Movies: Brick Lane, Persepolis

8 Dec 2007 Brick Lane was a little disappointing. A small indie film that occasionally leads you into expecting something grander, visually very impressive, but with a jarring tendency to signpost plot developments a bit too blatantly, something I'm more accustomed to in dumb American action films. You half expect a subtitle to come up saying (for instance) "Watch out! Karim is becoming radicalised following the anti-muslim backlash to 9/11".

Persepolis - much better. Converted from the autobiograhpical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, and following her childhood in Iran, and her moves to Austria as a teenager, back to Iran, and later to France, the stark black and white images work beautifully as a film.