Where Do We Go Now? - Sunday 23rd December 5pm

So we come to the last movie of the year- it only seems like yesterday when we began. We hope you have enjoyed them as much as we have. We did a quick vote for 'film of the year' at the club Christmas party last weekend and 8 of the 15 films so far got at least one person's vote, so it seems we are still a club with a very varied choice.

This week's film is the Middle-Eastern 'Where Do We Go Now?', a light-hearted second look at the 'power of women'. In this view, we see the Muslim and Christian women of the village uniting to try to stop the men coming to blows over religion; their tactics start with sabotaging the TV and go on to some pretty irreligious methods of persuasion... a different take on Christmas, certainly, but definitely one that pushes 'good will on earth'...come along and enjoy the last club film of 2012!

Untouchable - Sunday 16th December 5pm

This weeks film stars, Francois Cluzet (who was the lead in 'Tell No One', that fantastic French adaptation of the Harlan Coben novel of the same name) and Omar Sy. It has been described as a 'culture-clash buddy movie', which is now the most successful French language film at the global box office. Interestingly, Welcome to the Sticks, a highlight of the last Festival, was for a time the highest grossing French film and it also had an oblique take on disability in one of its early scenes. It must be a Gallic thing.


Extract from the review in Digital Sky:

In the hands of Hollywood, Untouchable could have been overly sentimental and clichéd (worryingly, a remake is already in the works), but writer/directors Nakache and Toledano strike gold with the casting of Cluzet and Sy. The latter invests Driss with a buoyant personality, expertly balancing pathos and a lightness of touch that's enough to ignite a spark in his new boss.
Cluzet, too, is excellent as the wheelchair-bound aristocrat, delivering an expressive performance with only his face. As he gradually becomes comfortable in the company of Driss, there's a sense that he's also getting more comfortable with himself, not allowing his wheelchair to hold him prisoner.

Mysteries Of Lisbon - Sunday 9th December 2pm

A 93 minute film last Sunday can be considered a mere appetizer against the epic that is Mysteries of Lisbon, which due to its 4hr 30 minute running time will start at 2.00pm this Sunday. There will be an interval!

The Director, Raoul Ruiz, is little known in the UK, although Time Regained, with John Malkovich, did feature in the 2001 Festival Programme. The critics seem to love 'Mysteries, not least Philip French in the Guardian -

"The duration is intimidating, but the time flies by in an engrossing movie that covers three generations over the late 18th and early 19th centuries and deals with themes – chance, identity, manipulation, multiple personality – that recur in Ruiz's oeuvre. Like Jorge Luís Borges and Gabriel García Márquez (two Latin American writers he admires) and Italo Calvino, he is fascinated by the very act of storytelling, and the movie brings to mind Dickens, Balzac, Hugo and Dumas, but with a modernist twist."

Probably not many car chases then.