I just came across this old shot and wondered if I might take the opportunity to pioneer a new critical form… All contributions welcome; the parameters are self-evident.

First off, a disclaimer: I already pay tribute to the ‘local/sustainable/quality ingredients’ gods, so in a way this pilot episode feels like it’s preaching to the converted. However, where else on television can you get Michel Roux Jr and the Hairy Bikers on the same bill?

The premise of the programme is simple: each celeb foodie adopts a neglected British food and ‘campaigns’ to revive it in our hearts and homes, while rustling up some tasty grub with said ingredient to show us all how easy it is. The format reminds me of Hugh’s Fish Fight on Channel 4 earlier this year – is 2011 the year to campaign for your food (a step up from pedestrian food snobbery)?

It’s hard not to like Michel Roux Jr – he’s got French pedigree, he sounds English, he walks about Oxfordshire wheat fields in a smart blazer, and he comes across as someone passionate and relatable when he talks about food. I like the cut of his jib. The best part of his segment on Real Bread is when he visits a bakery under a Hackney railway bridge that uses a 200-year-old starter from Lapland. The finished loaves ‘turn him on’, and you can see why. Mmm.

His three recipes ranged from a simple white loaf (dead easy, but it’ll be a distant future where I dedicate an entire day waiting for dough to rise), a duck pie with bread crust (with a shocking amount of duck fat oozing absolutely everywhere) and a diplomat pudding – that’s posh French bread ‘n’ butter pud in wee little ramekins to you and me. Not exactly recipes I’ll be attempting in my wardrobe-sized kitchen. Lovely to watch and fantasise about.

In contrast to Roux’s savoire faire, you get the bumbling Hairy Bikers duo (it’s the Geordie one and the other one, sorry don’t know their names) espousing all things Brassica. Snowball, purple ones, ‘cheddar-cheese flavoured ones’ (they’re just orange) and my personal favourite, the Romanesco – which looks more like it could be the top of La Sagrada Familia’s towers than in your veg patch. What am I talking about? It’s the cauliflower, of course! Much maligned cousin of the trendy broccoli.

The Bikers’ food style is hearty to say the least, but their three recipes are meant to lure the British family back to buying caulis – cauliflower cheese with mushrooms and bacon, a ‘posh’ cauliflower purée with seared scallops, and an aloo bhaji curry. All ticking the ‘family favourites’ boxes. Guest chef Yotam Ottolenghi (he does sexy, sexy things to vegetables in a modern Middle Eastern style… check out his New Vegetarian column in the Guardian) is invited to do a crowd taste test, and he whips up a grilled cauliflower salad that looks easy, and yet it would never have occurred to me to try it. I would love to see Ottolenghi do a vegetarian food show.

But I digress. Overall the first episode is fun, informative and hasn’t stuck too stringently to a format that stifles each guest’s personalities. By concentrating on a key ingredient it’ll make the aspiring chef at home think differently about the same old veg, or maybe take a little time to try their hand at making bread. Will the campaign work? Well I’ve got a sourdough starter growing in my kitchen, and there’s a snowball in the fridge awaiting its transformation. But then again, I was at the altar from the start.

UPDATE: The Great British Food Revival is airing weekly at 8 p.m. from Wednesday 9 March, on BBC Two.

Black Swan, the latest effort from Darren Aronofsky, is a complicated tale of obsession, madness and ballet. Natalie Portman plays Nina, an up-and-coming ballerina who gets her shot at prima under the stewardship of Vince Cassel’s demanding director Thomas. Along the way she encounters fellow performer Lily (Mila Kunis), embodiment the chaotic, darker elements which Nina needs to discover in order to dance as the Black Swan in the production of Swan Lake.

Despite spending all of the film up close with Portman, she always seems closed off. Indeed, Nina appears in literally every scene of the film, creating a claustrophobic effect for the viewer, adding to the general feeling of constriction that pervades throughout. I found myself longing for some time with other characters, to see events unfolded that weren’t filtered through the ballerina’s skewed viewpoint. The single -character focus achieves an unsettling effect which lingers, but also pushes the viewer away.

Nina is cold and unsympathetic, often coming across as a sulking child. I found myself heartily agreeing with Vince Cassel’s character, Thomas, who repeatedly urges her to ‘lose yourself’, but I wasn’t sure whether I was aiming it at the character or the actress.

The theme of obsession with perfection – and the lengths that Nina will go to achieve it – suggest that she is intended to display this closedness to other characters, but the fact that she fails to reveal anything to the audience even in the depths of apparent psychosis, critically undermines any relationship with the viewer. Fear, yes; anger, yes; emotion, not really.

While the film gives the impression of accelerating and building to its climax, it -again – felt like things were on too short a leash. The energy of the production (within a production) felt very controlled, orchestrated and deliberate, and even the actual manifestation of the titular black swan didn’t unleash enough chaos. It felt like a portrayal of dark energy and insanity, but in a perversely restrained manner.

At the heart of it, sharing in the fear and madness of the character isn’t enough to build a sympathetic bond with the viewer. It’s a staggering and accomplished portrayal of an intensely disturbed individual, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoyed the – equally traumatic but infinitely more relatable – Requiem, which retains its crown as Aronofsky’s masterpiece.

Black Swan is a film that gets under your skin and makes you want to scratch, but the whole experience is troublesome and doesn’t quite gel.

Noted horror director Hideo Nakata (The Ring), goes British with Chatroom, which will prove to be one of the last films you see funded by the UK Film Council. Nostalgia aside, Chatroom basically crashes on startup: More gosh-horror than shock-horror, the film concentrates on the social disquiet that visits five Chelsea Teens, who run around pouting and touting and generally looking for attention in a chatroom named… ahem… Chelsea Teens.

Nakata doesn’t seem to have pegged that no-one uses chatrooms anymore. Still, some thought has clearly gone into filming (making ‘real’) the virtual chatroom, and the film is initially enjoyable if mainly for watching just how Nakata does it. The chatrooms are represented along a great corridor in a sleazy hotel; inside, they are each different, as designed by their ‘owner’. These rooms are either free to all, or locked down to some. Makes sense, I think.

Conversation in the chatrooms is uninhibited, to the point, and frequently clichéd. You’d hope exchanges like “you can do whatever you want” / “I know isn’t it great?” purposefully mirror the stilted and rapid-fire way people converse online. But then it could just be shoddy scriptwriting – it’s hard to tell. Whatever the case, it seems to work. For the first half an hour, at least.

In that first half an hour, Chatroom exhausts all it has to say – that, given the chance, we’d all create a better looking, more confident version of ourselves; that the internet can help loners find solace; that the internet can also give a false sense of community to a handful of deviants on the trail of perversity. Thereafter, it just becomes an itinerary of teenage angst, a la Skins, filtered through the strong jaw lines of teenagers living in Chelsea.

There’s Eva (Imogen Poots), the self-conscious model, Emily (Hannah Murray), the prissy conservative, Jim (Matthew Beard), the fatherless loner, and William (Kick Ass’ Aaron Johnson), the son of a famous novelist. William is the ringleader, a young man (or aging kid) who likes to enjoy by proxy his obsession with suicide. A model, a conservative, a depressive and a spoilt suicide-minded brat: it’s easy to see why Chatroom fosters a dearth of empathy from its audience. (I found myself rather hoping they’d all top themselves – an ending sensitive of humanity, I think, though admittedly far-fetched.)

In the midst of all this upper-class urban-youth jeopardy-frolicking, one character stands out. Mo (Daniel Kaluuya) is 15, cool, well-intended, and hot for his friend’s 11 year old sister. Concerned about his inclinations, he tells his friend about the crush. And receives a beating in reply. The genuine horror of pedophilia deserves no place in a film that is otherwise content to mine such limited quandaries as teenage angst, and yet the judgement-free depiction of Mo’s position is impressive.

Daniel Kaluuya (Posh Kenneth in Skins) is outstanding in the role, exhibiting an underplayed style and perfect tragi-comic sensibility. Sadly, Mo is always on the periphery of the group, and Chatroom is too in thrall to its more glitzy, gobby characters to recognize its diamond in the rough. By the end of the film, Mo is largely forgotten.

One last thing to say. Chatroom reminds me not of The Ring, but of another rectally referential title: The Hole. Like The Hole, Chatroom ‘traps’ a group of well-off youngsters in a small space. Like The Hole, the main narrative conceit is that one of the characters is a massive bastard. Like The Hole, the majority of the characters are just unlikable. And, like The Hole, there’s a young English actress, more pretty than good, who may just end up on an alarming amount of screens, billboards, and minds. In this case, the actress is Imogen Poots.

Remember the name. And the pout.

With such a political chain-yank for a title, Paul Thomas’s and Matt Harlock’s new documentary sets a certain standard for itself. But American: The Bill Hicks Story, besides scene-setting references to “Lyndon Johnson’s great society” and the war in Vietnam, makes no attempt to solder the American experience to a bio of the late American comic. It is a personal history, an effort of oceanic devotion. It threatens to drown its subject.

The form and content of the film are familial. While Hicks’s loved ones tell, in chronological order, the story of his life, we watch reels of photographs from the family album, animated to make every moment improbably and attractively iconic. Hicks, like any publicity-conscious stand-up, was much-snapped. Even as a 16-year-old, he hired a friend, David Johndrow, as his official photographer. Diagnosed with cancer toward the end of the film, he arranges “one last photo shoot”. And in a peculiar anecdote delivered by his mother (one of the film’s ten narrators) Hicks invokes posterity and appears to prophesy the very film you’re watching.

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First-time director Mo Ali has created a beast.

Shank tries to be a dystopian film that presents a vision of London, circa 2015. Rag, tag and bobtail gangs run the city. So far has the world fallen, they peddle not stolen stereos and drugs but “munchies” – food, in other words (an apple costs £350; a pizza, intriguingly, £85.50). We’re not really told how this came about, and in so short a time too, but no matter: As The Road has shown, people enjoy not being presented with a cause when confronted with apocalyptic effect.

Shank also tries to cross gritty cinema with music video stylistics. Imagine Children of Men and then intersperse it with the credit sequence from The IT Crowd. That’s how Shank watches. For 90 minutes. One minute it’s in fit-like shakycam mode, bouncing through alleyways in chase of hoodlums, the next it’s become a mock-crap computer cartoon of a kid jumping over tower blocks. Quite what that’s supposed to do to you as viewer is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t matter because… Read more »

British-born director Bernard Rose is on familiar ground with The Kreutzer Sonata, a digitally captured adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Beethoven-inspired novella by the same name. The film is released this weekend in the UK, though a quick search suggests only the Apollo on Regent Street is carrying it. That may change, given time.

Most will know Bernard Rose for the urban slasher Candyman (Candyman Candyman Candyman Candyman Candyman). That was back in ’92. Since then, Rose has made a successful second career piggybacking off the two classic masters The Kreutzer Sonata draws upon. He directed Immortal Beloved, a biopic-of-sorts about Beethoven, before turning his camera upon Tolstoy. First up was Anna Karenina, a bore-draw featuring Sophie Marceau, then Ivans XTC, a vigorous modern day interpretation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Somewhere in between those Rose found the need to make Snuff Movie, but we’ll leave that well alone.)

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Rithy Panh’s The Sea Wall (a.k.a Un barrage contre le Pacifique), newly available on DVD from Axiom Films, is less eager and high-flown than Régis Wargnier’s Oscar-winning Indochine (probably the most popular film about France’s colonial adventures in southeast Asia), but it has similar impulses to the 1992 epic. Besides a plot based around a landowning French matriarch (Catherine Deneuve in Indochine, Isabelle Huppert in The Sea Wall) and her daughter’s interracial love affair, both films suffer from helplessly luscious cinematography and confused political needs.

Panh, a Cambodian filmmaker who trained in France, has spent his career documenting the Cambodia of living memory, specifically the racist, medievalist Khmer Rouge regime – responsible for the deaths of his immediate family in the ’70s – and the country’s subsequent moral and economic recovery. In adapting Marguerite Duras’s 1950 novel, Panh turns his attention to a previous generation, when the Indochinese peninsula marked the furthest reach of the French empire, and he relegates the indigenes to walk-on roles.
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The nice people at Axiom Films recently sent me a copy of Goodbye Solo (it’s just come out on DVD), so I’m armed with a handy excuse to revisit one of last year’s most acclaimed films.

On its release, Goodbye Solo was received with that gushing sincerity critics reserve for non-obnoxious indie cinema. Ben Walters of Time Out found the film to be “shot through with beauty and humility”; Neil Smith wrote in Total Film that Goodbye Solo was made of “humour, grace and compassion”; Roger Ebert enthused it was “the best film in town“. All very nicey-nicey.

Then someone mentioned Realism and a small blogging war broke out. That someone was A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Grouping Goodbye Solo with its contemporary releases Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain, Scott came to the conclusion that director Ramin Bahrami was leading a Stateside return to Neorealism (yes, that’s right: post-war, black and white, car-headlamp lit, lefty Italian cinema). It was all a gush too far for The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who felt compelled to write an eight-point rebuttal two days before Scott’s piece was even published in print. Scott quickly retreated behind a wall of critical hooey, suggested he and Brody agree to disagree, and everyone went on living as before. Ho-de-hum.

To cut a long introduction short: Goodbye Solo was widely accepted to be a good film, but, save for a few wishywashy adjectives and a self-serving storm-in-a-teablog, no one could really say why. Read more »

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s MicMacs marks a return to cinemas after a five-year break following the release of 2004’s A Very Long Engagement. This hiatus was chiefly dedicated to an attempt to bring Yann Martel’s award-winning 2001 novel Life of Pi to the silver screen. However, ballooning costs resulted in the canning of the project, which was a real blow to all of us hoping for a life-affirming treatment from the same mind that brought us the joy-enforcing powerhouse of Amelie. If rumours are to be believed, however, Ang Lee is now on board (geddit?), so there may be hope for the project yet.

Anyway, instead of the story of a boy with a tiger in his boat, Jeunet has opted for the story of a man with a bullet in his head. While the film isn’t deliberately grittier than the rest of his back catalogue, it certainly has a foot more firmly planted in the real world (with the possible exception of …Engagement). The antagonists of MicMacs are a pair of profit-oriented arms manufacturers, who are jointly responsible for two major blows to the life of lead character Bazil; the loss of his parents (to a landmine and bereavement-induced grief) and the round permanently embedded in his skull. Following a chance meeting, he becomes part of a family of eccentrics living in a scrap yard and, with the help of his new friends, sets out to force some karma on the men that destroyed his life.

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