The Class

Gran Torino

Gettysburg

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Probably there are people who generally enjoy Woody Allen films, and the rest who can't bear him in any form whatsoever. I tend to lean towards the first group.

Rachel Getting Married

Anne Hathaway plays Kim - allowed out of rehab to attend her sister Rachel's wedding. I have to begin by saying 'What is the name of holy heaven possessed the director to throw the audience onto the roller coaster of watching a full length film using for its entire length the methods of a cheap wedding video?' In other words we were forced to endure hand held cameras, shaky close ups, fuzzy outlines and variable noise levels.

Milk

Sean Penn is a revelation as gay political activist - assassinated 30 years ago. Harvey Milk arrives in San Francisco shortly after his 40th birthday from New York feeling he had done nothing of imprtance up until then, and had lived too long in the closet. In the next eight years he helped to transform the status of gay people through political activitism. He formed a gay businesses group, and gay people gathered in the Castro Disrtrict of San Francisco initially for protection from the violence of police and everyone else, then as a statement of their existence. Milk is elected to the City Board of Supervisors but makes enemies and comes up against the campaigning zeal of Anita Bryant and religious groups determined to remove all homosexuals from the public service - especially schools. Josh Brolin plays a fellow Supervisor who becomes embittered by Milk and his success on the Board. Milk always said he would never reach 50, and this prophecy comes true when the Brolin character arrives one morning and shoots both the Mayor and Milk in City Hall. How do we know all this? Harvey Milk left tapes only to be heard in the event of his assassination. The film is not melodramatic nor mawkish, and effectively intercut with period footage. Sean Penn's performance is superb, neither too over the top nor stereotypical, and yet the film manages to give the feeling for the gay lifestyle - somehow normal and yet different. Rating 9/10

The Duchess

More melodrama than drama - this tale of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire married at 17 to a man who only wanted her to provide him with an heir. (Something she lamentably fails to do for some considerable time). Perhaps she might have had a hint of what married life might be like when the Duke presents Georgiana with a daughter from a prior liaison and informs her that she is to take the girl in as though she was a their child. Keira Knightley acted this role with far too many nods at another member of the Spencer family the late Diana of Wales, and Ralph Fiennes as her cold hearted husband is taciturn to the point of becoming mute. The film rattles on as a hectic pace - perhaps the Duchess had too full a life - characters are zipped in and out without much historical explanation - Fox, Sheridan, are wheeled out to represent her interest in politics - and into their joint lives comes Bess Foster whose husband has taken her children away from her. She is first Georgiana's friend, then the Duke's mistress and they bizarrely become a menage a trois. Unsurprisingly the Duchess becomes a gambling, drink and drug addict (although like everything else this film skims over these aspects of her life) and then scandalously takes up with Charles Grey, living with him openly. As you might expect it all ends in tears. A bit unsatisfactory in many ways, and failing to do justice to Amanda Foreman's biography. Rating 6/10