In Brief

David Haviland

Godsend
Nick Hamm

Godawful more like.

Greg Kinnear plays a right-on teacher who has Robert De Niro's Mephistopholean geneticist clone his recently-murdered son. The clone proves a perfect replacement, until he reaches the age at which the first son died, and starts having murderous visions.

An inferior cross between The Omen and What Lies Beneath, this suffers from Perpetual Terror Syndrome, in which characters act like they're in a horror film even when nothing scary is happening. The silliness of the plot is well matched by the absurd dialogue and disastrous miscasting, petering out to an ending (one of the seven shot, apparently) which only qualifies as such by dint of the credits that follow.

A Thousand Months (Mille Mois)
Faouzi Bensaidi

A Thousand Months is a rather earnest film from Morocco about a young boy coping without a father, while his village suffers from drought and oppression.

Faoud Labied gives a nice performance as the boy, and the cinematography is impressive, although Bensaidi's tendency to simply plant the camera quickly becomes tiresome. There is no plot to speak of, nor any exploration of the themes, so at over two hours long this collection of vignettes is just terribly boring.

The Story Of The Weeping Camel
Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni

In the Gobi Desert, a family of herders face a crisis when one their camels refuses to nurse its calf.

The calf's cries are unbearable, and without its mother's milk it will die, so they arrange a traditional music ritual to reunite the pair. This is a charming and unusual film, creating a fictional drama from mostly documentary footage. However, despite some moving scenes, there's really only enough material for a short, so the film feels very slow.