Film
Katherine McLaughlin
The beautifully adorned Grand Budapest Hotel is not only home to the fastidious, foul-mouthed concierge Gustave H. and his bellboy and confidante Zero but to a myriad of other fantastic characters. This is director Wes Anderson's candy coloured ode to the art of storytelling, and his tribute to the actors he's collaborated with and strong friendships he's forged via his illustrious filmmaking career. Anderson's eighth film is a warming, welcoming and, of course, whimsical comedy caper which whizzes by at a break-neck pace and is gifted with his signature air of melancholy.This hotel is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Ealing Studios was known for comedy, but when it released Dead of Night in 1945, it unleashed on movie-goers the classic template of portmanteau horror for decades to come. The film comprises six tales – five supernatural stories and a framing narrative in which architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Jones) arrives at a country house, only to find he recognises not only the house and its rooms but everyone in it, as figures from half-remembered nightmares that slowly, inexorably come to life as each one embarks on a tale of the uncanny.This nightmarish, circular framing device is part of what gives Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may not have won the Best Picture Oscar, but Gravity's sack of gongs for cinematography, sound editing, original score and more was richly deserved, while Alfonso Cuarón's acute directorial vision brought its own reward. I was amazed by Gravity on first viewing, and watching it again on disc it's even better. I've always found the notion of travelling into the infinite freezing vacuum of space a horrifying prospect, and perhaps only Kubrick's 2001 can match Gravity in its ability to evoke its incomprehensible and unfeeling emptiness. However, were one forced to part company with terra Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If ever an Oscar ceremony pointed to the fundamentally schizoid nature these days of Hollywood’s defining love-in, the 86th annual Academy Awards was it. On the one hand, you had an out-gay host in Ellen DeGeneres taking selfies, ordering pizza, and generally trying to treat the crowd at the Dolby auditorium as an extension of her own funky, vaguely edgy persona.On the other, you had a running theme about heroism in the movies that landed as limply as leading actor Matthew McConaughey’s cringe-making acceptance speech, an extended paean to God and to the actor himself that seemed utterly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's the astonishing thing about the 2014 Oscars: for the first time in memory, there are actually three or four nominees that - dare one say it? - actually merit consideration as the year's best. Is this because films are actually getting better? That seems a perverse argument to make amid a climate when so much talent is migrating away from cinema towards TV or even the stage (Steven Soderbergh, for instance, who is in rehearsals with a play Off Broadway). But quite possibly as the tentpole franchises get increasingly generic, their opposite numbers are flourishing, as well, so that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For those who haven't seen it, the funny face of the title belongs to Audrey Hepburn. As preposterous as that seems for someone so iconically gorgeous and although when others fail to notice her beauty it seems insane, Hepburn was famously insecure, so when her character Jo Stockton says, "I have no illusions about my looks, I think my face is funny" it doesn't sound insincere.The ravishing, Technicolor-ed Funny Face sees an independent woman turned into a bride, an intellectual transformed into an obedient beauty. Hepburn plays Jo, an employee of a "sinister" Greenwich Village bookstore Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“Follow the instructions."David Lean’s suggestion to a costume designer shows the importance of the script – a film’s “recipe”. This is why the Oscar categories for Best Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay are so important: without great bones, we'd have nothing good to watch.In the second part of our Oscars preview, here are our predictions and picks for the screenplay gongs, alongside our look at the scene-stealers in the supporting acting categories.ADAPTED SCREENPLAYIn the Adapted Screenplay category, the leading nominee is, as expected, John Ridley’s superb script for 12 Years a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At some point during Non-Stop - a mostly serviceable though increasingly nuts peril-on-a-plane movie - I began to doubt that Liam Neeson had ever had a credible career. Recently we've seen him starring in assorted nonsense such as Battleship and Wrath of the Titans and if you go back a few years you'll recall him looking bored in The Phantom Menace. But what we've gotten particularly used to is Neeson as the middle-aged action man, the skull cruncher from the pretty hideous Taken movies. There might have been a time when we thought he was elevating such films with his presence, but I think Read more ...
David Nice
Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There aren’t many understated films about cannibal clans. Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, the Mexican original on which this American remake is based, reeked of despair and depravity, in a tainted Mexico City where a family fed on the homeless. Director Jim Mickle has almost inevitably made a sleaker, less disturbing film. More surprising is just how slow a burn it is. We know something is wrong with the Parkers: mother Emma (Kassie De Paiva), who falls down and dies hawking up black blood in the first scene, stern, grieving patriarch Frank (Bill Sage), teenage daughters Rose (Julia Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Is it just me or are the Oscars getting better? I don't necessarily mean the show itself, rather the films selected for nomination and the eventual winners. In recent years we've seen films as brilliant and diverse as The Artist, The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men take the top prize. And whilst The King's Speech, Slumdog Millionaire and Argo might have been crowd pleasers, they were also finely crafted and help banish memories of seeing Chicago, A Beautiful Mind and Crash crowned, or Forrest Gump trumping Pulp Fiction and Titanic sinking everything in sight.This year's nominees Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Basil Barrow (John Mills) is a proud, repressed, upper-class lieutenant colonel who was traumatized by his experiences in a Japanese POW camp. Shortly after the war, he fulfils his ambition by taking command of the Scottish battalion once led by his grandfather. When his by-the-book methods are ignored, his stiff upper lip doesn't quiver, but one of his eyes twitches dementedly and his head looks as if it it might burst, like a plum. Mills was able to twitch that eye at will.The cause of Barrow's apoplexy is the acting colonel he has replaced, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness), a coarse, Read more ...