Transit Palace

Excellent film that rightly received awards in independent categories. Throughout there was an unpretentious feel to this film that shows the directors craft and subtle methods. Made without a script this simply highlighted the talent of the actors. Considine as ever delivers a simple yet compelling performance and the young Artyom also showed a maturity beyond his years. Again credit must be given to the direction and the subtle use of light that created the feeling of isolation and solace as well as an other wordly dream like paralysis. Really well crafted and paced and beautifully shot. Enjoyable and compelling and worth a watch.

A few days have past since I saw Last Resort and it's still on my mind, especially Paddy Considine's performance. Last Resort is undeniably technically good, shot really well, great locations, top editing etc. The script is good but it's the performances that really make this drama as good as it is. I would love to know how this director got these actors to behave so realistically in every situation for every scene. All three leads were fantastic but Paddy Considine constantly stole the screen and brought humour along with him for the ride. I would recommend you watch this if you ever get chance, it is believable, rich, funny and lovely.

A contemporary film that perfectly captures the asylum crisis in 21st century Britain. It's a touching well-acted film, reminiscent of some of the earliest Film Four productions in the 1980s.

Ultimately it poses so many questions. Should action be taken, and is here a limit to the number of asylum applications? Why do they come, when they're treated so awfully?

LAST RESORT / (2001) ** (out of four)

By Blake French:

"Last Resort" suffers from exactly the opposite problem that agonized "Surveillance." That film had a really interesting style, part documentary, part detective story, totally photographed with a variety of digital cameras, giving the movie an authentic sense. The movie failed because the filmmakers did not put enough energy or effort into the script. "Last Resort" has a heartbreaking, oddly engaging story, but its style keeps the viewer distant and distraught. As I left this movie, I felt cheated out of what could have been a very good film.

Pawel Pavlikovsky, the Polish writer and director, certainly avoided the usual clichés involved here. He creates focused characters who define their environment and determine their own future. Most of the movie is unpredictable and hidden, we are unsure where things are headed from the first shot. Pavlikovsky combines psychological truth and realism in the film's visual style; there are frequent switches between hand-held shots and static composed wide shots. It's as if the characters are submerged in a dreamlike documentary reality.

The movie tells the story of Tanya (Dina Korzun), and her son Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov). Tanya leaves Moscow with her street wise 10 year old to meet her fiance in England. When he is not at the airport, she requests political asylum. The two confused individuals find themselves virtually imprisoned in a deserted seaside resort where all refugees are forced to reside. There are no privileges, no money, and no means of escape.

With failed attempts to get a hold her alleged finance, Tanya finds herself in a strange relationship with a nice man named Alfie (Paddy Considine). Tanya is not really eager to start a new relationship though, being betrayed by her fiancee and all. Her complications deepen when Artiom becomes friends with the wrong kids, and as a means of making money to pay for her passport, she becomes involved with an Internet pornographer, challenging her morality and conscience, as well as jeopardizing her relationship with Alfie.

Dina Korzun's performance is interesting because she bases every scene on the fact that she is a stranger in an unfamiliar area. The rest of the characters cannot really do much with the material because it is so focused on the gimmick. Pawlikowski injects a fun subtle terror through a carnival funhouse atmosphere, but the movie never takes off with the material; success would be unequivocal if the film was created in a typical Hollywood fashioned rather than Pawlikowski's attempt at new and original filmmaking techniques.

This film has ample potential and an interesting premise, but it is so depressing when director's noble intentions get in the way of an otherwise captivating motion picture.

This is a stylistically outstanding film, where Pavilkovsky pares down the usual omnipresent noise of the modern world and allows the protagonists to interact in controlled conditions, like a professor in a laboratory. The result is something uniquely beautiful that exists somewhere on the outskirts of modern film-making, at least from my humble perspective. In a sense, we feel as if we've been allowed access to world outside of our own, close to, but vitally different from ours. As a bad analogy, think of Reservoir Dogs, where Tarantino constructs a microcosm which looks familiar to us, but the events and the atmosphere within that microcosm are alien to us. (N.B. That is where parallels between the two films end!).

Considine turns out another sublime performance, showing us his ability to court our empathy, and then throw it back in our face when his simmering rage boils over (see also A Room For Romeo Brass and My Summer Of Love). Dina Korzun provides the perfect foil as a picture of stoic vulnerability. She plays the role of mother, friend, struggling provider, lover, and jilted lover without ever missing a beat, and in a perfect world would have received an Oscar nomination for her role.

To me, this film embodies the joy of film watching. You quickly realize that in order to appreciate it, you must surrender yourself to it and allow it to lead you where it will, unquestioningly. And the rewards are plentiful. For me, the beauty lies in the simplicity, the lack of hyperbole, the feeling that despite the director's attempts to present an abstracted vision of the modern world, he is still commenting heavily on it, and there is something within for us to reflect on. Hollywood could never, and perhaps would never, make a film like this, there's nothing in-your-face witty or clever about it, but as a reflection of a world that actually exists, it is absolutely uncanny.