heywood100

The story of Ang Lee's American Civil War drama Ride With The Devil is a straightforward enough piece about a young man getting caught up in the violence of the time. What surprised me most was Toby Maguire's performance as that young man. Before seeing this I had always thought of him as a decent actor for low key roles, but certainly not a leading man (I haven't seen Spiderman). But although he does occasionally look a bit too much like his dopey hitchhiker character from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, for most of this film he is spectacular. He pulls off his leading role with style and steals pretty much any scene he's in.

Another surprising performance comes from singer Jewel Kilcher. She's not exactly going to win any Oscars, but compared to most singer-turned-actresses (You know who you are Mariah) she's very impressive. Overall, Ride With The Devil is a decent enough film, made by a classy director, and starring a first rate class.

I haven't yet read the Kurt Vonnegut book this was adapted from, but I am familiar with some of his other work and was interested to see how it would be translated to the screen. Overall, I think this is a very successful adaptation of one of Vonnegut's novels. It concerns the story of an American living in Germany who is recruited as a spy for the US. His job is to ingratiate himself with high ranked Nazi's and send secret messages to the American's via his weekly radio show. But when the war ends he is denounced as a war criminal but escapes to New York, where various odd plot twists await.

If Mother Night has a problem it's that it tends to get a little too sentimental at times. But for most of the film the schmaltz is kept to a minimum and the very strange plot is carried through with skill and aplomb. And there are some fabulous moments of black comedy involving three right wing Christian fundamentalists and a very highly ranked Nazi in a prison cell. Very much recommended.

In my limited experience of them, I have not yet seen a French film with any redeeming qualities. And L'ennui does not halt that sequence, as it is without doubt the worst film I've seen since...well, since the last French film I watched. The story, as far as you could call it that, concerns a boring, selfish and distrustful university professor falling in ‘love' with a seventeen year old girl who seems to have no emotions. I've put ‘love' in inverted commas, because essentially they just do it a lot. And I've said that the girl ‘seems' to have no emotions. That was wrong of me, because it suggests that she has some hidden under the surface. She doesn't. She is possibly the most one dimensional character of any film ever. No attempt has been made to make her seem more human; she is just a non-stop sex machine. With bad dialogue. The actress who plays her might be superb at pretending to be emotionally dead, or she might just be wooden - it's hard to tell the difference.

The frequent sex scenes are, to be honest, a little grotesque, and the rest of the time is taken up by very long passages of question and answer between the two leads. The boring, selfish and distrustful man asks a general question about life, the 1D woman answers with `I don't know'. Every. Single. Time. So, all in all this is your stereotypical French art film. It's also an insult to anyone who likes intelligent cinema, that they think they can pawn (or maybe that should be porn?) us off with this vague, meandering, interest-free rubbish.