Workers' Liberty

These two recent films provide conflicting visions of the future. They are both set on mining outposts, a century or two in the future, but the conclusions of both films are rubbish.

Possibly the most hyped British movie ever, Trainspotting is also one of the best British movies of recent years.

Four Rooms bombed with the critics, but Quentin Tarantino remains hot property. According to Paul Schrader, writer of such Martin Scorsese movies as Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, and director of — among others — American Gigolo, and Mishima, Hollywood is desperately trying to remould its output on Tarantino-esque lines, but can’t work out what they are.

Mesrine is slick. Very slick. The film looks great, and successfully evokes its time and place (France in the late 1970s).

The film "The Navigators", about rail privatisation, directed by Ken Loach and written by the late Rob Dawber, an AWL member, will be screened on Film Four TV at 23:20 on Tuesday 9 June.

Review of "Il Divo"

Review of "In the Loop".

Review of The Age of Stupid

Perhaps Woody Allen is just a dirty old man. His relationship with, and marriage to, his adoptive step-daughter is well publicised. And recent films, such as 2005’s Match Point, have centred not so much around the philosophical conflicts and neuroses of his earlier works as on his latest muse Scarlett Johansson's cleavage.

Review of "Slumdog Millionaire".

Review of "Milk"

Review of "Che: Part One"

This is a war film with a political backdrop. The action follows the revolutionaries’ landing in Cuba in December 1956, their trekking covertly through forests, taking of military bases, gaining support of the locals, street-fighting in Santa Clara to being days from taking Havana in January 1959. (The taking of Havana will come in Part Two).

Review of the film Hunger

Whatever your opinion of the Irish Republican movement, and we have criticised it over many years, the events that took place inside the Maze Prison remain an incredible display of political courage. The film Hunger, coming eighteen months after the famous “Chuckle Brothers” scene of Ian Paisley sitting beside Martin McGuiness, gives some historical context to the cozy bourgeois relations now enjoyed by the leaders of the IRA and DUP.

Review of the film: The Baader Meinhof Complex

This film traces the history of the German “Red Army Fraction” (RAF) from its origins in the predominantly student protest movement of the late 1960s through to the prison suicides of its remaining leaders in 1977.

In 1950 four young Scots stole a lump of rock from Westminster Abbey and took it to Scotland. It was the “Stone of Scone”, reputedly used in the coronation of kings of Scotland, but taken to London in 1296. The piece of rock was eventually abandoned in the grounds of Arbroath Abbey, and police took it back to Westminster Abbey.

Review of Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Acrassicaduda (Latin for black scorpion) is a heavy metal band in the world’s most “heavy metal city” — Baghdad. After writing about them in US counter culture magazine Vice in 2003, two metal head journos make the ultimate groupie pilgrimage to the world’s most dangerous city to track down the young Iraqis who make up the band.

Review of The Duchess

The reviewers said it would be pants (bloomers?) and so it was in the main. I went to see it because I’m a sucker for costume-drama feminism. And really, if the story had been told as it should have been, I would have been appalled, moved... something other than bored and slightly irritated.

In Tamar Yarom’s film six young Israeli women talk about their experiences during compulsory military service in the occupied territories.

Is there ever a point to examining the lives of the idle super-rich. Do we really need to know about the hyper-disfunctionality of their family life? Wait a minute — isn’t that the question they usually ask about us plebians?

Blatantly recognisable, but with a style which never overwhelms the content. His films are individual, personal - yet awesome in scale and power.

Persepolis is a story of the bravery of a young Iranian girl as she learns and comes to understand the politics of her nation, and the various factions that have fought to rule over it through history.

Tony Stark is a millionaire weapons designer who decides to ensure his weapons never fall into the wrong hands — but only after being captured by terrorists in Afghanistan using them!

The new film Three and Out is a comedy about a London Underground driver who suffers two “one unders” — people throwing themselves under his train — and then deliberately goes for a third in order to get a pay off. Here a Workers’ Liberty member who drives trains on the mainline and was previously a Tube driver, and experienced a “one under” himself, responds.

Nick Broomfield’s latest cinematic offering dramatises a particular brutal and harrowing chapter in the five year history of the U.S occupation of Iraq.

What’s Price’s Equation — a mathematical description of evolution and natural selection — got to do with a series of dead bodies turning up in New York?

Already hailed as a masterpiece, this film is one of the bookies’ favourite for the Oscars, particularly for Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of oil man Daniel Plainview. His performance certainly dominates the film — he is central to all but two scenes in the film — and it is as subtle and understated as it is masterful.

According to Anamaria Marinca, one of the two lead actresses in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, “It isn't a film that is pro-abortion, neither is it against it; it's not as easy as that.”

I must admit, I’m no Dylanologist, so I was not particularly upset by director Todd Haynes’ decision to merge Suze Rotolo and Sara Lownds into one character, nor the fact that I’m Not There is far from a biography of Dylan. However, while the film has an excellent score (unsurprisingly, it features lots of Bob Dylan tracks) and features some memorable performances from the six actors representing the singer-songwriter’s different personas, it feels like a simple homage rather than offering any particular insight.

A smug doctor, played by Emma Thompson, gives a TV interview about how she has adapted viral bacteria to, in effect, cure cancer.

Heather on why you should go to the cinema right now to see Atonement.