin’ indeed.

Blow Up

Michelangelo Antonioni (1966)

Unlike the hyper reality of the DePalma film which succeeded it, Anotonioni’s 1966 thriller is a much slicker affair. David Hemmings plays a deep-eyed fashion photographer who believes he has witnessed a murder. He finds two lovers in a local park and proceeds to take their photo but only when the black and white grains of film are enlarged does the sinister event begin to reveal itself. Antonioni indulges in some touristy behaviour here- his vignettes of swingin’ 60s London feeling vacant at times- but the director still has bags of style. Hemmings is slick and slimy in the lead role and though it may be less playful than DePalma’s homage, Blow Up does benefit from a little nonchalance and a welcome dollop of ambiguity.