Tom Hollander Page 2

Curtis has said he may stop making movies, and on the basis of this film you can kind of see why: he's clearly in a rut. While this romance attempts a bit of magical whimsy, it's the same collection of sassy comedy, romantic drama and sudsy sentimentality that characterised Love Actually and Notting Hill. More troubling is how it presents that same almost offensively slanted view of British society.

The magical element is time travel, as young Tim (Gleeson) learns from his father (Nighy) that the men in his family can flit back along their timelines at will, reliving past events and fixing things where needed. Tim decides this will come in handy as he looks for a wife, and indeed he uses his skill to circle round and round charming American Mary (McAdams) until they fall in love. And over the next several years, as he figures out how to make their life together as amazing as possible, he learns that there are some limitations to this gift.

As always, Curtis gives his characters a fantasy level of wealth that doesn't really make sense. We never see Tim travel back to win the lottery, but there's no other explanation for how he and Mary are able to buy a house in a posh Maida Vale street. And these characters also live in an imagined pocket of London that has no diversity at all, as we never see anyone who isn't white and straight. But then, Tim's idyllic childhood on the Cornish coast isn't exactly believable either, complete with a quirky earth-adoring sister (Wilson) and always-confused uncle (Cordery).

Continue reading: About Time Review

Nearly 20 years after Interview With the Vampire, Neil Jordan returns to the genre to breath some new life into a mythology that has grown stale, predictable and rather mopey  (see Twilight). With a lively script by Buffini, Jordan creates a lushly stylish dramatic thriller that continually takes us aback with off-beat storytelling and complex characters who don't always do what we expect them to.

The story centres on mother-daughter immortals Clara and Eleanor (Arterton and Ronan), who are on the run when they arrive in a fading British seaside town. The resourceful Clara seduces the nervous Noel (Mays) so they can stay in his dilapidated Byzantium guesthouse. To earn some cash, the always resourceful Clara turns the empty rooms into a brothel. Meanwhile, Eleanor befriends the fragile young Frank (Jones) and reveals the fact that she and her mother are actually more than 200 years old and need human blood to survive. Through all of this, they're being chased by two elder vampires, the ruthless Ruthven (Miller) and the more sympathetic Darvell (Riley), both of whom share a tangled romantic past with Clara.

Unusually intelligent, the film holds our interest with an astonishing series of twists and turns plus an array of colourful characters that play on stereotypes. Holding it all together is a fairly simple plot that reveals itself in bits and pieces until the full picture comes into focus. From this point, we pretty much know what has to happen in the big finale, but watching events unfold is satisfying and sometimes both thrilling and moving.

Continue reading: Byzantium Review

Subtitled "The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman", this outrageously colourful animated movie certainly can't be pigeonholed as a documentary or a biopic, even though there are elements of each. The filmmakers use recordings of Chapman reading the book about his life, then hire teams of animators to create a stream-of-consciousness 3D tribute. It's not particularly easy to follow, and the absurdly Pythonesque approach isn't always successful. But the film is such an oddity that fans won't want to miss it.

Whatever it is, this isn't a straightforward retelling of Chapman's life story, although it does loosely fill in the details, with each chapter animated in a distinctly different style. It begins with his rather odd childhood, followed by his years at Cambridge, where he met Cleese, Palin, Gilliam and Jones and formed Monty Python. Their TV sketch show was launched in 1969, an unexpected hit that propelled them to stardom. Along the way, Chapman determines that he's 70 percent gay, and indulges in all the alcohol and sex he could find. He died at age 48 of throat cancer in 1989.

The film is a riotous collection of animation styles, from stop-motion to paper cut-outs. Woven into these segments are TV clips, movie scenes and interviews from the archives, and the surviving Pythons supply the voices along with special guests like Stephen Fry and, yes, Cameron Diaz. It feels oddly rambling, going down random sideroads and indulging in moments that cross lines of taste and propriety. Some segments are sharp and pointed, while others take too long to get to their punchlines. But maybe these are inside jokes we simply don't understand.

Continue reading: A Liar's Autobiography Review

Starting with its unlikely origin as an amusement park ride, the Pirates series quickly mushroomed into a sort of meta-pirate film, a vast and whirligig universe unto itself that drew in every possible nautical cliché and legend possible. Thus the first film concentrated on yo-ho-ho-ing, rum-drinking, and general pirate-y scalawaggery. The second roped in Davy Jones and The Flying Dutchman -- not to mention an excess of secondary characters and familial drama. For the third (but not necessarily last, given the teaser it ends with) entry, the bursting-at-the-seams script tosses in a raging maelstrom, an actual trip to Davy Jones' Locker, and even the sea goddess Calypso. Dead Man's Chest showed that more is not always better, with excess just leading to more excess and a general sense of lethargy -- they were just setting us up for the conclusion and marking time until then. At World's End, however, shows that Hollywood excess, when combined with the right combination of actors and an occasionally smart script, can work out quite nicely, thank you very much.

Continue reading: Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End Review