Restless: One Star

"The sheer fatuity of the film's representation of bereavement and death is breathtaking, and even given that it is, arguably, supposed to be a semi-fantastical riff, there is something so insufferably smug about the whole proceedings. This film is so annoying that as the lights went up, I was to be found hanging from the cinema ceiling by my fingernails, growling."

Peter Bradshaw's review of Gus Van Sant's Restless in The Guardian.

Fillums: Smiley's People

"The movie brilliantly conjures up the heavy weather of Le Carré's spy game: it involves nothing like derring-do, but a ritual of humiliation and a ballet of shame in which the security services play their part in managing decline and managing denial, and the Brit spooks try to rebuild their reputation with the Americans – the only people with secrets worth keeping – in their calamitous post-Philby world. Alfredson shows how the profession of secrets meshes with sexual shame, heterosexual and homosexual: perhaps because married womanisers and in-the-closet gay men are good at pretence and doublethink, and perhaps because they yearn for a world which makes a virtue of deceit. In his visit to Moscow this week, David Cameron regaled his hosts with an ingenuous anecdote about being approached as a fresh-faced teenager during a Russian trip in his 1985 gap year. Two men encountered him on a beach, then took him to lunch, then dinner, and flatteringly asked him about politics. Cameron laughingly says it was a "KGB interview". Well, yes. But were they to collaborate on a film version, Le Carré and Alfredson might give us a clearer hint about the subtexts to this predatory encounter..."

Peter Bradshaw reviews Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in The Guardian.

Film: Bent Double

"The English language can be a treacherous and slippery thing, with some entirely innocuous words changing their character as they cross the Atlantic. This has sadly been the case with the new movie from M Night Shyamalan, which has just arrived here from Hollywood, a deeply serious and long fantasy epic – the first in a number of parts, in fact – based on an animated TV series. For a British audience, the film's language is inadvertently flavoured by associations and nuances that are vulgar, abusive, and very, very unfortunate indeed.
"The story is set in an imaginary era in which the world is divided into four nations based on the four ancient elements: earth, air, fire and water. The Fire nation is warring with the others for total domination. Yet each nation has a certain type of people, a favoured race different from the rest, people with the Jedi-like power to control or "bend" the elements. Firebenders. Earthbenders. Waterbenders. And airbenders. At the cinema showing I attended, the British crowd hooted derisively at key dialogue moments. One wise old lady says solemnly to a young man: "I could tell at once that you were a bender, and that you would realise your destiny." One character tells another wonderingly: "There are some really powerful benders in the Northern Water Zone." Another whispers tensely: "We want to minimise their bender sources." A key figure is taken away by brutal soldiers, one of whom shouts cruelly: "It's a bender."
"And so on, for almost two hours. Each time, the response from the auditorium was deafeningly immature, and brought many of us to a state of nervous collapse. By the end of the film, I felt like a bit-part player in some feature-length adaptation of Viz comic – Springtime for Finbarr Saunders, perhaps. This scene will inevitably be repeated in every cinema in the land showing The Last Airbender. For Friday and Saturday night showings, the police may have to be called..."

- Peter Bradshaw reviews The Last Airbender (1 star) in The Guardian