Critical Times

This is Cate’s year. It’s Angelina’s year, too. Plus it’s a year in which we will see a new Spider-Man, more from Hannibal Lecter and further episodes in the lives of Shrek, Mr Bean, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Harry Potter; a year in which the Caribbean will continue to be troubled by undead Pirates, Jackie Chan will be caught in the Rush Hour for a third time and the Aliens, with slightly wearying predictability, will choose to pit themselves against the Predators for the second time. Ho and hum. Yes, one of those years.

But hey! This is also the year in which, come June, we will see a new Coen Brothers film, No Country for Old Men. Based on the extraordinary Cormac McCarthy novel, it’s about a hunter (Josh Brolin, in a part intended for Heath Ledger) who stumbles on a stash of cash and heroin and must then face a series of moral dilemmas. We’re back in the cinematic territory of Miller’s Crossing, a goldmine if ever there was one.

And if we can stay attentive until October, we’ll be gifted with a new David Cronenberg film, Eastern Promises, in which the great Canadian auteur is re-united with Viggo Mortensen. And that’s just the start of a dream line-up: our Naomi Watts is there too and the script is by Steven Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things. It’s about a London mobster who … but who cares what it’s about? I’m excited already.

But, actually, even January’s film schedules look surprisingly encouraging. As all keen film-goers know, the cinema year has its own seasonal humps and troughs. After the Boxing Day hump of big-bang crowd-pleasers – Babel, Happy Feet, Marie Antoinette, The Holiday, The Queen, plus one art film from France, Heading South, which is about sex tourism in Haiti, and one for the kids, Night at the Museum – we expect a school holiday trough. Then, with the Oscars looming on February 25, people get movie-minded again and the exhibitors whip out their finest.

This year, however, there is some excellent swill in that holiday trough. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, out on January 18, is a tour de force: at once delicate and epic, it sets the story of a child who can pass magically between fantastic worlds with a fiercely partisan account of Spanish fascism. Rated by many critics as the best film on last year’s festival circuit, Pan’s Labyrinth is good enough to merit a day’s drive back from the beach. Or, if your holiday brain can’t take anything beyond superior fluff, you could catch Golden Globe contender Dreamgirls, featuring Beyonce at full throttle, on the same day.

And just round the corner, in the following week, lies Breaking and Entering, Anthony Minghella’s provoking drama about haves and have-nots in our acquisitive world of lifestyle. Even the big kidbuster of the season is something special: Arthur and the Invisibles features Madonna and Snoop Dogg in a story of a boy on a treasure hunt in a world of people so small they seem invisible, and is directed by Luc Besson, the French genius of visual splendour who made The Fifth Element.

In February, with the kids duly packed off with their lunch boxes, everything revs up a little. February 1, in fact, is a bumper day. Watch out for Forest Whitaker’s astonishing performance as a version of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, adapted from Giles Foden’s clever novel about tyranny and its attractions. Or, for the more festively inclined, there are two excellent music documentaries.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is a record of the fantastic tribute concert at the Sydney Opera House a couple of summers ago, featuring Nick Cave, Rufus Wainright and Bono; Shut Up & Sing follows the musical glory and political mayhem created by those wacky country gals, the Dixie Chicks. You definitely don’t have to like country music to enjoy Cecilia Peck’s doco, but you will need to feel something upscale from scepticism about George Bush. He doesn’t come out of it well.

February, week number two. Little Children, directed by Todd Field, is an intriguing venture into Ice Storm territory, with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson as suburban adulterers; Scoop is Woody Allen’s new lustletter to Scarlett Johansson, featuring our own Hugh Jackman. And on February 15 comes the first of the year’s Angelina vehicles – The Good Shepherd, with Matt Damon as a post-war spy out in the cold and Jolie as his wife – on the same day as our Cate’s first film for the year, Notes on a Scandal.

Notes on a Scandal is, so they say, an Oscar shoo-in. Richard Eyre directs; Blanchett plays a slightly daffy teacher who has an affair with a senior student, while Judi Dench reaches a personal best as the covertly Sapphic older teacher who thinks she knows what’s best for all concerned. Then, on February 22, come two more Oscar frontrunners: Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, about the death of Robert Kennedy, and Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood’s much-admired elegy to the Japanese soldiers who were doomed to die in World War II.

All that excitement dies down a little in March, but it is worth pencilling in March 1, when Nicholas Hytner’s wonderful adaptation of Alan Bennett’s hit play The History Boys comes out. The film is a perfect demonstration of the different strengths of film and theatre, but in an entirely benevolent way; it brings the play’s central conflict between rich, eccentric academia and New Labour practicality – which was so bold on stage – into more intimate, subtle focus and, in doing so, finds a whole new level in Bennett’s scintillating text.

A week later, Danish director Susanne Bier brings us the latest James Bond villain, Mads Mikkelsen, in a very different guise. In After the Wedding, Mikkelsen plays an aid worker who, having rejected his country’s material comforts and bourgeois smugness for his whole adult life, is suddenly presented with a compelling reason to go home. Absorbing and moving, it is yet another addition to the great canon of Danish domestic drama.

Our Cate hits the screens again on the same day, March 8, in The Good German, Steven Soderbergh’s eagerly awaited story of the war’s aftermath in Berlin. Here is another extraordinary gathering of talent: a script by Paul Attanasio, who wrote Donnie Brasco, with George Clooney and Tobey Maguire as US Army staff who become embroiled with a German woman (Blanchett) eager to slough off her past. Clooney, who is in partnership with Soderbergh, also produces.

Clooney, by the way, returns in October in the equally eagerly awaited Michael Clayton, playing an attorney whose work for rich dodgy dealers comes back to haunt him. Curiously – perhaps as part of another hump, following the holidays in the northern hemisphere – the mighty Angelina’s second big film for the year, A Mighty Heart, comes out in the same week. Michael Winterbottom will direct her as real-life character Mariane Pearl whose husband Daniel, an American journalist, was abducted and murdered in Pakistan.

A couple more gems – with many more to be unearthed, we hope – signal the continuing, surprise revival of the German film industry. The Lives of Others, which releases on April 19 (in the same week, again curiously, as a double B-feature package directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, those crazy boys) is perhaps the best film to come out of Germany since the ‘70s.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film is a steady-eyed, searing account of the pervasive spying culture in old East Germany that makes the horror suddenly real. As such, it shares a certain spirit with another film that could lay claim to be the best in post-’70s German film, The Downfall. And now here is Oliver Hirschbiegel, who directed The Downfall, working on a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for an American studio.

The Invasion, as it is now called, stars none other than our Nicole, along with a pre-Bond Daniel Craig. According to internet reports, the director and studio have been locked in battle over the film’s ending, with Hirschbiegel holding the line for European bleakness and the studio dictating reshoots and a conventionally explosive pay-off. We’ll see the result of this tussle in early September but, as one internet pundit said, is it really conceivable that Hirschbiegel could make a bad film?

In the middle of all this, from July 25 to August 12, comes the Melbourne International Film Festival. Former director James Hewison put his stamp on a festival that reflected his own passions – for the very different cinemas of Iran and Korea, for stylish action and the odd bit of grotesquerie – building a huge audience of fans and fellow travellers in the process.

But every festival reflects its maker, so we should expect a change of flavour under new director Richard Moore. These are early days, but he is keen to build up strong retrospective seasons, revive a stream of experimental cinema and investigate some new filmmaking cultures, beginning with a selection of African films from this year’s FESPACO festival in Burkina Faso. Forget Bruce Willis confronting terrorism (Live Free or Die Hard, July 19), Ice Cube as a disgruntled suburban renovator (Are We Done Yet?, April 5) or Will Ferrell on skates (Blades of Glory, June 7): here’s something that could really shake up your way of seeing the world. Happy viewing.