With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Errol Morris.
Description: Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris conducts an expose of the soldiers involved in the shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, which changed perceptions of American servicemen and -women fighting in Iraq. Attempting to understand the motivation behind the images, Morris interviews US forces who took and appeared in the photographs, examining whether these headline-grabbing snapshots in time are really evidence of physical and mental abuse, or have been twisted out of context to fit sensationalist headlines.
Country: US. 2008. 115mins
Notorious: detainees at the prison, where inmates were tortured and humiliated
Errol Morris's minutely researched film about the appalling treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and the notorious photographs that came to light in 2004, was made long enough ago to seem slightly secondhand by now. It says nothing that the more modestly produced Taxi to the Dark Side - which was about torturing prisoners in Afghanistan - didn't say in spades.
Added to that, this fine documentarist's attempt to tart up his film so that it gets a wider release is not entirely successful. There's an overweaning score from Danny Elfman, much swishing camerawork from robert Chappell and robert richardson, and a sense that Morris himself stares rather too long at the American GIs who produced those awful snaps.
In particular, he stares, without comment, at lynndie England, the private first class who is seen grinning inanely at the piled-up Iraqi bodies, and at Staff Sergeant Charles Granier, who ordered the fatal photos and with whom she was in love. If these wretched grunts are worth castigating, how much more culpable are those who either ordered such behaviour or did nothing to stop it?
Morris is never unfair, unlike certain other American documentarists, and this is still an important slice of film evidence which will shortly be published as a book. But this is not his best film. It's too polished by half.
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