The Big Short, Our Brand is Crisis, The Assassin The Film Review

with me to look ahead to the weekend's football, all on Sportsday

at 6.30. Now on BBC News, 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 Mark Kermode.

We have The Big Short, which is a financial satire, which I know you

have seen and enjoyed. We have Our Brand Is Crisis, Sandra

Bullock in a political satire. And The Assassin, a sumptuous

dynasty tale. I did love The Big Short. I liked it as well, direct

did by Adam Mackay, best known for directing comedies like Anchorman,

somebody who does not necessarily have a track record in the area of

financial satire. This is essentially a take on the financial

crash of 2007-8, which looks at the unfolding disaster from the point of

view of those renegades who predicted, and therefore were able

to profit from, the financial meltdown. This is not a film of

heroes, this is a film of very blackly comic tone. Here is a clip.

Do you smell that? What's that?

This is your basic mortgage bond, all right?

They were just thousands of triple-A mortgages bundled together,

They're private, and they're made up of layers of trenches.

The highest level triple-As getting paid first,

the lowest rated Bs getting paid last, taking on defaults first.

Obviously, if you're buying Bs, you can make more money,

Now, the interesting thing is that that slightly sarcastic tone, you

would think it would be hard to sustain that for the length of the

movie, but it does it well. There is a comparison between this and The

Wolf Of Wall Street, the problem with which was that I didn't like

the central character. But I found it hard to be treated in what he was

doing. In the case of this, it has a touch of margin to about it. It

essentially makes you interested, despite the fact that you don't like

any of these people. Like the Godfather movies, you have good

Mafia and bad Mafia, and you are on the side of the slightly better

Mafia. Exactly, they are all swimming in a sort of cesspool. They

are all swimming among sharks, and they are the least of the bad. The

film tries to explain this jargon, as you saw. There is a device, when

they talk about collateralised debt, we suddenly cut to Margo Robbie in a

bubble bath, explaining what one of these is. I found that gimmick less

funny than a lot of people did. We get Selena Gomez at a gambling

table, explaining what derivatives are. I didn't quite need that much

nudging and winking. For the rest of it, I found the spectacle of

watching this financial is to tuition coming to the brink of

collapse engrossing enough. The film is very bleakly comedic. It has

tremendous performances and has been nominated for a series of Academy

Awards. Christian Bale is the crazy guy who listens to heavy rock. And

is the first person to understand what is going on. And when he is

asked, how come you figured this out? He says, because I read the

bonds. They say, nobody reads the bonds, only the lawyers! He says,

no, they didn't either. One final thought, which was at the end of it,

I thought this is a brilliant movie. How did they do that again? It is

explained throughout the film, but I still didn't understand. I have

watched it twice, and I still can't explain to you what a synthetic CVO

is, but I don't want to know. Our Brand Is Crisis. Again, this is

loosely inspired by a true story. It has a wag the dog feel to it. Sandra

Bullock is a reclusive political adviser who is called out of her

self-imposed retirement to get on unelectable candidate elected in the

Bolivian presidential campaign. She doesn't want to do it, and then she

discovers that the opposition is being run by her archrival, played

by Billy Bob Thornton. They have history and personal battles, so she

throws herself into it. The next thing you know, she is running the

campaign. I like Sandra Bullock's performance. She goes from being

reclusive and looking slightly damaged to being somebody who is

completely on top of the game and running all these political

machinations, and then gets drunk and into trouble. She is great.

However, the film itself is somewhat uneven. It loses its cynical nerve

in the last section, which is not something you can say about The Big

Short. That is cynical all the way through. So the film loses its

nerve, but Sandra Bullock is very good and it is worth seeing for her

performance. It did not do well in America. No. But she is worth

watching. There is one slight parallel, going way back to one of

Clinton's campaigners, James Carville. Mary was on the other

side, and they got married. Truth is stranger than fiction. The Assassin.

I love this film. It is the latest from Hou Hsiao-Hsien and this was

Taiwan's official entry for the 80th Oscars foreign-language Oscar,

although it didn't make the short list. It is based on a Tang dynasty

tale of a young woman who is raised to be a killer and is then sent on a

mission which will test her metal, both physical and psychological.

Here is a clip. There is film-making where the

pauses mean everything. Funnily enough, that clip is on

representative, because although it is a martial arts genre, actually,

there is much less fighting in it than you would expect. It is not a

series of martial arts. There is a certain amount of wire work, but it

is really about stillness. It is about moments of observed

languorously, and looking inside. It is not about what people do, it is

about what people think. It is one of the most beautiful films I have

seen for a long time. The frame has a painterly composition, as opposed

to widescreen. It is a film which is about what people feel about

circumstances. It is visually astonishing. There is one sequence

in which we watch almost an entire scene through a sort of shimmering

haze of fabric, which gives it an almost in theory or unreality. The

director said when he was searching for locations in Mongolia, he came

across these things that looked like a classical Chinese painting. From

these images, you can see the beauty of it. The trailer has tried to make

it look more like an action movie like crouching Tiger. It isn't. It

is a story of love and honour and self-determination and betrayal, and

so much of it is, the soundtrack is birdsong and insects and zither on

drums, which you can't tell are in the frame or out of it. I thought it

was magical and mysterious. Slightly confusing for the uninitiated.

Again, I have seen it twice and the second time round, I did understand

it, which is more than can be said for The Big Short. It looks

balletic. It is beautiful, I relieve recommend it. You're best of the

week? I just think Room is wonderful. Fantastic performances

and they have done a wonderful job with the book. It is not the film

you think it is going to be. It is not a film about crime or captivity.

It is not the film you imagine if you hear it is about a mother and

her young son trapped in a room. Which might put you off going to see

the film. They should put that on the poster - Room is not that film!

It is superb. Did you decide this was housing week on the Film Review?

Your DVD of the week is 99 Homes. This makes an interesting double

bill with The Big Short, because 99 Homes is about the human cost of

what happened when the housing market crash. It is looking at it

from the other side. It starts with Andrew Garfield as somebody losing

his home who is then brought on by a Gordon gecko figure, greed is good,

singing that mantra about why it is that just looking after yourself is

what America wants. Together, they make a very interesting double bill.

It is also a terrific piece of work. It is one of those films that stays

with you. It's got overlooked in cinemas, which is a shame, because

it is top-quality. Each is why we have it as the DVD.

A quick reminder before we go that you'll find more film news

and reviews from across the BBC online, including