03/01/2014 The Film Review

after a skiing accident. We will meet the man hoping to win his

fourth World Darts Championship. Now, it's time for The Film Review.

Hello and welcome to THE FILM REVIEW on BBC News.

To take us through this week's cinema releases is Jason Solomons.

So Jason, what do we have this week? Yes. And it is our last season. . We

will see if the movie can match the legend as Idris Elba takes on the

role of playing Nelson Mandela along to freedom. Then we look at Last

Vegas. Is it worth a to the dais? -- a throw of the dice?

Then we look at a documentary memoir from Cambodian director.

A great book, Long Walk To Freedom. It is based on a novel by someone

who interviewed Mandela several times and gave a flavour of the man.

Interestingly, it shows Mandela in a period when people did not know him,

ie in the early 1950s and 60s. As he was making his impassioned defence

of Victoria. It shows the rolling hills of South Africa and what a

beautiful and it was. It travels from his incarceration breakthrough

to the time when he walked to freedom. There is a lot to pack in.

There is a great gap of inactivity were Nelson Mandela was

incarcerated. It comes hot on the heels of blanket coverage of the

man's life because of his recent death, of course. It is a monument

will task because the film is sort of a monument itself. It is perhaps

too soon to say anything controversial about Mandela to a

Hollywood movie. But it does build into the complex politics and the

things that were gnawing away at the soul of Nelson Mandela. Here he is

in that trial in 1963 in Pretoria, . We want equal political rights. One

man, one vote. I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the

African people. I have fought against white domination. I have

fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a free

democratic society, we're all persons live together harmony with

equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and

achieve. But, if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to

die. I thought it was a wonderful

performance by eco-celibate. The film did not shirk away from some of

the other bits about Nelson Mandela 's life. Particularly relations with

Winnie Mandela. Of course, Nelson Mandela as a

gunman looked very different. He was a very physical man. And I think

Idris Elba captures that likeness. It captures the sprightliness and

spring in the step and in the soul. What is interesting about this film

is it tries to be a family film. Because he could not do much for

politics while he was incarcerated, it is about his struggle for his

family, his wife, the death of his son which impacted on him greatly.

Perhaps it is not as easy to gauge the character of Winnie Mandela.

One thing I did not understand was why Winnie Mandela could be so

bitter and why her politics were so different, but I think that was

beautifully explained. Yes, it was a great performance from

Ione Harris to help us understand that. It helps the film move along.

Perhaps the film is a bit a to Z. It is about a man who is beyond a

standard biopic, this could have been about anyone. I would have

liked to have seen something a bit more inventive.

Your next choice is Last Vegas. I can imagine the pitch for this: We

will take for actors in their twilight years. It is the Hangover

for old men, isn't it? These guys really should know

better. They have read hundreds of scripts between them but they still

cannot say no. You have Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline and Michael

Douglas. I wish they would stop doing awful comedies. It is about

childhood friends who meet up for a kind of stag do. He is marrying

someone who is 32 years old. As Morgan Freeman says, he has a

haemorrhoid older than that! We say that we're going to party like it is

1959. There are few good gags, but they basically just local girls in

bikinis in Las Vegas. For me, it really just was not fun. It was the

last place on earth I would want to go.

Let's move on to something which sounds a lot better but more

serious. The Missing Picture. It is called the Missing Picture

because they are trying to convey what happened when they can approach

-- when the Khmer Rouge took over. There is no documentation of this

period, when millions of the middle classes were shipped out to work in

the rice fields and labour camps in what later became known of course as

the killing fields. What he does is he reconstruct this with sculpted

figurines carved out and a little bit of archive footage and what we

get is this extraordinary documentary memoir. It is already on

a long list for Oscar nominations. Here is a short clip.

What are the real picture is there? That is Khmer Rouge propaganda.

It is interesting because he was 13 when the Khmer Rouge came into Phnom

Penh and there is still a bit of that revolutionary zeal within him.

I think he still believes in some way that the teachings that were

inculcated in kids on the killing fields, he sort of admirers the

purity of the revolution. But actually, the system in which it was

executed was obviously terrible and wreaked havoc on his family. This is

him, in a sense, exercising some of those ghosts. He uses these

figurines to kind of play out this and I have never seen anything like

that. Quite extraordinary. It is very playful, it is about cinema. He

was intellectual as a kid and there is a sort of before and after look

at it. This is one of those documentaries that does not really

is fact, it uses memory and playfulness and it is an interesting

period to try to invent things where you do not have facts.

Next film is American Hustle. If you have not seen this then catch up

with it immediately. It is the best value can have. It includes Jennifer

Lawrence, who isn't as big again. There is a lot of big here in this

movie. Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence are both good. I am not

sure what it is quite about. My one quibble was that only

American scriptwriters could call a woman Sydney. Anyway, moving on. The

Conjuring. Your DVD choice. This is a horror movie, a strange

choice for me. I do not normally like these kinds of movies but this

harks back to those great horror movies of the 1970s. It is directed

by James Wan. Up it is about a Jew who go about exercising ghosts. They

go to help Lili Taylor who has been possessed by a house. I do not why

this was the idea. It does all the whispering stuff that you think may

be cliched, but it scared the living daylights out of me.

That is pretty much what you would like from a horror movie. You can

get more film News online. That's it for this week. Thank you for

watching. Goodbye. The weather is a bit horrific and

will stay like that for the next few