LET the Right One In (****), is a strange and haunting coming-of-age tale. Horribly bullied at school, 12-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a quiet, lonely and wimpy child who spends his spare time playing with knives, poring over a scrapbook of macabre newspaper clippings and fantasising about taking revenge on those making his life a misery. These traits bring him to the attention of Eli (Lina Leandersson), the sad-eyed girl who has recently moved into Oskar's bac
There are more dark twists on childhood to be found in the globetrotting fantasy film The Fall(****). A labour of love for its director Tarsem Singh, it's a rich, lavish and visually astonishing piece of work. Kicking off with a striking black-and-w
hite sequence to set up the film's Hollywood-in-the-Silent-era setting, the film soon relocates to a hospital where depressed stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is recovering from a broken back after a failed suicide attempt. There he befriends fellow patient Alexandria, an adorable five-year-old Romanian girl played by the utterly adorable five-year-old Catinca Untaru. Entertaining her with a tall tale incorporating the lives of the other patients, Roy has an ulterior motive: he needs her to steal some medication so he can finish the job he started – end his life. Pretty dark stuff, but Tarsem lets it sneak up on you by alternating the hospital scenes with elaborate fantasy sequences reflecting Roy's story as it plays out in Alexandria's head. An audacious work of flawed, crazy brilliance.
Fight Club meets The O.C. might have been the pitch for The Wave (***) had this film about a disastrous high school project to explore the roots of fascism retained the California setting of the true story that inspired it. Instead it transposes it to modern day Germany, which makes it an altogether more provocative proposition. Jürgen Vogel (Goodbye Lenin!) plays a radical teacher assigned to teach a class on autocracy to a group of apathetic students as part of a special projects week. Annoyed that he wasn't given the anarchy class, he decides to test out a theory inspired by his pupils' belief that a Third Reich could never again happen in Germany. Instead of simply discussing the issues, he turns the project into an week-long experiment to see how quickly his kids will conform to fascist ways of thinking when given the opportunity to follow a charismatic leader (himself) and adhere to strict rules, dress codes and a core ideology in which everything is allegedly done for the greater good. With the roots of fascism historically taking hold among disaffected social groups, the dangers of flirting with fascism soon become all too apparent.
And on the subject of danger, James Marsh's hugely entertaining documentary Man on Wire (****) recounts French tightrope walker Philippe Petit's remarkable high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974. Seamlessly mixing archive footage, dramatic re-enactments and talking head-interviews with Petit and his collaborators, Marsh creates a vivid picture of the sheer scale of the covert operation that has the thrill of a great heist film. But it's the way he taps into the emotional and artistic significance of the event without ever directly invoking 9/11 that makes it truly special.
&149 Let the Right One In, Cineworld, tomorrow 10pm; The Fall, Cineworld, tonight 9:30pm and 28 June 4:45pm; The Wave, Cineworld, tonight 8:15pm and tomorrow, 5pm; Man on Wire, Cineworld, tonight, 8:30pm and tomorrow, 9:30pm
The full article contains 601 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
