All Slights Deserved

There's a gimmick that's gained prominence in cinema over the past decade that I find increasingly irksome. It cropped up in La casa muda just last week and here it is again, albeit Haute Tension preempted the Uruguayan film by several years. Let's call that gimmick EYTYKIW: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong. Now EYTYKIW is a somewhat different creature to the twist ending, which has been with us ever since cavemen began sitting around the fire telling stories. Twist endings are the final snap in a story, a little surprise to muse over afterwards. By contrast EYTYKIW typically comes at some point during the third act and gleefully exposes the artifice of narrative; those logical assumptions we've made while reading or watching a story. The interesting thing about EYTYKIW is it can be effective without necessarily being that much of a surprise. Anybody with a passing knowledge of old school psycho-thrillers won't have been taken aback by Scorsese's Sh...

The opening to Duncan Jones' second feature film is classic Hitchcock, and not just because Chris Bacon's rousing score evokes Bernard Herrmann in his pomp. Helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens on a passenger train sitting opposite a woman (Michelle Monaghan) who seems to believe he's somebody else. More worryingly still when he checks a mirror the face that looks back is not his own. Yet before he's had a chance to try and understand what's happening a bomb on the train explodes, killing everyone. Since Gyllenhaal is the star and this is a science fiction movie you know it's only the beginning. He reawakens to find himself strapped into a sealed, cockpit-like cabin where - via a monitor - an air force officer (Vera Farmiga) explains to him he's part of an experimental programme that allows subjects to travel back in time to enter and control the thoughts of the last eight minutes of a dead person's life. Capt Stevens' mi...

When I heard there was a fresh adaptation of Brighton Rock my first thought, probably like many others was, "Why?". The Boulting Bothers' original is one of British cinema's sacred texts; a dark, brooding film that dared to explore territory other work from the period baulked and retains its vitality after more than sixty years. But it's ridiculous to be so precious. The original is still there regardless of whether the new rendition fails to match its standards and there's always the possibilty, however remote, it will either improve or at least bring a fresh perspective to some of the themes of Graham Greene's novel.  So, having thrown caution to the wind, I entered the cinema with two questions. First, how would Sam Riley's depiction of the vicious young gangster Pinkie compare with Dickie Attenborough's career-making portrayal? Second, how would this version choose the interpret the most sadistic ending in all of English literature? But...