Reviews

Films

Disturbia

Directed by DJ Caruso, starring Shia LaBoeuf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse

There's an ingenious twist on Rear Window here: the voyeur is immobilized by something more unexpected than simply being injured. Shia LaBeouf plays troubled teen Kale, sentenced to electronically tagged house arrest for punching a teacher. The poor kid finds himself spying on the neighbors with his binoculars, and becomes convinced that sinister Mr Turner (David Morse) next door is a serial killer, bumping off the attractive women he's bringing home, and becomes further alarmed when this creepy individual wants to date his lonely widowed mom (Carrie-Anne Moss). There's one entertainingly bizarre line when Kale's wacky friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) breathlessly reports that Mr Turner's basement smells like "the corpse of a rotting hottie". That might just be the title of director DJ Caruso's next film. Despite the interesting set-up, the action degenerates into obvious implausibility and silliness - fatal for a suspense thriller - and boredom sets in.

December Boys

Directed by Rod Hardy, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Teresa Palmer

There is no magic in Daniel Radcliffe's first non-Potter movie: It's an incredible clunker: naff, sentimental, like an episode of the treacly US TV show The Wonder Years, full of golden summery memories and riddled with irritating, unconvincing child acting. Radcliffe is the oldest of a group of boys at a 1960s Australian orphanage who are allowed a wonderful holiday by the sea. There are tears and laughter and for Radcliffe a coyly dramatized sexual awakening with a local girl. Nothing about it rings true and the touches of whimsy and fantasy are toe-curlingly awful.

A Few Days in September

Directed by Santiago Amigorena, starring Juliette Binoche, John Turturro

Good news for conspiracy theorists still puzzling over the strange alignment of double agents, financiers and foot-soldiers that allegedly foreshadowed the events of 9/11. Here is a film as rum and tangential as the theories themselves, a pleasingly off-kilter noir that casts Juliette Binoche as a cigarillo-smoking spymistress who lights out for Venice in the first days of September 2001. She's accompanied by a pair of pillow-fighting step-siblings and pursued by John Turturro's gaudy assassin. Turturro's performance is the film's ripest ingredient until the last five minutes, when Nick Nolte, swaddled in a trenchcoat and half-blinded by his eyebrows, comes staggering across the palazzo. A late arrival to the queerest party in town.

My Nikifor

Directed by Krzysztof Krauze, starring Krystyna Feldman, Roman Gancarczyk

Nikifor Krynicki was a tubercular Polish folk artist who enjoyed a brief spell of acclaim before his death in 1968. Here he's played - rather wonderfully - by female actor Krystyna Feldman, who sports a pipe-cleaner moustache as she spoons soup with one hand while slapping at a shapely rump with the other. Krzysztof Krauze's droll, unassuming little biopic stands as a fitting memorial to a life on the fringes.

The Guardian

(China Daily 09/19/2007 page20)