Tim Roth Page 3

Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker who simply can't be ignored, especially when he lobs a three-hour wide-screen epic whodunit Western into the cinema. This strikingly entertaining film is packed with his trademark plot twists and dialogue that snaps and crackles in every direction imaginable. So even though it's mainly set in a single room, it's never boring. But with no discernible point, it also leaves the audience rather cold.

In the snowy Rockies of southern Wyoming, cavalry officer turned bounty hunter Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) hitches a ride on a stagecoach with shifty gunslinger John (Kurt Russell), who is escorting feisty outlaw Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to collect the reward on her head and see her hanged. They also pick up lost new sheriff Chris (Walton Goggins) before an intense blizzard forces them to take shelter at a mountain lodge run by the suspicious Bob (Demian Bichir). Inside, hangman Oswaldo (Tim Roth), war veteran Sandy (Bruce Dern) and their mysterious friend Joe (Michael Madsen) are also waiting out the storm. And as these eight people circle around each other, it's clear that each of them wants the others dead.

No, there's not a single trustworthy person in this story, and Tarantino has a great time revealing the inner murkiness within each one. This gives the actors plenty of texture to work with, as they deliver their lines with knowing innuendo, razor-sharp wit and glowering loathing. The set-up feels somewhat belaboured, but the film's second half is a cracking Agatha Christie-style mystery as we wait for the first shot to be fired. With its single setting, it feels like a particularly nasty stage play, livened up by Tarantino's wordy writing, which drops in big issues like racism and sexism without ever quite grappling with them. And there's of course also a steady stream of vicious violence, including an extended flashback featuring Channing Tatum.

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While this strikingly well-made film is a great calling card for rising-star filmmaker Norris, it's also so relentlessly dark and unsettling that it's difficult to see the point of it all. This is such a bleak coming-of-age tale that it almost obscures any hope at all, focussing a series of horrific incidents into a confined space that gives the actors and filmmaker a change to shine, but leaves the audience exhausted.

It's set in a North London cul-de-sac, where the pre-teen Skunk (Laurence) lives with her big brother Jed (Milner), her single dad (Roth) and her nanny Kasia (Marjanovic). But her happy life is thrown into chaos when violence erupts: hotheaded widower Bob (Kinnear) storms across the street and punches simple-minded Rick (Emms), seemingly for no reason, triggering a series of events that Skunk struggles to understand. And Bob's three daughters seem to be just as violent. One (Bryant) is mercilessly bullying Skunk at school, while another (Daveney) is seducing Jed.

The way so many story elements circle around Skunk makes the film feel almost like a stage play. Everyone is so interconnected that we wonder if much of this exists only in her mind. For example, Kasia has just started a relationship with Skunk's schoolteacher (Murphy), who has been accused of abusing one of Bob's daughters. And there are even more issues that put Skunk in both emotional and physical peril, including a new boyfriend (Sergeant) who might have to move away and the fact that she has Type 1 diabetes. And Skunk's world seems to be limited to her street and a junkyard across the field.

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Richard Gere delivers such a charming, layered performance that he overcomes a contrived plot that piles too many financial and personal crises on the central character. But Gere is magnetic, and the film's themes resonate at a time of economic difficulty, most notably in the idea that all major world events revolve around money.

Gere plays 60-year-old financial mogul Robert, who lives the high life with a private jet, glamorous philanthropist wife Ellen (Sarandon) and sexy French art-dealer mistress Julie (Casta). He seduces the press with his intelligent wit, and has managed to conceal the fact that he's in severe money trouble. Everything hinges on selling his company, but the buyers are dragging their feet. Then he is involved in a fatal car crash that could undo everything. He turns to an estranged friend (Parker) for help, but a tenacious police detective (Roth) is beginning to piece it all together.

Having Gere in the central role makes all the difference here, because he is able to add the subtext and moral ambiguity that's lacking in the script and direction. Otherwise, it's shot like a too-obvious TV movie with close-up camerawork, a bland Cliff Martinez score and constant moralising about family values. By contrast, Gere is a shady character who is up to all kinds of unethical things and yet holds our sympathies because we can see that he's not all bad. Even so, the script puts him through the wringer, with a never-ending stream of personal and professional problems.

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Among the group is Susie Carter (Sophie Okonedo), who quickly reunites with her husband Ian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) but is devastated to learn their four-year-old daughter slipped out of her father's arms and has disappeared. Meanwhile, Kim Peabody (Gina McKee) has lost her husband but finds her teenage son horribly injured.

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Prelude: A noisy 1980s London auction for van Gogh's Sunflowers dissolves to a 1880s vagabond-ish Vincent (Tim Roth) and brother Theo (Paul Rhys). Multi-million-pound bids of a distant future echo as Vincent declares he's becoming a painter.

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Joshua, a long-time Little Odessa expatriate, is called back to the neighborhood to perform a hit on a big shot resident. When he arrives, he encounters his worshipful brother Reuben (Edward Furlong), former lover Alla (Moira Kelly), hateful father Arkady (Maximilian Schell), and dying mother Irina (Vanessa Redgrave). Together, the cast creates a highly dysfunctional family the likes of which you've probably never seen before.

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Now, after Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Robert Greenwald's Uncovered: The War on Iraq, France's The World According to Bush, the upcoming Bush's Brain, and many more, filmmaker John Sayles adds his satiric shovelful with Silver City, a (fictional) feature film which explores the ramifications of a political system that lends itself to corrupt and unseemly influences.

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Deceiver may not be the latest in this trend of trying to trick us, but it is, like most of them, incredibly easy to predict. You see, when you've watched enough movies, you become immune to their tricks. You see through them, know the killer ten seconds in from their first facial expressions.

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Torpid, trite and not the least bit scary -- just unrelen=tinglyunpleasant -- the first 45 minutes of the movie only came to life in twoscenes involving the messy divorce of miserable single mom Jennifer Connelly(proving Oscars don't bring talented actresses good roles). She subsequentlymoves into a drab, creepy cinderblock slum with her sad-eyed daughter (ArielGade), even though it's made very clear that there's nothing keeping herfrom finding a nicer place in the suburbs.

Soon the kid has an "imaginary friend" she won'ttalk about, their ceiling is dripping gooey black liquid from an abandoned(and eerily flooded) apartment upstairs, and the building's greasy manager(John C. Reilly) and bug-eyed, hollow-cheeked building superintendent (PetePostlethwaite) both seem to be hiding something sinister.

Director Walter Salles (the Brazilian behind "TheMotorcycle Diaries," making his inauspicious Hollywood debut) dragsout these routine, oppressively glum establishing scenes to a mind-numbingdegree. (If this apartment building is spooky enough to justify its ownominous soundtrack theme from the moment mom and daughter arrive, how comeConnelly isn't astute enough to realize something's amiss, even if shecan't hear the music?)

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Without the faintest hint of director Tim Burton's uniquely uncanny style, "Planet of the Apes" version 2.0 feels like nothing more than a generic (albeit overblown) sci-fi summer movie -- and a forgettably mediocre one at that.

A passionless, elementary endeavor of wow effects and a yawn plot (which has been reinvented from the 1968 original), the picture opens circa 2029 with astronaut Mark Wahlberg working on a space station, training chimps to pilot one-man pods into electrical storms encountered in deep space.

After losing contact with one chimp in a rather ominous anomaly, Wahlberg establishes his maverick personality (which soon fades into a vanilla version of your standard action hero) by swiping a pod against orders to go rescue him. Once inside the storm, our hero is sucked into a wormhole that turns his helm dead and spits him out to crash land on a faraway world in the distant future where -- as if you didn't know -- a brutal, medieval society of evolved simians enslaves primitive humans as labor and pets.

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After all its TV commercial posturing about "re-envisioning" a classic as a post-Hong Kong actioner, "The Musketeer" betrays the truth of its utter lack of real ambition in the casting of a wooden, charmlessly handsome, totally generic Hollywood pretty boy in the title role.

His name is Justin Chambers (Jennifer Lopez's irritating Italian suitor in "The Wedding Planner"), and he looks and acts like he got the part only because Chris O'Donnell -- the industry's preferred choice for glinty-eyed, mannequin-souled heroes -- already played D'Artagnan in Disney's weightless 1993 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers."

Out to avenge the murder of his father some 14 years before, this D'Artagnan is "all for one" without the "one for all." Ostensibly, he ventures to Paris to join King Louis XIII's elite guard, only to find them disbanded and in disarray following a power shift that favored troops loyal to the power-mad Cardinal Richelieu (Stephen Rea).

Continue reading: The Musketeer Review