Right, I should get through these fairly quickly, first up is My Winnipeg, which I was tempted to see on its theatrical release (as there were comparisons with La Antena) and very surprised to see on television so quickly, being shown on SkyArts last week. It's an irreverent take by native Winnipeggian Guy Maddin on his link to the city he lives in, but apparantly can't stand. Maddin's visual style is a very unique fusion of silent cinema aesthetics with modern techniques applied, usually in the form of a burst of images, edited together in clusters. First and foremost this film is, at times, riotously entertaining. Hearing Madden (via his voiceover) lambast the NHL and seeing him recreate family scenes from his past (he rents his childhood home for the setting 
) is extremely amusing.
Almost inevitably, given the style, it's a bit hit and miss - certain sections work better than others as his style meshes with the content with varying success. So an uneven film to be sure, but so funny when it all comes together that it's well worth checking out. I'd seen a short of Maddin's before (pretty sure it was The Heart of the World) and had detested the editing in it, and that is what had put me off seeing this film in the cinema, so maybe because of that My Winnipeg was surprisingly watchable for me as the cutting wasn't so frenzied. I have no idea what it would be like going in cold turkey and the style could very well put a lot of people off. One of those where you'll only know if you'll like it by watching it.
After that Film Four showed Les enfants du siècle at stupid o'clock in the morning, so I taped it then watched it the next day. It's a period drama biopic about two 19th century writers, starring Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel. The technical side of things is first rate, the sets and costumes are gorgeous, but this was the original french 135 minute cut rather than the version released in America which was half and hour shorter, and this does suffer from pacing problems and drags on. Binoche in particular is fine and Magimel gives a committed performance but director Diane Kurys utterly wastes wonderful talents like Karin Viard and even more reprehensibly, Isabelle Carré in glorified cameos. The romances shown are rather unconvincing, the characters are neither likeable nor fascinating enough to retain an inherent interest, but it is very nice to look at.
Lastly, The Cottage, which I watched (as I always say when I talk about an atrocious film here) as it was on tv and I had nothing better to do. It's almost impressively poor. Paul Andrew Williams made quite an introduction for himself with London to Brighton, which probably contained the finest teenage performance in a British film since the one Tim Roth extracted from Lara Belmont in The War Zone in 1999. Sadly though, on the evidence of this, that could very well have been a complete fluke. It's really not even worth my intellectual time in slating it in detail, every aspect of the film fails spectacularly.