MikePadgett.com

• Director: Alfonso Cuarón
• Mexico, 2001
• 

What’s odd about Y Tu Mamá También is how it can be so many things all at once: a road movie, a coming of age comedy, a sexy love story, a political critique. By way of illustration, this latter motif peppers the movie: there are soldiers and police and beggars and put-upon peasants. Somewhat oddly, however, the three characters who take us on their Mexican odyssey seem never to notice what’s out there.

The business of explanation is left to a kindly narrator whose voiceover comes right out of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. He seems to encourage us not to judge Julio, Tenoch and Luisa too harshly, instead coughing up furballs of pathos that stockpile the humanity in a way two teenage bums and a broken-hearted ague could never do.

Let us make no mistake, this film is a coquettish charmer. We absolutely have to love it, because it loves life and so must we. Here the relentless positivity and positive absurdity of the youthful condition reunite us with that sense of adventure that grows harder to maintain the older we become.

• Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
• Austria, 2007
• 

A busy master forger, Salomon Sorowitsch is a man with little concern for political ideals. And that’s what keeps him alive when war breaks out and he ends up in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Receiving preferential treatment to other prisoners, Sorowitsch is given the task of forging the currency that will keep the Nazi war effort alive and ruin the Allies’ economies. Put simply, it’s a case of “(y)our money or your life”.

The balance of principles and survival adds massively to the tension of the movie. We are never left in any doubt that Sorowitsch and his colleagues are moments from the same fate as those over the wall. As a result the film feels much weightier than its mere 98 minutes.

Karl Markovics is an agreeably grim Sorowitsch. An opportunist with few redeeming features, but in the circumstances, we still find ourselves rooting for him even though other characters perhaps deserve more regard. Sachsenhausen is certainly no place for lofty words, yet oddly it brings Sorowitsch a sort of redemption.

• Director: Wim Wenders
• Germany, 1999
• 

Ry Cooder visited Cuba in 1996 to record sessions for an intended Afro-Cuban collaboration. The Africans never made it out of Mali leaving Cooder and World Circuit’s Nick Gold high and dry. What followed was pure serendipity: within three days Juan de Marcos González managed to put together an extraordinary collective of musicians whose output became the Buena Vista Social Club album.

Cooder has been a frequent collaborator on Wenders’ films and the latter agreed to shoot the documentary on digital in 1998, with the former becoming a sort of central character. One might argue that with such colourful subjects against the dilapidated, colonial Havana backdrop, the film could have made itself.

The digital format gives the documentary a welcome rawness and interviews with each of the main Buena Vista players sets the scene for a triumphant coda in which these humble old gents gaze in awe at New York, most having never before left Cuba. A deserving Oscar winner even if rather uneven at times.

• Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
• Germany, 2006
• 

Crass Hollywood remakes of European art film aren’t often successful. The big budgets, the bigger country and the biggest names tend to kill off every single cell of zeitgeist in the original. And I can see that happening here, when they get sad-jowled Nicolas Cage to emote all over this one.

A Stasi official instigates a surveillance operation on a successful playwright. Beginning with an implacable dedication to finding the evidence he needs to condemn his subject, the official instead grows to respect and perhaps envy him, with difficult consequences for both.

The Lives of Others is steeped in atmosphere, the performances are beautifully restrained and the material is worryingly relevant to our times. Top that, Weinstein. Or rather, don’t bother.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1993
• 

Déjà vu abounds in Kika, a brief return to the sort of hair-brained frivolity that characterised Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. Parallels might also be drawn with Almodóvar’s ¡átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) (1990), another film in which the director treats a sexual attack on a woman with surprising humour.

At times, Kika comes across more music hall than movie, though the main plot manages to remain perfectly serious, similar in content to High Heels, as a son and his newly returned father divide up the affections of the eponymous make-up artist and the smell of murder gets increasingly strong as the father’s past unravels.

Verónica Forqué is an unusual but affable Almodóvar muse as Kika while craggy father figure Peter Coyote doesn’t quite fit in. Star turns come from the goofy-gorgeous Rossy de Palma as a yokel housemaid and Victoria Abril as an investigative journalist cum TV presenter, bravely sporting what must be one of cinema’s weirdest wardrobes.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1987
• 

There’s much to like about the performances in Law of Desire. Eusebio Poncela plays a marvellously ambivalent, sexually ambiguous film director as his insouciance gives way to raw emotion while Carmen Maura takes well to her role as his gold-hearted, rough diamond sister.

But the real turn here is delivered by Antonio Banderas who, in portraying his second of three exemplary Almodóvar nutters, does a fine job of representing reckless jealousy with a worrying streak of sincerity.

So much for great acting, because the story holds about as much water as a bucket with a hole. Nevertheless, Almodóvar manages to plug it for a while at least and his treatment of similar themes - in 2004’s Bad Education - would prove more fruitful next time.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1991
• 

The early 90s represent a busy, transitionary period for Almodóvar. And during that period, he takes on multiple muses having apparently fallen out with Carmen Maura. His two key players are Marisa Paredes and the delectable Victoria Abril, both of whom spring up here to lead this oddball of a movie.

Abril is a career-driven newsreader whose errant actress mother (Paredes) is back in town after years away. Abril has married an older man, who happens to be an old flame of Paredes. Classic Almodóvar, really.

And the films of his transitionary period can be a bit awkward - frivolity rubs up against more serious content in a typical riot of colour. Scenes between mother and daughter are superbly acted and these tend to cover up for other, weaker or more implausable moments.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1995
• 

You get the very distinct sense when watching La Flor that Almodóvar is onto something. And so the maturity and virtuosity of his output has increased with each film ever since.

As a writer of great female parts, he’s blessed here with a strong performance from Marisa Paredes who as the protagonista Leo (and her nom de plume Amanda Gris) carries the story almost single-handedly.

Leo’s neurotic approach to love is a little hard to empathise with for this stoical anglosajón, but the film’s luminosity hints overtly at the great things to come. Indeed literally, for the plot of one of Gris’ trash novels would later become Volver.

• Director: Bong Joon Ho
• Korea, 2003
• 

Korean cinema is alive and kicking, emboldened and naive like a headstrong teenager with something to prove. One driver is undoubtedly a gutsy brew of high melodrama and truthful acting. Another might be that uniquely Korean gift for all things epic: simple, emotive storytelling with a keen directing wit.

Song Kang Ho runs the whole gamut as a twitchy detective who finds a sort of nobility in Memories of Murder, elevated by the soul searching investigation of a series of killings. Together with out-of-towner Kim Sang Kyung, Song grinds painfully through crime scenes and suspect interviews, finding few clues yet finding himself. Based on a true story, the film plays it humble with excellent humour and fine performances but classic status seems assured within minutes.

Bong Joon Ho here deserves a place on the growing list of talented directors to emerge from the peninsula during the last decade. He deals sensitively with provocative content and provocatively with scenes of rural Korea: it’s a subtle, successful contrast like the perfect balance embodied in the national flag. This is a beautiful film about the preservation of humanity in the face of inhumanity and it’s a triumph of style and substance.