A time of the signs

May 17 2007 Mike Davies review the latest cinema releases

• Zodiac * * * *
  Cert 15, 157 mins 

On Dec 20, 1968, Bay Area couple David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot dead in their car. On July 4, 1969 Mike Mageau survived a shooting that left Darlene Ferrin murdered.

Four weeks later, the San Francisco Chronicle received a letter from someone claiming to be the killer. So began a 30 year manhunt for the self-styled Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorised San Francisco and taunted the police with cryptic letters and ciphers.

Although a prime suspect was identified, the evidence was circumstantial and no arrest was made.

A meeting between Seven and All The President’s Men, David Fincher’s compelling, precisely minuted film follows the investigation and the emotional and physical impact it had on the four principals involved in trying to solve the case: glibly cynical crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the paper’s young cartoonist and cipher enthusiast, Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the seasoned SF homicide cop in charge, and his partner William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

The focus is initially on Avery, mining his contacts, trying to put the pieces together, slowly collapsing into alcoholism. The midsection turns attention to Toschi and Edwards, constantly frustrated as each lead turns sour.

The final act is almost exclusively concerned with Graysmith whose determination to solve the mystery (he wrote the best selling books on which the film’s based) identified the probable killer but cost him his second marriage.

Part compelling police procedural drama, part gripping psychological thriller and part sober examination of the self-destructive nature of intense obsession, it rivets you to the screen.

If it does dip, it’s only because Downey Jr’s career high performance is so mesmerising you really notice its absence when he slips from the story.

However, there’s not a weak turn to be seen, particularly fine support coming from Chloe Sevigny as Graysmith’s long-suffering wife and Philip Baker Hall’s handwriting expert while, carrying the final 45 minutes on his shoulders, Gyllenhaal is outstanding.

Hugely ambitious in its dense, decades spanning narrative, thematic thrust and visual stylings, peppered with masterful dialogue, veined with dark humour and evoking the best 70s work of Coppola, Lumet, Pollack, and Pakula, it seems set to be best American movie of the year.

• Conversations With Other Women * * * *
  Cert 15, 84 mins

This is pretty much a two-hander chamber piece between Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart as the unnamed Woman and Man.  They meet at a wedding and begin flirting. He's with his girlfriend, she left her husband back in England. The flirtation continues, but something doesn't feel quite right.

Slowly, the conversation reveals they’re not actually strangers and the cut and thrust banter may be some sort of sexual sparring across an emotional distance between them.

Finely acted, it's clever and witty enough. What really distinguishes it, however, is how Hans Canosa has shot it entirely in split screen, even the bedroom scene. The couple quite literally occupy their own space, the images joined together with only the occasional overlap of hand or arm, touching but never making contact.

It's a gimmick, but an inspired one that, once you get used to things, works for rather than against the narrative, sometimes catching you offguard as it represent the pair's different perspectives, fantasies or memories of the same incidents. With no peripheral distractions, it locks you firmly into the moment, savouring the brittle bruise and erotic frisson of the relationship without ever feeling pretentious. Remarkable.

• Magicians * *
  Cert 15, 90 mins

Having developed a decent cult following with Peep Show, Mitchell and Webb now follow in the footsteps of Harry Enfield, The League of Gentlemen, Ant & Dec and, er, Cannon & Ball, in transferring their small screen personas to the big one. With about as much success.

Amazingly, it took six people to cobble a story that’s basically The Prestige but with fewer laughs, as an illusionist double act falls dramatically apart when, after Harry (David Mitchell) finds his wife having sex with Karl (Robert Webb), she winds up the victim of botched guillotine trick.

Some years later, trying to make a comeback, Harry enters the ultimate magician’s competition and for a moment it seems he and Karl, now a mentalist act, will reunite. Instead old wounds are reopened and they wind up rival competitors.

Padded out with adoring new assistant Linda (Jessica Stevenson) trying to get Harry to notice her as a woman and Karl romancing admirer Dani (Andrea Riseborough) while fending of the gay overtures of manager Otto (Darren Boyd), it’s a flimsy and, save for Peter Capaldi’s preeningly cynical compere and a gag about Jersey’s chumminess with the Nazis, relentlessly laughter-free affair.

Were it not for the embarrassed insistence on swearing and sex talk, it could have been made in the 60s by Mike & Bernie Winters, except even they’d have been a lot funnier.

• Black Snake Moan * * *
  Cert 15, 116 mins

With a poster showing Samuel L Jackson standing over a scantily clad and chained Christina Ricci, you’d be forgiven for expecting some lurid throwback to a 50s exploitation melodrama about race and sex. If that’s what you pay for, you’ll be at least partially disappointed.

Craig Brewer’s follow up to Hustle and Flow is another morality tale of a Southern musician in need of redemption, swapping hip hop for the blues.

Jackson’s the significantly named Lazarus, a Tennessee bluesman who’s put away his guitar and taken to farming. Ricci, meanwhile, is Rae, white trash with a traumatic past that’s left her psychologically dependent on sex whenever she feels unsettled.

So when she goes on a sexual bender after boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake, quietly effective) enlists for Iraq and winds up raped and beaten by his best mate, it’s Lazarus who finds her in the road and takes her in.

Nursing her back to health, he soon discovers she’s gotta have it and resolves to cure her the sickness – by chaining her to his radiator and singing some R&B until the itch runs its course. Both get their inner demons cleansed.

Jackson redeems his own acting dignity after his risible last snake movie while, channelling Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll, Ricci delivers the most electrifying and sexually charged performance of her career.

Simplistic in its tale of mutual salvation, overheated and on occasion unintentionally funny, nonetheless there are some powerful, provocative moments, baiting the sexploitation accusations while exploring a deep world of pain and self-loathing. Of Humanist Bondage, if you will.

• Lovewrecked * *
  Cert PG, 86 mins

Randall Kleiser’s tongue in cheek spin on his own The Blue Lagoon is just about salvaged by a perkily charming Amanda Bynes, the Hilary Duff it’s okay to like.

She’s Jenny Riley, a high school graduate who winds up marooned on a deserted tropical island with Jason Masters (Chris Carmack), the rock star with whom she’s besotted.

In fact, they’re only a short walk from the Caribbean resort where she’s working and he and his entourage are staying.

But is she going to waste an opportunity to impress him with her apparent foraging resourcefulness and have him fall for her? Certainly not. Unfortunately, her bitchy love rival (Jamie-Lynn DiScala) rumbles her scam and poses as a castaway herself, prompting cat fights for the self-absorbed Masters’ attention.

Poor direction, trite script and threadbare gags hammered into the ground, it’s just about worth a look to enjoy Bynes’ gift for physical comedy and wonder why she’s not a bigger star. Maybe making movies like this is the answer.

• The Family Friend * * *
  Cert 15 102 mins, subtitled

Imagine a cross between The Merchant of Venice and The Last Seduction and you'll have an idea what to expect from Paolo Sorrentino's stylish dark Italian noir con drama.

Geremia (an outstanding Giacomo Rizzo, loathsome yet veined with sympathy) is a grotesque septuagenarian provincial tailor who doubles as a moneylender. He likes to be called Geremia the Golden Hearted, but is actually a heartlessly cruel, misanthrope, friendless save for the wannabe cowboy he uses to put pressure on debtors. However, when he meets Rosalba (Laura Chiatti), whose parents are borrowing money to pay for the wedding, he’s smitten.

Having initially blackmailed her into sex in return for reducing his interest rate, an unlikely intimate relationship develops, the pair apparently twisted soul mates.

Devoid of likable protagonists, often visually abstract with striking images, and coldly claustrophobic, to reveal more would spoil the delicious knotted twists.

Proving more icily manipulative than he, Rosalba spins out a suitably ironic revenge that is both satisfying yet oddly heartbreaking.

• Scott Walker 30 Century Man * * *
  Cert 12A, 95 mins

Given just a one day screening (Cineworlds, Wednesday), Stephen Kijik’s fascinating if hagiographic documentary charts the career of the Ohio born Scott Engel.

An overnight but ill-at-ease 60s hearthrob status as a third of the Walker Brothers, it follows his swift disillusionment with the pop business, through his solo albums’ love affair with Jacques Brel to lengthy disappearances and painfully slow re-emergence as avant garde artist with 1985’s Climate Of Hunter, 1992’s Tilt and, 14 years later, the impressionistic Drift.

Bowie, Brian Eno, Damon Albarn, and Jarvis Cocker line up to reflect on their favourite Walker song and discuss the man’s huge influence on their own work. But the real coup is getting Walker to not only give a candid interview that reveals him as unexpectedly down to earth but, for the first time, allow cameras into the studio, demystifying the process of recording Drift. Marvellous stuff.