Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly, Kagiso Kuypers, Arnold Vosloo
Director: Edward Zwick
Scheduled release: January 18

It seems to be a trend in Hollywood these days – making films with a social conscience. Like Lord of War and The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond highlights many social problems in Africa, this time caused by the diamond trade. The title of the film refers to diamonds used to fund conflicts in the dark continent by corrupt governments and rebel groups.
Set in 1999 in civil war-ravaged Sierra Leone, the film focuses on the lives of two very different men, one white and one black. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a village fisherman, forced to work in rebel-operated diamond mines until captured by government forces, who longs to be reunited with his family. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a self-labelled “soldier of fortune”, an ex-mercenary and current diamond smuggler who ends up in the same jail as Vandy after trying to smuggle his jewels across the Sierra Leone border into Liberia.
The two men’s lives collide when Archer hears that Vandy had
stolen and hidden a large pink diamond before government troops raided his mining camp. Archer agrees to help the fisherman find his family if he leads him to the hidden diamond. American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) is roped in to assist them in reward for a scoop – proof that the European diamond industry fully supports the trade in conflict diamonds – and provides the love interest for Archer.
With this latest venture, DiCaprio finally cements the fact that he is more than just a pretty face and flexes his acting muscles to their fullest (with a credible Zimbabwean accent) as the charming and roguish Archer. He is thoroughly watchable, as is the subtle performance of Hounsou whose plight as a father and husband trying to reunite with his family is incredibly touching.
Although this film has been labelled clichéic and preachy, it is neither. It is entertaining and you truly feel for the characters: the sense of chaos and loss on screen allows viewers to understand what these people lived through (and, to a certain extent, what goes on in certain African countries where rebels still fight for control of diamond exports). The film deals with some topical issues – the effects of white colonization, child soldiers, the role of journalism in conflicts – and compels you to think seriously about each.
However, at 140 minutes, Blood Diamond could have easily been edited for a slicker and far punchier story that would really hit the audience hard. But somewhere on Vandy and Archer’s journey, the mind does wander – which doesn’t do the point director Zwick is trying to make any favours. And it is an important point – we in the west need to know that our luxuries often come at a price for those less well off. If there is a film you should make a point to see this year, Blood Diamond is it.

Starring: Louis Koo, Rene Liu, Carl Ng
Director: Jingle Ma
Scheduled release: January 18

Adapted from a short novel by Rene Liu, Happy Birthday was originally intended to be a romantic tragedy about Xiaonan and Xiaomi, who, in spite of their relentless love for each other, are hopelessly entwined in an unfruitful relationship. And yet probably because of its origin, the plot is hardly more than various clichés pieced together to keep the two protagonists apart.
Ever since the start of their relationship back in college, Xiaonan (Louis Koo) had never failed to send Xiaomi (Rene Liu) a heart-warming message on her birthday each year. Over a decade after the first message, Xiaomi waits desperately when Xiaonan’s happy birthday email is late for the second year in a row. The couple’s story then unfolds in flash back and reveals the emotional tensions that tore them apart.
If you can avoid being distracted by the fragmented plot, the movie is quite enjoyable. The intelligent script brings life to the characters although, as the main characters are trapped in clichés on tragedy, it is the supporting roles the audience will more readily relate to. The sorrowful central theme is relieved by humorous gems, situational, well orchestrated and tailored for a local audience: a significant proportion of the jokes comes from Chen (Carl Ng), the candidate chosen by Xiaonan’s best friend in an attempt to match Xiaomi up with another guy.
Leaving the theatre, I noticed around half a dozen viewers were sporting reddened eyes and dishevelled mascara: Happy Birthday is probably a satisfactory date movie choice for guys with a packet of tissue paper at the ready.
Hanson Lau

Starring: Yoshioka Yui, Tsukamoto Takashi.
Director: Isao Yukisada
Scheduled release: January 25

Every morning Koji (Takashi) waits at the bus stop for his two buddies, so they can go surfing before school. Little does he know he is being watched. From her window across the street, young Kaoru (Yui) gazes on, adoringly. How she wishes she could go down and talk to him, but this being a Japanese romantic drama, there is a problem. Kaoru suffers from a rare medical condition known as XP, meaning she is allergic to direct sunlight. So she lives a nocturnal existence, sleeping during the day, and spending her evenings composing teen-angst rock ballads on her guitar in the nearby park.
Kaoru’s parents are surprisingly accommodating, allowing her to wander the streets all night, on her own, provided she is home before sunrise. But in this parallel universe they needn’t worry. There are no drunken salary men or deviant delinquents around to cause her any bother, and even the police leave her in peace to wax lyrical about being alone, yet happy. Why she doesn’t go to night school or get a job is never discussed, but she still seems to know enough English to pepper her songs with plenty of catchy lyrics. And she’s cute as a button too, so when Koji and her paths finally do cross, the attraction is instant.
The Japanese love these teenage tragedies of doomed love – the relationship is crippled from the outset not only by the couple’s inherent adolescent awkwardness, but by Kaoru’s debilitating illness that could snatch her from this world at any moment. Blending elements from the likes of Crying Out Love, In the Centre of the World with pop vehicles such as NANA, Midnight Sun is little more than a showcase for its young star, Yui. It’s not so much a bad film as simply naïve, formulaic and painfully slow. It takes such a long time to reach its touching, tragic, yet wholly predictable resolution that only the most dedicated of audiences will still be awake to appreciate it. James Marsh.

Starring: Ben Whishaw, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman,
Alan Rickman
Director: Tom Tykwer
Scheduled release: January 25

Like chugging a $200 bottle of pinot noir while feeding a steady methamphetamine habit, Tom Tykwer’s take on Patrick Suskind’s perverse classic Perfume takes out all the novel’s dark teases and replaces them with his patented conniption-fit editing streaks and flashy colour sweeps.
Since birth, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (newcomer Ben Whishaw) has had a curiously strong sense of smell, bordering on superhuman. Born and continuously dropped off under bad signs, Jean-Baptiste eventually makes his way to Paris where he becomes the apprentice of Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), an elderly perfumer once famous for his flourishing scents. Baldini wants to compete with modern perfumers, but Jean-Baptiste has loftier ambitions. After murdering a fruit girl, Grenouille becomes obsessed with cultivating the scent of women by any means possible. He leaves Baldini and heads for Grasse, the supposed kingdom of scent, where he encounters Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman) and his fiery, redheaded daughter (Rachel Hurd-Wood). It is here that Grenouille perfects a way of capturing the scent of women and begins collecting the 12 women that will compose his ultimate scent... by paying with their lives.
Though terrifically overrated, Tykwer’s Run Lola Run was certainly a fresh movie at the time of its release. Few films looked like it and the premise was derivative but never boring. Tykwer solidified a certain style in that film that carried into The Princess and the Warrior, but didn’t become substantial until he directed Heaven, a film penned by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Heaven showed that Tykwer wasn’t all flash-and-dash; it was a strong story with steady production and restrained direction. Perfume plays more like the lost note between that film and the galvanizing The Princess and the Warrior, where Tykwer is still working out the kinks in the system. In scenes where studied, levelheaded production is crucial, the film jerks and twitches with special effects and extremely overdone zoom-ins. The style of the story itself, separating it even from its source material, requires a precise dramatic tone echoing that of Jack the Ripper. To bring a story of such deeply rooted, dark psychology into a rather frenetic style takes gentle hands which Tykwer simply doesn’t have. What transpires is predictable and terribly hollow, the speediness of the film overtaking any character growth or audience empathy.
Tykwer’s editing and style doesn’t get quite as bad as Tony Scott’s migraine-inducing cinema of dilation, but it’s not far off. The actors don’t really act; they say their lines to make way for the next Red Bull-induced frenzied long-range shot. Suskind’s classy, sublimely dark novel inspired several artists, not least of all Kurt Cobain, who wrote Scentless Apprentice about the famed novel. On film, however, it smells of something a few steps down from Aqua Velva. Chris Cabin

Starting: Nicole Kidman, Ty Burrell, Robert Downey Jr., Jane Alexander, Harris Yulin
Director: Steven Shainberg
Scheduled release: January 18

Diane Arbus forged a name for herself by making the normal look peculiar and vice versa: many of her pictures detail ‘freaks’ in calm, classical poses and spaces. When Steven Shainberg got the notion to cook up a fictional story about how Arbus got the inspiration for her photographic portraits, that had to be on his mind. But it was a notion that created an inventive misfire.
Shainberg imagines Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, as a faithful housewife, very self-conscious of her strange stares and off-putting manner. She’s a devoted assistant to Allan (a superb Ty Burrell), her photographer husband, who captures the poppy, pastel colours of 1950’s dresses and various appliances for catalogues. Her life gets an electric charge when she catches the eye of a strange neighbour with hypertrichosis named Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) who featured as a dog boy in a freak show when younger. The relationship that builds between Arbus and her hairy friend accounts for her artistic awakening and liberation from feminine constraints.
The metaphors are heavy: right after she sees Lionel for the first time, hair clogs Diane’s (pronounced Dee-Ann) plumbing along with a small key that opens his door. Shainberg’s compositions are full of colour and look genuinely pretty, but there’s a severe lack of freakishness here. Most of the set design and camerawork recall some tropically flavoured Tim Burton piece with hints of Lynchian noir. It’s in every restaurant, bar, and funeral home (don’t ask) Lionel and Diane visit. The film looks quirky enough but, in the realm of a truly strange person, appears shockingly proper. Not surprisingly, the truly bizarre images are those of the serene place-settings Diane’s husband shoots.
Shainberg’s first film, Secretary, would have been a more comfortable fit for Arbus. The erotic, perverse emotions she (self-admittedly) felt from taking pictures of the people who were her subjects and from the people themselves are muffled and only released in small dribbles. Kidman’s eyes often hint at the vast dunes of wayward thought beneath Arbus’s plain exterior, but it doesn’t add up. Kidman takes on Arbus and all her yearning, but she is severely miscast as the dark, bleak creature. Downey, however, aptly conveys Lionel, speaking in patented art-teacher-on-meths spurts and letting his eyes dart under the mounds of fur that cover his face for three-quarters of the film.
In its reach for wanton grandeur, Fur doesn’t necessarily bore but rather confounds in its attempt to present a perverse life without really getting too strange itself. Arbus called art “a secret about a secret” and it is possible Shainberg purposefully holds us at arm’s length for intrigue’s sake. But fascination is a hard beast to wrangle and, while at moments Fur manages it, the film never lures the viewer into the wilful world Arbus inhabited. It makes that peculiar world look extremely normal. Chris Cabin

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Steve Coogan, Asia Argento, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston
Director: Sofia Coppola
Scheduled release : January 18

The word "soft" summarizes the world of Sofia Coppola, perfectly. Each film she has made has the tenderness, vagueness and, ultimately, the sensibility of a fluffy, white cloud in the middle of a blue sky. With two near-perfect films on her resume, 1999's The Virgin Suicides and 2003's majestic Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's third film should have been an easy play. Instead, we are given the beguiling Marie Antoinette.
There's the famous Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst): the one who so insipidly said "Let them eat cake" when learning of the famine and starvation of the French people and the one who had her head cut off and displayed, with ample delight, to the same people she told to eat said cake. Then there's the private Marie Antoinette: the one who was forced into a French marriage (she was Austrian originally) by her brutish mother and who would eventually lose a newborn baby right as her kingdom was crashing down. Coppola seems very confused as to whom she wants to show in Marie Antoinette.
The film begins as Marie is being married off to Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), who will take over for his grandfather, King Louis XV (a particularly boisterous Rip Torn) when he passes on. In the film's first third (roughly till Louis XV dies), Coppola paints the world of Marie Antoinette like the original Paris Hilton: the little dog constantly in her arms, the frivolous clothes and the constant pouting over the traditions of French royalty. There is a dreaminess to the first half of the film that sets off a mesmerizing sense of dazzle. It doesn't even seem weird that '80s post-punk heroes Gang of Four, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and The Cure share the same area as classical composers like Rameau.
Far from a social commentary, Marie Antoinette seems to cast off any sense of history or class war in favor of the daze of womanhood. The scenes of Antoinette frolicking around with her daughter with sheep in a garden and the shot of her giggling uncontrollably after finally having sex with her husband seem much more important than scenes where the poverty-stricken people of France rally outside the royal palace. This is all for the better, since all of Coppola's previous films exist in a certain dreamscape while dealing with the emotional plights of their heroines.
Trouble rears its ugly head in the film's last quarter when, seemingly out of nowhere, Coppola starts searching for Antoinette's soul on the physical plane. The brilliant cinematographer Lance Acord (Lost in Translation, Adaptation) keeps the imagery wondrously whimsical, but with the death of her child and the French people forcing Antoinette and Louis to leave their palace brashly drag the film into a fake sense of reality. Coppola's second-guessing of her treatment turns the end of this otherwise breathtaking pastel wonderland into a shockingly uninvolved dramatic stab at insincere integrity, and it becomes almost impossible to give into the featherbed that Coppola lays out for us. Call me a softy. Chris Cabin

Starring: Zhao Ben Shan, Song Dan Dan, Hu Jun, Wu Ma, Xia Yu
Director: Zhang Yang
Scheduled release: January 25

A promise, or perhaps just a slip of the tongue, leads Old Zhao, the main character of Getting Home, all the way from Shenzhen to Chong Qing – with a dead body. Directed by Zhang Yang, whose previous works include the internationally acclaimed Shower, Getting Home is a heart-warming film with a great sense of dark humour. But if you dig in, the problems of modern China the film exposes, though light-heartedly, bring a sense of unease.
Based on a true story, the film journeys with Old Zhao, whose best friend and co-worker Old Liu died unexpectedly. A heavily drunk Zhao once promised Liu that if he died, Zhao would take him home, even if he had to carry the body all the way. Zhao pretends Liu is just a passed-out drunk and, one by one, meets and gets help from ordinary people with their own unique stories: a tough truck driver who has just lost the love of his life, a man who opened a bee house in remote area for his disfigured wife, and a young girl who moved to the city to run a salon all by herself, though she is often mistaken for a prostitute.
Although death is usually a taboo subject, Zhang tackles it with humour. Zhao cries at a stranger’s funeral just to get a free meal, and later meets the ‘ghost’ of the departed. With this Six Feet Under style, Zhang (together with the young group known as the ‘6th generation of Chinese directors’) breaks the tradition of Chinese movies focusing on village life or martial arts.
Although he doesn’t take it too far (either as a deliberate choice or for other political reasons), Zhang reveals the real face of modern China with issues such the exploitation of migrant workers (Liu is only given RMB 5000 for his death – and later the money turns out to be fake), the rigid household system (Liu must be buried in his working district instead of at his home), illegal blood sales and the ignorance of AIDS, as well as ecological problems (Liu’s family is forced to move due to the construction of a dam).
The biggest disappointment is that old Zhao’s thoughts and emotions are seldom reflected in the movie and consequently audiences fail to go through the journey with him: they can only observe the adventure, like a third person, from the outside. Or perhaps that is what this simple, sometimes naïve character is all about – he looks at the world as if everything will be okay tomorrow – which may be true. In a country where fake milk powder, soap and even egg is pervasive, an old man is willing to carry his departed friend for miles for a promise. Humanity, instead of harsh reality, is the key to the film – and also the true story. RM