DIRECTED BY: ERICK ZONCA
STARRING: TILDA SWINTON, SAUL RUBINEK, KATE DEL CASTILLO
AS AN ACTRESS, Tilda Swinton rarely makes bad decisions – so it's interesting to see her play a character who makes nothing but. Her titular role in Julia casts h
er as an alcoholic 40-year-old LA woman increasingly ill-equipped to hold her life together. Fired from her latest job, she's persuaded by friend and fellow alcoholic Mitch (Saul Rubinek) to attend AA, where she meets Elena (Kate del Castillo), a young Mexican émigrée who is so desperate to regain custody of her eight-year-old son from the boy's wealthy grandfather that she's cooked up a delusional kidnapping plot. Sniffing money, Julia agrees to help her out, but secretly plans to put her own spin on the plot, from which point everything spins disastrously out of control as Julia's abduction of the kid leaves one man in a coma and her on the run to Mexico with a frightened child in tow. Essentially a riff on John Cassavetes's 1980 classic Gloria, Erick Zonca's film is overlong and occasionally histrionic, but as Julia has to face up to the life-threatening danger her actions have placed the boy in, Swinton's tour-de-force performance makes her path to salvation thoroughly gripping and convincing.
RIVALS (15)
DIRECTED BY: JACQUES MAILLOT
STARRING: FRANÇOIS CLUZET, GUILLAUME CANET, MARIE DENARNAUD
TELL No One's François Cluzet and Guillaume Canet reunite for this moody, downbeat cop drama revolving around fraternal rivalry in 1970s Lyon. Having directed their previous collaboration, Canet is on acting duties only this time round, which affords him a beefed-up lead role as François, a conscientious cop whose job has left him estranged from his elder brother. This is Gabriel (Cluzet), a pimp and a murderer, newly paroled after a ten-year-stretch inside for killing a rival gangster. Familial bonds make François duty-bound to help him go straight, but as usual, that is harder than it looks and is complicated by the antipathy François feels towards Gabriel on account of his favoured status within their family – it's the criminal, not the cop, who ranks highest in their father's eyes. Director Jacques Maillot has a good feel for period detail and though it's not hard to see where the plot is heading – particularly when François gets involved with the wife of a criminal he helped put away – in evoking an era in which hard-bitten cop dramas didn't have to rely on hi-octane action, he's served up a welcome throwback to a time when acting counted for more than gun play.
LAKEVIEW TERRACE (15)
DIRECTED BY: NEIL LABUTE
STARRING: SAMUEL L JACKSON, PATRICK WILSON, KERRY WASHINGTON
AFTER his universally derided remake of The Wicker Man, Neil Labute tries to get himself out of movie jail in this yuppies-in-peril thriller. Labute casts his misanthropic eye on an up-and-coming LA suburb where new residents Chris and Lisa, a young interracial couple played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, find their lives becoming a living hell after moving in next door to Samuel L Jackson's long-serving, embittered and possibly corrupt cop, Abel Turner. He takes umbrage to Chris's status as Lisa's husband, and begins subtly rousing him, coaxing out Chris's long-buried prejudices. Labute is good at making us feel uncomfortable here and, for the first hour or so, Lakeview Crescent is taut, head-messing stuff. Alas, he's less skilled at delivering on the thriller conventions demanded by David Loughery and Howard Korder's script. Jackson's initially intriguing character descends into one-note caricature in the final act, and the film becomes as over-heated as the neighbourhood-threatening bush fire deployed as a none-too-subtle metaphor for race relations in modern-day Los Angeles. Up until this point, though, it's a welcome return to form for Labute.
TRANSPORTER 3 (15)
DIRECTED BY: OLIVIER MEGATON
STARRING: JASON STATHAM, NATALYA RUDAKOVA, ROBERT KNEPPER
THE French-backed Transporter 3 is a terrible film, an overripe slab of brie so pungent it makes the worst excesses of pre-Daniel Craig-era Bond seem the epitome of restrained film-making. Yet its cheesy preposterousness is precisely what makes it irresistible, thanks to modern B-movie action god Jason Statham. Growling his way through this third instalment of the Luc Besson-conceived franchise – about a professional driver who is the first port of call for dodgy special deliveries – he's ready to deliver the wrath of Stath, ripping off his shirt at a millisecond's notice if it will give him a little more traction for action, cracking heads and shooting lead. Satham's Frank Martin keeps breaking his professional rules, this time by getting involved with a Ukranian hottie (Natalya Rudakova) he's been coerced into "delivering". But forget about plot – it's mostly gibberish – and revel in the absurdity of Statham chasing down his Audi A8 to prevent the booby-trapped wristband he's been forced to wear from exploding. It's that kind of film. Besides, how can you resist an action film directed by someone called Olivier Megaton?
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES (12A)
DIRECTED BY: GINA PRINCE-BYTHEWOOD
STARRING: DAKOTA FANNING, JENNIFER HUDSON, QUEEN LATIFAH, PAUL BETTANY
IN ITS early stages, this adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's bestselling 2002 novel about a troubled young white girl who finds sanctuary with a trio of black sisters in the Civil Rights-era Deep South looks like it might have a bit of grit. It's too bad that it repeatedly descends into comfortably folksy melodrama more befitting a TV movie. Dakota Fanning stars as 14-year-old Lily, burdened by the knowledge that when she was four she accidentally killed her mother. Cursed with an abusive father (Paul Bettany), she's been raised by his cook, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), whose arrest and beating at the hands of Southern bigots determined to prevent her exercising her right to vote (newly enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964) is the shocking event that forces them to go on the run. Issues of race and economics weave themselves into the fabric of the story as they take refuge on a 28-acre bee farm run by sisters August (Queen Latifa), June (Alicia Keys) and May (Sophie Okonedo), but any time the film threatens to get interesting it reverts to its default coming-of-age story setting.
The full article contains 1079 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
