> Then She Found Me
Directed by: Helen Hunt
Starring: Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Ben Shenkman, Lynn Cohen.
Rating: M
5 stars (out of 5)
Review by Christine Powley
In the harsh world of Hollywood, any actress over 35 is elderly.
If you do not choose to turn yourself into a Barbie-doll clone through surgery, you had better get used to playing people's feisty grandmother or start generating your own work.
Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt has obviously decided to take the difficult path of artistic integrity.
Then She Found Me (Metro and Rialto) is her first time as a director.
She stars as April Epner, a 39-year-old teacher whose marriage has just broken up.
She looks good but not movie-star good, just good in a real-woman sort of way.
That alone is reason enough for every woman over 40 to like Then She Found Me but things get better when Colin Firth turns up as Frank, the recently divorced father of one of her pupils.
Really, for every woman with a crush on Firth's Mr Darcy, I do not have to sell this movie any further, but this is more than just a pleasant thumbs-up for second-chance romances.
April was adopted, and after the death of her mother, her birth mother re-enters her life.
Bernice (Bette Midler) is nothing like the restrained April, but she is also not as brassy as Midler's normal screen presence.
April has a hard time accepting her but Bernice is sympathetic enough for us to keep wanting April to give it another go.
Best thing: The way it packs in so many plot turns without ever becoming a melodrama.
Worst thing: A few too many shots of Hunt looking wistful, but when you are directing yourself it is hard not to indulge.
See it with: Any Colin Firth addict; he gets much more screen time in this than Mamma Mia.
> The Edge of Heaven
Directed by: Fatih Akin
Starring: Nurgül Yesilay, Ayten Öztürk, Baki Davrak, Tuncel Kurtiz, Hanna Schygulla, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Nursel Köse.
Rating: M
5 stars (out of 5)
Review by Mark Orton
Digging deep into the cultural divide spanning Turkey and Germany, The Edge of Heaven is an utterly compelling example of top-notch storytelling.
From the Black Sea coast, to urban Bremen, director Fatih Akin carefully weaves together the narratives of six very different personalities.
Linked by the surprise death of Yeter, a Turkish-born prostitute; a tale of illegal aliens, communication breakdown and bigotry unfolds.
Akin takes the liberty of priming our expectations with revealing chapter titles, only to throw in some cunningly disguised plot deviations along the way.
Shifting seamlessly between Turkish, German and English, the entire cast seize the subtle nuances of displacement, without over-sentimentalising the issues.
Racial prejudice surrounding the Turkish diaspora in Germany, and Turkey's European ambitions, may well be lost on a local audience.
Thankfully, The Edge of Heaven takes the regionalised issues, and frames them in the wider context of dysfunctional families.
A thoroughly riveting and engaging portrait of what on the surface seems a world away, but in reality isn't.
