Film
Tom Birchenough
The Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice by director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the closing ceremony of the Berlinale last night, as well as picking up the best actor prize for its star Liao Fan.It was a night for Asian cinema in general, with the best actress award given to Japan’s Haru Kuroki, playing in veteran director Yoji Yamada’s The Little House, while Chinese cinematographer Zeng Jian came away with the Silver Bear for outstanding contribution in the technical categories for his work on Lou Ye’s Blind Massage.Expectations were high for 'Boyhood' by Berlin favourite Richard Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy, playing in Berlinale’s Forum programme, recycles that legend, only in his film Houellebecq is vanished to a gypsy compound outside Paris where he’s held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.Nothing then of the atmosphere of Houellebecq’s most recent Goncourt Prize- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at the Berlinale, in the documentary category: the Teddies have been going since 1987, making them no less of a pioneer in the gay world, their brief to acknowledge and support LGBT cinema from around the world. (The maelstrom that is the Berlinale’s programming meant I missed the Portugese drama, Daniel Ribeiro’s The Way He Looks that took the Teddy Read more ...
james.woodall
Not the least remarkable thing about Richard Linklater's Boyhood is its being shot over a decade – that’s probably a first in film history. And it’s more than a sociological experiment, portraying in vibrant contemporary detail and a lot of observational fun the growing-up in Texas of a little boy, Mason, which will surely have an extraordinary impact on the life of the actor, Ellar Coltrane, who played him. It must be a bit like having a red carpet rolled out for you before you know the meaning of or have ever uttered the words “acting”, “award” and “celebrity”.Linklater won this year’s Read more ...
james.woodall
French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off the street but which are never less than thoughtful – and that is part of the problem. His stage imagination, so flexibly at work in The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Far Side of the Moon (which also became a film), wreaks endless visual and sonic surprises, and also allows itself to probe, three-dimensionally, philosophically. The screen can flatten Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Pretty well the last film in the current array of Oscar hopefuls to reach Britain is also (in my view, anyway) the best. That's saying something as we gear up for an Academy Awards ceremony paying tribute to the strongest selection of nominees filmdom has fielded in an age. But even to talk about Spike Jonze's Her in this way seems tantamount to cheapening it by way of commodification, when the truth is that this quietly devastating, achingly moving film seems to come from a private and privileged place all its own. Small wonder that Jonze has emerged as the front-runner for the Oscar for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”It was an idea that obviously came to fascinate Wenders, and he has been integral in the process of expanding it into Cathedrals of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The makers of 8 Minutes Idle have a kickstarter campaign to thank for the cinema release of their offbeat comedy, which was made in 2012 but has sat on the shelf since. It's a charming (perhaps knowingly so) low-budget romcom, adapted from his novel of the same title by Matt Thorne with Nicholas Blincoe, and directed with a light touch by Mark Simon Hewis.It covers an awful but life-changing week in the life of Dan (the ever wonderful Tom Hughes, a huge star in the making), a young call-centre worker in Bristol who's drifting through life by way of emotional inertia. On Monday morning his mum Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Stellan Skarsgård is having a good Berlinale. The veteran Swedish actor proved the main calming influence in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volume One (***), which the Berlin festival screened as a world premiere in the director’s version, running at 145 minutes. That’s about 25 minutes more than the UK will be seeing from 21 February, when both parts of the work will be released. There are no prizes for guessing which scenes seen in Berlin won’t make it to your local screen, on grounds of decency – though there will be for spotting the exact moments when, and how, body-doubles were cut into Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us romance with added zombies.However, recent efforts The Decoy Bride, Not Another Happy Ending, I Give It a Year and About Time Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whenever someone wants to dispel the gender simplification that female directors only make feelgood films, they wheel out Kathryn Bigelow, whose action movies are cited as being tougher than any man’s. It’s a spurious debate, admittedly, but if we were to play that game I’d definitely bring Denis into Bigelow’s corner. The Frenchwoman doesn’t do action, per se. But her films can be tough as nails, black as pitch, and as disquieting as they are marvellous.Denis can be sweet, for sure. Despite its urban tensions, 35 Shots of Rum is a touching account of father-daughter affections. But for the Read more ...