Film
emma.simmonds
"I first tasted semen when I was seven-years-old." Those are the first words spoken in Calvary, the superb second film from writer-director John Michael McDonagh. They're delivered by an unseen confessor addressing Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson). The priest's response: "It's certainly a startling opening line." Well, quite. Evidently fucking with us from the off, Calvary wants to shock and is inclined to nod and wink at its own machinations. However, what might at first seem like a movie that's merely incendiary and irreverent in nature gradually reveals itself capable of considerably Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s the bad books, it has been famously said, that make the good films. As for the good ones, they have to take their chances. There is so much more to lose, so many nuances of tone and subtleties of texture to be sacrificed. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is one such good book. It won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2007 and became a bestseller. Being a multi-stranded narrative peopled by a rich array of characters against an epic backdrop, its journey to the big screen was always on the cards.Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, it tells of two well-to-do, well-educated and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Every cinephile is going to have a personal perspective on Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film, an engrossing, affectionate, and frequently revelatory look over how aspects of childhood, and children, have been portrayed on screen over more than half a century, from almost every cinematic tradition that we’ve heard of – or, rather more often, that we haven’t heard of.That cinephile issue is going to revolve itself around whether any of his or her personal favourites have been left out of Cousins’ final cut. So I’ll get my own ones out of the way, directly – the amazing 24 Eyes from Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a bittersweet ballad of a movie. Based on alt.country singer-songwriter Willy Vlautin’s novel and set in wintry Reno, Nevada, it’s the tale of Frank Flannigan and his older brother Jerry Lee, and what happens when Jerry Lee commits an accidental, fatal crime, forcing them to go on the run.With Emile Hirsch as Frank, Stephen Dorff as Jerry Lee, Dakota Fanning as Frank’s ex- and Kris Kristofferson as a gruff second-hand car salesman-sage (pictured bottom left), Alan and Gabriel Polsky’s low-budget directorial debut was made with high-powered, justified faith.Strangely compressed, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Darren Aronofsky has made some of the most innovative and daring films that have ever been misunderstood. From Pi to Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Black Swan, his films have something to delight and upset everyone. That is as it should be – and Noah, his latest, is no exception.Noah (Russell Crowe) is an action man – a father and eco-warrior, a man of God’s word and his own, a protector of animals and a destroyer of men. Much has been written already that it revisits themes seen in The Fountain – a film that young men are more likely to love and weep while watching. But Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Goddamn The Hunger Games movies for reminding us (after the travesty that was the Twilight saga) that films based on YA fiction could be thought-provoking and thrilling, for they've only gone and hoiked our expectations up too high. Those expectations have recently been dashed by the likes of Ender's Game, The Mortal Instruments and Beautiful Creatures. And now along comes Divergent, directed by Neil Burger (Limitless) and based on the first of a series of - if we were to judge them solely by this film - very poor books by Veronica Roth.It's set in a futuristic Chicago which is still reeling Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Claustrophobia and a sense of huge space combine in Quebecois Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm. It’s an adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s stage play, and the former element must have worked particularly well in the theatre’s enclosed space. Transferring it to the screen Dolan has brought out an almost hypnotic enormity in the empty rural landscapes that act as counterpoint for this chamber drama with a main cast of just three, figures acting out a somehow perverse but chillingly convincing scenario of loss and deceit.Dolan opens his French-language film (Tom à la ferme) with a short Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Social mores and the nature of what’s taboo change as time passes. The once acceptable or abhorred can become the opposite. The psychedelic-era British film Wonderwall is a case in point. Its storyline is built around a man who finds a hole in the wall between his and his neighbour’s flat. The wall becomes the wonderwall of the title as he looks through it to a naked, or near-naked, woman.And yet this was not a film about the unpleasantness of a peeping tom. It was a fantasy, a whimsy from an era when free love was a bandwagon for jumping on. It had an unexpected afterlife as Oasis’s Noel Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Take some hot Fyodor Dostoyevsky, top it with two scoops of Jesse Eisenberg and stir with writer-director Richard Ayoade – and you'll have The Double, Ayoade’s second feature after his successful Submarine. You know to expect freshness, quirkiness and quality from that far southwestern pool of the UK creative arts. Stylish and sharp, this is a quirky black comedy that clicks with serious undertones, aided by terrific sound design and Eisenberg acting himself off the screen. It feels like Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich meeting Kafka, with a bit of Five Easy Pieces thrown in.It's the Read more ...
David Nice
Hands Over the City is to Naples at a crucial point in its 20th-century history what Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta is to the Italian capital and Visconti’s La terra trema to the Sicilian coast. Francesco Rosi’s decision to capture the only boom that Italy has ever really known in the early 1960s is an uncompromising film about the energy that directs itself to bad ends.Its embodiment is Rod Steiger’s Eduardo Nottola, a councillor who embroils city housing plans in his own profiteering property development. "So what’s new, or rather old?" you might ask. And indeed the film remains pertinent Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Always the bridesmaid but never the bride: that adage, and its many equivalents, courses through 20 Feet From Stardom, the hugely entertaining but also gently poignant documentary that was a popular winner at this year's Oscars. A look at the life of backup singers over time - who they were and are and where they have got to - Morgan Neville's short (90-minute) and bittersweet film casts a necessary spotlight on those show biz folk who aren't necessarily given centre-stage.It deepens our response that the given milieu also works as a metaphor for so many lives across all vocations that exist Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first outing of the re-tooled Captain America in 2011's The First Avenger was a bit of a hoot, thanks to its carefully-wrought 1940s setting and Stanley Tucci and Hugo Weaving portraying contrasting varieties of Teutonic craziness. Bringing the Cap into the present day after a 70-year slumber poses a few different problems, since he is quite literally a man out of time. It's really not that easy to take seriously a bloke who goes everywhere with a large tin shield clamped on his back, while everybody else has upgraded to hover-jets and laser-guided weapons.Still, while The Winter Soldier Read more ...