mercywright's reviews

"Bombi-Bitt och jag" is best knows for introducing Stellan Skarsgård, then a young teenager, as the lead in a five part TV- series. The supporting cast included a dozen of Sweden's most iconic actors of that time (1968) - Tor Isedal, Gudrun Brost, Margareta Krook, Sigge Fürst, Åke Grönberg, and Ingvar Kjellson among them.

"Entre les murs" (2008, France) wins prizes at Cannes, and is nominated for a Foreign Language Oscar while not much is heard about the very similar movie, "Les Bureaux de Dieu" (2008, also France). Both films use similar techniques - assigning documentary dialogues to non-actors, and the effect is amazing. You don't know if you're watching a documentary or a feature film! Both movies seems like documentaries, since no rosy solutions are provided to the dramatic problems the teachers/social workers have to deal with. Both films are very talky, with no escape outside the confinement of class room/social services office, but the stories and conflicts presented here are so fascinating, you willingly stay with both films to the end.

Naomi Watts is every bit as good as Garbo was in the 1934 version, and Ed Norton is outstanding. Great supporting cast as well - Diana Rigg is almost unrecognizable as a Mother Superior, and Liev Schreiber is, as always, terrific as a slimy lowlife. Based on one of Somerset Maugham's best stories, this is a movie that will satisfy anyone looking for an old-fashioned, romantic drama about love lost and love earned. The social quandary of British women after the first World War, which created a generation of unwilling spinsters, is taken as seriously by the filmmakers as the emergence of a new China standing up to its Colonial oppressors. Watts' character's journey from spoiled, selfish Daddy's girl in 1920's fun-loving London to a mature woman in a deprived, cholera-infested third-world country is harrowing.