Browse films by title with CW new film archive.

Hollywood’s ARK

Evan Almighty (2007), directed by Tom Shadyac

American studios’ productions always have included an element of moral education, promoting traditional values. Evan Almighty is in this tradition, and its weaknesses are not so the result of secularisation, as the increasing isolationism of American politics.

A sordid experience of migration

I for India (2005), directed by Sandhya Suri

The film opens with a clip in which a man explains, for the sake of newcomers to this island and apparently to civilisation, how to switch on a light. Yes, it’s very disturbing to watch this. But it’s also darkly humorous.

Liberalism is dead

Jesus Camp (2006), directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

Evangelicals care more passionately about politics, and in greater numbers than their liberal counterparts. Their enormous fundraising power makes them a force to be reckoned with. Are they wrong to subject their children to brainwashing? Most certainly – but what alternative are kids being offered?

Complete with imperfections

Goya's Ghosts (2006), directed by Milos Forman

For some reason director and co-writer Milos Forman decided it would be a good idea for everyone to speak English with a vague Spanish accent; now this is all well and good for Javier Bardem who is, in fact, Spanish, but everyone else, particularly Natalie Portman, just sounds silly.

Marathon, dance, psychology and death

Everest: Man vs. Mountain (2007), directed by Rupert Day

When the army team makes it to the very highest slopes of Everest, their bodies are beginning to shut down: the lack of oxygen causes their stomachs to stop digesting, their lungs begin to fill with fluid and their brains to go into meltdown (as the bravura male voiceover announces repeatedly).

Hollywood buddies

Ocean's Thirteen (2007), directed by Steven Soderbergh

The plan is both a metaphoric and a very literal shake down of The Bank - Willie’s neatly, if egotistically, named gambling skyscraper – involving a giant drill and a fake earthquake. Yep, a giant drill and a fake earthquake - you can practically feel Dr No and Dr Evil seething with jealousy.

Dumont’s slaughter of the innocents

Flandres [Flanders] (2006), directed by Bruno Dumont

For Dumont the film belongs firmly to him, not the performers – he is the auteur. He has a purposefully difficult relationship with his actors – ‘I’m not looking to make friends’. And he expressly states he does not have affairs with actresses.

Colonial watercolours

The Painted Veil (2006), directed by John Curran

Kitty could so easily come across merely as the spoilt child of Empire, annoying and vacuous, but Naomi Watts and her director John Curran bring out far more complexity in her. And importantly the story doesn’t judge her for not being as serious as her husband.

Humanist cinema

Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki [When a Woman Ascends the Stairs] (1960), directed by Mikio Naruse

Naruse’s whole body of work, like those of many of his 1960s European fellow directors, finds in the life of woman a undying source of inspiration. The love the director has for his heroine is heartbreaking in its purity, making her appear like a goddess demanding respect simply by being.

Into the darkness of the soul

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006), directed by Stephen Kijak

The scenes in the recording studio are alive, and fascinating for the obsessive quality that surrounds the bringing together of each recorded piece. Only Walker has the whole song in his head. The musicians come in and serve each small piece of a picture that only becomes whole in the mixing process.

Piaf in a bottle

La môme [La Vie en Rose] (2007), directed by Olivier Dahan

Marion Cotillard’s transformation is astounding. Her interpretation of Piaf makes you feel you’ve met the singer personally by the time you leave the cinema. It isn’t simply the admirable make-up job of Didier Lavergne, or Cotillard’s mimetism of Piaf’s every tic and attitude, but her voice.

Bad taste aesthetic - The trash trilogy

Pink Flamingos (1972), directed by John Waters / Female Trouble (1974), directed by John Waters / Desperate Living (1977), directed by John Waters

In his ‘mondo trasho’, replete with bodily fluids, drag queens, incest and bestiality, low replaces high and the trashoisie replaces the bourgeoisie. And over the mess and the noise and the reek and the wrong, Waters reigns supreme.

The artist and his vision

Klimt (2006), directed by Raoul Ruiz

This self-proclaimed ‘phantasmagoria’ of Ruiz’s cinema does not work as a literary narrative, but rather as an intrinsically visual one. Malkovich, as Klimt, is always in focus. The cinematography almost always sets him in the best light, continuously eclipsing his background or foreground.

Characters stripped of their scripts

Opening Night (1977), directed by John Cassavetes

Cassavetes shows that in order to be someone fully, we need to recognise, through pain, loss and grief, what we are not or can be no longer. Paradoxically, struggling with these questions and limitations provides a way to personal growth: recognising the boundary of the self is the first step to pushing it back.

Funding Yiddish theatre

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story (2006), directed by Dan Katzir

As the title suggests, the film is indeed an ode to Yiddish theatre as well as a prayer for its continuance. Coming out of the film, however, is also an important arts policy question about what types of minority arts and culture should be funded by the state, and how.