While medium-priced Paris-based movie Micmacs offers great all-round entertainment, the much bigger budgeted From Paris With Love proves bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.
In fact, in this case it basically shows how you can make a real mess for lots of money.
French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet doesn’t make run of the mill movies.
From Delicatessen, through Amelie, to A Very Long Engagement, his films are full of weird coincidences, random happenings, eccentric characters and odd Heath Robinson-esque contraptions. Micmacs carries on in the same vein and in its charmingly weird way becomes enthralling – even if you’re a non-believer in the cult of Jeunet at the start, it will win you over by its thoroughly satisfying end.
He was one of the greatest writers ever to come out of Russia and so it’s funny to discover how little we actually know about the life (and death) of Count Leo Tolstoy.
Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) was a man of means with a beautiful country estate and yet, through the urgings of his most devoted follower Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), he rejected his title and in the last year of his life embraced a simple, peasant lifestyle threatening to leave all his wealth and the future rights to his writings to the Russian people. This infuriated his long-suffering wife Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), who felt he would be betraying his family if he did such a thing.
At long last Jeff Bridges is getting the recognition he deserves for his portrayal here of a washed up, grizzled, past his sell-by date country singer, given a shot at redemption by a younger woman.
He plays Bad Blake, a singer/songwriter who has been there, seen that and done it far too many times before. Drowning himself in booze, he is now trawling through the backwaters of America, playing any gig his agent can get him. One evening a member of his backing band asks if his niece, a journalist, might interview the once great man and Bad Blake says yes, which is when Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) walks into his life.
Imagine Pierre Morel’s Taken, but with more unflinching brutality and a better storyline.
That’s exactly what’s offered by this multi-award winning Australian thriller from debut film-maker Steven Kastrissios
When Christian (Peter Marshall) is sent a horrifying porno featuring his recently deceased daughter doped-up on heroin, he spirals into a maelstrom of violence as he steadily works his way through everyone involved, from the producers and guys behind the camera to the ‘co-stars’.
While he drives through Queensland hunting for those responsible, Christian picks up troubled runaway Alice (Caroline Marohasy), and an unlikely bond develops between the pair. She sees him as a man she can trust, blissfully unaware that he has become a relentless killing machine hellbent on smashing heads in with a variety of big, heavy things.
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