movie reviews

One of the trickiest aspects of creating drama from a celebrated artist's life is finding an actor who can convey both the emotional life and the talent of that artist. It takes an accomplished actor to provide a convincing face to that artist and an excellent artist to convey the talent.

Reel 2 Real International Film Festival For Youth, running 9 to 16 April, was established in 1998, to provide “culturally diverse, authentic programming for youth.” While the festival has a younger audience in mind, with audiences engaging in the event through question and answer sessions, and linked classroom discussions, many of the films will have a broader appeal.

Fish Tank (out on 12 March) is one of those gritty working class, Brit flicks that makes few concessions to the demands of commercial cinema. Set in the grimy hinterlands of contemporary underclass England, it's a rite of passage drama about a bored and stroppy teenager Mia whose transition into adulthood begins when her mum brings a new man home to their grungy, high-rise flat.

As costume dramas go, The Last Station is perfunctory and it sags in the middle. Set in the last year of Leo Tolstoy's life, it dramatizes the battle between the author's wife Sofya and the leaders of the Tolstoyian movement that the writer founded, over the rights to his works.

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke's brand of filmmaking has been aptly described as “Hitchcock without the melodrama”. He also avoids neat conclusions, preferring ambiguity and the provocation of uncertainty so that his films clatter endlessly around your brain afterwards.

A highlight of last month's Vancouver International Film Festival was a potent little documentary called Burma VJ (http://burmavjmovie.com). The good news for those that missed it, is that it's showing again at the Amnesty International Film Festival this month (12-15, Vancity Theatre).

The 16-day Vancouver International Film Festival gets underway on 1st October. If previous years are anything to go by, you can expect a programme bursting at the seams with world cinema, documentary, music and arthouse work from across the globe. In particular, with the Earth Summit in Copenhagen coming in December, expect festival artistic director Alan Franey to field a strand of hard-hitting environmental documentaries when the full VIFF programme goes live on 12th September.

Adam (out on 14th August) is a romcom with a twist. It's a tale of a beautiful girl meets boy with Asperger's Syndrome, a condition that is a mild form of autism.

In the 2004 feature documentary Scared-Sacred, activist filmmaker Velcrow Ripper went to what he called the “ground zeros' of the planet - post 9/11 New York, Bhopal, Hiroshima – in search of hope in humanity's darkest hours.

A preview of the closing film, Earth Days, at the Projecting Change Film Festival, Vancouver.