Eastern Promises

Cast
Viggo Mortensen
Naomi Watts
Vincent Cassel
Armin Mueller-Stahl
Screenwriter
Steve Knight
Director
David Cronenberg
Running Time
100 minutes

When a Russian teenager dies in childbirth, nurse Anna (Watts) determines to find her family and save the baby from foster care. The girl’s diary leads her to enigmatic ‘driver’ Nikolai (Mortensen) and the bloody underworld of the Russian Mafia.

A Cronenberg film so it's pretty grisly in some scenes. Well played and directed but it just sort of rolls to a stop at the end.

Die Falscher - The Counterfeiters

Cast
Karl Markovics
August Diehl
Devid Striesow
Martin Brambach
August Zirner
Veit Stubner
Screenwriter
Stefan Ruzowitzky
Director
Stefan Ruzowitzky
Running Time
104 minutes

In 1936, Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch (Markovics) is arrested for forgery and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. Eight years later he is transferred to Sachsenhausen to head up history’s biggest counterfeiting operation - part of a Nazi plan to destabilise the Allied economies.

A fine film with a strong performance by Karl Markovics.

Ratatouille

Cast
Patton Oswalt
Ian Holm
Lou Romano
Brian Dennehy
Peter O'Toole
Brad Garrett
Janeane Garofalo
Will Arnett
John Ratzenberger
Screenwriters
Emily Cook
Cathy Greenberg
Directors
Brad Bird
Bob Peterson
Running Time
111 minutes

Remy (Oswalt), a country rat, has an exceptional sense of taste and wants to be a chef in Paris. When he meets inept human Linguini (Romano), newly installed on the bottom rung of top chef Auguste Gusteau’s restaurant, they hatch a plan to bring Remy’s creativity to the table.

Excellence all around from the script to the voice acting and the animation.

Michael Clayton

Cast
George Clooney
Tom Wilkinson
Tilda Swinton
Sydney Pollack
Screenwriter
Tony Gilroy
Director
Tony Gilroy
Running Time
120 minutes

Arthur Edens (Wilkinson), a lawyer defending an agro-chemical corporation against a class-action suit, is overwhelmed by guilt and cracks up. Michael Clayton (Clooney), his law firm’s ‘fixer’, is sent to sort Arthur out, but the corporation deploy even dirtier tricks to solve the problem.

I wanted to know a great deal more about the case but it was portrayed almost as just something incidental, one of many things going wrong in a bad four days of his life, when surely it was or should have been the focus of the film.