A roundup of the current best and rest in film. In this installment: The Descent, Volver, For Your Consideration, A Prairie Home Companion.

The Descent (Marshall/UK/2005)
Snubbing current horror trends in spirit vengeance and torture snuff, Neil Marshall goes all vaginal on us with this rather penetrating follow up to his genre debut, the feral and bloody Dog Soldiers. The temptation to insert a group of men into the tight cracks of an underground cave system must’ve been overwhelming for Marshall, who previously enjoyed dispatching a team of soldiers by gruesome means, and not without a wicked sense of humour. Wisely enough though, he avoids the impregnation metaphors by throwing six thrill-seeking ladies into the deep end: their subterranean adventure a slow descent into the womb of madness, where the onset of darkness and claustrophobia force them to seek out the lower depths of their own depravity and propensity for violence. If having to contend with the uncharted regions of a cave network and their own pack bitchiness wasn’t enough, someone or something also lurks beneath. Happy to crib haute tension from the likes of Alien and Deliverance, Marshall’s pièce de résistance isn’t a chest burster or a backwoods ass rape, but a simple and effective understanding of the concept of pitch black. Sure, the monsters are frightening and the blood flows liberally, but it’s the suffocating darkness that really terrifies, so much so that you’ll want to come up for air. Needless to say, any sick fantasist can make a movie with a guy having his eyeball roasted by a blowtorch. Those kind of horror films are scary only because they make you fear for the human race. The Descent is scary as a marriage of every conceivable phobia, but it’s also a taut, economical and very thrilling exercise in filmmaking. That Marshall openly indulges in the shamelessness of entertainment speaks volumes in times where most other horror directors are secretly complicit in the violence they peddle. OPENS MARCH 8.—Tim Wong

Volver* (Almodovar/Spain/2006)
Penelope Cruz has the finest cleavage in world cinema, Pedro Almodovar says. Much less at home in the English idiom, despite her obvious charms, Cruz makes a stunning return to form as Volver’s Raimunda. In 2005 the Cannes Film Festival shared the Best Actress prize six ways with Volver’s cast, but this film is very PC. It’s all about Penelope Cruz, and along with Sister Maria Rosa (from All About My Mother), Raimunda is one of her great performances. Almodovar, Spain’s maestro, is working in a more minor key than his sublime Talk to Her. Volver (The Return) tells the story of restaurateur Raimunda and her sisterhood, “woman’s troubles.” Her late mother Irene (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’s Carmen Maura) returns to her sister Sole (Lola Duenas). The action switches between Madrid and La Mancha (hometown of Don Quixote and Almodovar), which “has the highest rate of insanity per inhabitant”. The Uma Thurman to his Quentin Tarantino, Almodovar swooningly shoots Volver’s star. Providing the film’s head and heart, Raimunda is a plucky, clever, charming character. Among her obligations and trials is her teenage daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). In a exceptional scene Raimunda bursts into the titular song her daughter hasn’t heard at a restaurant party. It’s a beautiful, everything’s all right moment. The trappings are, of course, classy, from Jose Alcaine’s lush fire-engine red cinematography to the ever excellent Alberto Iglesias’ eclectic score. “Tomorrow you’ll have food coming out your eyes,” Raimunda wittily tells an understandably smitten young man from a film crew who patronises her restaurant. Volver offers an abundance of tapas; it could have done with more meat though. Muy bien. IN THEATRES NOW.—Alexander Bisley

Alexander Bisley also reviews Volver for RNZ [here]

For Your Consideration (Guest/USA/2006)
In a well-considered departure from the banality of mockumentaries, Christopher Guest and ensemble try their hand at the Excruciating Comedy. Just in time for Awards season, For Your Consideration is as ditzy and deranged as anything else in the Guest canon, only corkscrewed to the point where you’ll have to look away. Whether it’s in Catherine O’Hara’s plasticized Marilyn Hack, Harry Shearer’s crest-white Victor Allan Miller, or Jane Lynch and Fred Willard’s odious pair of TV hosts, Guest has inflated his film with a cringe-worthiness audiences will recoil from in horror. The absurd overstatement of this film-within-a-film belongs to Home for Purim, a skewered Rockwellian drama about a dying Jewish mother and her closet lesbian daughter that’s beyond ludicrous. O’Hara plays the family matriarch whose performance gathers some potential Oscar momentum via the internet; soon, other cast members, including the always wonderful Parker Posey, are being spoken of in the same breath. These are train wreck personalities though, destined to be sucked into Hollywood’s vacuum, and then just as quickly spat out. The cruelty of the film is that as its laughter subsides, it becomes more painful to watch: the sight of Marilyn Hack succumbing to cleavage, fake tan and a Joan Rivers facelift, followed by the ignominy of one final blow to her career, makes for possibly the saddest demise of a character you’ll see all year. Evidently, if not cynically, it has dawned on Guest that at 58, and with most of his regulars in their fifties, his used-by-date in show business is drawing nearer by the year. For Your Consideration, at the blunt end of the spectrum, is his riposte to the ravages of time: whereas Entourage considers what hype and buzz does to a young actor when you’re ‘It’, young and hot, Guest’s film scathingly berates the stigma placed on middle age, particularly for women, in an industry as vapid and it is fickle. But there’s also fun to be had in the mid-life crisis, and Guest wastes no opportunity in having his ‘aging’ troupe play along: just try and not laugh at Shearer’s attempts to style himself like Ryan Seacrest, O’Hara’s whorish knock-off of Sharon Stone, Fred Willard’s amazement at cell phone technology, or John Michael Higgins’ discovery of email and the ‘world wide interweb’. OPENS FEB 15.—Tim Wong

A Prairie Home Companion (Altman/USA/2006)
Praise needn’t be justified for one of America’s finest filmmakers, whose passing last month brought to the fore an oeuvre of enduring relevance, brilliance and importance: McCabe & Mrs Miller, Nashville, 3 Women, and Tanner ’88 ranking among the utmost of my Robert Altman favourites. In A Prairie Home Companion, Altman’s final fling is at once a tribute to the lush medium of radio, and posthumously, a premonition of the end of an era. That the film’s unfolding performance – the last ever broadcast of a beloved musical radio show – is watched over by a guardian angel, that the spectre of death lingers throughout, that eulogies are discussed, an old legend dies, and strains of classic Altman seep through its pores – makes for an uncanny and entirely appropriate endnote. It is a work of humour, of indelible charm; a remembrance of things past; a plea to continue on. It’ll make you pine for Altman long after. But if A Prairie Home Companion positively draws the curtain on a 50-year career, it also signs off the great director with a hushed modesty. Poignantly, when Lindsay Lohan’s character asks Garrison Keillor “You don’t want to be remembered?” following the death of a fellow musician they ought to publicize on-air, he replies: “I don’t want them to be told to remember me.” That’s Bob’s humility as an artist right there. And we won’t easily forget. IN THEATRES NOW.—Tim Wong [Read More]