Film
emma.simmonds
The Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson first burst onto the scene in 1998 with the chaotically romantic Show Me Love (original title Fucking Åmål), a story of a love affair between two teenage girls which shocks a small Swedish town. He followed that with commune comedy Together (2000) before eventually segueing into darker territory with films such as Lilya 4-Ever (2002), A Hole in My Heart (2004) and Mammoth (2009) which focussed on sex trafficking, amateur porn and the ills of globalisation respectively.His latest We Are the Best! revisits Show Me Love's shy-girl-wild-girl dynamic but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spider-senses will be buzzing alarmingly before the end, as deadly danger approaches Peter Parker and his loved ones - just the sort of danger, in fact, that some viewers may remember from the distant days of 2004, and Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi’s superhero movie high-water mark. It’s the problem that won’t go away for the series reboot Sony’s budget and creative conflicts with Raimi required, when the series had only just begun. Everyone has done an excellent job on director Marc Webb’s exciting, well-crafted sequel to his first Spider-Man film. But it’s impossible to reboot audiences’ brains, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This April is proving the kindest month for cinephiles. Hot on the heels of Mark Cousins’ engrossing A Story of Children and Film comes another documentary about cinema of captivating, encyclopaedic interest, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Celluloid Man. The director’s immediate subject is PK Nair, the man who created India’s National Film Archive (NFA). It’s thanks to Nair that many early classics of that nation’s film heritage – India is as cinema-centred a country as any in the world, with many of its national languages giving rise to distinct branches of the industry – have been preserved at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.We Are the Best! is the story of Bobo, Klara and their unlikely soul mate Hedvig. It’s about their assertion of individuality and how Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bill Forsyth’s 1979 debut feature is so polished shouldn’t be a surprise; he’d been working on documentaries and short films since the 1960s. Several of these are included as generous bonuses on this disc. KH-4 and Mirror are offbeat mini-dramas, but more pertinent is Oscar Marzaroli's Glasgow 1980, an upbeat short edited by Forsyth in 1970, outlining in optimistic fashion how the city would soon be transformed for the better. The depressing gap between aspiration and reality is clear in That Sinking Feeling. Glasgow remains grubby and congested, its pasty-faced denizens negotiating a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The contradictions and iniquities of Panama City were very much in evidence last week. The city opened Central America’s first subway system, which many claim is a $2billion folie de grandeur for outgoing president Ricardo Martinelli, rather than a necessity; meanwhile, a fire destroyed one of the city's dilapidated old city buildings, killing a number of squatters who had refused to remove themselves from the path of gentrification, and whose lives would have benefited from an infinitesimal fraction of the money spent on the subway.Here was hubris and suffering, side by side in a city still Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first line of his Wikipedia entry says that Tom Hardy "is an English actor" (he was born in Hammersmith), but for the 84 minute duration of Locke I was fully prepared to accept that he came from Llangollen or Llareggub. The film's narrative floats on Hardy's warming Welsh brogue like a boat navigating heaving tides and contrary currents, as his character Ivan Locke tries to cope with his life disintegrating around his ears.It's not easy to devise an entirely fresh form of film-making, but writer/director Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Dirty Pretty Things) has had a pretty good go here. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bradenville is on the way up. The town might only have one bank, but it does have a copper mine and a newly opened pyjama factory. In Arizona, it’s sufficiently isolated to seem the right target for a trio of bad guys looking to help themselves to what’s in that bank. Their plans culminate on a Saturday.The 1955 film Violent Saturday is, potentially, standard film noir. A darkly drawn bank heist caper, it is also a Peyton Place-style melodrama examining the lives of townsfolk, their infelicities, insecurities and foibles. The two styles exist in parallel and meet head on the fateful Saturday Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Making sense of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is impossible. Beyond some early scene-setting, this Giallo-inspired film has no narrative and, apart from its protagonist, it becomes increasingly difficult to work out who is who, what is what and whether anything relates to anything else. Depicting reality is not on the minds of Belgian director and screenwriter, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. An impressionistic take on Italian genre cinema of the Seventies, it confounds, then delights and ultimately electrifies.The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (L'étrange couleur des larmes Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
A mouth-watering mixture of romance, drama and comedy is delivered in this fresh and impressive debut from Indian writer-director Ritesh Batra. A poignant and bittersweet relationship between a lonely housewife and a man on the brink of retirement is set in motion via a mistake by the legendary dabbawalla lunchbox delivery service of Mumbai who mix up an order.Housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is stuck in a desperately unhappy marriage and as a final attempt to make things better she prepares a delicious surprise meal for her husband to grab his attention. Unfortunately it's mistakenly delivered to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After reinvigorating the actioner in 2011 with The Raid and its furious flurry of feet and fists, what next for the obscenely talented Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans? More of the same? Well, not quite. The sequel widens its net and extends its running-time, taking the action from a Jakarta tower block to the city's streets and dividing its time between the gangs competing for control of the city. Returning are Evans' martial arts muse Iko Uwais (with whom this marks his third collaboration) and the almost embarrassingly exciting ultra-violence.Just as computer games have evolved their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Atom Egoyan’s stock has dropped a bit in the 21st century. This box-set of his first seven films remains – along with his response to the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Ararat (2002) – the essence of his work to date.These early films have as much personal character as his compatriot and mentor Cronenberg’s. His feature debut Next of Kin (1984), in which a teenager escapes his loveless home by pretending to be a Toronto Armenian family’s long-lost son, introduces several themes: carefully faked identities, and the erasable memories enabled by video-tape. Family Viewing (1988), Speaking Parts Read more ...