Starring: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Judi Dench, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini
Director: Martin Campbell
Scheduled release: December 20

After four decades, 20 feature films and five actors in the leading role, the James Bond franchise finally gets... an origin story?
You’d think it unnecessary, as 007’s trademarks by this point have been burned into our memory. We know the trained assassin’s drink of choice, his preferred mode of transportation, and his willingness to invoke the hard-earned licence to kill when dangerous situations arise.
But familiarity has bred contempt for a spy that hasn’t ignited movie theatres since the Cold War concluded. A change was long overdue. When last we saw Bond – played by Pierce Brosnan in Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day – the secret agent was racing across frozen ponds in invisible sports cars and windsurfing on waves created by a melting glacier. Realism isn’t a quality we associate with Bond, yet these adventures had become too ridiculous for even 007’s standards.
Casino Royale marks GoldenEye director Martin Campbell’s return to Bond’s world and performs a succinct Ctrl-Alt-Delete on the flailing series. It strips Bond of his recyclable traits and reinvents him for the next generation. Royale adapts Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel of the same name as it shuttles the character back to square one.
But you don’t care about that. You want to hear about new Bond Daniel Craig who has had to stomach a steady stream of negative press since Eon Productions tapped him to succeed Brosnan. The backlash against Craig’s hiring was swift and violent. London reporters began calling the light-haired Layer Cake star James Blonde. The 5’11’’ Craig was deemed too short (he is the most vertically challenged 007) and too fragile. Rabid fans opposed to the casting launched a website where they critiqued everything from the actor’s ears (too big) to his teeth (too white), and posted disparaging accounts from the film’s set.
It’s all for naught. The latest addition to her Majesty’s Secret Service is the franchise’s most physical James Bond. Judi Dench, once again playing exasperated MI6 superior M, describes Craig’s character as a “blunt instrument”, which nails the actor’s steely presence. However, the hard-hitting and fast-running Craig also serves as a shot of pure adrenaline administered to a deteriorating series which has been in desperate need of rejuvenation for years.
Far from your father’s Bond, Craig is vulnerable, mistake-prone, arrogant to a fault, and often forced to race against the clock because he has been outwitted by his foes. He isn’t suave (like Brosnan), sophisticated (like Roger Moore), cunning (like Timothy Dalton), or all of the above (like Sean Connery).
Craig’s greatest asset seems to be his ability to take a beating. Since Royale recounts Bond’s inaugural mission as a Double-O, the rookie spy lacks field experience, prompting the headstrong hero to plough into obvious traps and endure multiple strikes from worthy adversaries. In a welcome change, Craig actually allows cuts and scrapes to scar his chiselled face, a clear indicator that we’re not in usual Bond territory. Not only did Brosnan never bruise, his hair rarely looked out of place.
The Royale plot is typical Bond fare, a convoluted smokescreen floated so the filmmakers could ship the spy to exotic locales. Early scenes set in Madagascar, the Bahamas, and Miami build to a high-stakes poker game, where Bond and abnormally sexy accountant Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) must bleed terrorist supporter Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) of vital funds.
Stunt work on Royale will impress you the most. Campbell makes instant use of his younger Bond’s athletic abilities. You’ll understand in the first 10 minutes why Sebastien Foucan receives a “free-running stunts coordinator” credit.
What doesn’t work is the requisite romance between Craig and Green. The film’s final act hinges on the couple’s devotion as it establishes Bond’s eventual branding as a womanizer. But it’s painfully obvious Campbell, Craig, and the three credited screenwriters (Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade) couldn’t care less about Bond’s heart, unless they’re focused on stopping it... which actually happens in the film’s most riveting scene.
Where does Craig fit in 007’s lineage? It’s too soon to tell, though Eon and Sony seem content to give the actor at least one more shot, as evidenced in Royale’s final scene. (Bond 22 to star Daniel Craig is currently in pre-production – Ed) Overall, this is a great start for the actor and a decent re-launching pad for a franchise that had slipped from lethal to ludicrous. Welcome back, Bond. Sean O’Connell

Starring:
Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, Chou Jay, Junjie Qin, Li Man, Liu Ye
Director: Zhang Yimou
Scheduled Release: December 21

A pageantry that would put Bertolucci or Lean to shame, Zhang Yimou’s The Curse of the Golden Flower piles spectacle upon spectacle, and tragedy on tragedy, until the whole construction fairly disintegrates under the fervid weight of it all. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, as late Yimou films like House of Flying Daggers and Hero have been perfectly acceptable as period-piece baubles, rife with dynamic wuxia action sequences and dashing costumes – both of which Golden Flower has in abundance. While packed with emotion, those earlier films could certainly be enjoyed on surface detail alone, but there was still some heft to them; one doesn’t buy for a second that Zhang Ziyi could fight like that without help from gravity-defying wires, but the films were still able to dance that line between escapism and drama without leaving either behind. But Golden Flower can’t dance.
The film spends most of its time in a royal court during the 10th century Tang dynasty; which at first doesn’t seem like a bad place to be. The palace is a bejewelled rainbow of colour, and Yimou starts off with a feverishly choreographed ballet of hundreds of courtiers readying themselves in synchronized grace for the arrival of the long-travelling Emperor Ping (Chow Yun-Fat, regally villainous). His three princes await him, each curious about if and how he is going to divide up power between them, as his health seems to be in decline.
The Empress Phoenix (Yimou’s one-time muse Gong Li) doesn’t seem exactly enthusiastic about Ping’s return, sick as she has been for years, drinking an elaborately prepared concoction every two hours – the ritualized presentation and drinking of which would have made Marie Antoinette’s servers blanch in embarrassment. Unbeknown to Phoenix, Ping has instructed his head doctor to add a dash of black fungus which will apparently cause madness within a matter of months. Phoenix already appears in decline, her hands wracked by tremors, and face a near-constant mask of gorgeous porcelain-skinned agony. Adding to her worries are the fact that she’s been sleeping with one of the princes (the one born to Ping’s deceased first wife) and that a palace coup may be in the wind, perhaps during the upcoming Chrysanthemum Festival (not surprisingly, Yimou’s centerpiece allows him to flood the screen with thousands of brightly blooming flowers).
Yimou’s greatest mistake in Golden Flower is to let his natural impulse for regal spectacle overwhelm practically every other element of the story. After an energetic start, the first half of the film drags perilously and stiffly from one declamatory scene to the next with hardly any action. Left adrift without the zippy fight sequences of Yimou’s other wuxia, the performers attempt scenes of passion and betrayal in a state of constant high anxiety often verging on camp.
By the time the director stages the film’s first great action scene – a night-time assault by a squadron of scythe-wielding assassins who flutter down from high cliffs on spiderweb-like ropes – the damage has already been done. Which is a shame, as Golden Flower makes some impressively unexpected turns near the end. The film takes a more philosophic than pulse-pounding approach to the bloody cacophony of combat, highlighting warfare’s deadening horror instead of its thrills. Also, unlike many such costume dramas, Golden Flower maintains a welcome cynicism about power; it becomes clear that all the luxuriously maintained rituals would go on unabated no matter who was in power, and regardless of their wisdom or cruelty. Chris Barsanti

Happy Feet
Starring: Elijah Wood, Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Robin Williams, Hugo Weaving, Johnny A. Sanchez
Director: George Miller
Scheduled Release: December 21

Hollywood is led by followers, and whenever a studio comes up with an unexpected left-field hit, other studios tend to rush out imitations, following blindly like lemmings (or penguins) over a cliff.
So when the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins became a surprise hit and, ahem, broke the ice, more penguin movies became a probability. Luckily, one was already in the works and, even more luckily, Happy Feet is the project of Aussie auteur George Miller (best known for Babe), who doesn’t follow anyone’s lead. It takes only a few seconds – the time for one penguin to sing the first verse of Prince’s Kiss while another warbles Heartbreak Hotel – for Miller’s film to qualify as the weirdest of the year.
Happy Feet is a computer-animated penguin Moulin Rouge, but it also contains elements of teen movies of all eras (as well as TV’s Animal Planet, The Abyss, and even Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). For that matter, the storyline – a misfit penguin is unlucky in love, but his tap dancing makes him famous! – goes back to clichéd pre-war Broadway musicals. But, somehow, the whole thing seems fresh. The penguins’ heart songs are mostly jams over the last three or four decades from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Queen, the Beach Boys, old-school R’n’B etc; the actors do their own singing (and yes, Brittany Murphy can really sing). A group of Adélie penguins (birds which supposedly ‘dance’) are, for some reason, sub-West Side Story caricatures of Latin machismo. I don’t know why, but they help the film hit its groove and provide a couple of smiles with a haunting version of the oldie Leader of the Pack and a Spanish My Way, both sung by Robin Williams (who also voices the Barry White-like character, Lovelace).
If all this doesn’t sound that good to you, well, it didn’t to me either, but I was just wrong. Yep, Happy Feet is weird and goofy, but sometimes you have to be goofy to be great. Unlike most other children’s movies this season, Happy Feet doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence and its best gags are funny, clever, and not overworked.
Any computer-animated kids’ flick is going to cross into Pixar territory and Happy Feet includes all the requisite Pixar elements – action scenes, pop culture references for the grown-ups, and celebrity voices (on a sad note, the late Steve Irwin voices an Aussie elephant seal). But the sequences of penguins dancing on the ice sheets and struttin’ under the Southern Lights are definitely weirder than anything in a Pixar film to date.
And, frankly, Animal Logic ices Pixar in the animation department. The frozen landscapes are brilliantly conceived, but even better are the penguins themselves. Their choreographed moves and body language are characteristically evocative even though they are almost identical.
Along with the jokes, the film offers an array of messages, from ‘Be yourself’ to ‘Unite the world’ to ‘Stop overfishing Antarctic waters’ and a dark environmental communiqué requiring an abrupt change of tone. But that’s hip too – and it works, because the animators make the penguins seem so much like us we identify viscerally with their plight. In fact, when one of them is taken to a zoo, the human faces outside the glass seem bizarre and foreign, and we share the character’s alienation (while yet laughing with the jokes).
The final message of Happy Feet is naive and somewhat vague but, as Lovelace would probably put it, “Maybe if we can learn to live together, and everybody follows his own groove, maybe we can all come together and listen to our small Antarctic brothers, and make a groovy planet of love.” Say it with me! David Bezanson

Starring: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub, Ciarán Hinds, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Stanley Townsend, Alexander Siddig,
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Scheduled release: Now showing

There’s a newly famous scene in Borat where a rodeo official advises the titular character to shave his moustache so as not to arouse suspicion that he’s a terrorist. What could that possibly have to do with a movie about the birth of Jesus? Well, given that said rodeo official would have to advise (probably rather awkwardly) virtually everyone in this film to do the same, a whole lot.
Many Biblical epics have graced the screen but few have made any effort to match the casting with the geography. The Nativity Story is a notable exception. In a narrative long since detached from the holiday that celebrates it, Israelite Mary (Castle-Hughes), living under Roman rule in, well, zero B.C., sees a vision in which the angel Gabriel (Siddig) tells her that she will conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. Cue the scratching of the record.
Mary takes the news a whole lot better than her family, including Joseph (Oscar Isaac) her new husband. No sooner does he have a dream that helps him get with the program than their paranoid King Herod (Ciarán Hinds) decrees a census in which all men must return to the place of their birth with their families. So, Joseph and Mary are off to Bethlehem, and for the rest of the story, see the first couple chapters of Luke or, in a pinch, Linus’ speech from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The culture and setting of the film have a feeling of authenticity that, intentionally or not, serves as a bit of counter-programming in a time when many Middle Eastern faces receive ignorant, knee-jerk associations with terrorists. It’s not much of a coincidence that the reason given for the Pope missing the premiere of The Nativity Story at the Vatican (the first film to premiere there) involved preparation for a trip to Turkey to mend Christian/Muslim relations.
Unfortunately, social healing may be all the film has to offer. In spite of a plethora of plot the film never really feels like it’s going anywhere. Given that the director is Thirteen helmer Catherine Hardwicke, that’s particularly disappointing. One of the hallmarks of her debut was the raw, complex emotions of the characters. Here the performances, while admirably natural, betray no depth.
Hardwicke, while capturing the rugged beauty of the terrain, doesn’t lend a directorial eye to much else. The film lacks a visual stamp, subtracting one more possible point of entry into the story. In the end, that may be the greatest factor working against the film; it lacks a point of view.
Artistically, The Nativity Story may do no more than competently tell its eponymous tale, but if it also serves to encourage audiences to associate a dark complexion and a thick beard with Joseph instead of Bin Laden, that may be an accomplishment of greater proportions. David Thomas

Starring: Amber Tamblyn, Arielle Kebbel, Teresa Palmer, Jennifer Beals, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Edison Chen
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Scheduled Release: Now showing

Low cost and high quality: Japan is king when it comes to assembly-line production ethos and Grudge 2 director Takashi Shimizu takes that approach in this latest edition in the Grudge series. Block by block, shock by shock, he builds a movie that runs fine and looks slick. It’s a solid product in terms of celluloid, but there is no soul, no artistry in the merchandise. What went wrong? Enthusiasm. Shimizu seems to take pride only in the technical proficiency of his work. Actors be damned. Plot be damned. While there’s nothing wrong with a really well-made but vacuous art-horror film (see Dario Argento’s entire canon), Grudge 2 is just cleverly staged shock shots stapled one to the other like the reels of skin in Sion Soto’s Suicide Club.
Perhaps it’s because Shimizu’s essentially made the same film six times now. The first Ju-on in 2000. The second in 2000 as well. Then he did both of them again in 2003. Then the American remake in 2004. And Grudge 2 makes six in only six years. (In between he made the similar Marebito and Rinne.) It’s not surprising the film feels mechanized, paint by numbers.
The plot – as it is – consists of randoma opportunities for the ghoulies (a family of pale ghosts) to plague the lives of common-day schoolgirls (and one reporter) and scare the crap out of them while pulling them through mirrors or phone booths. There’s really no reason to see the first film in the series – you get the back story three of four times in this one – but it goes a little something like this: a long time ago (I’m guessing it’s the mid-’80s) a man killed his wife, child, and obnoxious black cat. Then he hanged himself.
This ghastly crime was so atrocious it reverberates down through history and anyone entering the house the family was killed in will be haunted unto death (or disappearance). Keeping with every J-horror cliché (Shimizu invented most of them), the mother ghost (with long black hair hanging in front of her eyes, natch) moves like she’s being stop-motion animated by teens looking to put something up on YouTube, the little boy ghost – all blue ’cause he was drowned – pops out from under desks and howls like a cat with laryngitis, and, in his rare appearances, the dad usually cracks necks. Simple enough. And those visitations were creepy enough to fill the short running time of the first movie, but The Grudge 2 has no new game. We’re treated to almost every ghosting and gruesome dispatch from the first film, just in a different order.
To be fair, Grudge 2 does have one interesting and mildly original plot device. As things play out predictably in Japan, something rotten is happening in Chicago. A family moves into a new apartment to find the neighbouring children seem to be possessed by something really eerie. This sideline plot (it connects up at the end of the film with the Japan hauntings) is more effective and honestly should have been the main focus of the picture (I know, I know, that will be Grudge 3.)
Shimizu knows how to make an effective shock sequence. He’s good at tension. Good at lighting scary set pieces. But despite all that there isn’t an original bone in The Grudge 2’s over-long 95 minutes. Hell, if I’d made the same film six times I’d be pretty damn good at it too. That or really, really bored. Keith Breese