One of the oddest gigs I've seen in a long time. The weathered Leven sings mournful songs of loss and regret in a rich, soulful voice. He's a big poetry man, quoting Pablo Neruda on his new album Shining Brother Shining Sister. Yet, more often than he's being a melancholic, working-class minstrel, he's being a man of the people in an entirely different manner. For at least half his time onstage, he tells bawdy shaggy dog stories.
John Sayles scripted this Jaws-onland rip-off, with Robert Forster as the cop chasing a giant man-eating monster down in the sewers. Forster's dogged, and some of the set pieces are pretty nifty, but the plot's farcical, and this isn't strong on intellectual content despite its obligatory eco-message. The sequel is a made-for-TV retread, of practically zero interest.
Oblique, arcane and infuriatingly sluggish, even by Tarkovsky's standards (makes Andrei Rublyov look like Moulin Rouge), Nostalgia is the litmus test for arthouse cinephiles. The 'story' of a Russian poet locked in existential agony while researching an obscure 18th-century composer is brimful of breathtaking tableaux, portentous dialogue and primal symbolism (flickering flame as human soul). But is it enough?
Run-of-the-mill contemporary Bollywood fare—a riot of colour, violence, heavy-duty tearjerking and song. But its tale of a beautiful young girl, Nandini (Karishma Kapoor), whose marriage sees her uprooted from a comfortable life in Canada back to the poverty of India, is a cut above. There she confronts her tyrannical father-in-law, striking as feminist a blow as Bollywood allows.
Bryan Singer's faithful take on Marvel's merry mutants is probably the best superhero movie to date, due primarily to Hugh Jackman's grumpy Wolverine, Anna Paquin's fragile Rogue, a couple of class-act Shakespearean luvvies (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen), some great SFX and David Hayter's fine script. Roll on the sequel!
