MOVIE REVIEW

The Secret of The Grain (drama)

Cast: Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi

Direction: Abdellatif Kechiche

The film has been a winner at several international film festivals and has won the Best Film award in France. Rightly so, for The Secrets of The Grain is both cinematically and thematically mesmerising. On the one hand is its camera work which captures the highs and lows of an immigrant French family with riveting intimacy. And on the other hand is the heartwarming story which serenades the institution of family like never before. No homilies, no fake goodness; on the contrary, there are loads of internecine rivalries, bitching, breaking apart until the final coming together, when the head of the family actually ends up bringing the disparate members of his extended family together, even in his absence. Sixty-year-old Silimane is a Tunisian immigrant who has been laid off from his work and decides to use his severance pay to set a restaurant that serves couscous made by his ex-wife. Currently, he is living with his mistress and his step daughter who run a seedy hotel. Naturally, they are treated as outsiders by the rest of the family that gets together every Sunday for a family lunch, excluding them. It's a quaint ritual, meant to preserve the traditions of a family that may have become quintessentially French, yet it hasn't lost it's traditional culture. It takes many a hurdles before Silimane's dream actually comes true. But more importantly, his couscous eatery ends up bringing the feuding Tunisian family together, despite the bitterness, the rivalries. Watch out for some excellent performances and a refreshing new look at 'family dramas.'

Mirrors (horror)

Cast: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton

Direction: Alexandra Aja

THE horror factory in Hollywood relentlessly keeps churning out Asian remakes, after the success of The Ring series. This time, the devil manifests itself through malevolent mirrors, which suddenly turn murderous. Ordinary people begin to die when their reflection turns assassin and pulls jaws, cuts veins, slashes necks, or what you will. Enter Kiefer Sutherland, a dysfunctional cop whose punishment posting now entails guarding a burnt-out building. Nothing wrong with that, except that the spooky house has a larger-than-life mirror that begins to show him strange things. His wife dismisses it as musings of a stressed mind, but goes on high alert, when her six-year-old son too starts staring into mirrors and conversing with them. Time to go back in history and find the cause behind the mysterious apparitions. But that doesn't matter really. What matters is the spook quotient of the film. How many times do you jump out of your seats or cover your eyes with fear? Just two or three times, to be precise, when a reflection stares at you long after the person has moved or maybe, when it tears it's face apart with its bare hands. The rest is mostly a hunt for the missing link between illusion and reality, with lots of half-lit sequences of bloody body parts and gutturals moans. Strictly for diehard horror buffs, Mirrors doesn't really have anything new to offer.