Reviews

Fernando Rey and Gonzalo Vega feature as two screenwriters who retreat to a monastery to pen their next work. During their stay, they witness the slow toil of monastic life and become fixated upon a local girl, played by Maribel Verdu.

There is very little plot to speak of - the two writers compete for the affection of Verdu, even though Fernando Rey looks more like her grandfather. Maribel performs excellently as the wily minx looking to be cast in a screen role.

The saving grace of the film is the beautiful lush setting and insight into monastic life.

Reading through the comments, there seems to be a lot of nonsense about the emotional banality of La Pianiste. I find this hard to comprehend given the outstanding performance by Isabelle Huppert. Huppert is gripping - she manages to convey perfectly the woman on the edge, full of self-hate and delusion.

The film is wonderfully paced and judged. It would be so easy to portray the lead as a ridiculous figure - consider the scene in the porn store for instance. Somehow, Huppert is able to carry it off, partly because of her brilliant performance but also because the director makes her surreal life real and identifiable.

Don't ignore this film. It is one of the most startling and engaging films (and performances) I have seen.

Trust Boris!

Oh please, this was a truly awful film. The performances were so wooden it made me cringe. Steve Martin should be ashamed of himself, delivering a kind of hammed up "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" role which did not do himself credit. The lead and the femme fatale were unbelievably wooden and completely unbelievable in their roles (her final line was awful).

The plot did have a few interesting turns but each twist was signposted so large that all suspense eventually disappeared.

I suppose it is easy to compare this film (unfavourably) with Rosemary's Baby - both feature a satanic group attempting to spawn an anti-Christ with the help of an unsuspecting accomplice.

However, I think the central theme of each film is different.

Rosemary's Baby is about paranoia. All through the film, we are not sure whether Mia Farrow's suspicions are correct or whether she is just suffering from a pregnancy-related illness, as her doctor suggests. What makes this film work is this uncertainty and unease.

The Devil's advocate is about vanity. Keanu Reeve's ultimate destruction is brought about because he of this weakness in his character. In RB, we never get the sense that Mia's involvement in the Satanic cult is in anyway related to a sin or vice. DA is clearly about one man's fatal flaw.

I'm not saying that The Devil's Advocate is a great film. It is watchable and fairly scary. But I don't think it is fair to call it a copy of RB.

The film is basically a complete rip-off of the evil child genre and, to be honest, Omen makes a much better job of it. A young couple, living in an idyllic country setting, are visited by a pregnant woman who gives birth at their house and then disappears mysteriously leaving her baby daughter. A series of "accidental" deaths follows in the household and eventually the parents come to realise that the demonic child is the cause.

The film adds nothing to the genre, but it is almost worth watching just for the evil child. After each death, the camera zooms up on her face and she wears an expression of pure evil. Very disturbing. I remember seeing the film when I was 15 and could not forget her face.

Apart from that, the Godsend is pretty missable.

Allen is Boris Grushenko, a Russian coward, who unsuccessfully tries to avoid the impending war with Napoleonic France. He somehow becomes a war hero and hatches a plan to assassinate Napoleon with the help of Natasha (Diane Keaton).

This is classic Woody Allen. Apart from the cutting one-liners and characteristic asides, it is also a brilliant pastiche of Bergman, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The prison sequence and the conversations with death are inspired.

The score, Prokoviev's War and Peace suites, sets the pace for the film and gives it a feeling of lightness which is at odds with the supposedly lofty themes of Love and Death.

Definitely, a showcase for Woody's talent.

This early outing for Vicente Aranda is a bizarre and confusing concoction of psychedelia and soft-core pornography. Clara is a bored housewife who spends her spare-time appearing in idiotic porn films. Her husband discovers her double-life and demands to meet the director.

This film is best avoided.