Film
Karen Krizanovich
Miss this “gay” film at your peril - a thriller with a stronger story than most. Directed and written by Alain Guiraudie (King of Escape), Stranger at the Lake’s a stealthy ineluctable drama that draws the audience in as few other films can, with explicit nudity and sex integral to its unfolding.A gay cruising lake is the solo setting where Franck (Pierre Dalndonchamps) goes to socialise and have casual sex. Out of shape, older bloke Henri (Patrick D'Assumçao) becomes his friend and a kind of Greek chorus, outlining the film’s subtext. It is Michel (Christophe Paou) who attracts attention as Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Any synopsis of Two Days, One Night is bound to make it sound like a worthy, sub-Loachian drama: A young mother, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), recently off work with depression, is made redundant from a small factory. In her absence, 14 of her 16 colleagues have voted to take their bonuses rather than let her keep her job. But she persuades her boss to host a second round of voting two days later, to allow her the weekend to persuade her fellow workers to support her.However, none of the above takes into account the brilliance of the Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, or the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Frankly, the idea of a female superhero flying solo at the front of a modern movie is becoming a bit of a joke. Despite there being a Wonder Woman film in the pipeline, that this relies on the success of "Batman vs. Superman" (both of whom have had their fair share of reboots) is disheartening. But going into an X-Men film there’s always the hope of both sexes having gripping storylines - a trend we’ve also seen play out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier - so step forward Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique. In a film that’s all about righting past wrongs you can't do much better than casting Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With this year's Cannes Film Festival in full swing, the winner of last year's Best Director prize gets a belated UK release. Heli is the third feature from the Spanish-born, Mexican-raised Amat Escalante, following Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008). Set in a ravaged town in rural Mexico, Escalante's film shows a country enslaved by the drugs trade, its authorities corrupted and its people living in poverty and fear. By combining compositional magnificence and hard-to-watch content Heli gives us beauty intermingled with beastliness.Heli finds children growing up far too fast, while the Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly everything may have been said or written about the relationship of artist-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s masterpiece to Solomon Northup’s 1853 book relating how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. But there can be no end to observations on how the true story is unfolded. We know from the title that the protagonist begins, and will end, as a free man, so it’s a question of pacing the narrative. Which McQueen does with absolute mastery, binding the visual beauty or horror of every frame to a genius art of storytelling in film.There are countless examples of dramatic juxtaposition which Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability. Here, in his second film as a director, consolidating his credentials as a director-actor after his impressive directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which drew favourable comparisons with Sam Peckinpah, he portrays a bitter, seen-it-all outsider, cajoled into helping a lonely 35-year-old, "bossy and plain" virgin (the splendidly unplain Hilary Swank) transport three insane married women back Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Favourite of the Coens, John Turturro’s fifth turn at the helm is a surprisingly lively, enjoyable fable of male prostitution. After the shuttering of the New York City bookstore where he worked for Murray (Woody Allen), Fioravante (Turturro) is talked into being the male meat in a female sandwich between Selima (Sofia Vergara) and Murray's dermatologist Dr Parker (Sharon Stone). Meanwhile, Fioravante doesn't fall for either of his lady-pals. Instead, he finds himself drawn to untouchable Hasidic widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), she herself shuttered since her husband's death. To add to the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A blow to the head provides the catalyst needed for Abby (Robin Weigert) to re-think her life in Concussion, writer-director Stacie Passon's acute American indie about a lesbian couple coming adrift and the new life charted by one of the two women, in particular. Would Abby end up welcoming (female) sexual partners for pay to her freshly purchased high-end Manhattan loft had her young son not accidentally sent a baseball winging its way to her head, thereby jolting her reality? Who's to say: among the multiple virtues of Passon's smart, subtly revealing film - this director's debut feature - Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literal miracle in this earthily comic 1956 romance happens at the end. The deeper magic for producer-screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was the “small daily miracles” he found in its “extraordinary” Soho setting. He wrote the script in 1934, at the start of life in England as a Hungarian Jewish refugee, via France, from Germany’s newly Nazi film industry. In the two decades it took to make it, Pressburger wrote, produced and edited one of the greatest sequences in British cinema with director Michael Powell - A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Discussing what appealed to him in Patricia Highsmith’s simmering thriller The Two Faces of January, first-time director Hossein Amini landed on the deliberate lack of character motivation: “She doesn’t really explain why people do things.” This very obfuscation drew attention at the time of the novel’s 1964 publication, when the reader at Highsmith’s publisher identified “a frightening sense of the neurotic” in her approach to drawing characters.A lack of motivation is far from ideal in the mind of most actors, and there is a sense that Two Faces’ script is at times working against its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble may well be the film that foretold the end of Communism in Poland. Its script gestation period lasted almost 14 years, starting from 1962, and though its official release in 1977 was kept to a minimal level by the authorities, even in that form it’s believed that almost a fifth of the nation’s population saw the work.Aleksander Scibor-Rylski’s script plays loosely with the Citizen Kane narrative device of hunting down the personal truth behind a past legend. In this case it’s a socialist hero bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, centre, main Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Born in an era when the Japanese were censored out of making a straightforward post-Hiroshima film, King of the Monsters Godzilla – or aka his infinitely cooler Japanese name Gojira – is a hero, cultural phenomenon and metaphor: he represents nature that can both kill and save. As a film star, however, he’s moved from ultra low-budget to high in over 28 films of various quality. The original 1954 Japanese film produced by Toho is often considered the best with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version almost killing the monster and the franchise off entirely.To paraphrase Jennifer Lawrence’s character Read more ...