Review Movies: Pick of the Indies | Helen | missing teenager | Renoir Cinema | Joe Lawlor and Christine Malloy | Werner Herzog | Curzon Soho | McMurdo station Antarctica

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 7 May 2009

Pick of the Indies

HELEN, the moving portrait of a girl who is asked to help in a police reconstruction of the final known moments of a missing teenager, spooked me when I first saw it.
Now showing at the Renoir in Bloomsbury, the film’s directors – Joe Lawlor and Christine Malloy – have created a highly watchable and occasionally upsetting modern tale.
Helen discovers that the girl she is playing seemed to have it all while her own life pales in comparison.
Gradually she begins to live the life of the girl who has disappeared...

• ALSO screening this week at the Renoir is an end of the world flick which has
nothing to do with the Earth’s destruction.
Instead, we are taken to the furthest of polar reaches by maverick film-maker Werner Herzog.
The director, whose film is on at the Curzon Soho as well as the Brunswick centre’s Renoir, likes to find topics that do not automatically lend themselves to big-screen action, then finds a way of presenting them as the most compelling tales you have ever seen.
In Encounters At The End Of The World he trains his cameras on the life and times of the people who live in an incredibly remote McMurdo station in Antarctica.
While the scenery is gorgeous and the cinematography takes you there, the little quirks of the people at the station – the cash machine, the yoga studio and the woman with a bizarre party trick – means Herzog’s film is less about nature and the cold frontier than the odd people who decide to make it their homes.
Dates and times for Helen and Encounters at the End of the World at www.curzoncinemas. com

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