Having not seen Michel Gondry’s earlier film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when the wife went to see it considering I was otherwise engaged at the tattooist, I had very little real view of what to expect of his work. certain, I’d seen a few music videos and some clips of his films, but The S…

Another documentary viewing. Since I often watch films with very little beforehand knowledge, Born Into Brothels was completely different from what I was expecting from the title.What I thought I was going to see was a film about kids born into brothels in India, and that was not wrong, but I did no…

What could be better than a load of paraplegics ramming holy fuck out of each other in specially reinforced wheelchairs? Virtually nothing, that’s what!Murderball — or wheelchair rugby, to give it its more PC name — is just that. Oh yeah, and you have to get a ball from one end of the court to the…

I’m happy to report that, in Lars and the Real Girl, Ryan Gosling admirably redeems himself as an actor after the travesty that was Half Nelson. The character of Lars is everything that the other character wasn’t, not least someone you could care about and someone you believed. Lars is a lonely man,…

I had convinced mixed feelings before watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, henceforth to be known as TAJJBCRF (pronounced tadge-buh-cruff). See, the thing was, some folks whose views I respect on “proper cinema” were very complimentary, and I was afraid I might be let…

I’d been looking forward to seeing El Orfanato for some duration, so when I saw it for sale in Seville, Spain, on our recent trip there, I figured I should pick it up.The story revolves around a woman and her husband who have bought an old former orphanage, where the wife was once a resident, to liv…

As a general comment, the larger Jon Favreau gets, the less good his work seems to be. I don’t mean that in a “fattist” way; just saying. Like, clearly he ain’t starving; and we all know that starving artists are the greatest.Fortunately for all of us, Elf — Favreau’s second proper feature as direc…