Cinema: the autumn/winter collection

So the summer is nearly over, The Dark Knight has conquered the world and far too many people have discovered Pierce Brosnan can’t sing… It’s time to look to the future. And that future should be more than good: the next seven months are full of exciting and challenging movies from topline directors with class casts.
As ever, some will disappoint, while others will surprise – and who knows who’ll get the Oscar.
Listed below are 30 movies, the first two-thirds in order of release date; the final third do not have UK releases set yet.

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People
3 October
Simon Pegg stars as Toby Young as he hits New York, ready to impress New York with his publishing prowess. Of course, it doesn’t quite play out as he planned…
What does IMDb say?

Body Of Lies
10 October
It’s October, so it must be time for a Ridley Scott-directed two-handed thriller. This time it’s Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Iraq.
IMDb

What Just Happened?
10 October
Barry Levinson directs Robert De Niro as a Hollywood producer whose life and movie are going off the rails. Features Bruce Willis as a bearded, overweight, and arrogant version of himself. Part The Player, part Wag the Dog, this could well attract Globe and Oscar noms by the bucket load.
IMDb

Burn After Reading
17 October
The Coens’ follow-up to No Country features Clooney, Pitt, Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and JK Simmons. This is a comedy – so it could be raging success or a glorious failure.
IMDb

Quantum Of Solace
31 October
You know the name; you know the number. Nuff said.
IMDb

W
7 November
Oliver Stone’s comedic biopic of George W Bush will doubtless dominate headlines upon its release, but will the film live up to the coverage. The trailer looks like Stone’s best work for 20 years – and Josh Brolin, as the president, should win awards by the truckload.
IMDb

Blindness
14 November
Fernando Meirelles’ follow up to The Constant Gardener features Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore in a city hit by contagious blindness. As society breaks down, the couple must survive, their one hope: the wife conceals that she is not blind…
IMDb

Changeling
28 November
Clint Eastwood’s first film of the ‘season’ sees him firmly behind the camera, coaxing a likely second Oscar for Angelina Jolie as a mother whose son is kidknapped and then apparently returned. Only the boy returned to her is not her son… Based on real events in 1920s America.
IMDb

Hamlet 2
28 November
A festival favourite, this stars Steve Coogan as a failed actor who ends up as a teacher, directing a politically incorrect high school performance of Hamlet.
IMDB

Lakeview Terrace
5 December
A typically provocative piece from Neil LaBute: middle class, mixed race couple move into middle class suburb and are made to feel spectacularly unwelcome by Samuel Jackson next door, who is of course a cop…
IMDb

The Day The Earth Stood Still
5 December
Er, not much to say: it’s another Hollywood remake, but it could be good.
IMDb

Australia
26 December
Baz Luhrmann mixes the history of Australia with a remake of Out Of Africa: instead of Meryl Streep, we have Nicole Kidman, and in place of Robert Redford, we have Hugh Jackman. Looks like Baz is trying to have his cake and eat it. Could be a flop, but not without its merits.
IMDb

The Spirit
2 January
Using the technology that made Sin City and 300 possible, comics god Frank Miller brings Will Eisner’s visually inventive comic series to the screen. There’s a great supporting cast, but while Miller was a protégé of Eisner, there are concerns in the geek community as to how Miller will approach the material. Will undoubtedly look marvellous, but the rest remains to be seen.
IMDb

Frost/Nixon
9 January
The stage play comes to the big screen courtesy of Ron Howard. While that sentence fails to inspire hope, the original stage cast (Michael Sheen and Frank Langella) are in place. Oscars ahoy.
IMDb

Doubt
16 January
Meryl Streep is a nun who confronts Philip Seymour Hoffman’s priest whom she suspects has abused a student. Just might kick up some fuss in the media.
IMDb

The Road
16 January
Starry cast (Viggo Mortenson, Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron) lead this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalypse survival story.
IMDb

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
23 January
This will either be enormous or another Joe Black. David Fincher directs the Eric Roth-penned story of a man who ages backwards.
IMDb

Revolutionary Road
30 January
Sam Mendes directs his wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio as a couple in 1950s Conneticut. Adapted from Richard Yates' 1961 novel. Awards ahoy?
IMDB

Defiance
6 February
Ed Zwick’s latest epic, this time focusing on WWII and three Jewish brothers (Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell and Liev Schreiber) who escape the Nazis in their native Poland and fight for the Russians. There’s strong buzz on this already.
IMDb

The Soloist
6 February
Joe Wright, director Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, turns to America with this piece about a homeless musical genius, Jamie Foxx, and the journalist, Robert Downey Jnr, who befriends him as he tries to realise his dreams.
IMDb

Che
20 February
Steven Soderbergh’s long-gestating biopic of Che, complete with an awards-worthy turn from Benecio del Toro.
IMDb

Watchmen
6 March
The graphic novel to end all graphic novels finally hits the screen. While not a high street-known name like Spider-Man, X-Men, Superman and Batman, this will likely break 300’s March opening record in the US. The fans are crazy for it; the trailer looks good; fingers are crossed. The benchmark is set very high for this, and it will be a major challenge to not only deliver the product the fans want, but also to make non-fans see it.
IMDb

Without confirmed dates

Appaloosa
If you need a Western, then this should fit the bill. Ed Harris directs himself, Viggo Morternson, Rene Zellweger and Jeremy Irons. Looks good.
IMDb

The Brothers Bloom
From Brick director Rian Johnson comes this follow up with Adrian Brody and Rachel Weisz.
IMDb

Crossing Over
Ensemble piece, possibly in the style of Crash, featuring Penn and Harrison Ford, focusing immigrants attempting to gain legal status in America.
IMDb

Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood’s second film of the season sees both behind and in front of the camera. Clint plays a racist old man who takes a local Asian youth under his wings and tries to improve his lot. More noms for Dirty Harry?
IMDb

Milk
Based on real events, Sean Penn is in Oscar-grabbing mode as the first openly gay official in San Fran. It almost goes without saying that there is no happy ending…
IMDb

Miracle at St Anna
Spike Lee goes to war. Well, sort of, as he directs the true story of four black soldiers trapped in a Tuscan village in WWII.
IMDb

The Burning Plain
The writer of 21 Grams and Babel directs his first feature, focusing on four interweaving stories (natch!). The cast includes Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron. A probable awards contender.
IMDb

Valkyrie
Bryan Singer’s much-delayed black and white epic of the attempt by SS officers to assassinate Hitler. While Tom Cruise takes the lead, the starry British supporting cast (some playing the same senior Nazis for the second or third time) may well secure all the awards nods. Should be excellent.
IMDb

Review: WALL*E

Wall*E deserves every great review it's garnered; it might well be the most entertaining movie of the year. This is the simple tale of a waste collection and compaction droid falling shamelessly and hopelessly in love with a sleek, ipod-influenced recon droid and inadvertently saving humanity from itself. Visually it is breathtaking, but crucially, as with all Pixar works, real care and love have gone into crafting the script: I was in tears of joy and awe throughout.

WALL*E is the only robot left working on Earth (mankind having long since left the planet in massive starliners, overwhelmed by climate change and the detritus of the consumer-based society: waste), building skyscrapers out of the rubbish he compacts, his only a friend a redoubtable cockroach.

He collects man’s ephemera with charming curiosity: plastic cutlery (that after 700 years still hasn’t biodegraded), a Rubic’s cube, a video recording of Hello Dolly (that he watches every night when he gets back to his ‘home’), an egg whisk and a light bulb. Rather disturbingly, he also collects replacement parts for himself from long-since shut-down WALL*Es with nary a second glance.

His tidy little life is opened up when EVE, the sleek, ultra-modern vegetation search robot is dispatched from a passing ship.
WALL*E’s reaction to EVE’s arrival moves swiftly from fear to awe and then to love. While she fails to reciprocate his feelings, she clearly senses a kindred spirit in WALL*E. Their future together comes to a grinding halt when she discovers he has found a plant: her directive fulfilled, she takes the plant and goes into ‘sleep’ mode until the ship returns.

WALL*E attempts to re-awaken her to no avail, and decides that she just needs to go on some dates; while beautifully realized by Pixar’s animators, WALL*E’s thoughtfulness is in vain: the ship returns and removes EVE.

If there’s a criticism to be made of this film, it comes now. Up to this point in the story, Pixar produces its bravest and most original work to date: the only dialogue uttered by the two robots are their names and ‘directive’, otherwise all other emotions are communicated via WALL*E’s beeps and whistles (created by the sound engineer behind R2D2), his body language and the soundtrack. The storytelling is sleek and minimal, pared down for maximum impact. Arguably once the distraught WALL*E smuggles himself on board the ship, the film echoes the likes of Monsters Inc, devolving (with no loss of character, mind) in to series of chases and face-offs.

But that may be a petty criticism in the face of such brilliance and audacity, for the script still has many highs to hit and, indeed, points to make: WALL*E uncovers the full horror of what has happened to humanity: waited on hand and foot by robots, humans are so overweight they no longer walk, instead carried around on hover chairs. Drama, conspiracy, awakenings and near-death ensue, but love ultimately must triumph.

The film features many nods to sci-fi classics (and some not so classics), some conscious (Sigourney Weaver voicing the starliner’s computer announcer), some unconscious (WALL*E’s design is reminiscent of Johnny 5 in Short Circuit). And while the temptation must have been there, there are no pastiches of classic sci-fi scenes: the focus remains on the two hearts at the core of the story.

There are a few intriguing observations that emerge: while the foundations of the story are rooted in a form of apocalypse, its message is one of hope; humanity’s dependency on robots leads them to exist in the same way, lifeless, unquestioningly following a series of procedures and protocols with no curiosity (a frightening warning as computer geeks continue to inherit the earth, their developments almost determining how we live; and yet, perversely, without that hardware and software, this film could not exist); that waste, more than climate change, might be our ultimate downfall; and while we never find out if androids do dream of electric sheep, we do learn that even robots want to hold hands.

Superb stuff. A hanky may be necessary.

Score: 9.5/10