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The Times & The Sunday Times
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The Times
The Times

ADAPTATION

Columbia, 15, 2002

AFTER the eccentricities of Being John Malkovich, writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze have generated a film just as wonderful and bizarre (up to the finale at least). Kaufman puts himself centre-stage, as a bumbling scriptwriter wrestling with the task of making a film from a book about a thief of rare orchids.

Real life and reel life intermingle; time leapfrogs over itself. Nicolas Cage, split in two as Kaufman and his twin brother, couldn’t be better; Chris Cooper obviously had the time of his life as the orchid fiend who can even stir embers in Meryl Streep’s heart. Available to rent and buy on DVD.

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FEMME FATALE

Warner, 15, 2002

BRIAN DE PALMA’S flashy French thriller spins into the outlandish and baffling. Tall blonde Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (“I’m a bad girl, Nicolas, rotten to the heart”) fully lives up to the film’s title; Antonio Banderas is personable as the scummy photographer caught in her trap. Available to rent and buy; don’t miss the high-speed French trailer on the DVD.

CHICAGO

Buena Vista, 12, 2002

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HOW not to make a film version of the Roaring Twenties musical. You hire players expert neither in singing and dancing (Richard Gere, as the Death Row girls’ lawyer, passes muster the least). You treat musical numbers as fantasies and slice them up with a barrage of cuts that robs them of rhythm and short-changes the characters. You miscast Renée Zellweger as the chorus girl Roxie, making her trample her best quality, her innocence; and you botch the central relationship between Roxie and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Velma. The result: six Oscars, including Best Picture. Available to buy.

MORVERN CALLAR

Momentum, 15, 2002

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LYNNE RAMSAY’S second film demonstrates her gift for conveying psychological states, striking images and the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The brilliant Samantha Morton is a dislocated supermarket drone who finds her boyfriend dead and drifts into a journey of discovery. Irritating, but you keep watching. Available to buy.

GEOFF BROWN