Children of Men

The Sweet Hereafter, written and directed by the Armenian- Canadian director of Exotica, Atom Egoyan, is a movingly updated version of the Pied Piper story only without the rats. This time the Pied Piper is not a businessman or a moralist but mere capricious fate which causes a school bus to run off the road…

Better wear some flowers in your hair

Yet another showcase of British acting talent turns out to be pretty good as a movie too.

Portrait of a Lady by Jane Campion has a very strange beginning. A bunch of contemporary girls, photographed in black and white and grainy stills, as if they were the fading memories, talk about love and men and kissing and “relationships” and marriage over opening credits until one holds out her hand and we see…

I tried very hard to like Henry Fool by Hal Hartley and was intermittently successful, but I found it in the end unsatisfying. The film tells the story of two friends, the rogue Henry Fool (“there used to be an ‘e’ on the end of it in the 17th century, but it dropped off”), played…

Whatever by Susan Skoog stars Liza Weil as Anna Stockard and Chad Morgan as her slutty friend Brenda, two high school girls in 1981 who do the standard “survivors” turn on behalf of the I-am-womanism of Ms Skoog. It follows the by-now familiar path of mythologizing and romanticising the sufferings of women, particularly young, post-pubertal…