***REVIEW: The Artist***

Dir.: Michel Hazanavicius

With: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman

I think I just found my new favourite film! And a new favourite actor!

At the moment ‘The Artist’ is triumphantly playing at various film festivals and my future husband, Jean Dujardin, won the best actor award at Cannes earlier this year and I think that the film will be nominated for an Oscar. There are plenty of reasons as to why.

This is one of the more daring films I have seen in the past few years – it’s silent! The director, Michel Hazanavicius has studied reels and reels of the silent era cinema to put together this love-letter to the early days of Hollywood. The story follows a very successful silent actor George Valentin in the years between 1927 and 1931 when “talkies” or sound films began their ascension. His unwillingness to follow this new direction results in his personal and professional demise. There is also a very touching love story between Valentin and Peppy Miller, an extra in some of his films.

Surprisingly, after about 5 minutes into the movie you completely forget that it is silent. The emotions, the story and the characters are so vibrant that the lack of conversation does not limit the film in any way. It is also highly humorous and I promise you, you will fall in love with Peppy, Valentin and his adorable dog Uggie. There are a number of great appearances by John Goodman, James Cromwell and others. I think one has to have a very expressive face to be able to star in a silent film - Bérénice Bejo is highly adept at that.

I am absolutely infatuated by Jean Dujardin and his brilliant moustache. Although he is known as a comedy actor in France, he successfully demonstrated his dramatic and dancing skills in this film. Also, this year’s most charming smile award goes to him (for the million-dollar smile that vanishes from his face when he hits hard times). Honestly, I cannot praise the film and the performances enough, it is so rare to see such a gem that has so much heart and soul and is not corny.

I watched ‘The Artist’ in Belgium, it is coming out in the States on 23 November and the UK release date has not been confirmed. It is also coming out in various European countries in the next few weeks. Go watch it!!! I can't wait to see it again.

REVIEW: Contagion

Dir.: Steven Soderbergh

With: Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard

I think that ensemble casts are very dangerous. It is extremely difficult to make a movie with several intertwined plots and keep them entertaining throughout the film. That’s why I was really looking forward to seeing ‘Contagion’; I was hoping that Soderbergh would manage to achieve the impossible.

And the film does start with several brief yet gripping character introductions – we have Gwyneth Paltrow as a jet-setting wife, Matt Damon as her husband, Laurence Fishburne as a head of some sort of a medical facility, Kate Winslet as his employee and Jude Law as a conspiracy blogger. The thing that connects them all together is the outbreak of a new deadly virus MEV1 in Hong Kong.

‘Contagion’ has several highly unpleasant scenes especially the ones that show how the disease spreads from person to person (after watching this you’ll think twice before shaking someone’s hand again). However, after quite a powerful start, the movie begins to lose its intensity. Some storylines sag in the middle and need more development. I thought that Jude Law’s Australian accent was terrible as was his character to be honest.

I guess the film attempts to analyse various human reactions in the moment of global crisis but some of people’s motivations were very unrealistic I think (or at least the way they were presented was not persuasive enough). I feel like Soderbergh tried to cover too much ground in this film, it veered from thriller to mock documentary to disaster movie. Maybe it would have been better if he stuck to one genre only. It is still not clear to me what the main message of the film was – whilst being quite preachy and moralistic it also had some typically American disaster-movie moments that undermined the whole “documentary” feel of it. And despite the huge scale of the drama in the story, you don’t really get to see any real human tragedy. Additionally, the action takes place largely in China and the States – Africa and Latin America where the people would suffer the most presumably are not even shown. The ending does not provide any sense of closure/satisfaction and the movie fizzles out completely.