Updated Movie Reviews
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Battle of Heaven

Director: Carlos Reygadas
Certificate: 18 Mex 2005,

Following on from his impressive debut feature JAPON, which won the Guardian New Director's Award at Edinburgh in 2002, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas' BATTLE IN HEAVEN establishes him as one of the true visionaries of contemporary cinema. Marcos and his wife kidnap a baby for ransom money but it all goes wrong when the child dies. Tortured by the tragedy, Marcos, a chauffeur to a general, decides to confess to his boss's daughter Ana, who prostitutes herself for fun.

Propelled by his guilt and confusion, Marcos' world descends into a downward spiral... An uncompromising, unorthodox and at times disturbing vision of human folly – certainly challenging and fresh from it's official selection screening at Cannes earlier in the year, BATTLE IN HEAVEN is certainly memorable merely because you don’t often see films like this at your local cinema.
Matt Arnoldi

MAREBITO



The director of The Grudge brings another Japanese horror flick to film, this one focusing on the face of fear. A cameraman possessed by the desire to understand fear wanders the Tokyo streets, stalking potential subjects and hoping to come upon haunted expressions and deaths. When he follows one subject too far, he's lured into a haunted world that may be more horror than even he can handle.


Cast Shinya Tsukamoto, Tomomi Miyashita, Kazuhiro Nakahara, Miho Ninagawa, Shun Sugata.

Director(s) Takashi Shimizu

Writer(s) Chiaki Konaka

Status In theaters (limited)

Genre(s) Horror, Foreign

Release Date Dec. 9, 2005 — New York/Los Angeles; expands wider in January

Running Time 92 minutes

MPAA Rating R - for strong violence and some nudity

S1M0NE (2002)





A star is... created.

Starring: Al Pacino, Rachel Roberts, Winona Ryder, Jay Mohr, Catherine Keener, Evan Rachel Wood, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Pierce, Jenni Blong, Claudia Jordan, Stanley Anderson, Daniel von Bargen, Sean Cullen, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos

Director: Andrew Niccol

Running Time: 117 minutes

Comedy, Drama, Science Fiction

On DVD

"Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it", muses a pleased-with-himself Viktor Taransky, the movie director played here with entirely predictable aplomb by Al Pacino. For Taransky, right down to his first name, is something of a Frankenstein for the CGI age. He's just given the world Simone, supposedly one of the biggest Hollywood icons of the modern era - and she's not even real.

'S1m0ne' is, sporadically, a very funny satire of Hollywood, the media, and the often completely irrational nature of fan culture. Taransky is fed up with the ridiculous demands of movie stars, from squabbling over who has the biggest trailer to commanding him to pick all the pink ones out of a bag of jelly-beans. So, using a computer programme left to him in the will of a crackpot scientist, he creates a leading lady of his own (Rachel Roberts). She expects no wages, needs no make-up, never complains about "creative differences", has no qualms about taking her clothes off - and public and critics alike absolutely adore her. The trouble is, keeping her less-than-authentic status a secret gradually becomes more and more difficult for our Vik.

Penned, produced and directed by 'The Truman Show' and 'Gattaca' writer Andrew Niccol, Simone is almost like a Truman in reverse. While 'The Truman Show' gave us a man fooled by his artificial world, in 'S1m0ne' it's everyone else in the world who's being fooled by an artificial woman.

Unfortunately, the more you think about the plot, the less sense it makes. Viktor claims to be useless with computers, yet becomes remarkably proficient with what must be an incredibly complicated programme, all in a fairly short space of time. Similarly, Simone's rip-roaring global success doesn't quite ring true, considering it arrives before she's even made a second film. There's also a disappointingly upbeat ending, which fits uncomfortably with the tone of the rest of the movie. An opportunity to finish the film in a much darker way is made very apparent, only to be taken away again almost as if Niccol chickened out at the last minute.

But, for all that, I found 'S1m0ne' an enjoyable movie, predominantly for its tongue-in-cheek approach and, of course, the presence of the marvellous Pacino. Take it with a fair helping of sodium chloride, and you shouldn't be too let down.

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