The Commune (15)
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
4/5
ALONG with co-writer Tobias Lindholm and a perfect cast, director Thomas Vinterberg has transformed what on the surface might resemble a storyline from an upper-bracket small-screen soap into an unexpectedly moving character-driven comedy drama which holds the attention.
It’s set in 1970s Copenhagen, where staid college lecturer Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits his father’s large suburban house.
His television newsreader wife Anna (Trine Dyrholm), bored and in need of a change, persuades him to transform the mansion into a commune and live there with their teenage daughter Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrom Hansen).
The commune is established and populated by some fascinating personalities, including a cheerful drunk, an over-emotional and penniless young woman and a young boy whose ill-health adds unexpected pathos to the engagingly cynical proceedings.
Erik, subscribing to the zeitgeist of the era, starts an affair with 24-year-old student Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann) and moves her in with him. Communal life inevitably deteriorates and Anna’s initial acceptance of the situation evaporates.
Performances, large and small, add potent emotional impact to the film, adapted by Vinterberg from his play without any trace of staginess.
While there is enjoyable lightness in some scenes — memorably, a commune meeting with residents bickering over who drank beer without paying — the serious emotional sequences are intense and moving.
By Alan Frank

Barry Lyndon (12A)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
5/5
TOO often nowadays, many film-makers hopefully — and wrongly — claim to be auteurs.
The late Stanley Kubrick, however, certainly justified that descriptor.
And this stunning picture, his tenth, perfectly proves the point.
Kubrick produced, directed and skilfully adapted William Makepeace Thackeray’s 19th-century novel for the screen and it rightly won Oscar nominations for best picture, direction and screenplay adaptation.
At just over three hours, it’s a long film. But Kubrick makes every frame count as he tells the story of the eponymous 18th-century Irish adventurer who, forced to flee his village after a deal goes wrong, joins the British army.
The ensuing narrative charts his many exploits, his marriage to a wealthy woman and his inevitable fate.
The pace is deceptively leisurely, giving Kubrick’s detailed storytelling the time to consistently command the attention.
He elicits a persuasive and powerful portrayal of Barry Lyndon from Ryan O’Neal, something one would hardly have expected from someone more known as a Hollywood star than as an actor.
Marisa Berenson, too, hits all the right notes as his rich bride.
Still more impressive is the spot-on casting throughout, with unforgettable contributions from Leonard Rossiter as the English officer, wry and with just the right level of serio-comic delivery, Hardy Kruger as Lyndon’s Prussian captor, who turns out to be a valuable tutor and, notably, Michael Hordern whose commentary links the story perfectly.
There were very well-deserved Academy awards for John Alcott’s evocative cinematography, the art direction, costume design and Leonard Rosenman’s score — all contributed to what’s indisputably a cinema classic by one of the great auteurs.
By Alan Frank

Finding Dory (U)
Directed by Andrew Stanton
and Angus MacLane
5/5
WE MAY have waited 13 years for this highly anticipated sequel to Pixar’s classic Finding Nemo but the film-makers have risen to the challenge with this thought-provoking yet highly amusing and entertaining adventure.
Its lead character is a flawed blue tang fish who embraces her disability of short-term memory loss and refuses to let it define her or stop her achieving her goals and dreams. Her mantra? “Just keep swimming.”
It also explores the meaning of family as Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) goes in search of her long-lost parents (Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) which takes her to the Marine Life Institute in California where, bizarrely, Sigourney Weaver features.
There she teams up with the cantankerous Hank (Ed O’Neill), a seven-legged octopus, who can blend into any background chameleon-style and would much rather spend the rest of his days in an aquarium tank in Cleveland than be released into the ocean.
The uber-positive yet forgetful Dory is still as lovable as ever. But you can’t fail to be moved by her heartbreaking story in this empowering film which is full of old and weird and new and fun characters.
And there’s a fun bonus at the end of the final credits for what’s destined to become another Pixar classic.
By Maria Duarte