"Seven" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
American cinema's most powerful and chilling psychological thriller since The Silence of the Lambs is David Fincher's, Seven. It repeatedly confounds expectations, beginning with the realisation that there is infinitely more to Fincher's own ability than his only previous feature film Alien3 suggested; unhampered by that movie's cluttered and compromised screenplay, Fincher seizes on the potential of Andrew Kevin Walker's imaginative script for Seven and develops a brilliantly stylised and creepily unsettling drama.
Similarly, Fincher and Walker upturn the well-worn odd-couple-teaming of its principal pair of homicide detectives - one, William Somerset, is black, wise, worldweary and at retirement age, the other, David Mills, is white young, cocky and impatient, and their sharply different backgrounds gives a genuine edge to the movie and is closer to the teaming of Inspector Morse and Sgt Lewis than to such a stereotypical grouping as the Riggs and Murtagh team of the Lethal Weapon series.
Then there is the serial killer who is their prey and who is gradually revealed as a methodical and cold-blooded operator whose motivation is a scream of rage at the disintegration, corruption and moral bankruptcy of modern society and whose motif is based on the seven deadly sins. It is Somerset, of course, who, Morse-like makes the initial connection between the crimes - the sin of gluttony as he and Mills find the body of a man forced to eat until he bursts, and then greed with the discovery of the corpse of a wealthy lawyer who has been bled to death.
Andrew Kevin Walker's ingenious and intricate screenplay written while he worked as a cashier at a Tower Records outlet in New York, is heavily symbolic and suffused with allusions (some overstated) to Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thomas Aquinas and the Marquis de Sade Most of these references sail over the head of Mills, who pronounces Sade as if he were talking about the silky-voiced singer and who opts for the Folens Notes-style versions of the texts referred to him by Somerset.
In his finest screen performance to date, Morgan Freeman plays Somerset with authority and great subtlety in a minutely observed performance which well merits an Oscar nomination. As the cocky and ambitious Mills who is not as smart as he thinks, Brad Pitt has rarely, if ever, been more effective. The elaborate and often startling production design of the film is the work of Arthur Max and the visual charge of the film is heightened by the urban hell caught through the camera of Darius Khondji, who was the lighting cameraman on Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and Before the Rain. The film features Howard Shore's most atmospheric dramatic score since The Fly and the eclectic songs on the soundtrack notably feature Nine Inch Nails's Clever and David Bowie's The Heart's Filthy Lesson over the tantalising opening and closing credits, respectively.
With commendable restraint, Fincher does not dwell on the gory details of tile serial killer's crimes in Seven, but - as in the most effective Hitchcock thrillers. It's not what you see on screen which is most unsettling, but what you don't see. He takes us through a grim urban maze of squalid apartments and even more squalid lives, a persistently dark and rain-soaked world full of harrowing horrors, personal and public, intimate and large-scale. Nevertheless, nothing about what we see prepares us for the film's subversive and shocking denouement.
"Korea" (PG) Light House, Dublin.
Eleven years after the release of the gritty contemporary Dublin drama Pigs, Cathal Black makes an overdue and more than welcome return to the cinema screen with the accomplished Irish rural period drama, Korea, based on the short story by John McGahern and adapted by Joe O'Byrne in collaboration with John D'Alton and Black himself.
This melancholy and moving film is set in a lakeside Cavan village in 1952, at the time of the rural electrification scheme, but while many people are celebrating that progress, some others are rooted in the past and the village lies in the shadow of two wars - the Korean war which had claimed the life of a local lad, and the Civil War which had left a legacy of deep-rooted bitterness and resentment.
Andrew Scott, an impressive young newcomer, plays Eamon Doyle, a quiet-natured 17-year-old whose father, John (Donal Donnelly), a lonely widower and Civil War veteran, combines an uneasy mix of stubborn pride and repressed feeling. The film tenderly catches Eamon's sexual stirrings and the early, tentative stages of his relationship with Una (Fiona Molony), the daughter of John's Free-Stater enemy (Pass Anderson).
"Some things never change John Doyle tops his son, oblivious to the changes happening all around him. Having lost his wife and about to lose his fishing rights to the developing tourism industry, he is prepared to lose all that remains dear to him - his son, to emigration - because of his own obstinate inability to change spurning the tentative reconciliations of his old enemy and balefully disapproving of the tender relationship between their off spring. In several respects, the story's themes are as relevant today as they would have been then, despite all the many changes in Irish society in the intervening 40 years and more
John Doyle is captured in all his sadness and imperfections, and with a poetic intensity, in Donal Donnelly's virtuoso performance and the other principal performances are precisely judged
Thoughtful and intimate, Korea is visually expressive cinema in which looks and glances speak volumes and it is made with firm narrative control as it builds in power. Visually, it is consistently striking with lighting cameraman Nlc Morris assembling a succession of haunting compositions. And the film is fluidly edited by Emer Reynolds and accompanied by an aptly sombre score by Stephen McKeon.
"Cold Fever" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin.
The breeziest, most offbeat of today's new releases is a road movie with a difference from the Icelandic director, Fridrik Thor Fridrikson - Cold Fever, which operates from a quite unlikely premise for a feel-good movie: a young Japanese man (Masatoshi Nagase) travels to a remote area of Iceland to perform a memorial service for his geologist parents who drowned there.
However, from the moment his plane lands in Iceland he finds himself sidetracked and drawn into the company of assorted eccentrics, among them rogue American hitch-hikers played by Lili Taylor and Fisher Stevens, and a wise and kindly old Icleandic man played by Gisli Halidorsson, who starred in Frikriksson's Oscar-nominated Children Of Nature. And the Japanese visitor gets to experience the power of the country's national drink (known as Black Death) and to dine on such exotica as sheep's head and fermented shark.
Shot under the most daunting conditions - in the depths of the Icelandic winter with daily snow and only four to five hours of daylight - Cold Fever is a gently humorous look at some of his country's strangest features by Fridriksson, who wrote the screenplay with Jim Stark, the American producer who has produced most of Jim Jarmusch's movies. The Jarmusch connection is extended through the casting of Masatoshi Nagase from Mystery Train as the hapless young Japanese man.
Filmed against a series of stunning widescreeen landscape, Cold Fever is both hilarious and touching, and it left me with a very warm glow by the end.
"Farinelli" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin.
A gorgeous and sumptuous Belgian production which won last year's Golden Globe award for best foreign-language film, Gerard Corblau's Farinelli is based on the life of Carlo Broschi, the celebrated castrato singer who performed under the Stage name of Farlnelli in 18th-century Europe. Dismissed by Handel at one point in the film as "neither man nor Woman Broschi was born into a lesser Neapolitan noble family in 1705 and lived until 1782; in the film's most thrilling musical sequence, the castrators performance of a Handel composition is intercut with scenes depicting the truth behind the singer's castration as a 10-year-old boy.
Director Corblau's constant cutting back and forwards in time Is a pointless and irritating exercise until the movie gets to its point: the interlocked relationship between Carlo Broschi and his older brother, Ricardo, a minor composer who uses his singing sibling as a vehicle for his uninspired music, and exploits Carlo's sexual allure by playing third party in the consummation of the castrato's sexual acts.
Heavier on overheated melodrama than on insight, Farinelli holds the attention because of its unusual subject matter and the brothers are played with conviction by the Italian actors, Stefano Dionisi (as the singer) and Enrico lo Verso (from The Stolen Children and La Scorta) as the older Broschi brother. Farinelli's extraordinary singing voice with its breathtakingly sustained high notes, is recreated skillfully by electronically mixing the voices of an American counter-tenor, Derek Lee Ragin, and a Polish soprano; Ewa Mallas Godlewska.
"Sister My Sister" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin.
Set in a small French provincial town in 1932, theatre director Nancy Meckier's assured cinema debut, Sister My Sister, is adapted by Wendy Kesselman from her own stage play, My Sixter in This House, staged first by the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1981 and later in Dublin. Kesselman's play and screenplay are based on the factual events which inspired Jean Genet's play' The Maids.
Meckler's film is set in a forbidding house occupied by the domineering Madame Danzard (Julie Walters), her sulky daughter, Isabelle (Sophie Thursfield) and their dutiful live-in maid, Christine (Joely Richardson). The household is kept meticulously, orderly by Christine and is minutely supervised by her fussy, white-gloved employer - an upstairs-downstairs arrangement which seems to suit both women and remains untroubled until Christine is joined by her younger sister, Lea (Jodhi May).
The two sisters appear to be discreet and unprying, timid and subservient, and quiet to the point of silence, but gradually erotic overtones - first suggested during mutual hair-washing - build to a release of passion as the sisters are drawn into an incestuous lesbian union. The palpable tension which begins to permeate the household finally is released in a torrent of violence.
Sister, My Sister will inevitably be linked with the recent cycle of movies in Which dose female friends commit violent crimes - Thelma & Louise, Heavenly creatures, Butterfly Kiss and Fun - but the most apt comparison is with Claude Chabrol's excellent recent Ruth Rendell adaptation, La Ceremonie, which opens here soon. Meckler's film wisely eschews attempting to open out Kcsselman's play in any significant way and benefits as a result by retaining its crucial claustrophic element, and her film is expertly acted by all four actresses at its centre.
Helen Meany adds:
"Something to Talk About" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
If everybody just gave a little more, listened a little harder and bought some new clothes, life would become sweet, and family members lovable; Grace (Julia Roberts) a ranch manager in a small Southern town in the US, learns some of these homely lessons when her husband's avail propels their Stagnant marriage towards the divorce court, her patriarchal Daddy (Robert Duvall) is unsympathetic and her mother (Gena Rowlands) counsels passivity.
Carefully presenting a diluted, pragmatic brand of feminism, Lasse Hallstrom directs this consciousness-raising drama with a very leisurely attention to detail and a sympathy for the characters which is saved from total mawkishness by Callie Khourie's droll script. As Grace's sister Emma, a caricature of a tough-talking Southern belle, Kyra Sedgwick gets the most brittle lines - and the chance to knee Grace's errant husband Eddie (Dennis Quaid) in the groin.
Sven Nykvist's tastefull photography does little to dispel the impression that we're watching pure soap-opera especially in scenes Where Grace attempts to poison Eddie, and disrupts a Women's Institute meeting with revelations of the extra-marital affairs of her triads' husbands. And you know that none of it is too serious when, having sleepwalked through the film, Julia Roberts finally leaps into life, flashing those legs ha a high-kicking, swooping, jive.
