New at the Movies: The Company You Keep, Rebelle (War Witch), Haute Cuisine, Antiviral and Jurassic Park 3D

It’s easy to laugh at age­ing movie stars. Crumbs, when they make films like The Expend­ables they act­ively encour­age us to make jokes about creak­ing joints and dicky hips. But let us pause for a moment and salute the longev­ity of one of the greatest movie stars there ever was, someone who was head­lining box office smash hits when Arnold was still just pump­ing iron and Bruce was still at High School.

Robert Red­ford – the “Sund­ance Kid” – is 76 years old and in his new film, The Com­pany You Keep, he does quite a bit of run­ning around even though you can see he has the slightly uncer­tain gait of someone whose bal­ance isn’t what it was. He rations out that mil­lion dol­lar smile pretty care­fully too, as this is anoth­er of his ser­i­ous polit­ic­ally-aware dra­mas – couched in the form of a thrill­er.

Red­ford – who also dir­ects – plays pro­gress­ive small town law­yer Jim Grant, a wid­ower with a spark­ling twelve-year-old daugh­ter (Jac­queline Evan­cho). When he turns down the chance to rep­res­ent Susan Saran­don’s former domest­ic ter­ror­ist, who is cap­tured nearby, loc­al report­er Shia LaBeouf starts dig­ging into his back­ground and finds some dan­ger­ous sur­prises. Grant is forced to go on the run with LaBeouf (and the FBI) chas­ing him and oth­er pen­sion­ers like Julie Christie and Nick Nolte all around the Mid­w­est.

So far, so enga­ging. The scen­ario is inspired by the real life Weath­er Under­ground, a left-wing mili­tia that either blew up or set fire to, vari­ous Gov­ern­ment tar­gets to protest the Viet­nam War. Anoth­er fanci­ful ver­sion of their sup­posed lives on the run, Run­ning on Empty, starred River Phoenix in 1988.

I wish I had enjoyed The Com­pany You Keep more as it is the kind of mater­i­al that is usu­ally right up my alley. The prob­lem here is of the fish/fowl vari­ety – not enough polit­ics for the polit­ics junkies and the thrill­er nev­er rises above tep­id. This is an imper­fect ana­logy, so for­give me, but it’s as if (late peri­od) Woody Allen tried to dir­ect a Bourne movie.

Return­ing from the very strong French Film Fest­iv­al, we have two dra­mas that are a study in con­trasts – Cana­dian co-pro­duc­tion Rebelle (akaWar Witch) by Kim Nguy­en and Chris­ti­an Vin­cent’s Haute Cuisine (aka Les saveurs du Pal­ais, the lit­er­al trans­la­tion of which is The Fla­vours of the Palace which is much bet­ter than the hor­rible cliché that actu­ally got attached to it).

War Witch is a remark­able magic­al real­ist por­tray­al of the tragedy of child sol­dier­ing in one of Africa’s many civil wars. The phe­nom­en­al Rachel Mwanza plays Komona, kid­napped from her vil­lage by the rebel army and forced to murder her own par­ents. She is the only one to sur­vive the new com­pany’s first action and super­sti­tious com­mand­ers start to believe that she is a lucky charm, hence “War Witch”.

Hyp­not­ic, beau­ti­ful, upset­ting – War Witch is an extraordin­ary achieve­ment, totally deserving of an Academy Award nom­in­a­tion against Amour and No earli­er this year. By any defin­i­tion, this isn’t going to be every­one’s cup of tea but I’m going to highly recom­mend it any­way.

In the slender Haute Cuisine, Cath­er­ine Frot plays Hortense Labor­ie, plucked from rur­al obscur­ity to run the private kit­chen for Pres­id­ent François Mit­ter­and while he was Pres­id­ent of the French Repub­lic. He wants to eat nos­tal­gic­ally and her authen­t­ic recipes and fine fresh ingredi­ents fit the bill. As food movies go, this gets the present­a­tion of the actu­al cuisine very right. Every dish looks like it has been plucked straight from the oven, and even though this review­er may not have been won over by cab­bage stuffed with sal­mon, you can see the care and atten­tion that has gone into every dish.

I just wish I could say the same for the story, which lacks drama – a fun­da­ment­al flaw you might think – and uses a rather redund­ant fram­ing device of Mme Labor­ie cook­ing in Ant­arc­tica to emphas­ise the sub­text of a ded­ic­ated, middle aged, career woman pro­fes­sion­ally going about her craft while mis­un­der­stood but not unap­pre­ci­ated.

With Anti­vir­al, Brandon (son-of-the more-fam­ous-Dav­id) Cronen­berg has made an object les­son in intel­li­gent low budget hor­ror. In the near future, our obses­sion with celebrity will have become so grot­esque that fans will be inject­ing them­selves with vir­uses har­ves­ted from their favour­ite screen stars, in order to get even closer to them. A licensed mar­ket for these wee bugs is being under­mined by pir­acy and coun­ter­feit­ing and thus Anti­vir­al man­ages to bring the entire zeit­geist rather nicely to the boil. Although the film drifts a little in the final third, the premise – and the clev­er con­struc­tion of a future world out of today’s every­day items – makes the film a worth­while watch and Cronen­berg a name to keep an eye on.

Last year the Embassy played a one-off screen­ing of Jur­as­sic Park on DCP and they are now play­ing the 3D ver­sion. For reas­ons of sci­ence, then, I sat myself in the very same seat as last year so I could com­pare the two formats and help guide you on wheth­er the extra D is worth it. The answer, I can report, is a firm “maybe”. After all, the ori­gin­al made $350m in 1993 so I think it’s fair to say that no one was hold­ing out, hop­ing for a 3D ver­sion at the time.

The con­ver­sion is per­fectly fine – though not to the level of Camer­on’s Titan­ic last year – and 3D gives Spiel­ber­g’s eleg­ant dir­ec­tion a help­ing hand with some of the more thrill­ing dino­saur moments. If you haven’t seen this film on the big screen since it was first released, I can recom­mend you check it out this time, though I can­’t ima­gine the 3D ver­sion will end up as the defin­it­ive way to see it.