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Film reviews

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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The Open Sky (El Cielo Abierto) (Film)

by Julian Wood | October 26, 2011 14:18 | Edited October 26, 2011 14:35

A simple but affecting documentary about martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero.

One would think that there should be more films about the radical priest Archbishop Oscar Romero (John Duigan's 1989 Romero being an honourable exception). He had such a spectacular and nation-affecting life. In the 1980s El Salvador was a little Latin American country that rarely drew the world's attention. It was just another underdeveloped nation, living - as they saw it - under the shadow of US imperialism. Local-born Romero starts out as being a conventional priest, teaching the dispossessed peasants that they should not try to get their fair share because the poor will sit next to God himself in heaven on a golden throne with a beautiful open sky before them etc, etc. Then Romero realises this kind of deferment of earthly justice is the opposite of helpful and he forges a new direct-action ‘liberation theology'. At this point religion goes from being the ‘opium of the masses' to the rocket fuel for change. Not surprisingly both the conservative Catholic Church and the US-backed rulers and their paramilitaries hate Romero and his movement. The US starts to inject money into armed death squads and promotes a repressive agenda politically. Romero sees all this and calmly tells his nurses and nuns that he will be assassinated. Did he will this martyrdom? Could he have done anything to avoid it? When he and his followers are gunned down on the steps of their church the story broke for the whole world. There followed a bloody civil war but, eventually, some measure of peace. Everardo Gonzalez' doco proceeds via recreations and solid (and occasionally shocking) archival footage, but it is the retrospective testimonies of those involved (both resisters and death squad members) that gives it its true taste of authenticity.