Space travel goes lo-tech

Martin Freeman stars in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

10 April 2012

Martin Freeman is surrounded by grumpy aliens and depressed androids in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Maria Full Of Grace is an extraordinary, moving story and Watership Down explores the social complications of a warren-full of rabbits on the run...

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ***The late writer Douglas Adams's brightest legacy is The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, a daft story of a bunch of grumpy aliens destroying Earth to make way for an intergalactic bypass - and Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), whose timely if inadvertent befriending of a well-disguised alien ensures his survival. Cue much bouncing around the stratosphere with depressed android Marvin and the galaxy's schizo president (Sam Rockwell), who really does have two personalities (and two heads). There are nice touches - Alan Rickman as Marvin's glum voice, the wonderful Bill Nighy as planet designer Slartibartfast. But, despite the voiceover, the film suffers grievously from the lack of Adams's distinctive writing style, and the fact that it looks like a TV series - and a cheap one at that. Extras: Two making-of docs, deleted scenes and, er, 'really deleted' scenes.
La Nina Santa ***In Lucrecia Martel's second feature, La Nina Santa, the holy girl of the title is Amalia (Maria Alche), in whose 16-year-old soul religious education and bubbling adolescent hormones form a potent brew. When the middle-aged man who felt her up on the street turns out to be a doctor attending a conference at her mother's hotel, Amalia becomes convinced that it's her mission to save him from himself. This combination of histrionic naivety and spiritual arrogance is bound to cause trouble, especially given her terminally confused victim and the claustrophobic location in which the drama takes place. Martel's startling camera style and lack of narrative urgency irritate occasionally but mostly they allow the characters time to carefully construct their own disasters. Extras: None.
Watership Down ****Richard Adams's beloved book Watership Down, about the social complications of a warren-full of rabbits on the run, isn't ideal animation fodder, although given its cast, there was no other way to bring the story to screen. And the film achieves the same curious mix of ostensibly childish subject matter and deeply adult story that Adams's book did: it's much more Animal Farm than Beatrix Potter. The warren, chilled by a prophecy of doom, braves the open in search of a home safe from predators. Their travels are as eventful as they're allegorical but the power of the story blasts away any hint of artifice and even overcomes some 1978 animation blips.Extras: Conversation with the filmmakers, storyboard comparisons, unused scenes.
Maria Full Of Grace ****It's hard to believe that Maria Full Of Grace is writer-director Joshua Marston's first feature. It's also hard to believe that his star, Catalina Sandino Morena, was also a novice and that the film's language, Spanish, is not Marston's first. The result of all this rule-breaking is an extraordinary, moving story about a mildly rebellious young woman, Maria (Sandino Morena). Her ill-timed pregnancy and inconvenient intelligence lead her to leave her Colombian village, sappy boyfriend and sweatshop-style job for the cash rewards of becoming a mule: swallowing heroin pellets and flying them from Colombia to New York. There are predictable contretemps with violent thugs at her destination but Marston's understated writing and direction and Sandino Morena's beauty and nuanced acting raise this film far above the obvious. Extras: None.

MORE ABOUT

Actors And Actresses