Film
Madeleine Sackler
For the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, there are many risks to doing something that we might all take for granted: telling stories about our lives. These risks include censorship, blacklisting, imprisonment, and worse. But when the authorities forbid critical examinations of such topics as sexual orientation, alcoholism, suicide and politics, the Free Theatre responds by injecting these taboos into underground performances. Unfortunately, their activities eventually become too dangerous for even these individuals, and after a rigged election and a violent crackdown by the KGB, they are Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's not often we're told to strap ourselves in for a drama - it takes quite some skill to make the everyday excite and to make ordinary lives seem extraordinary, but these are gifts that the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has in abundance. His talent for meticulously structured, thriller-tense narratives, for coming at stories from an interesting angle (conducive to creating and capturing emotional charge) couldn't even be ignored by the Academy, who recognised 2011's A Separation outside the (niche) world cinema category, with an Oscar nomination for its screenplay alongside the gong Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Donald Cammell made two films that were close to his intentions: Performance and this. There were only four films altogether, in almost 30 years of trying. Wild Side, studio-savaged as Demon Seed had been, was restored to something like his wishes after he shot himself in 1996, defeated.White of the Eye is, then, the only untarnished testament to Cammell’s talent away from his Performance co-director Nic Roeg. It’s a 1986 film about a possible serial killer, Paul White (David Keith), and his wife Joan (Cathy Moriarty, pictured below). Each anonymous murder is highly stylised: a meat cleaver Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s sleazy being green. In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit The Frog stars as both himself and evil Constantine, a frog that would annex the Ukraine if he could, in a star-studded follow-up to the enjoyable hit The Muppets. Like the feature of 2011, Muppets Most Wanted has some terrific songs, even if it lacks the momentum and funny logic of its predecessor. Nevertheless, given a little time, the frog and his buddies warm up, brush off the dust and get down to the kind of Muppetry we crave. It’s one of those films you’re not sure about, but as you leave the cinema you'll be singing the songs as Read more ...
ellin.stein
If Errol Morris lived in Middle Earth he’d make a documentary about Sauron. If he taught at Hogwarts, he’d be turning his cameras on Voldemort. You get the idea. Morris is drawn to Dark Overlords, powerful men of steely ambition and ego, convinced of their own rightness even after events have proven that their wrong-headed ideas have demonstrably contributed to the sum of human misery.He can also claim to be the only person to have made documentaries about not one but two former U.S. Defense Secretaries (Ministers), the pinnacle of the Pentagon. The first was 2003’s Oscar-winning The Fog of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The big screen is no country for old women. The exception who proves the rule over and over again is of course Judi Dench. Of no actress is it more frequently said that you’d happily listen to her reading out the phone book. Her most recent masterclass in the tiny brushstrokes of screen acting is in Philomena, adapted from Martin Sixsmith’s book about helping an Irish woman to find the son she bore out of wedlock in 1952. Dench is very largely the reason it’s worth making an appointment to view.She plays Philomena Lee, a devout old woman with love and sadness in her heart leavened by a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You'd have to go a long way to find a film as truly, mind-bogglingly bad as A Long Way Down, which trumps A New York Winter's Tale as the worst celluloid entry in this still-young film year and may likely set the bar for some while to come. Adapted from the darkly comic 2005 novel from Nick Hornby, the movie about four suicidal malcontents who find solace in one another's company manages to trivialise and cheapen every aspect of human behaviour that it touches. Amidst the pervasive ineptitude, the astonishing Toni Collette wrings a tonal grace note or two out of the dross around her, which is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone who secretly liked High School Musical or is a fan of Mean Girls or Glee will find something to like in Darren Stein's candy-coloured high-school satire, which detonates some teenage culture bombs (albeit some of them years behind the curve) while giving some hearty laughs.When quiet and unassuming Tanner (Michael J Willett) is outed, suddenly he becomes hot property for the school's clique queens – Mormon princess 'Shley (Andrea Bowen), sassy drama diva Caprice (Xosha Roquemore) and bitchy blonde Fawcett (Sasha Piertse). If they all sound like stereotypes, you're absolutely right Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Given the world’s most famous crime organisation hails from Italy, it’s odd that we associate the best crime movies with elsewhere, notably Hollywood (not least its quintessential Mafia films, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II). But Italian directors have been contributing some memorable additions to the genre of late. And following The Consequences of Love and Gomorrah comes the scintillating Salvo.It opens with a terrific extended sequence. As Salvo (Saleh Bakri) drives his boss (Mario Pupella) through the Palermo streets, he’s edgy, expecting trouble – as though trouble comes Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Director David MacKenzie has made a prison drama for those who don’t like the genre and an ace in the hole for those who do. Starred Up is an example of how quality filmmaking captures an audience no matter what the topic – and here, that quality includes skilful cinematography, a tight script and tremendous performances from both leading and supporting cast. The result is that we get to see how the horror of prison life reflects the violent pockets of society outside. This is a film that edifies and also gives hope – even if that glimmer is currently beyond the realms of reality.Like his Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking. With his fifth feature - staring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin - Reitman Junior tries something different, something initially more dramatic, but ends up back in comic territory anyway, albeit unintentionally.Set in 1987 during the titular US holiday weekend and narrated by Tobey Maguire (who seems to do this a lot - see also The Ice Storm, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once in his stride as a director, Samuel Fuller never shied away from the controversial. The mental-hospital set Shock Corridor, from 1963, prefigured One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and touched on the arms race, incest, racism and the Korean War. A year later, his Naked Kiss sympathetically portrayed a prostitute. The final film he made in America, 1982’s White Dog, also pulled no punches and met the nature of racism head on. In some quarters of the press it was trailed as itself being racist. It was not released in America. Fuller then upped and offed to France where he had long been hailed Read more ...