Riviera's Best Films of 2008

I saw more than 300 new films this year: in the cinema during a film's theatrical release but also at press screenings, outdoor cinemas, in airplanes, at festivals, at home and in one particular case, in a pole dancing studio. Lists are silly, and obsessive listmaking such as this borders on the pathological, but indulge me - this is the silly season after all.

RIVIERA'S BEST OF 2008

1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
2. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
3. The Secret of the Grain, Abdel Kechiche, France)
4. Genova (Michael Winterbottom, UK)
5. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
6. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
7. Three Blind Mice (Matthew Newton, Australia)
8. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
9. Everything Is Fine (Yves-Christian Fournier, Canada)
10. Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

The next 33 (in no particular order) are 3 star-and-above titles: Wall-E, Margot at the Wedding, Silent Light, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Out of the Blue, Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Dark Knight, Me and Orson Welles, Towelhead, Adoration, Grindhouse, The Chaser, Boy A, Pontypool, Slumdog Millionaire, In Bruges, Savage Grace, Lake Tahoe, Reprise, Stop-Loss, Lust Caution, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Elegy, Summer Hours, Only, Quantum of Solace, Otto; or Up with Dead People, Elegy, Gran Torino, Funny Games, Persepolis, Australia, The Man From London, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

These films which in some countries came out in 2008 don't make it into the list because I saw them in 2007: Flight of the red Balloon, My Winnipeg, Paranoid Park, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Still Life, You, The Living, Mister Lonely, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days...

These might've made it into the top list, but I haven't seen them yet (Sydney aint't exactly one of the five buroughs): Ballast, La Belle Personne, Mesrine: Ennemi Public Numero 1, Wendy And Lucy, Doubt, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, The Headless Woman, 35 Shots of Rum, RR, The Class, The Changeling, Three Monkeys, Frontier of Dawn, Che, Still Walking, Rachel Getting Married, Liverpool, The Hurt Locker, Il Divo, Tulpan, Milk, United Red Army, 24 City, Two Lovers, The Wrestler, Martyrs...

Top 5 documentaries

1. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts (Scott Hicks, Australia)
   
2. Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog,
   
3. Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK)
   
4. When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, USA)
   
5. Every Little Step (del Deo & Stern, USA)

The next five: Examined Life, This Film is not yet Rated, In The Shadow of the Moon, Planet B-Boy, About a Son.

Best Cinema of 2008

• Best Film: A Christmas Tale - Kings and Queens, an accomplished multi-layered, quasi-mythological take on family relations became my favourite French film of all time. Turns out it was only a teaser for Desplechin's true masterpiece. This, my friends, is cinema.
  
• Best Director: Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale)
  
• Best Original Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu (A Christmas Tale)
  
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso & Roberto Saviano (Gomorrah) - Like being there. Like being there and fearing for one's life. Like being there but, unlike every other person caught in the intricate net of organized crime a la napolitana, seeing the bigger picture. Astounding.
  

• Best Actor: Michael Fassbender (Hunger) - In a year full of great male performances, it was this one which made me think long and hard about the work of an actor, and what that work looks like when it's done right.
  
• Best Actress: Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long) - When she acts in French, Scott Thomas seems liberated, free from expectations and affectations. It's as if she'd shed a layer of skin: her raw performance here is all the more impressive because she plays against type.
  
• Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) - His best performance, in a career which had the potential for many more, was his last one. This'll stick in my head for years: the shot of the Joker sticking his head out of a speeding police car window, hair flying in the wind, eyes lit up like those of a mad dog, Gotham lights flickering frenziedly in the background.
  
• Best Supporting Actress: Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona) - In a film featuring some the most celebrated, lusted after young women in cinema, this relative newcomer not only held her own (she's not even on the poster!) but stole several scenes from her top-billed costars.
  

• Best Cinematography: Marcel Zyskind (Genova) - luminous, dangerous, heartbreaking.
  
• Best Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (Lust, Caution) - Throws caution to the wind: lustful melancholy at its best.
  
• Best Special Effects: the team behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Special effects should serve the story, and they do so beautifully here. Knowing when to impress and when to take a step back and let the actors take over, these special effects take two of the most handsome actors in Hollywood and give them new sets of bodies to play with.
• Best Short Film: Crazy in Love (part 1 of The Signal) - David Bruckner tied with The Brazilian - Sook-yin Lee (part 2 of Toronto Stories). One's about zombies, the other's about autistic love, both are well worth a gander.
  

Best Opening Credit Sequence: The Dog Problem (Howard Nourmand, Grand Jete). It's fun, it's witty and it's nice to look at, just like the film it introduces.

Best Use of a Song: Massive Attack's Herculaneum over the end credits of Gomorrah. If I remember correctly there is no music at all in this superb, suspenseful dissection of the inner-workings of organized crime in Napoli. The narrative in Matteo Garrone's film moves forward by slowly stacking layer upon layer of a brutal truth which all but suffocates the characters, eventually trapping them in a prison of their own making and leaving the audience gasping for air. At which point Massive Attack's dark, merciless instrumental kicks in, its bass-heavy rumblings threatening to bring down the theatre, which after three hours of a cinema so intense and unrelentingly visceral, almost feels like relief.

Best Song: Gran Torino, sung by Clint Eastwood over the end credits of Gran Torino, if only because its bittersweet, corny melody is the only theme possible for a film both profound and utterly over-the-top.

Best Poster. The spare, confronting and beautiful poster for I've Loved You So Long made we want to see and like this film. If Kristin Scott Thomas wins an Oscar this year, she'd be smart to thank the designer for this deceptively simple key art. Runner up spots for Mister Lonely (Jeremy Saunders' version) and Ignition's poster for Vicky Christina Barcelona (even though it all but impossible to find Woody Allen's name in the picture). As for the worst, it just has to be the floating heads of Nothing But The Truth.



Best Blog. David Hudson's Green Cine Daily is to film criticism what the best film festivals are to good cinema: a carefully curated showcase of the works of talented individuals passionate about the medium, and a prism through which to look differently at what's around us. Every morning I look forward to the moment when, between sips of coffee, I get to check out what happened overnight -David blogs from Berlin - in (the) world (of) cinema. David's writing is moving to IFC in a few days, and I look forward to where it takes us (read David Hudson's farewell post).

Best Review: Manohla Dargis on Gran Torino for the New York Times. In a year where film criticism has come under fire in more ways than one, it's good to remember that good film criticism is first and foremost good writing. A special mention to the Village Voice's Nathan Lee, whose clever and hilarious review of Cloverfield made me smile all the way to the videoshop.

I think my favourite quote of the year is Manohla Dargis on Iron Man, on the phone to the Carpetbagger: "There's not enough filmmaking in that film for me to be interested in it". It's almost as deadly as what must be the line of the year: "You unpatriotic little cunt, you're gonna walk right off the plank into the bowels of hell." (hissed at Kate Beckingsale's character by the great Vera Famiga in Nothing But The Truth).

10 moments of cinema which I can't (and won't) get out of my head

1. Jean-Claude Van Damme's lengthy, desperate monologue, delivered to camera in meta-thriller JCVD. It's ironic that it takes an actor playing themselves to remind us that we never really know what an actor is capable of until they show us.
   
2. The opening sunrise and closing sunset of Silent Light. The shot is so beautiful, mysterious and magical it made me hold my breath. After a while I stopped holding my breath though, which is a good thing as the shot lasts a full 5 minutes.
   
3. The 20 min dialogue scene between Bobby Sands and the priest at the centre of Hunger. In my memory, it's a single take. And these men, they just blow you away: as actors, as characters, as people who feel things in black and white, but think in all shades of gray.
   
4. The sounds of Bruce Lee's kung fu fighting over a black screen in Lake Tahoe. Staring at that dark screen - cinema, annuled - I felt my love of the medium, for its super-powers and its wonderfully diverse, vibrant history, well up in me and travel up from my gut to my heart, to my brain and eventually to my tear ducts.
   
5. Kiwi stunt woman Zoe Bell hanging on for dear life on the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger in Death Proof. Who does that? How is it even possible?
6. Francois Cluzet crossing the peripherique in Tell No One's gripping chase sequence. Who does that? How is it possible?
   
7. The rain soaked, confused and dangerous car chase in We Own The Night.
   
8. Hafsia Herzi's feverish, never ending belly dance in The Secret of the Grain. Remarkable in not least for its sensuality in a year (a time?) when sensuality has virtually disappeared from the cinema.
   
9. The superb shot of great white shark leaping out of the water to chomp on a seal, stretched out from four seconds to over a minute in Earth, thanks to the most advanced of high-definition cameras. A spectacle ordinarily so short-lived that even had we been there to see it (leisurely boating meters away from the ocean's largest predator) our eyes and brain would have been unable to properly process it. Jaw-dropping.
   
10. The witty and hilarious running joke of a house permanently on fire in Synecdoche, NY. Oh yeah. I've been there.
    

PS: someone please give these 10 actors under 30 some good material!

1. Hafsia Herzi (The Secret of the Grain) - The mix of innocence and sensuality is effortless for this actress (Summer Bishil does a good job too in Towelhead), but here she takes her character far beyond mere Lolita.

2. Ahney Her (Gran Torino) - it can't be easy standing up to Clint Eastwood but this young actress charmed her way the old codger's heart - and our own. 

3. Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) - It takes someone special to make the scenery chewing Daniel Day-Lewis know that his bark is worse than his bite.

4. and 5. Lina Leandersson and Kåre Hedebrant(Let The Right One In) - imagine asking a kid to come across as a wary, androgynous, ageless vampire. Now imagine that kid doing just that. Meanwhile the human half of this ambiguous, pre-pubescent couple was as creepy as his vampire counterpart. Robert Pattison eat your heart out.
6. Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) - He was great in controversial UK series Skins. In Danny Boyle's feel-good rags-to-riches drama, he's sympathetic, charismatic and entirely believable.
7. Willa Holland (Genova) - she's great as a girl dangerously perched on the brink of adulthood while mourning the death of her mother.

8. Brendan Walters (Australia) - he stole the show, which in this case included mighty abs, grand landscapes and 10,000 head of cattle.
9. and 10. Maxime Dumontier and Chloe Bourgeois (Everything Is Fine) - their naturalistic acting seemed to capture the very essence of adolescence.

The last film I saw was The Curious Case of Benjmain Button, earlier today. If I can take one image with me from this past year in film, it'll be Benjamin and Daisy sailing around the Florida Keys in 1962, a space shuttle taking off in the background, an optimistic image of beauty and magic to take cinema into the new year.

Riviera's Best Films of 2008

10 Best Movie Going Moments of 2008

Not the best films of the year. In some cases, not even in the top 100. But these are my most memorable film watching moments of 2008.

1. Mamma Mia. This Merryl Streep musical blockbuster (the highest grossing film of all time in the UK) is a guilty pleasure. Watching it with a huge crowd at Moonlight Cinema on Boxing Day, however, put any form of shame to shame. Imagine Sydney's Centennial Park filled with people lying in the grass, enjoying a picnic and a glass of Pinot under the stars (and the giant, hovering fruit bats). Now imagine it's the singalong version and everyone is the crowd in warbling along to Abba, cheering and clapping wildly at the end of each musical number. And ponder 300 people rushing to the bottom of the screen when the finale starts, engaging in drunken, euphoric dancing and impromptu Abba choreographies. This so-bad-it's-good camp-fest has true Rocky Horror potential (I came up with a few heckles myself while watching Streep's The Winner Takes It A-a-a-ll).

2. Young People Fucking. This hilarious Canadian sex comedy is fun in itself, but hold the screening in a pole studio, frame it by pole dancing and burlesque acts, add an open bar and some spirited DJ's, and it becomes, well, one of the best movie going moment of 2008.

3. Passenger Side. While in Toronto last September I was invited to attend a private screening of Matt Bissonnette's follow up to Who Loves The Sun, straight off Final Cut. I haven't felt happier in a cinema this year than sitting with a few colleagues, filmmakers and friends watching a very rough cut of a very good indie in Toronto's iconic Royal Cinema (Bruce McDonald was editing his new film upstairs!).

Night. Lawrence Johnston's film - a documentary exploration on our relationship with night - is something you want to see at night, sitting by a bay under the stars. Which is what we did. Bjork was performing live on the Opera House steps and her voice carried over the water towards the end, which was nice. We are so lucky to live in this city.

5. Stop-Loss. Watching Stop-Loss in the grand State Theatre at the Sydney Film Festival was a powerful, if a little nerve-wracking experience. I knew that afterwards I'd be doing my first interview ever, with the charismatic and talented Kimberly Peirce (War and Peirce). I liked the film a lot more than I thought I would, perhaps because then more than ever I had my film critic cap on, and the pre-interview adrenalin which kept my body and my brain alert throughout. The interview itself was an amazing experience, not least because it made me aware of both the intricacies of the process and the potential for insight of the outcome.

6. My Winnipeg. I'd seen (and began a long, steamy affair with) My Winnipeg at the Toronto film festival last year. But it was seeing it again at the State Theatre during the Sydney Film Festival, with Guy Maddin (who I'd have a nervous drink with later) doing the live narration himself, which made we want to have this film's babies.

7. Wanted. I actually saw this film on my birthday with some good friends. We decided to pretend momentarily to be 15 again taking a trip to the multiplex to see a blockbuster. We even sneaked in minitures of absolut, shouted at the screen and whistled when Angelina smacked her lips (and later, went to laser skirmish). We thought Wanted might be one of those "so bad it's good" action thrillers. We were wrong. Three words: Loom of Fate.

8. Global Metal. I saw this doco in the basement of a metal-pushing record store with over 100 metalheads well on the road to drunk: the sound system turned to 11 couldn't drown out the hisses, cheers and general mayhem in the audience. The film, about the appropriation of metal culture by fans outside Europe and the US, drew raves from the pierced, black-clad, hard-to-impress audience. Watching the representatives of a particular sub-culture go crazy watching a film about them was a real highlight for me this year.

9. Wild Combination: a Portrait of Arthur Russell. Despite the fascinating environment in which its subject came to prominence, this documentary didn't really do it for me. What did, however, was the nude hula performance by Trash Vaudeville (yes, those are iPod tassles), which followed the screening at the Metro at the Sydney Film Festival. I think every film should be paired up with a burlesque act from now on.

10. Australia. I saw Baz Luhrmann's oft-panned camp epic on opening night in Sydney, with a large group of friends and friends of friends. Most of us weren't born in Australia, which perhaps explain how much good we thought of the film: most of my aussie buddies cringed and fumed in paranoid outrage at the the cultural stereotyping (did they mind it in Amelie?). It's become terribly bad form to say anything positive about Australia. The evident glee with which Australian critics have been spitting in this film's face - including before they'd had a chance to see it and often after whining loudly about the country's so-called incapacity to produce commercial films - is mildly disconcerting to say the least. Though most of our group work in the film industry, we went as tourists rather than cynics, and yes, we all agreed the film was severely flawed, but at the end of the day, I think we had a really good time. 

If you're not morally opposed to year-end lists check back tomorrow for my best of 2008.

10 Best Movie Going Moments of 2008

It coulda been a contender (Nothing But TheTruth)

Rod Lurie's work is steeped in the political culture of Washington and, from The Contender to tv's Commander in Chief, interested in the decision making ethics of women in power. Earnest, gently liberal and all too happy to sacrifice versimilitude to the demands of Hollywood-style storytelling, Lurie's films are well-intentioned but lacking the sharp edge of the best political thrillers.

Nothing But The Truth takes a true political scandal, the outing former covert operative Valerie Palme by journalist Judith Miller, and repacks it as a femme-driven prison drama cum legal thriller.

Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), a young reporter on the national desk of a major Washington, D.C. daily, writes an explosive story that reveals the identity of covert CIA agent Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga). With the support of her editor (Angela Bassett) and her attorney (Alan Alda) she decides to keep mum and stand up to the bullying tactics of smarmy prosecutor Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon).

This act of first amendment bravery lands her in a detention centre for months, which is where the story stalls somewhat. It takes the pulling of invisible narrative strings to move the story to a satisfying conclusion, neatly tying up Armstrong's integrity with her maternal instincts.

Unfortunately the mechanisms of Hollywood storytelling become so blatantly apparent by then that our empathy, already seriously tested by bad casting and some terrible dialogue, takes a fatal hit. Once the film's only interesting character dies so too has our interest in this otherwise fascinating story. It's a shame because this female-driven tale of power, integrity and free speech in an era of male-initiated warmongering has all the right ingredients for an explosive thriller.

Existing at the confluence of the personal and the political, the narrative does a good job of putting the viewer at the heart of the ethical dilemma. Its need to justify every morally ambiguous decision of its saint-like main character, however, sends a clear message to the viewer: don't work too hard at unravelling the implications of Armstrong's choices, we'll do it for you. And don't worry, Rod Lurie seems to say, I wouldn't burden you with the responsibility of having to think for yourself.

The story's lack of emphasis on the wider canvas - partly attributable to budgetary restrictions, Nothing But The Truth being an indie masquerading as a studio picture - is its undoing. Despite the story involving an unwarranted military operation on foreign soil, a plot to assassinate an American president and a class-A political scandal, there is no sense (let alone images) of national turmoil. Shot in studio locations in maddening close-ups, Nothing But The Truth shoots for widescreen realism with results somewhere between Law and Order and Judge Judy.

Kate Beckinsale is not entirely convincing as a hotshot journalist working on The Story Of The Year. Matt Dillon is grating as the prosecutor while Angela Bassett is given very little to do as the head of the country's most respected newspaper. But even worse is Alan Alda. Usually so charismatic and effortlessly intelligent, his performance here is hindered by the incredible banality of his role as the fashion-obsessed attorney.

One actor does manage to extricate herself from this mess with her dignity intact. Vera Farmiga is sensational as the outed secret agent posing as a soccer mom. She doesn't have many scenes but it's impossible to look away when she's on screen, and not just because she's given the best lines ("You are an unpatriotic little c*nt who's gonna walk right off the plank in the bowels of hell!" - for example). One can only imagine what she might've done with Kate Beckingsale's role...

Nothing But The Truth is something best stumbled upon by accident on late night television, ideally caught 20 minutes in, ensuring at least some assembly work on the part of the viewer. Some of its more hysterical moments are entertaining enough (particularly an over-the-top prison catfight scene straight out of a 70's exploitation flick), but probably not in the way the filmmakers originally intended.




Nothing But The Truth opens stateside December 19th for an Oscar qualifying run, returning for a wider release in January.

It coulda been a contender (Nothing But TheTruth)

Redeeming features (I've Loved You So Long)

Once or twice a year, a French film achieves crossover success in English speaking territories, thanks to efficient marketing and distribution on the part of specialist distributors, award season consideration and a little je ne sais quoi which audiences emotionally connect with. Critics get behinds the film in a big way and it achieves some degree of box-office success, often not entirely proportional to its original French reception.

The somewhat overrated thriller Tell No One (Ne le Dis a Personne) - which also stars Kristin Scott Thomas - is one such example, but the import which is currently making a splash (at least in terms of critical swooning and awards hype) is French novelist and literature professor Philippe Claudel's first feature I've Loved You So Long (Il y a Longtemps que je t'Aime).

Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) and Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) are sisters reunited after 15 years apart. Juliette has just been released from prison and is letting Léa attempt to both reconnect and help with the difficult transition to life on the outside.

Juliette is taciturn and distant, ill at ease in the company of her sister’s friends, having all but forgotten the social manners and conversational skills most take for granted. Close contact with her sister's family, however, enables something inside her to thaw - for better or worse.

One the one hand, she is finally able to engage with society after years of isolation, on the other, her newfound emotional vulnerability means she is forced to confront the past and come to terms with a burden of guilt no one around her truly understands. And for good reason - every character (and every viewer) is kept in the dark as to Juliette's original crime until the last reel.

The role of Juliette is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and not just because it is that rarest of things, a role written for a middle-aged actress. It's also the kind of role where everything happens just below the surface, simmering silently until the final breakout scene of emotional catharsis (usually the clip played during the nominations recap at the Oscars).

I've always found Kristin Scott Thomas an engaging actress, even if she is often typecast - perhaps because of her clipped accent - as an ice queen, from Chromophobia to Gosford Park. When she acts in French, Scott Thomas seems liberated, free from expectations and affectations. It's as if she'd shed a layer of skin: her performance here could almost be described as raw. The same thing could be said of her unvarnished beauty, which shines through here despite a refreshing absence of make-up.

Just as good, though, is Elsa Zylberstein as Léa, a role perhaps less showy but easily as difficult. The younger sister's emotional intelligence, which allows her to weave a bond with a long lost relative despite the at times overwhelming obstacles, is beautifully conveyed by Zyllberstein, making Léa the real heart of the film.

The sisters' parallel journey is inspiring to watch and scripted with intelligence and precision by Claudel. At least until the end of the film, when the screenwriter is unable to resist going for emotional payoff in the hope of securing audience sympathy once and for all. Claudel does that by revealing the nature of Juliette's original crime and in doing so, offers a psychological back story which erases any trace of moral ambiguity.

While it's precisely this narrative cop out which has given the film its appeal to a broad audience looking for a happy end to their bleak foreign films, it also diminishes the power of and intelligence of a story built on unknowable foundations. I've Loved you So Long could have been an uncompromising, debate-provoking story if it didn't let its audience off the hook so easily. It would have been much braver to ask viewers to accept Juliette as we discover her, rather than how we secretly hope her to be.

By the time redemption begins to rear its ugly head, we've left behind the kind of intransigent drama (which an actress such as Isabelle Huppert would've owned in the hands of a more intrepid filmmaker) and entered the familiar territory of Hollywood style resolutions.

By exonerating Juliette from the inevitable brutality of a crime vicious enough to warrant 15 years of imprisonment, Claudel isn't fully able to conquer his subject, choosing at the last minute to take a path around the philosophical mountain he was attempting to scale, while being so very close to its summit.



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I've Loved You So Long is currently in cinemas in the UK and the US and out on Australian screens on December 26.

Redeeming features (I've Loved You So Long)

Rumble in the bungalow (Frost / Nixon)

Like the "sophisticated" core audience that studios go after during awards season, I'm a sucker for political films. And who best to tackle that love-to-hate-him icon of political infamy, Richard Nixon, than British playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan?

Morgan's celebrated portraits of the Queen of England (Stephen Frears' The Queen) and Idi Amin (Kevin McDonald's The Last King of Scotland) are testaments to his uncanny ability to uncover the humanity and (one version of the) truth behind the manic media portrayal of a public figure. Adapted from Morgan's very own play, Frost/Nixon - like Oliver Stone's W. - is not a caricatured indictment of a much-hated politician but a nuanced portrait of a deeply flawed man.

Three years after his resignation, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) agrees to break his silence (for a hefty sum) and takes part in a series of eagerly anticipated television interviews. The unlikely interviewer is UK talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen), a showbiz personality himself in need of a comeback.

As cameras rolled in the summer of 1977, many expected the veteran politician to control the agenda. And for a while, he does, skilfully evading questions about Watergate and clawing his way back into the hearts and minds of viewers. But then of course, the tables are turned.

The interviews are filmed like a boxing match, from training practice to the weigh-in, from round 1 to eventual defeat. The Rocky formula - used again and again in sports movies for over three decades - is so predictable that watching this film is about as suspenseful as watching a lava lamp for two hours.

The set up is such that one waits patiently for the underdog to come to terms with the stakes of his endeavour (personal, political and otherwise), fully aware that a deus-ex-machina moment will show David Frost the light, in extremis, and give him the strength to crush Goliath.

When that fateful moment comes - in the form of an unlikely late night drunken phone conversation between the disgraced president and the wily journalist - it's riveting to watch but far from satisfying, dramatically. The resulting crash course which Frost undertakes that night, learning in a few hours of insomnia what his research team have been unable to teach him over several months - is just as implausible.

Ron Howard is no George Clooney and Frost/Nixon is no Goodbye, and Good Luck. His pedestrian direction doesn't help proceedings much. Howard has always been an efficient filmmaker, but his work is bland and utterly devoid of artistic personality. That it's held in such high regard by Hollywood speaks volume about the conservative nature of the award-bestowing establishment. Many must be thankful to Mr Howard for proving again and again that directors who enthusiastically adhere to formula can still be handsomely rewarded.

If the film remains satisfying it's largely due to the great cast, most notably Frank Langella's masterful, reined in performance as Richard Nixon. Without trying to mimic the larger-than-life statesman, Langella goes after Nixon's often conflicting characteristics - his manipulative intelligence, his arrogant charms, his vulnerability and loneliness - and creates a unique, believable character.

It's not surprising to learn that both actors have portrayed these characters repeatedly on stage beforehand: their chemistry is apparent and Michael sheen seems totally at ease in the "effeminate" Italian shoes of David Frost. Around them are some great actors given very little to do, including an aging Kevin Bacon who now eerily resembles Clint Eastwood, the ever-watchable Toby Jones as Nixon's agent, and Rebecca Hall (superb in Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona), criminally underused here in the insultingly paper-thin role of Frost's hot mistress.

Frost / Nixon is a terribly well acted film, a great match between sharp, witty banter and the experienced actors to do it justice. For all the film's eye-catching production design and fancy Californian bungalows, I would have loved to see a stripped-bare version of this fascinating material, directed by someone with raw talent... which is how many have described the play. I have a feeling watching the actual 1977 interviews might be just as rewarding, if not more.

David Frost reminded me of Ron Howard himself, a charismatic entertainer who wants to be loved, is good at what he does but approaches his subject without the respect, attention and personal dedication that it deserves. Still, while I believe this formulaic film is destined to be over-rated by conservative filmgoers the world over, it's certainly no waste of anyone's time. Well, apart from poor Rebecca Hall's.

Frost/Nixon is out now on US screens. It opens in Australia and New Zealand on December 26th and in the UK in January 23rd 2009.

Rumble in the bungalow (Frost / Nixon)

Seoul survivors (The Chaser)

No one does dark, morally ambiguous thrillers like the Koreans - at least at the moment. From Sympathy for Mr Vengeance to Bittersweet Life, from Memories of Murder to The President's Last Bang, the cruel and unusual gems keep on coming... and that's only the internationally distributed tip of the iceberg.

I finally caught up with Hong-Jin Na's The Chaser (Chugyeogja), a massive runaway hit at the Korean box-office which has crossed over to the West thanks to a stellar festival run. It's had a UK release and has been snapped up by distributors across Europe and Asia, but it looks like Australians will have to wait for the imminent American remake to see this story on the big screen (or a local fest with its finger on the pulse). Word is that a script is being sought from William Monahan - who remade Infernal Affairs into The Departed - and that Leonardo DiCaprio will play one of the two leads.

Joong-ho is a washed-out fourtysomething ex-detective turned ringleader in a nearly-bankrupt call-girl operation. Though two of his girls have gone missing, he sends a third, Mi-Jin, to a client known for his sociopath ways, even though the woman is ill and has no one to loo after her seven year-old daughter. Things get ugly really quickly for Mi-Jin once she enters the client's house. She soon realizes she is next in line in a killing spree which has taken the lives of 9 other girls.

The well groomed though clearly psychotic serial killer bears a hint of resemblance to Kevin Spacey's character in Se7en, while the cat-and-mouse chase is constructed with the elegance of Silence of the Lambs. As with these two landmark thrillers, it's the screenplay's firm grasp on the codes of the genre which draw us in, but it's its unpredictable structure which keeps us hooked.

In The Chaser, viewers' expectations are constantly confounded. By the end of the first nerve-jangling act for example, the killer our "chaser" thought he'd never catch is already in police custody. The narrative engine changes from the search for a perpetrator to the search for evidence, and eventually to the search for Mi-Jin, who's alive but trapped in the killer's lair. Later still, in a vicious, I-never-thought-it-would-happen moment, the film shifts gears yet again, taking a turn into an even darker night where redemption comes only at a steep price.

Yun-Seok Kim's affecting performance as Joong-ho is the spine of this many headed-beast of a film. We're firmly in noir territory and Joong-ho is comfortably more "anti" than "hero". He gets our sympathy despite his violent, misogynistic behaviour, only because we sense in the screenwriters' layered characterization the embryonic rhythms of a drawn out moral awakening.

In a society corrupted by greed, ignorance and moral decay, Joong-ho's complete lack of faith in human nature is a given - that he is able to feel anything resembling guilt or compassion feels almost heroic.

From a tonal perspective, the director's heroism lies in his ability to juggle horror with humour without giving an inch. As with Memories of Murder and The President's Last Bang, much of the film's coal-black humour stems from the grotesque incompetence of the police and the authorities. This seems to be a recurring theme in a national cinema which has only been truly free to speak its mind for about 20 years.

Hong-jin Na displays a confidence which betrays his short CV as a director. He plays brilliantly with pacing, atmosphere and audience expectations even when such high-wire acts risk bringing such a long, convoluted film down. He is helped in this by the tangible talent of editor Sung-min Kim (Memories of Murder, The Host) and particularly evocative cinematography and score.

In its refusal to bow down to formula, its concern with process rather than result and ultimately, its use of the thriller format to paint rich portraits of conflicted, obsessive men, the film The Chaser reminds me of the most is Fincher's accomplished Zodiac. Both films successfully deconstruct real-life events through genre fiction (here the real-life case of Young-cheol Yoo, whose 21-victim spree in 2003-4 launched a nation-wide debate about the death penalty) as a means to expose an entire nation's troubled political, social and cultural psyche.

Seoul survivors (The Chaser)