Workers' Liberty

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.

The following films are not necessarily the best documentary films every made, and by no means the only films that have changed the course of events in the real world. But they have been either innovative in some aspect of film technique or led to changes in the way filmmakers represented the “creative treatment of reality” (John Grierson). All of the films have been highly influential.

Into The wild reviewed.

I like to think I’m a pretty low-tech, non-materialistic kind of person. Apart from a few books, I’ve not accumulated much stuff over the years.

Elizabeth, the Golden Age reviewed.

I have a lasting grievance against Solidarity. Why? Because on the recommendation of its review of the film Elizabeth (Elizabeth I to the new Elizabeth II so to speak) I went to see Elizabeth, the Golden Age. It was more than disappointment you expect from all such films.

The Last Legion is an unusual film. It deals with the late Roman Empire and the nominal last emperor of the West, the juvenile Romulus Augustulus.

Healthcare has become a hot political subject in the US, and even more so since Michael Moore’s film Sicko went on general release. It is now due to be shown in cinemas around the UK from 26 October.

Michael Clayton (played by George Clooney) is “the fixer” for a top firm of New York lawyers. He’s the one that they ask to clean up the mess created by the crimes and misdemeanours of their corporate and millionaire clients.

Sofie Buckland reviews Atonement

Sofie Buckland reviews Atonement

Ed Maltby reviews the War on Democracy

John Pilger has created a film which is informative, shocking and timely.

Rosalind Robson reviews La Vie en Rose

Edith Piaf’s “rags-to-riches” life story is familiar to many. The urchin who sung for centimes on the streets of Paris after the First World War. The girl who was in the power of a pimp when, by chance, she met an impresario who put her on the stage. The woman who became France’s most popular singer… ever.

Caroline Henry reviews This is England

This is England is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Thatcher’s Britain from Nottingham based director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands).

This is England; Arctic Monkeys; May Day

Dan Katz reviews The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)

In East Germany in 1984, just before Gorbachev and Soviet glasnost, a Stasi (secret police) agent Gerd Wiesler sets up a surveillance operation on playwright Georg Dreyman.

God, how vile. Some sadist is making a film about Margaret Thatcher.

Anyone up for organising protests/stunts outside screenings of it, the comments box is all yours ...

Paul Cooper reviews Bobby

Bobby Kennedy met his end on 5 June,1968. He was shot in the head, point-blank, as he made his way through a crowded hotel kitchen.
Most of the people in the kitchen were black or Hispanic hotel workers. They had been servicing the Democratic Party convention that was celebrating Kennedy’s victory in the California Primary. Bobby Kennedy was the great hope of those workers, as he was of the civil rights movement.

Sofie Buckland reviews Notes on a Scandal

From the moment the film opens with Judi Dench's acerbic commentary on school life, you know there's something not quite right about her character, Barbara Covett.

David Broder reviews The Last King of Scotland

Kevin MacDonald's film charts the progress of Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young Scottish doctor who, by chance, becomes a close aide to 1970s Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker).

Sofie Buckland reviews Babel

The latest effort from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, is over two-and-a-half hours of intense misery. Which would be fine, had Iñárritu not made it such hard work to empathise with a single one of his characters. A tale of emotional heartache centred around miscommunication (hence the title), the film drips with anguished expressions, heavy music and lingering shots of the desolate landscapes it’s set in, but somehow still manages to come across as very cold.

Casablanca, is perhaps the most popular Hollywood movie ever. More than 60 years old, it is now, digitally re-mastered, in the cinemas once again. Paddy Dollard went to see it.

Louise Gold reviews Marie Antoinette

The true story of Marie Antoinette is one made up of malicious rumour, compelling plot and a tragic end — for her. The Sofia Coppola film version of her story, starring Kirsten Dunst, neglects historical context; it is less tragic and more fun. Dunst is Marie Antoinette as queen, as woman, as mother, as wife, as foreigner, as family member, as teenager, as symbol of monarchy...but not as the representative of an entire social system — as the French revolutionaries of 1789 identified her. The film is nostalgic, but not for the ancien regime: for youth and innocence and shagging boys in fields.