La Saison des Hommes ****
Dir: Moufida Tlatli
With: Rabia Ben Abdallah, Sabah Bouzouita, Ghania Benali, Hend Sabri, Ezzedine Gannoun, Mouna Noureddine
122 mins, cert 12
This beautifully lucid, compassionate film from Tunisian writer-director Moufida Tlatli is conducted at a walking, talking pace, allowing its audience unhurried access to a powerful and deeply engaging family drama. It's the story of a woman and her two daughters, and the female community that both nurtures and imprisons them on the Tunisian island of Djerba. Rabia Ben Abdallah is superb as Aicha, a woman who is married to a businessman away in Tunis and must live in a kind of purdah with all his sisters-in-law on the island. He and the other menfolk come to live with them for just one month a year - the "season of men". With a wonderfully fluent gift for storytelling, Tlatli interleaves the past and present as naturally as the verses of a song, with a narrative mastery that she makes look easy.
Taxi 2 ***
Dir: Gérard Krawczyk
With: Samy Naceri, Frédéric Diefenthal, Emma Sjoberg, Bernard Farcy, Marion Cotillard, Jean-Christophe Bouvet
82 mins, cert 15
www.taxi2.com
Luc Besson wrote and produced this follow-up to his unexpected hit comedy thriller, Taxi, with Samy Naceri back as Daniel, the Marseille taxi driver who cheerfully drives at terrifying speeds, often leaning round to chat to his gibbering fare. As with all car chase flicks, serious or otherwise, you have to suspend your disbelief regarding the zero-pedestrian-fatality rate, but this is an entertaining high-speed romp, with a happy taste of Bond movies from the camp Roger Moore era: flying automobiles, crunchy collisions, and some running-gag repeat appearances from minor characters. How long has it been since you saw an honest-to-God police-car pile-up?
Ginger Snaps ***
Dir: John Fawcett
With: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers, Jesse Moss, Danielle Hampton, Peter Keleghan
104 mins, cert 18
www.gingersnapsthemovie.com
The "euuuuwwww" factor is sky-high for this black horror comedy in which lycanthropy and blood lust are pressed into service as metonyms for sexual anxiety. Ginger Snaps is a Canadian feature about two intensely close teenage sisters, Brigitte and Ginger, played by Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle. They are bored as hell in their dull suburban town, which starts being threatened by a werewolf just as their slightly weird mom - Mimi Rogers - is worrying about them not getting their periods yet. In the end, it pans out as a stock teen scary movie. But it's worth seeing for the first reel, which is brilliant, as Brigitte and Ginger prepare a grotesque installation-style series of photos showing their own violent death for a class project. It's all downhill from there, but there is something efficiently creepy about the enclosed world of two alienated young women in suburbia, and it whets your appetite for the similar riff in Terry Zwigoff's forthcoming Ghost World.
Town & Country **
Dir: Peter Chelsom
With: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Andie MacDowell, Charlton Heston, Marian Seldes, Tricia Vessey, Josh Hartnett
104 mins, cert 15
www.townandcountrymovie.com
What is the collective noun for egos? A calamity of egos, perhaps? I pity the unfortunate director, Peter Chelsom, having to preside over all the egos at work on this muddled, unfocused comedy of manners that has become a legend for its desperate script rewrites and ruinous schedule over-runs. The über-ego is, of course, Warren Beatty, who has consented to play a cute, wealthy, young-looking architect who somehow finds himself cheating on wife Diane Keaton. Support comes from Goldie Hawn and Garry Shandling, who, like Beatty, have that permatan glaze of smugdom and stardom that is the antidote to comedy. The film can't decide if Beatty is supposed to be an unstoppable babe-magnet or an essentially decent monogamist. (I suspect Mr Beatty is trying to have it both ways.) But Charlton Heston and Marian Seldes do a decent job as a crusty old gun enthusiast and his cranky wife.
The Princess and the Warrior **
Dir: Tom Tykwer
With: Franka Potente, Benno Fürmann, Joachim Król, Marita Breuer, Lars Rudolph, Melchior Beslon, Jürgen Tarrach, Ludger Pistor
129 mins, cert 15
www.derkrieger.de
I was never a fan of Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run - with its slightly shallow Hartleyesque conceit of alternative stories - and much prefer his compelling first feature, Wintersleepers. But at least Run Lola Run had zip. This, I'm afraid, is a terrible disappointment, and that flatulent, orotund title is the first tip-off that something is very wrong. Franka Potente, Tykwer's favourite leading lady, is Sissi, a psychiatric nurse who gets hit by a tanker lorry in the street. Benno Fürmann is a disturbed ex-soldier who saves her life by giving her a tracheotomy - with fateful results. This is a long and tiring film, with no real fire to the narrative or clarity in the characterisation. Tykwer's diffuse story is supposed to be held together with cosmic correspondences, but they are just nebulous and dull. Finally, Sissi and Benno become a sort of Germanic Thelma and Louise. But at least Thelma and Louise had the decency to die at the end.
Nowhere to Hide **
Dir: Myung-se Lee
With: Joong-Hoon Park, Sung-kee Ahn, Dong-Kun Jang, Ji-Woo Choi
110 mins, cert 15
A straight-up-and-down crime actioner, set in Korea, about a tough cop on the edge who is obsessed with taking down a drug lord. It has a little of John Woo and Ridley Scott, and Myung-se Lee's direction provides for plenty of expertly shot thrills and a good performance from Joong-Hoon Park as the pudgy, facetious, and dangerously amoral Detective Woo. There are some pleasingly weird and cynical touches illuminating crime lore, such as the "lucky money" that one detective on stake-out holds up for another's inspection: "You take it off an accident victim, iron it, and you're safe till retirement." Atmospheric, certainly, but in the end this procedural is by the book.
Out of Depth *
Dir: Simon Marshall
With: Sean Maguire, Danny Midwinter, Nicholas Ball, Phil Cornwell, Josephine Butler, Leigh Lawson, Clive Russell, Rita Tushingham
100 mins, cert 18
www.ood.redbus.co.uk
A young guy gets sucked into violent crime when he hires a professional hit man to avenge an assault on his mother. It's an excellent idea for a thriller, and writer-director Simon Marshall tells us that it's actually based on the true and tragic story of a friend of his. But that doesn't stop it being unconvincing, cliched and derivative, with dodgy dialogue and outrageous over-acting. Nicholas Ball is Lenny, the pop-eyed Pirhana brother, in Marshall's quaintly imagined universe of geezers: he's tasty, lairy, and mental. When young Paul Nixon and his mate Steve, played by Sean Maguire and Danny Midwinter, tell him how a slag attacked and humiliated Paul's diamond old mum by urinating on her, Ball's brow contracts in a worrying frown: "He pissed on her? Fair do's. The geezer deserves a slap." Ooo-er. It takes skill to bring out intentional black comedy in violent crime, and I'm afraid this film doesn't have it - although Rita Tushingham is a delicate, dignified presence. And finally flashing up the solemn dedication, To the Real Paul Nixon, immediately after Paul gets horribly "done" in the prison bogs is surely not the most sensitive way of remembering him.
