All the festive movies
Keeping yourself busy at the movies this festive season? We bring you the best of the year-end movies.
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Earthling soldier goes to faraway planet, which is being mined for a precious mineral.
Che, Part II: The Guerrilla
The second part of Steven Soderbergh’s two-movie biopic of Che Guevara arrives just as most of its likely viewers, probably, are realising they’ve missed the first part. But perhaps it doesn’t matter much: they are basically the same film done twice. Part two covers Guevara’s Bolivian campaign, which has to be deemed a failure, not least because he was killed. Part two is more straightforward than part one: no tripartite narrative structure or flitting back and forth in time. But that also makes it duller than part one, which was already something of a trudge. — SdW
Invictus
Clint Eastwood’s movie is about that historical moment in which Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The storyline simplifies matters to give us a close-up look at Madiba as he brilliantly uses the World Cup final as part of his project of reconciliation. Morgan Freeman’s accent as Mandela is bearable, but will not fall happily on South African ears. Invictus is really a glorified sports movie with Mandela as a sort of super-coach. That comes across as reductive, and the film’s dramatic centre is essentially the same as that of Cry Freedom: a contrasted black-white relationship that is supposed to sum up a whole nation’s progress. You can see the narrative appeal, but it feels unbalanced, and it’s ironic that the Pienaar half is better than the Mandela half. — SdW
Sherlock Holmes
Conan Doyle’s great detective has been played on film by everyone from John Barrymore, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee to Charlton Heston, Michael Caine and Rupert Everett, not to mention Basil Rathbone’s 15 or so outings as the man — and never mind the TV series. One of the most intriguing missed opportunities of cinematic history is the Sherlock Holmes musical that Billy Wilder planned to make with Peter O’Toole as Holmes and Peter Sellers as his faithful sidekick Dr Watson. It didn’t happen, and years later Wilder made a Holmes movie as a non-musical with Robert Stephens, but the idea of the O’Toole/Sellers project still tickles the mind. It offers a bizarrely offbeat vision of Holmes that has perhaps now been realised in part by Guy Ritchie, who casts Robert Downey Jnr as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson. Downey doesn’t bother to try to look like the traditional vision of Holmes, with his deerstalker and so on; he just plays himself, all wacky, dishevelled and unshaven, though the filmmakers have omitted Holmes’s taste for cocaine. It’s in Doyle, but perhaps they felt that was a bit close to the bone for Downey. At any rate, the cast as a whole camps it up enjoyably, the sets are good to look at and the plot, though unsteady, rattles along at a decent pace. The film opens with a race through the streets of London, a hansom cab clattering over cobblestones, and that’s the most apt image for the film as a whole — a bouncy, sometimes jarring ride, more than a little absurd (it has a touch of Wild Wild West about it), but still fun. — SdW
Swan Lake
Exquisitely danced, beautifully dressed and set, technically perfect, this 1996 version of the Kirov Ballet’s production of Swan Lake, filmed in St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, should have been a joy. The medium enables the audience to enter the orchestra pit, scan the sumptuous theatre, feel part of the audience and home in on the principals as they execute the breathtaking choreography. But therein, perhaps, lies the problem. What the closeups make painfully clear is that the production is devoid of emotion. Uliana Lopatkina’s Odette is no more empathetic than her fiery Odile, and Danila Korsuntsev’s Siegfried is all pyrotechnics and no humanity. The huge corps is superb, the soloists are spot-on, but I, who have wept through scores of productions of this ballet, remained dry-eyed. Worth seeing for the calibre of the performances, but don’t expect to be moved. — Pat Schwartz
Waltz with Bashir
Has Israel made a mass, semi-conscious decision to forget about the Sabra and Chatila massacres of the 1982 Lebanese war, in which Israeli forces allowed Christian Phalangist militia into Palestinian refugee camps to slaughter civilians? This extraordinary animated documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman — a kind of fictionalised docu-autobiography — suggests that Israelis have indeed forgotten, in a kind of huge, willed amnesia. But his movie makes an acid trip down memory lane and Folman might have created his generation’s very own Apocalypse Now. This is a fascinating and often electrifying film. — Peter Bradshaw
