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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Buried (Film)

by Annette Basile | October 05, 2010 15:21 | Edited October 06, 2010 17:10

Driven by Ryan Reynolds’ magnificent performance, this tense and ambitious film is absolutely riveting to watch unfold.

It begins with a pitch-black screen and the sounds of a man's laboured breathing. The man is Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), an American civilian truck driver in Iraq, 2006. He is, we soon discover, gagged. His hands are tied. He manages to retrieve a conveniently placed Zippo lighter from his pocket. The Zippo flame comes alive and Conroy sees where he is - he's inside an old wooden coffin, underground, buried but alive ... for now. 

It's an arresting opening to an incredibly ambitious film, and Buried immediately demands your full attention from the first few colourless frames. Set entirely underground, it may take the whole "set in a confined space" notion to the extreme, but it's not uncomfortable or claustrophobic to watch. It's riveting.

 

Somehow, director Rodrigo Cortés keeps the audience at just the right distance - you're there with Conroy, but not quite inside the coffin. To spend 90 minutes inside a rectangular box is a lot to ask of an audience, but Cortés knows what he's doing. This small measure of distance that he creates doesn't interfere with identifying with Conroy's plight - you might be an observer, but not a detached one. You sense the anguish, the fear, and the tension.

 
For all Cortés' skill and vision, the film's success actually lies on the central performance from Ryan Reynolds. As Conroy, the Canadian actor doesn't make a single wrong move. There are other characters in Buried, but they're basically disembodied voices over Conroy's phone, which is his only link to the outside world. Reynolds is it, and he's magnificent. He never overplays it. He lets you inside his head. Although the relationship between you and he takes time to develop, it happens. You care about him, and that feeling increases all the way through to the impacting finale.

There is, though, the need to suspend disbelief on occasion; there are moments when you wonder how Conroy, brandishing his Zippo, manages not to set the wooden box alight. It may seem all too convenient that Conroy even has a phone, but without the phone, there'd be no interaction with the outside world, and little to build the plot and the character. Even in a hyper real film such as this, it's still a movie, and suspending disbelief is what movies are all about. On occasion, the coffin seems to expand and contract (this is clearly intentional in at least one scene), but this is one of the film's minor flaws, as there is sometimes an inconsistency to the space - it suddenly may seem bigger or smaller than you've been led to believe. But mostly it works.

 

The director has said that he treated the wooden box "location" just like any other set, and that he and his crew sought not to be "limited by space." He's transcended these limitations. He's gone into a small, restricted, cramped world and found a universe inside.