Reviews

Films

The Sacrifice

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Tommy Kjellqvist

Andrei Tarkovsky's final film, from 1986, re-released for the 75th anniversary of his birth, is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema. The setting is a Bergmanesque summer house in Sweden, in which Erland Josephson (pictured) plays Alexander, about to celebrate a birthday in the company of his wife Adelaide, played by Susan Fleetwood (pictured), children, servants, friends and locals.

A radio announcement warns of an imminent nuclear apocalypse and that night Alexander begs God to spare the world and in return he will destroy his family and everything he holds dear. The next morning, everything has returned to normal. Josephson's speech to his Creator, beseeching Him to turn aside from the final destruction, is very remarkable - has prayer ever been rendered so passionately, so convincingly, on screen?

KM31

Directed by Rigoberto Castaneda, starring Iliana Fox, Adria Collado

The title refers to a remote road sign on an accursed stretch of Mexican highway, up in the mountains, where the dry ice blows. It is a spot that writer-director Rigoberto Castaneda seems peculiarly drawn to, though he's mostly spinning his wheels until the obligatory dark and stormy night when all manner of secrets shall be revealed.

So what bit of this stylishly made, relentlessly silly horror film is "based on real events", exactly? My guess is that there was a real road, and possibly a real accident connected to it. All the rest must go down as penalty points on Castaneda's artistic license.

A Very British Gangster

Directed by Donal MacIntyre, starring Dominic Noonan

Dominic Noonan is the avuncular head of a crime family in Manchester, northern England. He presides over a band of swaggering hard-men, chain-smoking matriarchs and feral teenage wannabes who throw open their door to film-maker Donal MacIntyre and all but boast themselves into oblivion. The documentary takes some fascinating diversions, but it's a little compromised and faintly suspect. As ever, you sense that MacIntyre is half-seduced by the hard-man lifestyle, flattered to be included and content to peddle excitable gangland tourism in the guise of a criminal expose.

Code Name: The Cleaner

Directed by Les Mayfield, starring Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu

There's a moment in this dud when the inappropriately named Cedric the Entertainer, playing an amnesiac who thinks he may be a secret agent, tries to put together the clues to his identity.

He does this by scrawling out the story's various plot points on a diner's paper placemat in crayon. It's impossible to imagine that the script didn't arrive in exactly the same format. This is a comedy. You'll know this because the music is full of whimsical cues, and Cedric's performance is full of gurning and mugging to the camera. But these are the only clues. If you like comedies but hate going to the trouble of actually laughing, then this might just be the movie you've been waiting for.

The Guardian

(China Daily 12/12/2007 page20)