Starring: Audrey Tatou, Gad Elmaleh,
Marie-Christine Adam, Vernon Dobtcheff
Director: Pierre Salvadori
Scheduled release: 10 May 2007
Audrey Tautou, who reaped international acclaim as the gamine Amelie, had hard times in Dirty Pretty Things, and tried to solve the world’s dark riddles in The Da Vinci Code, is back in France as a gold digger with an eye for expensive fashion in a gentle comedy about consumerism in overdrive where everything and everybody has their price.
She plays upmarket hooker Irene whose territory is the opulent hotels of Paris and Southern France where she ensnares older men with large wallets and spends their money with reckless abandon in designer-label fashion boutiques. On her birthday night, bored by her snoring current conquest Jacques (Vernon Dobtcheff), she wanders down to a late-night bar in the hotel and meets bashful barman Jean (Gad Elmaleh) whom she mistakes for a wealthy and susceptible business entrepreneur.
Both are soon drunk, and she seduces him with amusing results when they are found in the presidential suite in the morning by the bemused staff. Irene realizing that Jean is incredibly poor rather than fabulously rich walks out on him. This finally leads to Jacques giving her the big flick and Irene sets off for Nice, furious at the loss of her millionaire, but love-sick Jean is soon in hot pursuit. They meet up again and she punishes him by going on a spending spree that would do Paris Hilton justice, with his credit card.
As Irene callously squanders Jean’s bank balance he is only saved by a wealthy predatory older woman Madelaine (Marie-Christine Adam) who decides the young man should become her ‘paid’ companion. Irene encourages Jean to get all he can from his relationship with Madelaine in the same way she endlessly milks money from her conquests. She teaches Jean some tricks of the trade, but while so doing falls in love with him. This is a case of the biter bit – as you can imagine there are further complications before true love wins through.
Audrey Tautou is just fine as the material girl in a material world, obviously enjoying her slinky, revealing fashions (which give new meaning to the plunging neckline) and the opportunity to play a charming vixen. Her amorous interludes are suitably enthusiastic with Gad Elmaleh (Ole, La Doublure) as the mild-mannered Jean with the hangdog expression, a sort of young Pierre Richard (popular in 1980’s farces like Les Fugitifs). Fortunately the scenes where both are involved with their older partners are treated with commendable restraint. Vernon Dobtcheff (Hamlet, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones) and especially Marie-Christine Adam (Les Acteurs, Le Divorce) ably support the leads with counterpoint performances.
Director and co-writer Pierre Salvadori (Les Apprentis, Apres vous) seems to be paying some homage to Audrey Hepburn (whom Audrey Tautou resembles in Amelie) since the plot has marked similarities to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and even a motor scooter ride recalling Roman Holiday. While the pace is moderate and there are no great belly laughs, the film has typical French amusing charm due to its sharp performances and flamboyant style.
This farce about the ‘beautiful people’ and consumerism may have darker connotations, though its elegant presentation and bitter-sweet view of the obscenely rich make it an entertaining night at the movies. There’s something for everybody apart from ironic humour, some girls will enjoy watching fashions in exotic locations, while some guys will enjoy watching Audrey. John Bale

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, Embeth Davidtz, David Strathairn, Billy Burke
Director: Gregory Hoblit
Scheduled release: 10 May
It is hardly a reassuring sign when one of the more interesting things in a film is not even sentient. Over the title sequence of Fracture, and in the midst of some of the duller stretches (of these there are many), we see a glittering sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, all shiny metallic tracks and carved wooden wheels, in which small glass balls skitter and roll in an elaborately choreographed dance. It’s a beautiful piece of elegant machinery and, one hopes, symbolic of the many complex and artfully managed plot twists to come. Instead, what we’re given is Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling sleepwalking around each other as they navigate through one of the year’s laziest films.
Fracture has no excuse to be so indolent, given the actors at its disposal and a setup that should have made this an easy slam-dunk. Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, an aeronautics engineer who’s found out his wife Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz) is having an affair with police detective Rob Nunally (Billy Burke). Confronting her at home, Crawford shoots her in the head and calmly waits for the cops to arrive. When they do, it’s with none other than Nunally at the lead, who’s shocked and enraged at finding Jennifer in a pool of blood and Crawford standing there as though nothing had happened. After a quickly-interrupted beating from Nunally, Crawford later confesses and even waives his right to a lawyer. When it’s all dropped in the lap of assistant district attorney Willy Beachum (Gosling), the case couldn’t seem more airtight, which is good since Beachum can’t wait to slip the bonds of lowly civil employment for a well-paying private sector job.
Things get more complicated, as they do, but hardly more interesting, which is truly a surprise. It’s no shock that Crawford has several aces up his sleeve, being a scientist who specializes in things like spotting stress fractures (not to mention being the guy who built that contraption shown in the beginning) and believes himself to have committed the perfect crime. And when some of his revelations are brought down on an arrogant and slipshod Beachum in the courtroom they do have an impact, as the film shifts into Beachum’s panicked race to win a case he barely thought he needed to be conscious for.
But for some reason, it’s at that point Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers’ script begins to simply peter out, eventually resulting in one of film history’s least satisfying ‘surprise’ endings. Crawford recedes from the picture – which is probably for the best, as Hopkins is playing it all as a winking lark; fun in bits but tiresome over the long haul – and Gosling is given little to do to pad out a nearly two-hour script that could have easily been compressed into a single episode of Law and Order. It doesn’t help that Gosling seems barely alive here, a flicker of wit only occasionally visible through his generally sleepy demeanour.
Blame is also due to director Gregory Hoblit, a TV veteran (Hill Street Blues) who has shot a number of hit-and-miss pulp films like Primal Fear and Fallen, none of which had the most logical of stories but made up for that with sterling casts at their best and a general sense of fun. In Fracture, though, even with two of the better actors in film today going head to head and a prime setup that wouldn’t have been unfamiliar in the glossy legal thrillers of the ’80s or ’90s – there’s a ghost of Joe Eszterhas in all these devilish machinations – Hoblit can hardly sustain even a modicum of tension. If one was making a case for how TV drama has eclipsed film in recent years, unnecessary product like Fracture would be Exhibit A. Chris Barsanti

Starring: Hideaki Ito, Ai Kato, Ryuta Sato,
Director: Eiichiro Hasaumi
Scheduled release: 10 May

Umizaru belongs to the kind of movies that glorify whatever uniformed group is under their spotlight. Those I have enjoyed include Top Gun with its US Navy pilots, Backdraft and its firefighters, and In The Line of Fire about the Secret Service. While those are Hollywood movies, in 2004 Japan also made Umizaru, a movie about a rookie team of coastguards, and this sequel brings back search-and-rescue diver Daisuke Senzaki (Hideaki Ito) and his team into what is another Poseidon-like adventure.
The film was entitled Limit of Love, a strange moniker for a movie high on action, and soppy on romance. It continues the romantic relations between our hero Senzaki-san and his fiancé Kanna Izawa (Ai Katô), or rather the strained relations between the two after the former rejected Izawa’s obvious hints to marry her, because of skeletons in his closet which continued to haunt him. The brooding hero has to exorcise his demons before he can commit to settling down!

Perhaps for such reasons the film was retitled Test of Trust, as there are many moments which reference that title: he has to trust his buddies to come back for him and the experts to do a job they are trained for while she has to trust her fiancé to take care of himself and come back alive… the list goes on. But fret not, even if you haven’t seen the first movie, you’ll be orientated quickly enough to land in the thick of the action.
The filmmakers spared no expense with planes, helicopters, ships, rafts, and tons of extras to make this a grand spectacle. Underwater sequences are never easy, but when this movie is compared to the Hollywood stinker Poseidon, with which it shares a premise, it triumphs, especially in the action sequences. And I don’t mean in its special effects or razzle dazzle (which Poseidon wins hands down), but by its delivery. Keeping the cast small and playing for intimacy avoids the mistake of casting too many characters which are easily brushed aside as action fodder and makes the film’s heroes regular (if clichéd) folks you actually care about.
If there is a gripe, it is the melodrama which gets pumped up to dizzying heights by plenty of lingering camera shots and rousing crescendos on the soundtrack. No doubt it is all for dramatic effect but to make the rescue operation more believable it would be better to get on with saving lives or getting the hell out of the danger zone.
I couldn’t help but smile at certain scenes shot in typical Japanese fashion with characters looking hard at each other and giving constant nods of assurance, especially in the control centre. Some things don’t change, do they? But all in all, this is a pretty interesting action movie, after a dearth of films that are neither romances nor horror movies from the land of the rising sun. Stefan S

Starring: Koji Yakusho, Manami Konishi, Tsuyoshi Ihara,
Hiroyuki Hirayama, Joe Odagiri, Ryo Kase, Riona Hazuki.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Scheduled release: 17 May

After the lame Loft, Japanese psycho-maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa bounces back with Retribution, a modern-day ghost story/serial-killer mystery that blends the helmer’s typical ingredients of guilt, suggestion and waking madness in largely successful doses. The film lacks the sheer clammy-handed creepiness of his earlier Cure – with which it shares some plot similarities – but should have an offshore market as a more-than-solid slice of J-horror.
Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho here plays Yoshioka, a stressed-out cop investigating the murder of Reiko Shibata, a young woman in a vivid red dress. Though she was apparently drowned in a small pool of muddy water, her stomach is found to be full of sea water. The most worrying aspect of the case for Yoshioka is that a button found at the murder scene matches one that’s missing from a coat he himself bought.
When fingerprints on the body match his, Yoshioka starts thinking he may have been the murderer, even though colleagues say he probably just handled the body without gloves on. However, Yoshioka has also started seeing a ghost in the same vivid red dress (Riona Hazuki), whom he presumes is Reiko.
Kurosawa takes this simple premise of a cop who may or may not be a murderer, and then skews it. When a surgeon, Sakuma, drowns his own son in a similar way, he seemingly sets up Yoshioka as the murderer, to a point where even Yoshioka’s sidekick, Miyaji (Tsuyoshi Ihara), starts to suspect his colleague. Also, the hauntings of Yoshioka – including a striking sequence where the ghost-woman appears to climb out of his bedroom wall during an earthquake tremor – have increased.
The plot seems to resolve itself two-thirds of the way through, before Kurosawa springs the first of two major twists. As Yoshioka delves into his own past to settle the mystery, he sends his girlfriend, Harue (the ethereal Manami Konishi), away for safety. But then the final twist reveals everything the audience thinks it’s seen is far from the truth.
The pic’s original Japanese title literally translates as ‘The Scream’, which explains the occasional ear-splitting wail the ghost-woman summons up. Throughout, there’s a sense of the spirit world pressing against the real world, like a face against a windowpane, demanding retribution for a past wrong. In line with this, the film’s horror is rarely full on, more a growing sense of unease punctuated by occasional striking effects.
The hangdog Yakusho makes an ideal protagonist, one with whom the audience is never quite sure whether it can identify. And at least one rather remote performance only makes sense at the very end.
In essence, Retribution is just a clever box of tricks that keeps turning the tables on the viewer, and it never sticks to the ribs like some of Kurosawa’s earlier movies. But it’s classily made, with the lucid colours and chiaroscuro lighting of director of photography Akiko Ashizawa keeping the sense of gentle dread bubbling away. Derek Elley – Variety (Reproduced with permission)