Film Reviews
UnbrokenTuesday, 23 December 2014
This year's award-courting survival picture (after 2013's All Is Lost, and 2012's Life of Pi) is based on the genuinely remarkable story of Olympian Louis Zamperini. It's a tale of heroic resilience in the face of an onslaught of adversity, helmed by someone who, in a very different way, is pretty unstoppable herself – Dame Angelina Jolie. Read more... |
Exodus: Gods and KingsTuesday, 23 December 2014
I wish Mel Brooks had directed this, but instead we've got the sort of stodgy techno-epic that has become all too common from the auteur-ial hand of Ridley Scott. Ridley's 150-minute rehashing of the Biblical story of Moses is often a feast for the eyes (especially in 3D), with its vast Egyptian panoramas and stunningly mounted action sequences, but the characters are largely cardboard, the dialogue is dire and a lot of very good actors are given nothing of any consequence to do. Read more... |
AnnieMonday, 22 December 2014
A lot of harsh words have been and will continue to be written about the new movie musical remake of Annie, the Broadway mainstay about the Depression-era tyke who exists to teach her elders a few life lessons on the way to a sun-drenched "Tomorrow" (to co-opt the title of the show's best-known song). But from where I'm sitting, a disproportionate share of the film's self-evident faults are swept away by its impossibly irresistible young star, Quvenzhané Wallis. Read more... |
Big EyesFriday, 19 December 2014
The worlds of marital abuse and artistic fraud collide to eye-opening if also frustrating effect in Big Eyes, Tim Burton's film about the unmasking of an elaborate deception that ruptures a family along the way. Read more... |
Dumb and Dumber ToThursday, 18 December 2014
“Comedy is all about timing” quips Lloyd Christmas at one point, something this sequel to the Farrelly Brothers' crass, gross-out comedy from 1994 very knowingly mocks. Those who hold a fondness for Lloyd and Harry’s shtick may be amused by the huge number of in-jokes and the silly slapstick, but overall this instalment is more filler than killer and relies way too heavily on nostalgia. Read more... |
Guys and DollsWednesday, 17 December 2014
This newly-restored version of one of MGM's most hallowed musicals is making the seasonal rounds with a run at the BFI and selected cinemas around the country. Directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1955, the piece drips with period charm, while its pairing of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra is still capable of generating a box office buzz 60 years later. But (I'll just whisper this) it may seem like a bit of a slog for modern audiences. Read more... |
Kon-TikiMonday, 15 December 2014
Nothing proves a theory better than practice, and this is exactly what Norwegian adventurer-archaeologist-ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl did in 1947 when he and five companions sailed a raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove his hypothesis of how the Pacific islands were originally settled. He thought people first arrived there from the east, not the west, contravening the then-prevailing scientific orthodoxy. But Polynesians didn’t have boats, cried the establishment. Read more... |
The CircleFriday, 12 December 2014
Remembering the early years of social and sexual liberation in Swiss gay life, Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary The Circle (Der Kreis) has rich affection for its subject. In particular, that’s the relationship between teacher Ernst Ostertag and drag artist Robi Rapp, who first met in the Fifties and have been partners ever since. Read more... |
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five ArmiesWednesday, 10 December 2014
“At the end of all things,” to quote Frodo Baggins in the dim and distant future, there is purgative fire and resounding clangour in the final instalment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit triptych. Thirteen years after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson has concluded his JRR Tolkien opus with an epic more thunderous than its two predecessors. The Battle of the Five Armies is also a little closer in tone to the LOTR films... Read more... |
The Great MuseumTuesday, 09 December 2014
I don’t think any of us will look at a museum in quite the same way after this dazzling documentary. For several years the Austrian film-maker Johannes Holzhausen and his team followed what seems to be scores of the working staff inhabiting Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (KMH), as they physically cared for the remarkable objects in their care, worried about how best to put them on view for the public, and met continually to discuss museum matters. Read more... |
The Green PrinceMonday, 08 December 2014
Finding a clear narrative among the deadly uncertainties of the long-lasting stand-off between Israel and Palestine is a challenge. Israeli documentarist Nadav Schirman, drawing on a real-life story, has honed The Green Prince down into a bare story of the ongoing contact between Gonen Ben Yitzhak, an officer of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service, and Mosab Hassan Yousef, a young man from the very centre of the Palestinian leadership who becomes his agent. Read more... |
The GrandmasterFriday, 05 December 2014
Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai has ventured into new territory with The Grandmaster. Many years in the making, his new film is a remarkable portrayal of martial-arts traditions, specifically the story of kung fu master Ip Man from his early life in mainland China on the eve of World War II, through to post-war exile in Hong Kong. Read more... |
St VincentThursday, 04 December 2014
God love Bill Murray. Just when you think you can't take yet another film about the cross-generational divide that finds crotchety older person transformed by the company of youth (and vice-versa), along comes Murray's latest star vehicle, St Vincent, to inject new life into a more than time-honored conceit in a movie that feels quietly revelatory in all sorts of small ways, as well. Read more... |
Black SeaWednesday, 03 December 2014
Despite the presence of Jude Law as a disillusioned old underseadog, the real star of Black Sea is the 50-year-old Russian submarine on which most of the action takes place. Now called Black Widow, the vessel lives on the river Medway near Rochester (pictured below right), whither director Andrew MacDonald and his crew hastened with cameras at the ready . Read more... |
School of BabelTuesday, 02 December 2014
“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary. Read more... |
Eastern BoysMonday, 01 December 2014
Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. Read more... |
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