Tim Roth

  • The Song of Names (2019)

    The Song of Names (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) There are times when The Song of Names threatens to sink into familiar dramatic movie clichés—it plays around with a multi-decade timespan, with long-lasting grudges, with a personal quixotic quest. Like The Good Liar, it even twists itself into a dual-period 1940s/1980s piece that showcases The Holocaust, and you don’t get any more blatantly manipulative than that. By the weepy end, which seems to overstay its welcome by twenty minutes in order to deliver the statement that the story structurally couldn’t avoid postponing, it’s obviously reaching for the usual levers of the sub-sub-genre: personal atonement, remembering the dead, providing closure. Still, especially compared to other films of its ilk, The Song of Names does have its strengths. A good lead performance by Tim Roth, repressing his own feeling until they shockingly come out punching in a car, is a solid anchor. Clive Owen shows up late in a role almost opposite to anything else he’s played (or being typecast in) before. There is a strong mystery that provides a solid narrative drive to much of the film’s first two acts, even if its conclusion seems to run a bit too long in order to pull everything together. The use of music is a central element, as with director François Girard’s previous Le violon rouge. Technical credentials are excellent, explaining the film’s various Canadian Screen Awards. In the end, The Song of Names is good but (to repeat) there’s a big gap between good and great, and it remains on the side of good. I expect that it will play for years on Canadian cable TV channels.

  • Four Rooms (1995)

    Four Rooms (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2012) Sketch comedy seldom works in movies, and Four Rooms isn’t much of an exception to the rule.  Four stories loosely set on a busy New Year’s Eve at a Los Angeles hotel; it’s a mash-up of four writer/directors with different sensibilities and a long list of actors playing small parts. Only Tim Roth provides a bit of continuity as the bellhop who ends up becoming the unwitting protagonist of the film, but his tendency to play the role at full intensity as a perpetually-manic oddball can be as grating as it is peculiar.  The four segments aren’t created equal: From the sex-romp of the opening segment’s coven of witches, we go to a twisted game of role-playing between a married couple, turbulent kids playing while their parents are away, and a small group of rich men having too much fun with a lighter and a butcher’s knife.  Robert Rodiguez and Quentin Tarantino, collaborating together years before Grindhouse, each bring their recognizable style to their segments.  Interestingly, the film seems to have been shot in TV-style 1:1.33 aspect ratio, perhaps as homage to some of the source material.  The humor is definitely quirky, and while some of it feels forced, other gags seem funnier.  Tarantino fans will also appreciate a little bit of his motor-mouth dialogue in the last segment.  Otherwise, Four Rooms exists as an increasingly-historical curiosity, the kind of intriguing idea that falters in production.  Not a disaster, but of primary interests to fans of the directors.