Film
emma.simmonds
A fresh take on the fish-out-of-water story, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter finds a lonely Japanese woman reimagining herself as an adventuress and travelling to America in pursuit of a fictional fortune. As with others of the ilk, the film derives humour from confusion and the culture clash but rather than being primarily concerned with calamity David Zellner's fifth film (co-written with his brother Nathan) makes Kumiko's alienation and retreat into fantasy its heartbreaking focus.When we first meet 29-year-old Kumiko (2007 Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi of Babel fame), she's following a cloth Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Have you ever had one of those moments where your imagination has played out a situation the way you wish it had been? A witty comeback after a putdown, an irresistible one-liner after a brutal rejection. Meet Walter Mitty, full-time negative asset manager for Life magazine; part-time idealist who lives out his fantasies whilst appearing to be in some sort of trance.In the first and most exciting of these daydreams we see Mitty take a running leap from the train station platform to dive into a burning building. He emerges from the explosion with his co-worker's three-legged dog and wins Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's been four years since Ryan Reynolds' one-man-show Buried, which saw the thesp prove his acting chops while six foot under in a box. The Voices gifts him a full and talented supporting cast but it's a film that he also shoulders, cast in a role which requires him to be both the good guy and the very, very bad guy - and the source of the titular voices - despite ostensibly playing just one part.Working from a spiky script from Michael R. Perry (Paranormal Activity 2, TV's American Gothic), Marjane Satrapi's fourth film is almost cartoonish - which might seem fitting considering she's best Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The bitterness and jealousy of a relationship on the rocks is superbly handled in this disconcerting, witty and sharp indie which poses moral quandaries galore. Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) are the couple at odds with one another. The abrasions caused by their long-term relationship have led them to therapy and as a last resort their therapist (Ted Danson) sends them off on a break guaranteed to cement their love and rekindle their passion.On arrival the pair realise that not all is as idyllic and straightforward as they think, with the discovery of a magical guesthouse in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A quick scan of the credits gives grounds for optimism about Transcendence, with Johnny Depp leading a copper-bottomed supporting cast which includes Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany and Cillian Murphy. Director Wally Pfister may be a first-timer, but since he's been Christopher Nolan's cinematographer since 1999's Memento and won an Oscar for his work on Inception, you might give him the benefit of the doubt.Hence Transcendence frequently looks superb, and for a good chunk of its running time tweaks your attention with ideas about the (over) appliance of science and mankind's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There might seem to be a world of difference between Israeli director Eytan Fox’s last film, the coming-out-of-grief, intimate drama Yossi, and his new movie, the delicious, prove-what-you-can-do comedy musical Cupcakes. But both are about moving towards a better place, and overcoming the obstacles encountered along the way, with a little help from your friends.Cupcakes is about camaraderie as much as anything else, in this case a group of neighbours who have a tradition of getting together every year to watch UniverSong (as close to Eurovision as it comes – we presume that the latter name Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow – meet Allen Ginsberg, before the beard. Daniel Radcliffe plays an 18-year-old version of the infamous beat poet in the defining moments of the artist as a young man, and the true-life episode that created the genre.A bespectacled, sheltered, bookish Jew, Ginsberg frees himself from the shackles of a mentally ill mother and dodges the shadow of a middle-class education provided for by his bourgeoisie poet father Louis Ginsberg, by heading off to Columbia University. There, he is intoxicated by the kicks of jazz, a plethora of drugs and the heady thrill of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Home is truly where the heart is in writer-director Joanna Hogg's extraordinarily astute and artistically alive third film, which takes in the minutiae of a marriage. Exhibition is the story of two artists as they prepare to move out of the beloved home they have lived in for the best part of two decades and it imaginatively illustrates how where we live can challenge and define us. The star of Hogg's previous films (Unrelated and Archipelago) Tom Hiddleston - who has since gone stratospheric - sportingly cameos as a smarmy estate agent.The couple in question, known simply as "H" and "D", are Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We see the harshness of everyday life in Danis Tanović’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker first in its snowy, subsistence landscapes, as hero Nazif goes out to the forest to bring in whatever wood he can find to keep the family home warm. But by the end of the film, which took the Jury Grand Prix at last year’s Berlinale, we have seen, much more chillingly, the harshness of human behaviour.Nazif and his wife Senada are from Bosnia’s Roma community, living with their two young daughters in a remote village. Home life is happy, even if sparse in comforts, and Senada is pregnant. Nazif Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even Emma Thompson's finely honed deadpan delivery can go only so far in The Love Punch, a caper movie (remember those?) that moves from the implausible to the preposterous before sputtering to a dead halt. A revenge comedy nominally steeped in a desire to right social injustice, writer-director Joel Hopkins's film soon abandons all loftier aspirations in favour of one jaw-droppingly daft sequence after another. If you've ever wanted to see four distinguished British thesps d'un certain age don body-hugging scuba gear while they attempt to crash a French wedding by any means necessary, here's Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sixty years a masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is being released by the BFI on DVD and in a Blu-ray Steelbook. Digitally restored by Toho from an original 35mm master positive, it ought to be a mandatory purchase for movie-struck kids raised on CGI, 3D, and hyperbolic action epics that bear no relation to reality. They and everyone else should, of course, see it in a cinema, too.Set in 1587, during Japan's late Warring States period, it tells the story, both stirring and elegiac, of five seasoned ronin, a boastful charlatan, and a starstruck rookie hired to spearhead a mountain Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
If Crystal Fairy is about "the birth of compassion in someone’s life”, as director Sebastián Silva explained when it premiered at Sundance last year, then Magic Magic (which he shot at the same time) can be seen as a companion piece of sorts. It’s not too far a reach to assume Silva is testing his audience with this disorientating and incredibly taut look at mental illness. He explores how deep sympathies really lie for a disorder that some have difficulty empathising with and how the decisions arrived at by a pack mentality can lead to devastating consequences.Silva cleverly sets this Read more ...