英文影评例文5篇

1Slumdog Millionaire

An orphaned Mumbai slum kid tries to change his life by winning TV's 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' in a feelgood fable from director Danny Boyle and the writer of The Full Monty, Simon Beaufoy

Jamal Malik ('Skins' star Dev Patel) is being beaten by Mumbai police for allegedly cheating on hit TV show 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' One question away from the ultimate 20 million rupee prize, no one, including slick show host Prem (Anil Kapoor), believes a chai wallah (teaboy) like Jamal could know all the answers. As the tough inspector (Irfan Khan) replays Jamal's appearance on the show, it's revealed that each question corresponds to a specific life lesson from Jamal's tragic past.

Raised in abject poverty in Mumbai's grimmest slum along with older brother Salim, then orphaned by a Hindu mob attack, Jamal and Salim are forced to fend for themselves on the streets through opportunistic petty crime. They pick up a young girl, fellow orphan Latika (Freida Pinto), escape the clutches of a vicious Fagin-like crime boss, lose Latika, and continue their picaresque adventures, one step ahead of the law. As adolescents, however, Salim becomes entranced by a life of crime and Latika's unexpected return sets brother against brother. Will Jamal salvage his girl, his fortune and his life on 'Millionaire'?

Adapted by Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy from Vikas Swarup's hit novel 'Q&A', Slumdog is an underdog tale. Beaufoy's lively screenplay scampers after Swarup's self-consciously Dickensian storytelling tradition, and is even built around the 'Millionaire' show, as iconic a symbol of Western capitalist entertainment as exists. ming skyscrapers erupting from wasteland, slum kids turning into overnight

millionaires through the kiss of television. The film's uniquely vibrant, headlong 21st century rush is that of the infinite possibilities of modern India itself.

Slumdog's such a crowd-pleaser that some critics might brand it Boyle's best since Trainspotting . It even echoes a couple of that film's classic set pieces, notably a slum chase reminiscent of Renton and Co's opening Edinburgh dash and a lavatorial incident so stomach-churning (yet hilarious), it makes Trainspotting's infamous toilet scene seem like Ewan McGregor took an Evian bath.

In fact, the likable Boyle has been on great form for some time - 28 Days Later revamped the zombie movie, Millions is perhaps the best kids film of recent years. No other current British director makes such thrillingly current (all his films are set in either the present or future), kinetic, inherently visual films and proper recognition is long overdue - though, true to form, he's insistent here on crediting co-director Loveleen Tandan, whose major contribution seems to have been unearthing the wonderfully naturalistic kids to play Jamal, Salim and Latika.

Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle have evidently immersed themselves in India's sensory overload. The film revels in the

sub-continent's chaotic beauty and raging colours, from Mumbai shantytowns to Agra's regal Taj Mahal. The thrillingly off-the-cuff digital imagery reflects a nation in a state of explosive flux, loo

2Kung Fu Panda

The synopsis for Kung Fu Panda looks something like this: “A clumsy panda bear becomes an unlikely kung fu hero when a treacherous enemy spreads chaos throughout the countryside in this animated martial arts adventure featuring the voices of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, and Jackie Chan. On the surface, Po (voice of Black) may look like just another portly panda bear, but beneath his fur he bears the mark of the chosen one. By day, Po works faithfully in his

family’s noodle shop, but by night he dreams of becoming a true master of the martial arts. Now an ancient prophecy has come to pass, and Po realizes that he is the only one who can save his people from certain destruction. With time running short and malevolent snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane ) closing in, Furious Five legends Tigress (Jolie), Crane (David Cross ), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu), Monkey (Chan), and their wise sensei, Master Shifu (Hoffman), all draw on their vast knowledge of fighting skills in order to transform a lumbering panda bear into a lethal fighting machine. Now, if the noble Po can master the martial arts and somehow transform his greatest weaknesses into his greatest strengths, he will fulfill his destiny as the hero who saved his people during their darkest hour.”

3The English Patient

For those who have forgotten the depth of romance and passion that the movies are capable of conveying, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient can remedy the situation. This is one of the year's most unabashed and powerful love stories, using flawless performances, intelligent dialogue, crisp camera work, and loaded glances to attain a level of eroticism and emotional connection that many similar films miss.

Is The English Patient melodramatic? Of course, but it's the sort of finely-honed melodrama that embraces viewers rather than smothering them. And the movie never resorts to cheap, manipulative tactics. This well-crafted story, brought to the screen with great care by British playwright and director Anthony Minghella (Truly, Madly, Deeply) and based on the prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, serves up the love of Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas) in a way that is simultaneously epic and intimate.

The English Patient has an elliptical structure, beginning with the same scene that it ends with. In between, it moves several years into the future, and even further into the past. The opening sequence, which takes place during World War II, shows a British plane being shot down over the North African desert. The pilot, a Hungarian count named Laszlo Almasy, is badly burned in the ensuing crash. Years

later, in 1944 Italy, we meet him again. Although his outward injuries have healed, leaving his features scarred beyond recognition, he is dying. He has also supposedly lost his memory. Hana (Juliette Binoche), the Canadian nurse who cares for him, takes him to an isolated, abandoned church to allow him to die in peace. There, injecting him with morphine and reading to him from his beloved volume of Herodotus, Hana seeks to seeks to stimulate his memories. Meanwhile, others arrive at the church -- a mysterious, crippled war veteran named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who has a hidden agenda, and a pair of bomb experts, the British Sgt. Hardy (Kevin Whately) and his Sikh superior, Kip (Naveen Andrews), who becomes Hana's lover

4The Terminal

No modern traveler has more notoriety than Merhan Karimi Nasseri, who has been stranded in Terminal One of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport since 1988. Nasseri was expelled from Iran in 1977 and spent 10 years trying to gain political asylum in Europe. That all came to an end when his bag was stolen in Paris, essentially stranding him at CDG. In 1993, a movie was made about him (Lost in Transit), starring Jean Rochefort. Nasseri’s life reappears on screen this year in The Terminal, courtesy of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. And shamefully, Nasseri goes unmentioned in the movie’s production notes.

In The Terminal, Spielberg gives us Hanks as Viktor Navorski, a visitor from the fictitious country of Krakhozia in Eastern Europe. Hanks, made up to be pasty and lumpy, puts on a mush-mouthed accent reminiscent of Yakov Smirnoff, and finds himself landing at New York’s JFK on a mission we won’t discover until the end of the film. We know only that it involves a Planters peanut can.

Too bad for Viktor that his visa is denied once he lands in the U.S. –his country’s government has

been overthrown during the course of his flight. The U.S. no longer recognizes his passport, and his country no longer exists. Viktor can’t come into the U.S., nor can he return home. Homeland Security a gent Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) has no choice but to sequester him in the airport’s international terminal, strictly forbidding Viktor from setting foot outside.

Viktor, who barely speaks English, quickly comes to understand his predicament, and soon

eno ugh he’s taken up residence in part of the terminal under construction. He learns to read and subsist on quarters refunded from the Smarte Carte machine. He becomes friends with the local shopkeepers and airport staff, and he falls for a sexy but scattered flight attendant (Catherine

Zeta-Jones) who happens through.

5Avatar

First and foremost, Avatar, as promised, unquestionably represents the best visual use of performance capture and 3D technology in cinema to date. It has also been treated to one of the best marketing campaigns. Somehow, the phrase that found its way into every pre-release report, article or outright puff-piece was game changer - and that was before anybody had seen any footage. To get everybody talking about your latest project as a film that could change the face of cinema is a difficult thing, but not nearly so difficult as living up to the expectations that bravado creates. 'King Of The World' James Cameron does love a challenge.

So, is it or isn't it? Has 'the game' been changed? The answer really depends on what game you're playing. If we're talking about what a film can achieve visually (and in terms of box office receipts), Avatar is unequivocally a game changer. If the game you're interested in is the older art of storytelling, character and

dramatic narrative, it is not. Looking back at Cameron's own oeuvre, the experience of reading the scripts of Terminators 1 and 2 and of Aliens is engaging in its own right, before you add any visuals. The same can't be said of Titanic and True Lies, but they do undeniably provide great opportunities for some spectacular action set pieces. Avatar, while more ambitious, leans towards spectacle over script: the story is no dud, but you will come out of the cinema talking about what you've just seen, rather than quoting the instantly classic lines of Terminator/Aliens.

6Kramer vs. Kramer

Hoffman's work life and other concerns are sketched so lightly, that beyond the top three or four names in the cast, other faces barely have time to make their statements and move on. A young JoBeth Williams has a memorable moment in the hallway with Justin; veteran Howard Duff's role as the defense lawyer has been pared down to a minimum. Best friend Jane Alexander has a much larger presence, but drops out of the film just before the home stretch. Yet the movie never feels hemmed-in or minimalist. For the Emergency Room scene, which consists of just a couple of tracking shots following a running Hoffman, several blocks of traffic right off of Central Park had to be shut down.

Meryl Streep's career was already going into orbit after her television debut in the Holocaust miniseries; she shot her scenes for Kramer vs. Kramer while simultaneously working on Manhattan for Woody Allen. The Joanna Kramer part is a particularly tough one. Audiences could be expected to root so fervently for Ted the husband, that it's practically impossible to generate sympathy for the mother

who abandons her child. Streep projects innate decency and restraint - at the beginning she's so remorseful, we cannot help but forgive her even as she's walking out the door. Hoffman helps her during this episode by accentuating his boorish self-centeredness.

Kramer vs. Kramer made it very clear for a generation of selfish baby boomers that the responsibility of raising kids isn't something to be taken lightly. Little Billy has feelings, an ego, a desire to be special, and even the vain Ted soon learns the depth and satisfaction to be had from relating to a child who depends on nobody but you for practically everything. Ted Kramer also puts his child's welfare first, and makes some humiliating, previously unthinkable, career choices. This is a concept difficult to dramatize ... the idea that there could be a reason to work below one's earning level and retain self-respect must have come as big news to the disco generation.

Kramer vs. Kramer predictably winds up in an involved courtroom scene, but one organized not along legal lines but instead as a process of emotional discovery. In bitter conflict for possession of the child, each party has no desire to thwart the other, yet they find themselves in an ugly and cruel legal situation. Their life stories are aired in public; an accident can be interpreted as negligence. By the time the final shot has unspooled, most viewers are no longer aware of anything except the intensity of the drama before them. When the film ends abruptly, they're also surprised that they find it so satisfying an experience.

7Kick-Ass

In a way, it's almost a shame that Kick-Ass has so much in the way of violence and swearing in it - because as far as

superhero-movies-with-an-inspirational-message go, it's pretty difficult to beat. Its lead character isn't somebody with superpowers, or a vast fortune and decades of martial arts training - just an ordinary teenage comic book geek, who wonders one day why "everybody wants to be Paris Hilton, but nobody wants to be Spider-Man".

When Dave Lizewski, in his earliest days as the wet-suited vigilante of the film's title, stands protectively between a mugging victim and his three attackers, it's not about fulfilling the responsibility of flukily-granted powers - it's about standing up, no matter what the odds against you, and saying "No more". A pretty strong moral, and one it'd be quite nice to show the kids.

On the other hand, if it didn't have all the violence and swearing, then it'd be fair to say it wouldn't be half as much fun. And make no mistake, Kick-Ass is an absolute blast. With nods throughout to greats such as Superman and Batman - as well as not-so-greats like The Spirit - it constantly and wittily skewers the superhero genre; and yet at the same time, it's an exhilarating example of it.

8Alice in Wonderland

At 19 years of age, it's back down the rabbit hole for one of literature's most beloved heroines, Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska), and back into Wonderland, or Underland as she now learns it is called. Welcome to Tim Burton's vision of Lewis Carroll's playful alternate universe.

Burton's adaptation is rightly careless of slavishly rendering its source in wholly loyal detail. Any purists who argue that this Alice doesn't work because it strays so far from the text are wrong: this Alice doesn't work for the far more essential reason that the characters are too often missing a basic lifeforce of their own, possibly a result of being enbalmed in stunning-looking but airless CGI. They're not helped by dialogue that feels like an afterthought to a long-planned series of conceptual character designs.

There's also that nagging "teacher's pantomime" feeling, familiar from the Harry Potter series, brought on by a cast list that reads like a who's who of national treasures. They're mostly great actors, but really classic voice work in animation comes when you hear a character speak and their voice is a seamless part of that character, not when you hear a character speak and think "Ah, that's Alan Rickman."