Eleanor Reviews

** DVD Release When I went to collect this film from the DVD library at my university for my film course, the librarian asked if I had been ‘warned’ about it. I responded with ‘Warned?’ to which he replied: ‘Yes, it’s a bit… Err…’              So, before I’d even started I was a little unsure what to expect, but I’d heard that Robert Bresson was a good director, so I gave it ago. Michel has been released from prison after being arrested for thievery, only to find himself in a downward spiral of further petty crimes after the death of his mother. Basically, it’s just really boring. Not a great deal happens for the majority of the film – we see Michel (Martin Lasalle) pickpocketing people on the Metro, and then learning some new tricks, and then pickpocketing people at a train station… and that’s about it. Also, the lack of personal security in this film is deeply alarming – people seem to have no awareness about their possessions, and Michel himself lacks a lock on his

  **** In the not too-distant past, disgraced journalist Martin Sixsmith took the risk of writing a ‘human interest’ story about an elderly woman, Philomena Lee, whose child had been taken from her half a century before, when she had been living in a convent. From the poster and trailer, and having never heard the story before, I assumed this would be a cheerful story. I was wrong… this film packs some enormous emotion wallops and is perhaps one of the most heart-wrenching experiences I’ve had in the cinema this year – you have been warned! Of course, there are moments of humour as the two main characters, played by Jude Dench and Steven Coogan, get to know one another, but overall this is pretty grim. Dench is, obviously, excellent as the thoroughly wronged Philomena, who has not abandoned her faith despite what the Church inflicted upon her. Coogan plays the ‘straight’ and world-weary character of Sixsmith very well, and the pair seem to have a genuine repertoire which

**** DVD Release When young postman Jules makes a bootleg recording of his favourite opera singer, he has no idea of the dangerous world he is about to enter. Set in Paris, Diva depicts two intertwining stories involving cassette tapes, dotted with a variety of complex characters. It is hard to discuss Diva without giving too much away because it is a thriller and has a few twists along the way. Firstly, then, we shall tackle the appearance of the film; all the colours are very vivid, particularly blue which is used throughout the movie and seems to depict high art. The director, Beineix, started out in advertising and that is very evident here – there are lots of elongated shots of elaborate objects with emotive music placed over the top, making them kinds of ‘designer’ pieces that the audience will desire. The interior set-pieces are also interesting – we see inside several different flats, a lighthouse and one industrial space wherein the character Gorodish demonstr

  ***** Available for internet streaming/Cannot find evidence of DVD release In this excellent documentary, Jennifer Siebel Newsom delves into the world of the American media and the portrayal of women in this format. As a new mother, she wants to discover if the world has changed in its depiction of the female from when she was a young woman and suffered sexual abuse and an eating disorder. What she finds is laid bare in this documentary, and it is far from comforting. Newsom uses interviews from both men and women who are either in positions of power or play a role in the media, as well as academics. In between these very interesting interviews are deeply troubling statistics showing the truly dismal situation in the United States. There are also interviews with high school students, who openly dismiss media and its effect on young women – one girl comments on how her friends used to go to the bathroom between lessons to apply ’10 pounds of make-up [when] you’re at

**** After the events of Avengers Assemble , Thor and Loki return to Asgard, where Loki is flung into prison for his crimes against humanity, and Thor goes about restoring peace to the Nine Realms. On Earth, Jane Foster stumbles across an ancient weapon called the Aether, which reawakens the Dark Elf, Malekith, who had been defeated thousands of years before. With the Convergence of the Worlds fast approaching, Thor must reunite with Loki to save the Nine Realms… The first thing to say is that this film is utterly ridiculous from start to finish, and if you are unable to accept the comic book side of it then you are unlikely to enjoy some of the more preposterous plot points. One of the rather clever ways in which new director Alan Taylor combats the ludicrous nature of the film is to have it laugh at itself – at no point does the film take itself seriously, and it has multiple joke moments to ease the extremely far-fetched plot. And the jokes themselves are indeed funny an

** DVD Release Watanabe has been working in the council for the majority of his working life, without ever making anything of consequence happen. Upon discovering that he has months to live, he sets about trying to find a way ‘to live’ properly. It is a question often pondered by man: if you were told you would die soon, what would you do? In the case of Ikiru , our protagonist, he decides to take to the streets with an anonymous novelist, spend time with a young female colleague and finally to build a child’s playground in a bomb crater. For much of the film, the camera hovers on the face of Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) as he stares into the abyss and, indeed, I found myself starring into the abyss myself as the film goes on and on forever! As the film progresses, Watanabe becomes more and more incapable of completing sentences and the few words that he does utter are spoken so inhumanly slowly that, if it weren’t for the subtitles, you could easily forget what he was rep