The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 46

Boxd gks I I ot many people think of the days for $350,000. "That's a decep- ot many people think of the days for $350,000. "That's a Sunday comics as short films. And yet Canadian film-maker "It was weird shooting in there. It wasn't just six actors in a cube going crazy.

There were 36 of us." Post-production was more luxurious and Natali spent months on the aural environment. "We used organic sounds: monks chanting, slowed down animals. Some rooms throbbed, others tingled. I wanted the Cube to feel like a haunted house." If the characterisations retain some of the simplicity of the comic book, despite terrific performances, Cube is still a fascinating exercise, indicating Natali could follow in the footsteps of Cronenberg and Kubrick. "I'm the luckiest film geek in the world," he says.

RUTH HESSEY Cube opens Thursday at Dendy George Street and Dendy Newtown. deceptive figure," he admits. "Goods and services were deferred and all the special effects were given to us free." "Once we realised we could re-use the set, we came up with the idea of a maze composed of identical rooms. But then the story began to write itself and became much more than a conceit to save money," he says. An Orwellian scenario emerged in which a group of complete strangers, all condemned by some obscure bureaucratic glitch, wake up in a state-of-the-art gulag a kind of Sartrian No Exit compressed into a Rubic's equation.

I I I fit me rrwrTTW Vincenzo Natali says he learnt everything he knows from comic books, working for some years as a story-board artist before making his first feature, the sci-fi nightmare Cube. "Like films, comics are about what people do, not, as in literature, about what they feel inside. Character is revealed through action." Unlike film, the comic book has no physical limitations and is cheap to produce. It also has a tradition of subversion. In the '60s and '70s popular underground comics, such as Crumb, operated well outside mainstream inhibitions.

Having slavishly devoted himself to "a fantastic book called How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way," Natali made his first film, Dark Space, on super 8 at age 11 with Cube's scriptwriter Andre Bijelic. At 14 they spent a summer filming the post-apocalyptic Nuclear Memories in Toronto's Hyde Park. "I was much more ambitious at 11 than I am now," Natali says. "Shoestring budgets forced me to refine my techniques." Cube, for instance, was shot in 21 )) 7'. A 7 I i PRINCE OF EGYPT The climax, the flight from Egypt, the parting of the you-know what, is huge and thrilling, even when most of us know what is coming.

PB (Greater Union city (Sat. Sun only)) R0NIN John Frankenheimer's Ronin is the story of six professional but stateless ex-cold warriors andor terrorists chasing a briefcase, full of we-know-not-what. The publicity is calling it the best car chase film since Butt. Peter Yates's 1968 thriller, which starred Steve McQueen. Just as long as they don't call it a good movie.

PB (Hoyts city, Broadway and suburbs. Greater Union suburbs, Village Parramatta, Manly, Randwick, Warriewood) RUSH HOUR What makes Rush Hour smoothly entertaining is the teaming of Jackie Chan with Chris Tucker, the up-and-coming comedian. Much effort has gone into their joint schtick and some of it is very, very good. It's an odd combination of canny veteran and edgy newcomer, and the outtakes in the credits (a traditional finale in Chan's movies and a reward forthose who don't leave early) make clear how much each worked off the other. PB (Village city and Parramatta, Greater Union Liverpool Cambelltown, Hoyts Broadway and Penrith Lawson St, Beverly Hills, Warriewood) SAVING PRIVATE RYAN As promised, Steven Spielberg's re-creation of the Allies' D-Day landing at Omaha Beach is a full-scale assault on the central nervous system, battering you with 25 minutes of grotesque and appalling ways of dying The pity is that all this intensity has to come at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, for when he gets down to the quieter business of having to fit a story around his great set-piece battles, the other Spielberg emerges: the eternal Peter Pan who would rather wrestle with a dinosaur than a nuance.

SH (Greater Union city and suburbs, Hoyts Broadway, Village Parramatta, Collaroy, Manly, Randwick) SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE Play is the thing here. Love-play, wordplay and the occasional bout of confused swordplay. But mostly screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard are playing with our perceptions of the past. In this take on the Elizabethan age every tavern drinker and Thames boatman is a theatre critic, and Will (Joseph Fiennes) struggles to overcome writer's block. The real action is going on in the taverns and the theatres where a happy band of clowns are rattling around in spirited imitation of the mechanicals from a Shakespearean comedy the kind of comedy that competing managements of the Rose and Curtain theatres are desperately urging Will to write.

As the Rose's Philip Henslow, we have Geoffrey Rush, equipped with a mouthful of mossy teeth and the blank, jokey optimism of the seat-of-the-pants entrepreneur, while the Curtain's blustering Richard Burbage is played by Martin Clunes, carrying on more or less as he does in TV's Men Behaving Badly. It's broad farce, with plenty of corn and ham on the side, but the humour is salty and the direction by John Madden achieves a cheerful, knockabout grace. SH (Greater Union city and suburbs. Hoyts Broadway and suburbs. Village Parramatta and Roxy, Academy, Collaroy, Cremorne, Cronulla, Dendy Newtown.

Palace Norton St, Roseville, Randwick. Stanmore, Warriewood) A SIMPLE PLAN Based on the bestseller by Scott B. Smith, who also wrote the screenplay, A Simple Tale is the story of two brothers. Hank (Bill LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL Chaplin's influence is obvious in every frame of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, as it is in every gesture of Benigni's comic style. And like The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin controversially satirised Hitler, Life is Beautiful takes a huge risk for a comedy: the second half is set in a concentration camp.

PB (Greater Union Pitt Centre and suburbs. Hoyts Broadway. Palace Norton St, Roseville, Verona. Walker St) LITTLE VOICE Downstairs. Mari is doing battle with her hangover.

Upstairs, her daughter, LV, is communing with the ghost of her much-mourned father by pjaying his old Garland, Monroe and Bassey records at full blast. Man's new boyfriend, Ray- a seedy showbiz fringe-dweller- discovers that LV (Jane Horrocks) doesn't just listen to her father's favourites. She imitates them. The Rise and Fall of Little Voice was an instant hit with audiences and critics when it opened on the London stage seven years ago. It makes a lovely film, part fairytale, part romp, with some brutal home truths embedded in its jokes.

SH (Greater Union Pitt Centre. Hoyts Broadway. Avalon, Cremorne, Cronulla, Verona) MADELINE The children's author Ludwig Bemeimans has been dead for almost 40 years, but Madeline, the Parisian schoolgirl who became his most popular creation, has taken on a life of her own. The film's screenwriters, Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, have managed to weave episodes from four of the books into a rambling tale of great charm centring on the school's threatened closure. SH (Beverly Hills, Randwick (Sat Sun only), Warriewood) MEN WITH GUNS Argentine actor, Federico Luppi, plays the aging Dr Fuentes, who, some years earlier, trained a group of barefoot doctors and sent them off to help the Indians.

They were never heard from again. He goes to find out what happened. The film is structured as ajourney upwards. As the doctor goes higher, he loses his ignorance and innocence. For once, it's an American film about Latin America which doesn't have a gringo as the central character.

The ever reliable and patrician-looking Luppi is perfectly cast and he gives the film real gravity. PB (Verona, Walker) PAULIE Paulie is a talking parrot picture from Spielberg and friends' DreamWorks. Not that this is any old bird. You won't hear him cawing on about Paulie wanting a cracker. Like all good fairytales, this one takes itself seriously, and since it isn't inclined to condescend, you aren't either.

It's a picaresque tale which unfolds in flashback and hangs together much more elegantly than you might expect. SH (Greater Union Castle Hill (Sat Sun suburbs (Sat Sun only), Collaroy, Randwick Sat Sun only)) POST-COITUM, ANIMALTRISTEThe French actress turned director Brigitte Rouan Diane lets loose the dogs of love in the memorably named Post-Coitum. Animal Triste. The film is about Diane's affair with a younger man, from first meeting to last, and it's a very intense, fleshy story. PB (Chauvel) PRACTICAL MAGIC A big budget sister act for Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, one plays naughty, the other nice, and there are no surprises in the way that combination pans out.

Beware a comedy in which the actors' laughter is louder than the audience's. SH (Village city and Parramatta, Greater Union suburbs and drive-ins, Hoyts Broadway and suburbs. Beverly Hills. Collaroy, Cronulla. Manly.

Stanmore, Warriewood) new DEAR CLAUDIA This new Australian feature finds Bryan Brown stranded on a tropical island with a woman some 20 years younger. In this script, by first-time feature director Chris Cudlipp, Brown sheds all the larrikin swagger on which his long, busy career has been built, and plays a mild-mannered character called Walter. It's Claudia, his fellow castaway Croatian actress Aleksandra Vujcic who proves to be the feral half of the partnership. A first-rate crew led by cinematographer Brian Breheny The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Dead Calm) -worked on this film and all you can say about that is: what a waste. Sandra Hall (Greater Union city and suburbs.

Hoyts suburbs. Selected independents) PLEASANTVILLE Pleasantville exists only in a 1950s television show, idolised by a timid late teenager (Kevin Connors). His father is gone and his mother dates guys who mistreat her: his sister is a blonde bombshell headed for trouble. The two '90s siblings are sucked down the TV tube to become part of the show and once they're in TV-land they assume the bodies of Bud and Mary Sue in the show, without losing their '90s identities. For about 90 minutes, Gary Ross, the CITYSEARCH CLIP looked like being, but wasn't.

PB (Hoyts Penrith Lawson St, Avalon) EVER AFTER Drew Barrymore is a 16th-century French Cinderella, thoroughly updated to conform to contemporary feminist sensibilities. The most worrying question in all this is: does she have a prince worthy of her? SH (Hoyts Penrith Lawson St, Beverly Hills) THE FACULTY A parasitic alien species is taking over Ohio's Herrington High, it has already colonised the minds and bodies of the teachers. Now it's starting on the students. Why Ohio? Splatter master Kevin Williamson, who wrote the script for The Faculty, has given a lot of thought to that one. His answer: the aliens are craftily approaching by the back door.

Today Ohio, tomorrow the world. If shriek-and-splatter is your thing. The Faculty puts you in the hands of the experts. SH (Village city and Parramatta. Hoyts Broadway and suburbs, Greater Union suburbs, Warriewood) HIDEOUS KINKY Hideous Kinkyhas Kate Winslet gallivanting around Morocco in 1972 as a nice but hopeless hippie mother of two beautiful, rowdy and worldly girls, aged about six and eight.

The film is perhaps too episodic to be really engrossing, but there is something affecting in Julia's (Winslet's) struggle with maternal responsibility. You can't hate her for wanting to retain and explore a sense of her self. PB (Dendy George St, Chauvel, Valhalla) IMAX Mysteries Of Egypt. T-Rex. Everest.

Africa 's Elephant Kingdom, Search For The Great Sharks. writerdirector, looks like pulling off this ambitious directing debut, but he falters, becoming a bit strident, long-winded and preachy. Ross embraces the sort of Capra-corn he's been implicitly criticising all along. It doesn't wreck the film, so much as dilute its satirical power. What's left is still a lot of fun.

Paul Byrnes (Village city and Parramatta, GU suburbs. Hoyts Broadway and suburbs, Cremorne, Verona, Warriewood) RUSHMORE Seethe review in tomorrow's Herad(Greater Union city and suburbs. Hoyts Broadway and suburbs, Village Parramatta, Verona). first releases A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES Sonia (Renee Zellweger, who played Tom Cruise's secretary in Jerry Maguire is trying hard to be a good Jew, despite misgivings. She's living within one of New York's most Orthodox communities.

A Price Above Rubies is about how Sonia escapes and the question of righteousness. PB (Chauvel) ATLANTIS Luc Besson (The Fifth Element), gives us 75 minutes of beautiful underwater footage, shot all around the world. Atlantis is like underwatertherapy. There is no voice-over just a series of sequences shot in exotic locales with all manner of gorgeous sea creatures. PB (Valhalla) A BUG'S LIFE It squishes Antz.

The latter has a more epic feel but A Bug's Life is the more charming, inventive and funny. PB (Beverly Hills, Warriewood) CHINESE BOX Chinese Box is Wayne Wang's "love letter" to the city of his birth, and he has assembled an impressive array of international talent to assist in its delivery. So where did it all go wrong? In one story, Jeremy Irons is pursuing his grand passion for Gong Li cast as a mainland refugee now running a smart Hong Kong bar. In another, he's out on the streets with his video camera making a film within the film about Cheung's character, a young mystery woman with a badly scarred face. Peeping between these disconnected plots are hints that Wang really wants to be making something altogether different a heavy-duty political statement about reporters abroad, in the tradition of Welcome to Sarajevo and Under Fire.

SH (Greater Union Pitt Centre) ELIZABETH Cate Blanchett- a luminous figure in pale silks and brocades undergoes a tumultuous metamorphosis, from the princess who values the pleasures of love and intimacy to the queen who has learnt to depend only on herself. SH (GU Pitt Centre, Cremorne. Palace Norton St, Roseville) ENEMY OFTHE STATE Will Smith is the wrong man forced to flee until he can clear his name which eventually leads him to find the shadowy Brill (Gene Hackman). Tony Scott Top Gun, Days of Thunder) is usually such a bang-for-your-buck director that it's a surprise to find him in restrained dramatic mood. There are car chases and an exploding building here, but they're not central to the film's existence.

It's the character piece which Scott's last film 'The Fan) RECOMMENDED ftiFgfrlrlSffLra if'-1. 11 SMH METRO FEB 26-MAR 4.