Reviews

Film

Iraq war films

Two movies highlighting the horrors of the war in Iraq have won acclaim after their screening at the Venice Film Festival.

Canadian director Paul Haggis' US-movie In the Valley of Elah tells the story of a US soldier who commits atrocities during his stint in Iraq only to be murdered by his comrades shortly after his return to the United States.

Haggis' harrowing movie centers on a US veteran who goes searching for his missing son. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron, he soon learns that while in Iraq his son had tortured Iraqi prisoners and rolled his tank over a small child.

The film was preceded by the world premiere of Hollywood director Brian de Palma's Redacted, which also highlights the dirty side to the Iraq war.

De Palma's film, Redacted is billed as a fictional story. Shot with a cast of unknown actors on high-definition video cameras, it focuses on the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers and the subsequent murder of three members of her family.

British director Ken Loach's film, It's a Free World, was also well received. A German, British, Spanish and Italian co-production, it centers on the consequences of globalization and the exploitation of workers from Eastern Europe and the Third World in Britain. The Golden Lion is presented on Saturday. DPA

1408

Directed by Mikael Hafstrom, starring John Cusack, Samuel L Jackson

Can it really be true that there's mileage left in the hotel-room scary movie? Yes, and here's the proof: an excellent chiller based on a 1998 Stephen King short story about a cynical writer (John Cusack) who cranks out tongue-in-cheek tourist guides to supposedly haunted hotels.

When he arrives at the Dolphin Hotel in New York, airily insistent on sampling its legendarily creepy room 1408, the stone-faced manager (Samuel L Jackson) begs him to reconsider. All to no avail. But he is soon screaming to be let out: The room reveals to him his own darkest demons.

The movie is sharp, funny, and - whisper it - pretty scary, simply because it has learned a basic lesson un-learned by countless lesser examples: don't start with something scary. Unpretentious and effective. The Guardian

Hallam Foe

Directed by David Mackenzie, starring Jamie Bell, Sophia Myles

A happening indie soundtrack, a nice lead performance - it's all here, and yet it can't somehow cancel out the feeling that the story's tosh-level is considerably in excess of the EU maximum. Jamie Bell plays young Hallam Foe, a tortured teen who lives in a very grand house somewhere in the Scottish borders. He has lost the plot since his mother died: murdered, he suspects, by his foxy stepmother (Claire Forlani), who has ensnared the heart of his good-natured but ineffectual dad.

Hallam spends his time hanging out in his treehouse - a sign of ineffable creepiness in any other film, but here the token of wounded, eccentric sensitivity - and spying on local folk with his binoculars.

When he runs away to Edinburgh, Hallam finds himself scampering roguishly along the rooftops and working a menial job in a hotel, with whose personnel manager (Sophia Myles) he conceives an obsession, because she is the dead spit of his dead mum.

Jamie Bell has grown into a performer with warmth and style, and David Mackenzie's direction is exuberant, but the story itself is self-regarding, and the ending, with its muddled vengefulness, strains both sympathy and credibility. The Guardian

(China Daily 09/04/2007 page20)