Tears of the Black Tiger
***
Dir: Wisit Sartsanatieng With: Chartchai Ngamsan, Stella Malucchi, Supakorn Kitsuwon
100 mins, cert 18
You've heard of the spaghetti western - this is the stir-fry horse opera. Here's the uproarious high-camp cowboy drama from Thailand that wowed us all at Cannes. It's bizarrely stylised, boasting melodramatic over-acting, giant emotional close-ups, screechingly villainous laughter, with tense stand-offs and gory shoot-outs borrowed from Peckinpah and Leone. The whole thing looks like a silent movie with spoken dialogue, and the super-saturated colour tones and cheekily obvious sets make it look like an old black-and-white movie that's been "colorized" for American TV.
Director Wisit Sartsanatieng assures us it's a pastiche of Thai western styles. Most of us will have to take his word for that; often it just looks like it's in a barking world of its own. And most surreally of all, during sentimental scenes it uses music that sounds exactly like the Hovis ad theme. ("Ey oop lad, ah remember wheeling t'bike oop cobbled 'ill, on me way to a violent homoerotic shoot-out wi' Thai cowboys".)
It's got a weird charm, but it needs a loudly enthusiastic audience to keep it galloping along.
Lucky Break
***
Dir: Peter Cattaneo With: Lennie James, James Nesbitt, Bill Nighy, Timothy Spall, Olivia Williams
107 mins, cert 12
FilmFour are very keen that their new comedy - on which a lot of commercial hopes are riding - shouldn't just be regarded as Son of Full Monty. Actually, I liked it better: it isn't burdened with Monty's choked-up sense of importance about "masculinity".
This is an amiable, entertaining prison romp starring James Nesbitt and Lennie James as a couple of lags who plan a breakout under the cover of staging an amateur musical about the life of Lord Nelson (whose book and lyrics are composed by Stephen Fry; any chance of getting a complete, uninterrupted performance?)
Nesbitt is a very engaging, intelligent comic actor with a real big-screen future because he understands that less is more. There's a funny turn from Bill Nighy as the posh bloke inside for dodgy accountancy; Christopher Plummer is on terrific form as the musical-loving governor and Olivia Williams supplies charming and credible love interest. Enjoyable stuff.
Heartbreakers
***
Dir: David Mirkin With: Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ray Liotta, Anne Bancroft, Gene Hackman
123 mins, cert 15
www.mgm.com/heartbreakers/
Award-winning TV director David Mirkin has done a very solid job with this wacky comedy caper. Sigourney Weaver is the beautiful grifter who marries gullible zillionaires; then her sexy daughter, Jennifer Love Hewitt, entraps them into compromising situations. Mommie Dearest divorces them, they split the proceeds and then they set their sights on the next mark: Gene Hackman, a very old, deathly pale cigarette-addict, so cartoon-like he could be a Batman villain (the Sucker maybe?). The plot rambles on a bit, but there are plenty of laughs, and Weaver's angular, patrician poise makes her a true American original in a Hollywood dominated by identikit guys'n'babes.
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
*
Dir: Simon Wincer With: Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski
92 mins, cert PG
www.crocodiledundeeinla.com
It's 15 years since the feelgood comedy Crocodile Dundee made its big splash, and 13 since the first sequel. Since then, Paul Hogan's comic essence has been efficiently cloned for a million Australian lager ads. What is there left for a feature-length Croc Dundee III? Well, Mick's now out on the west coast, with very much the same high-jinks as the first adventure. He and his mate Jacko blunder into a gay bar, and blunder out again, Mick muttering about "gay homosexuals", having affected in the previous reel to believe that gay meant happy. Then they beat up some muggers. The movie gives Mike Tyson a lovable cameo, perhaps under the impression that he's famous for nothing but boxing. Dundee's got a son now, and Linda Kozlowski, his significant other in fact and fiction, is looking more stately. But Paul himself looks eerily much the same as ever: grizzled, lined, but the same bloke. He's enjoying himself. Good luck to him. But what on earth is in it for us?
Josie and the Pussycats
**
Dir: Harry Elfont, Deborah Kaplan With: Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid, Rosario Dawson
98 mins, cert PG
www.josiethemovie.com
This exhumes the corpse of a long-forgotten old Archies cartoon. Josie and the Pussycats are an ass-kickin' girl band whose good-time rock'n'roll is a damn sight more real than the pre-digested pap churned out by the corporations. But these sinister interests sign up Josie and the band and try to implant subliminal messages in their recordings, selling all sorts of branded teen fashion merchandise.
It's very lame. The movie's full of pseudo-criticism of corporate America with logos all over the place - companies which will naturally be furious that they are so prominently mentioned in this biting satire. It conveniently concludes that the perpetrators of corporate teen-fashion fascism are the oiks who used to be yucky, ugly and unpopular in high school, unlike über-sexy babes like Josie and her friends. Alan Cumming does well as the creepy limey manager, but it's a bit of a miss, as they used to say on Juke Box Jury.
Le Secret
**
Dir: Virginie Wagon With: Anne Coesens, Tony Todd
107 mins, cert 18
Imagine Intimacy crossed with Mandingo and you'll have some idea of how director Virginie Wagon's well-acted but questionable sex drama is put together. Anne Coesens is Marie, who sells encyclopedias door to door. One day she flogs her tomes to a sexy black American, played by Tony Todd. Soon they are enjoying rampant afternoon delight. The film endows Marie with a rich emotional life, and when the affair goes sour, it is Marie's pain that is important.
And Tony? He disappears from view. He's supposed to have had something going on with the black woman next door. Otherwise, he's a mystery, just an exotic phallus from whom Marie demands "spicy" sex. Her palate is satisfied; I found this flavourless.
