Posts Tagged ‘Vincent Cassel’

Jason Bourne

Director: Paul Greengrass

Cast: Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Julia Stiles, Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel, Riz Ahmed, Scott Sheperd

Director Paul Greengrass reunites with Matt Damon in a thrilling continuation of the Bourne franchise in the aptly titled Jason Bourne.

Having directed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, it was inevitable that Greengrass and Damon would work together again. The lure of the fast paced, globe-trotting Bourne franchise is irresistible.

Joining the cast of Jason Bourne are Alicia Vikander fresh from her Oscar win in The Danish Girl as a tech analyst Heather Lee, a more ambivalent version of the role played by Joan Allen in the previous films. Black Swan’s Vincent Cassel also joins the film as the ruthless assassin and the shady CIA director Robert Dewey is this time played by Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive).

Riz Ahmed (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) plays a Tech billionaire, Aaron Kalloor and head of Deep Dream who has some equally underhand dealings with the CIA. Julia Stiles reprises her role as Nicky Parsons which adds to the continuity of this Bourne film.

As the action moves from Iceland to Athens to Berlin and then onto a Tech convention in Las Vegas, Jason Bourne as an action thriller delivers on all fronts, crisp production design by Paul Kirby, brilliant car chases both in Athens and Vegas and excellent sound editing, especially notable in the riot sequence outside the parliament building in Athens.

Vikander is superb as an ambitious CIA operative who is ruthless at playing both sides whilst acknowledging the intrinsic value of Jason Bourne re-joining the programme as a highly skilled and effective assassin.

Matt Damon is all buffed up in this version, especially in the opening fight sequence in rural Greece, a far cry from the bewildered spy who wakes up on a fishing trawler off the coast of Marseilles in the original film, The Bourne Identity. Damon inhabits Jason Bourne, he personifies the role, reclaiming the identity of this protagonist synonymous with a gritty street spy who is able to navigate his way around the world without barriers.

The plot in this film centres on a hack of the CIA database and the real implications of the Treadstone program which delves into Bourne’s complicated past.

Jason Bourne is a brilliant thriller, especially the unbelievable car chase sequence down Las Vegas Boulevard landing up in the Riviera hotel. This is a top notch thriller, highly recommended and surely a definitive sign that there will be more Bourne films to come.

2007 Toronto International Film Festival Winners

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) takes place every year in September in Toronto, Canada.
Films which premiere at Toronto are often nominated for Academy Awards the following year.

TIFF does not hand out individual prizes for Best Actor or Actress but focuses on amongst others the following awards:
People’s Choice Award & Best Canadian Feature Film

Opening Night Film: Fugitive Pieces directed by Jeremy Podeswa, starring Robbie Kay, Monika Schurmann, Nina Dobrev, Stephen Dillane, Rosamund Pike & Rade Serbedzija

People’s Choice Award: Eastern Promises directed by David Cronenberg starring Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl & Sinead Cusack

Best Canadian Feature Film: My Winnipeg A Documentary directed by Guy Maddin, starring Ann Savage, Louis Negin, Amy Stewart

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Toronto_International_Film_Festival

Trance

Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting director Danny Boyle returns to his Shallow Grave roots in the seductive and hypnotic sexual thriller Trance, revolving around an art heist of a 1798 Francisco Goya painting, Witches in the Air valued at 27 million pounds from a London auction house. Trance teems up Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) with James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland) and Rosario Dawson (Sin City) in a frenetic edge of the seat thriller about hypnosis, artistic obsessions, addictions and violence set in a 21^st century contemporary London.

McAvoy plays a seemingly harmless Londoner Simon who while working at an auction house in London manages to save the expensive Goya painting during an audacious robbery from European gangster Franck played by Cassel and his band of ruthless thieves only to suffer a head trauma, not remembering where the original painting was hidden. Soon Simon threatened by Franck approaches a Harley Street hypnotist Dr Elizabeth Lamb, played with a sultry detachment by Rosario Dawson in one of her best roles yet. Trance is shot in brilliantly sharp Danny Boyle style with colour filters, wide angle shots and a pulsating musical score as the film follows the dangerous ménage a trios between Elizabeth, Simon and Franck as they all attempt to outwit each other with some serious violence and raunchy sex to spice up the narrative in a superbly visceral and intelligent thriller about art heists and what lengths people will go to in order to locate the original highly priced stolen work of art in this case the 18th century Spanish painting Witches in the Air.

No work of art is worth more than a human life

Trance centres on the premise that no work of art is worth more than a human life. Boyle who incidentally made this film, while directing the opening of the London 2012 Summer Olympics is clearly in his element in this tightly knit provocative tale of three bizarre characters who are sociopathic in their compulsion at all costs to find the original painting whilst throwing in revenge, amnesia and  some gory murder all to the seductive sound of Dawson’s entrancing voice.

Trance is fast paced, twisted, violent and superbly shot and will definitely leave viewers gasping at the end as their allegiance is switched and the plot takes a wonderfully unexpected turn in the sophisticated world of art heists. With loads of violence and nudity, Trance is not for sensitive viewers, making the Christopher Walken 2009 comedy The Maiden Heist look like child’s play.

Black Swan

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder, Sebastian Stan, Patrick Heusinger

Darren Aronofsky’s masterpiece is a taut psychological thriller about a prima ballerina who delves into her dark side, so she can perform the complex role of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.  Natalie Portman gives a stunning and frenzied performance as Nina Sayers. As well as the physical demands of playing the lead Ballerina in Swan Lake, Nina is trapped in a claustrophobic and co-dependent relationship with her mother, a wonderfully obsessive performance by Barbara Hershey (Portrait of a Lady).

Whilst rehearsing for the final act, the ballet master a seductive and sadistic Thomas played with relish by Vincent Cassel, taunts Nina and reproaches her continually for not bringing out her dark qualities to dance the antithesis of the White Swan, the Black Swan. The fact that Nina is prone to episodes of self-mutilation smothered by her overbearing mother and is generally an exceptional sexually frustrated and fragile young woman who uses dancing to quench her repressive state, makes Black Swan a highly intoxicating psycho sexual thriller set in the bitchy and uncompromising world of ballet.

Aronofsky always has his central characters stripped away to the vicious core, from The Wrestler, where in a break-out performance by Mickey Rourke as a washed up Trailer Park, drug-addicted wrestler angling for a comeback to heroin addicts played by Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto in Coney Island, who resort to extreme methods for their drugs, as detailed in the inventive and shockingly brutal Requiem for a Dream.

Black Swan is no exception, as Portman gives a ground breaking performance of a Ballerina rapidly losing her grip on reality, delving deeper into her own troubled and shattered psychosis to satisfy the dreams of an obsessed mother who compromised her own stage success.

Black Swan is about the rigours of Ballet training along with the mental deterioration of a young woman driven beyond the edge of sanity, surrounded by a gallery of heinous characters from an overbearing mother, a cruel ballet instructor and a tempting rival, Lily played with an unforgiving relish by Milas Kunis slyly plotting to derail Nina’s debut as the Swan Queen.

This is a classic psychological thriller, from the drab and daunting world of the dance studios, filled with giant mirrors reflecting Nina’s inner torment to the dingy apartment shared with her mother, an entire film bathed in black and white with only the occasional gashes of blood to break the diametric colour palette. Watch out for a great cameo performance by Winona Ryder as the broken ballerina Beth who declines as savagely as Nina’s star rises dramatically. Black Swan is a debut etched in blood and director Aronofsky, like in The Wrestler and Requiem for Dream shows this grueling Ballet world in its entire stripped down depravity, with obsessive dancers driven and searching for a depreciating gratification. A far cry from the graceful triumph associated with Ballet exemplified in such films as The Company and Mao’s Last Dancer.