With a title like Evil, you are entitled to expect something, well ... evil. What we actually get from the Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom is a tale of bullies and brutality at a private school in Sweden in the 1950s. There’s lots of beatings and blood — think Fight Club meets If ... — but if liberal Swedes think that’s evil, imagine being sodomised by George Melly at Stowe in the 1930s. Now that’s evil. When 16-year-old Erik (Andreas Wilson) is expelled from the local school, his mother sends him to a posh boarding school where discipline is enforced by older students. Erik rebels against these sadists and pays a painful price. He struggles not to use his powerful fists, because he has promised his poor old mum that he won’t get expelled. Hafstrom’s film is melodramatic and relies on scenes of brutality for its dramatic impact. It is one of those movies that strives to be ultra-realistic, yet doesn’t seem real. The performances are first-rate; too bad about the story. Two stars
Cosmo Landesman
Torremolinos 73
15, 91 mins
Set in Franco’s Spain of the 1970s, this film, directed by Pablo Berger, is a “black comedy” about Alfredo (Javier Camara), a struggling door-to-door salesman who, at the behest of his boss, starts making home-made porn films with his wife, Carmen (Candela Peña). The films, made for a Scandinavian audience, turn out to be a hit in Sweden. The money starts coming in, they spend, spend, spend, yet neither Alfredo nor Carmen is happy. She’s desperate to have a baby and be a mother, while Alfredo is desperate to give birth to a real movie and be the next Ingmar Bergman. He sets out to make a legitimate film called Torremolinos 73, with unforeseen results. Here we go again, back to the cutesy and kitschy delights of the 1970s, à la Boogie Nights. It’s all here: big hair, bad clothes and bubble-gum pop hits. And, despite its subject matter, this is a walk on the mild side. Two stars
Cosmo Landesman
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Czech Dream
12A, 90 mins
For the purposes of this documentary, two Czech film students, Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda, paid for an advertising campaign for a new hypermarket that didn’t actually exist. On the opening day, hundreds of people arrived and found, behind a facade, only a grassy field.
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In a country where modern capitalism is a relatively recent import, there may be a useful role for such a blunt reminder of hype’s untrustworthiness. To western eyes, though, it’s a pretty empty idea. Only in its details does the film provide a few interesting glimpses of Czech consumerism. Here are members of the public for whom Tesco is the next best thing to Xanadu, and admen who have acquired the very same cockiness we expect from their colleagues in the west. Two stars
Edward Porter
In My Father’s Den
15, 126 mins
This New Zealand film, written and directed by Brad McGann, proceeds in confident, enticing style, but loses its way amid a barrage of revelations in its last act. Matthew MacFadyen plays a journalist, Paul, who returns to his home town for the first time in 17 years, to find that his first girlfriend has a 16-year-old daughter, Celia (well played by Emily Barclay). The facts of Celia’s parentage are vague, and Paul behaves as if he suspects he is her father.
The truth only emerges, though, in the course of a slightly ridiculous series of classically tragic events.
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These are presented in a nonchronological order that holds things back from the audience with little justification and to no great effect. Two stars
Edward Porter
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A Lot Like Love
12A, 107 mins
An American outing for the UK’s Nigel Cole (the director of Calendar Girls), this romantic comedy tells of two soul mates (Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet) who fail to become an item. Accidents and bad timing play their part, but most of the blame is put on caprices of the characters themselves. This works fine if you’re Eric Rohmer, but it’s a useless approach here, because the should-be lovers are never sufficiently realised for their whims to ring true. After a few years of near misses (and an hour of the running time), they arrive at the verge of togetherness, but then some dialogue about uncertain feelings arrives from nowhere, the pair return to their separate lives and the film trudges on as before. Nothing funny or surprising happens while you wait for these two inexplicable people to come to their senses. One star
Edward Porter
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