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It looks like 2009 is firming up to be something of a fine vintage for a certain Eric Cantona on film. Not only does he have a rather charming starring role here, but he also stars in Ken Loach’s new movie, making him our favourite footballer-turned-actor du jour.

Here he is acclaimed French filmmaker Thierry whose musings on life and love are at first pooh-poohed by bluff English journalist Jed (Hugh Bonneville) who has been commissioned to interview the Frenchman. However, when Jed’s long-term girlfriend Cheryl (Victoria Hamilton) and his mates Marcus (Douglas Hensall) and Sophie (Anne-Marie Duff) question Jed’s romantic credentials, he starts to see there may be more to this l’amour stuff than he at first thought. Jed finds it difficult to talk about his feelings so Cheryl carts him off to couple counselling where she begins to realise he really doesn’t have a clue and it slowly dawns on him that “other people fall in love, they talk about it all the time, they write songs about it. I think I might want to fall in love; I’m nearly 40 and I’ve never done it.”

There are plenty of great lines in this rather grown up take on love and all its complications, however the film suffers from the same smug middle-classness that stymied Love, Actually – when the characters start talking about smoked fish and chip ice cream you know the movie has lost the plot somewhat. But it does have a certain rather wistful charm about it (Victoria Hamilton is particularly affecting) and had the editing been slightly slicker and Monsieur Cantona had more scenes, this could have been a real left-field gem.

Dee Pilgrim

The brand new South Park DVD, Imagination Land, is out now and to celebrate we have two copies to give away, along with a shiny iPod Touch.

We’ll get to the competition in a moment, but first, some information:

In this never-before-seen director’s cut, the doors of the world’s imagination are thrown wide open and the boys of South Park are transported to a magical realm in their greatest odyssey ever. Stan, Kyle, and Butters find themselves in Imaginationland just as terrorists launch an attack that unleashes all of mankind’s most evil characters imaginable.

With the world’s imaginations spinning out of control, the government prepares to nuke Imaginationland to put an end to the chaos. Racing against time to prevent nuclear annihilation, the citizens of Imaginationland realise their only hope of salvation lies in the mind of the unlikeliest hero: Butters. Ignoring the impending apocalypse, Cartman goes all the way to the Supreme Court to get justice for his case of dry balls.

So, onto the competition. The first name out of the hat will win a copy of Imaginationland on DVD along with an iPod Touch. Second place wins a copy of the DVD.

To enter, just answer this super simple question:

What are the names of South Park’s creators?

Send your answers to competitions@the-void.co.uk by 20 June, 2009.

Best of luck everyone.

South Park Imaginationland is out now.

When screenwriter Charlie Kaufman burst onto the scene with the wonderfully left of centre Being John Malkovich, it signalled a new and very singular talent had arrived, and this was confirmed by subsequent films such as Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Now Kaufman returns with a film he not only wrote but also directed and sadly, the resulting pile of self-satisfied, smug triteness is so far up its own sphincter it looks like Charlie boy is going to have to return to the drawing board and start all over again.

Welcome to the world of theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is suffering something of a midlife crisis. However, his middle-aged angst seems to be doing his directing the world of good and when he is awarded a substantial bursary to start a new work, he rents out a vast warehouse in New York where he plans to produce the ultimate in heightened realism. He builds a set of the city itself and gets actors to play real people, including himself (Tom Noonan) and his one-time girlfriend and collaborator Hazel (Samantha Morton in real life, Emily Watson in the play). But as the line between real life and theatre gets evermore blurred he comes to realise he has created a house of cards that will inevitably fall and bury him.

Kaufman has assembled the most astounding cast on this project including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams and Dianne Wiest, but he has given them material that is so dry and abstruse it’s a bit like watching a really bad acid trip. While Kaufman plays with time frames, genres, people’s identities and chronologies, he takes his eye off the main reason why the film should exist in the first place, namely to entertain. He is, in effect, entertaining himself, leaving the audience to go hang.

After two hours of such impenetrable onanism you may find yourself yearning for that good old-fashioned story format of beginning, middle and conclusion that doesn’t include a house that is inexplicably on fire for the entire duration of the film.

Dee Pilgrim

Although this was a mega blockbuster hit for Dan Brown when it was published as a book, as a film Angels & Demons is anything but a thrilling page-turner.

Tom Hanks returns as academic Robert Langdon, the man who cracked the Da Vinci code, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church. He is therefore, rather surprised when on the death of the incumbent Pope the Vatican turns to him to help discover the whereabouts of a group of the church’s leading cardinals who have been kidnapped. Langdon rushes to Rome where he discovers the cardinals are not the only things missing; an Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer) working on the huge CERN particle accelerator project has also been summoned to discover the whereabouts of a container of anti-matter that has been stolen from CERN. Can Langdon, the scientist and the acting head of the church, the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) unravel a series of clues left by the Illuminati – a secret society sworn to oppose the church – in order to get to the anti-matter before it turns itself into a huge bomb, destroying not only the Vatican but much of Rome itself?

This being a Dan Brown story, conspiracy theory, symbols and mysterious signs abound as the movie turns into a mad dash from church to church around Rome. Because the background to the story is essential in order for viewers to have any clue as to what is going on, the exposition at the beginning is interminable – and yet still leaves things as clear as mud.  The location work around Rome is glorious but you don’t get to see enough of it as Langdon looks at a statue, immediately grasps its relevance and is racing off to the next clue in yet another chapel or crypt.  It’s kind of Indiana Jones with a cod-serious plot and absolutely no sense of humour and by the time the totally unbelievable ending comes around (revealing – shock horror – a plot within a plot within the bigger plot) you’ll probably have lost the plot!

The money is most definitely all up there on screen but it is the story itself that lets the film down, never giving itself or the audience time to take stock and work out if it is all actually hanging together.  Tom Hanks does an awful lot of pointing, McGregor’s Irish accent is appalling and the poor old Italian gendarmarie and the Vatican’s own Swiss Guard have to suffer a rising body count. It’s really all cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors, and is about as convincing as Elvis on the moon.

Dee Pilgrim

Charlie Kaufman wants to get inside your head!

He wants his audience to try and figure out his films and for them to find their own unique connection with his work, be it the awesome Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the mind-warping Being John Malkovich or underrated Human Nature.

In his new film (and first time he has stepped behind the camera) he sets about constructing a film with a play within the film within the film which is enough to give even old Malkovich a headache.

Put simply, the film is about a theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) building a lifesize replica of New York inside an enormous warehouse as he struggles to complete a play telling the story of his own life.

There is so much to say about this film – which on on one level is the study of a man’s whole adult life and relationships, while on another is about health and the steady descent to death – so let’s look at things other than the story which is something that will divide audiences right down the middle.

The performances all round are absolutely brilliant, particularly Hoffman’s central role of the always-ill Cotard simply trying to hold his life together and find truth in his work. He imbues the character with depth and gravitas so that we actually care about his troubles on screen. Michelle Williams as his second wife Claire proves again that she is an actress growing in strength with every new role. Hope Davis as Cotard’s shrink is as good as ever while kudos should go to the casting of not only just Samantha Morton as Hazel but to Emily Watson who ends up playing the character of Hazel in Cotard’s play.

Spike Jonze was originally going to direct, and unfortunately the direction is the one problem with this film, as Jonze’s stylistic flourishes and touches are sorely missed. Kaufman is simply not experienced enough behind the camera to make this really sparkle. The camerawork is often stagey and static and although this fits in with the idea of filming a play, it’s not enough to raise it to same level as the astounding script and great cast performances.

Synecdoche, New York will confuse and enrage many who will see it as pretentious shite, but there is enough intelligence and strong ideas in the script to make this worth watching in the cinema.

Mark Cappuccio