This is my review of The Ides of March [DVD].

What do you do if your idol seems to have feet of clay? How do you take revenge and at what price when others try to destroy your prospects to protect their own?

Ambitious yet idealistic young press manager Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) is convinced that he has found a man he can trust and admire in the form of Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), a charismatic, liberal Democrat candidate running for the US Presidency.

For all his confidence and self-assurance, Stephen has a lot to learn about the ruthless tactics of those who have been in the game longer. Matters begin to go awry when the main Democrat rival's strategist, Duffy, makes a bid for Stephen's talents. Morris's campaign manager, Zara, sets a surprisingly high store by loyalty and a pushy journalist, Ida Horowicz, adds to Stephen's problems. There are tense encounters with sharp dialogue delivered by some great actors, not least Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti in the roles of Zara and Duffy. A further twist is provided by Stephen's unwise affair with a beautiful young intern.

The storyline is slow-paced at first, with a good deal of mumbled jargon likely to make a non-American viewer long for subtitles, although one can get the gist. The plot speeds up and becomes gripping, then ends abruptly, leaving you first surprised, then caught up in considering the issues raised before the inevitable "but what about?" questions surface as you begin to see flaws in the plot.

Overall, this is an absorbing political drama about issues of loyalty, how the desire for power corrupts, to what extent the ends justify the means. The modern fable raises some complex moral issues and leaves you to decide what is likely to happen next and why.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Leaving [DVD] [2009].

This is a fresh and moving take on the familiar theme of an unfulfilled woman sacrificing family and properous home for her obsession with an unsuitable lover. We expect tragedy from the opening scene of Suzanne, played as subtly as ever by Kristin Scott Thomas, slipping out of bed and out of sight, only for us to hear a gunshot. The film is never tedious or depressing because of the well-paced plot and clearly drawn characters.

Our sympathies are divided. We feel for Suzanne as she seeks happiness away from her controlling husband, even though we know that she is being devious, selfish and on a practical note ill-advised in choosing an unsuitable lover in the shape of a "bit of rough" immigrant handyman with a prison record, with whom she has little in common apart from sex and whom she at times seems to manipulate for her own advantage, not considering the risks she is asking him to run on her behalf. Her actions, well-intentioned or criminal, tend to have unintended damaging consequences.

On the other hand, although he rides roughshod over his wife's needs, one feels for the husband who understandably in some ways tries to use his position of power and influence to cling on to the wife he wants to possess, and may genuinely love.

We also empathise with the lover, vulnerable despite his physical strength, and with Suzanne's teenage children, torn between their parents' distress, all put under pressure in the chain of events.

In short, this is an intriguing drama of complex emotions, well-acted, with an unpredictable twist at the end.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Oranges and Sunshine [DVD].

The cruel deception of thousands of British children in care, misinformed that they were orphans and then transported to Australia as a cost-saving policy continued until as recently as 1970. A documentary of this would be shocking enough, but the director Jim Loach, carrying on his father Ken's tradition, achieves an even more powerful effect by making this a docudrama.

Emily Watson gives a convincing and moving performance as the determined real-life social worker Margaret Humphreys who discovered by chance that this injustice existed, and that many children had suffered hardship, even abuse, providing cheap labour for the Christian Brothers in Australia. Her establishment of the Child Migrants Trust has helped to put many naturalised Australians back in touch with their birth parents in Britain after decades of separation, but the indelible effects of childhood trauma often remain. We see the irony that Humphreys' dedication to making amends for the cruelty of others was often at the expense of giving enough time to her own children.

This thought-provoking and well-made film is worth seeing. It may leave you depressed for a while but we can't pretend ostrich-like that this never happened.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Mammuth [DVD] [2010].

Forced to retire from his job at a meatpacking firm, Serge (Gerard Depardieu), a bloated, mammouth-like former hippy biker, long hair still straggling down his back in greying locks, is at a loss how to spend his time, and is reduced to petty wrangling with the supermarket assistant on the cooked meat counter.

After a life of dead end jobs, his pension record is patchy, and his wife Catherine (Yolande Moreau) sends him off on the bike he hasn't ridden for years to obtain evidence of past employment to fill the gaps. There follows a sequence of amusing or poignant scenes, involving meetings with unsympathetic bosses or puzzling round buildings long ago changed to an unfamiliar use, culminating in Serge's meeting with the artistic, and probably also autistic daughter of a former friend. At this point, I thought Serge begins to recover a sense of his lost youth, or perhaps a period of liberation he has never had. Like a motorcycle out of control, the story does not end here but careers on in ever more fanciful images. We see a naked Depardieu squatting at the side of a pool – leaving me only with the sense that it must be the mark of a great actor to be capable of such unashamed lack of inhibition. Returning from his travels in a flowing caftan, arms spread wide in a universal blessing, he seems to have had some kind of revelation, but what does it all mean? Perhaps you may feel intrigued to watch this and tell me.

⭐⭐ 2 Stars

This is my review of Little White Lies [DVD].

This French approach to a "Three Weddings and a Funeral" type drama introduces us to a group of mainly thirty-something longstanding friends. Although shocked when one of them is seriously injured in a motorcycle crash, the rest decide not to be deflected by his coma from their plan to spend a seaside break at the holiday home of Max, a successful restaurant owner. Older than the others, Max is a tense and driven control freak, who forms the focus of many of the more amusing scenes, not least when another character, obsessed with his own sexuality, confesses the love for Max that he has been desperately trying to conceal.

Most of the group members turn out to have secret problems and to be telling each other "little white lies". There is the young man who drives the others mad as he agonises over how to keep his girlfriend and gets totally confused when they offer conflicting advice. Even the successful actress is found to be troubled by her "biological time clock" and failure to find the right man.

Despite the many amusing, and occasionally moving situations, I can understand why some people have been left cold, or irritated, by the unrelenting navel-gazing and angst of privileged people who don't really have much to moan about.

I agree that the film is too long, and probably self-indulgent towards the end. The only thing that really bugged me is the sentimental English pop music included in what are meant to be solemn moments- perhaps this doesn't sound so crass to French people who don't appreciate the banality of the lyrics!

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Potiche [DVD] [2010].

This tale involving a strike at a French umbrella factory reminds me of the recent “Made in Dagenham” about the 1968 Ford dispute over equal pay for women, but it is purely fictional, and a more lighthearted comedy.

Catherine Deneuve arouses immediate sympathy as Suzanne Pujol, the underestimated middle-aged “trophy wife” of Robert, the ghastly man who has taken over her father’s business and driven the staff to mutiny through his heavy-handed management style. When Robert is incapacitated by a heart attack, Suzanne is persuaded to take over and proves a remarkably emollient and creative director. Of course, when he has recovered, she is expected to get back on her ornamental shelf. But after a taste of power, combined with her discovery of his philandering, how can she return to being a simple “potiche”? Also, where will the loyalties of the couples’ son and daughter lie?

There is the added complication of the Suzanne’s long ago fling with Maurice Babin, the town’s socialist mayor, played by Gerard Depardieu, whose help she needs at first to pacify the angry strikers.

Recommended for a well-acted and humorous evening’s entertainment.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Beautiful Lies [DVD] (2010).

This is the latest in a spate of well-made, “feel good” films flowing out of France. Any irritation over its silliness is offset by the magnetic presence of Audrey Tautou, as Émilie Dandrieux, the to be honest rather capricious and devious joint owner of a hair salon. Not realising that an anonymous love letter has been sent to her by Jean, the salon’s handsome odd-job man, Tautou retrieves this from the waste bin, and uses it verbatim to concoct a letter from an imaginary secret admirer to her mother Maddy. Émilie is convinced that this will serve to shake Maddy, sympathetically played by Nathalie Baye, out of her longstanding grief over being abandoned by her callous husband.

In the style of true French farce, the misunderstandings pile up as you may well imagine.

There are many amusing scenes, as when Émilie is forced to admit that she has sacked Jean, because the discovery that he is multilingual and Harvard- educated (he’s lost his position as an interpreter owing to a nervous breakdown) makes her feel inadequate and uncertain about how to speak grammatically in his presence.

The denouement is cringe-making in places, the emotions superficial – except for Jean’s at times inexplicable fancy for Émilie – and the ultimate happy ending not in doubt, but a little light-hearted entertainment probably never did anyone much harm, and it is a way of practising one’s French. You may also like the fact that the main characters are all flawed in various ways, especially Émilie, which may make them appear more human.

My only query is why the title was changed from “De Vrais Mensonges” which translated literally as “Real Lies” seems more apt.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Midnight in Paris [DVD][2011] [2012].

During a holiday in Paris with his prospective in-laws, Gil, a young Hollywood screenwriter who longs to get a novel published , finds himself transported each night on the stroke of midnight into the world in which he nostalgically thinks he should have been born – the 1920s Paris of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. At first, I thought this sounded too silly and feared the film would be full of pretentious arty allusions that I did not “get”.

In fact, the encounters with an array of writers, painters, film-makers and so on prove highly amusing even if you know little about them. The audience laughed out loud at the sight of Adrien Brody made up to resemble Dali, and there is the ongoing humour of Gil causing confusion by letting slip his knowledge of what is going to befall the various characters. There is also his infectious joy every time he recognises some famous face.

The modern-day scenes are also entertaining, with each character possessing a distinct personality even down to the minor characters of Michael Sheen’s “pedantic” academic, with an eye to an affair with Gil’s sexy but petulant fiancée Inez, or Carla Bruni acting quite well, if out of character, as a self-effacing tour guide.

The opening scenes of Paris, in sun and rain, remind us of the timeless allure of this city, and the background of Woody Allen’s beloved slow saxophone jazz, and the Cole Porter and Noel Coward tunes from the `20s, also help to capture the nostalgia for Paris which we all begin to understand if we don’t already feel it.

Owen Wilson is very effective as a mouthpiece for Woody Allen, capturing him even in the slightly scatty and bewildered air and tone of voice, but of course not resembling him at all in being tall, blond and blue-eyed.

This is light, with no claims to anything deep, and turns out to be very enjoyable and in some ways unexpectedly quite wise and thought-provoking about the way, no matter in which age they are born, people tend to hark back to an earlier golden age.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Princess Of Montpensier [DVD].

Visually very beautiful and well-acted, this is the tale of how the innocent young Marie De Mezieres falls for the handsome, swashbuckling Henri De Guise but is forced for political reasons to marry the cold and unappealing young Prince of Montpensier. Still very young, she continues to receive lessons from the Prince's tutor, and some of the most moving and occasionally tense aspects of the film arise from the older man's love for her, which has to remain suppressed and unexpressed.

Many of the characters are two-dimensional, prone to sudden unconvincing changes in behaviour, or are caricatured (the tutor came across to me as the most "real" person), and the scenes are often too stylised for one to be deeply affected by the drama. I found myself more moved by the tutor's plight than the fate of the princess, which I do not think was the author's intention. Lacking a grounding in French history, I found some of the details hard to follow, but the bitter mistrust between the Catholics and Protestants forms an interesting background and overall it is quite entertaining.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Debt [Blu-ray] [Region Free].

This is an exciting drama which also manages to be much more moving than I had expected, and to raise some complex moral issues, rather than be simplistically pro-Mossad as I had feared.

Intense concentration is required to catch all the details and nuances, as the plot is revealed in brief, fast-moving scenes switching back and forth between the 1960s and the 1990s. It is hard to summarise the plot without giving away too much, as I think some previous reviewers may have tended to do.

Essentially, in the '60s, three driven young members of Mossad have been tasked to capture a notorious Nazi doctor,"the surgeon of Birkenau", now practising gynaecology, of all things, in an East Berlin hospital, and to bring him back for trial in Israel. Although there are some major hitches, the three claim to have managed to kill him and are feted as heroes for the next three decades. This accolade is of course questionable since the man has been denied a fair trial, which would have shown the Israelis to be morally superior to their oppressors.

It becomes apparent that the facts are not quite what they seem. The film becomes less of a righteous if fanatical Nazi hunt and more of a psychological drama – the relationship between the three agents, two men and a beautiful woman. The "leader" Stephan is ambitious, David is traumatised by the loss of his entire family, and Rachel also often appears too emotionally vulnerable for the task.

Under pressure, the trio begin to behave in often all too understandably flawed and "human" ways. We see how the captured Doctor Vogel plays on this. I disagree that he comes across as "too nice" because he seems to love his wife: in his lack of real remorse for past crimes, his crude anti-semitism and his ability to manipulate and goad his youthful captors, he is particularly chilling and sinister.

There is also plenty of scope to debate the three agents' various motives for their actions, which cover a wide range: fear, altruism, ambition, personal advantage, to maintain status and the love of others, or simple pragmatism. How should they have behaved at each stage? How would we?

Although some plot details do not hold water when you think about them afterwards, I do not agree that the film tries to cover too much. The complexity seems to me to add to its value and effectiveness. I also do not feel that it loses its way at the end when the fifty-something Rachel sets off for the Ukraine to honour "a debt" and conclude unfinished business. The end of the film is not what you would expect, and leaves matters slightly open for you to draw your own conclusions, which is often the mark of a good film.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars