Film
Tom Birchenough
Gay cinema in Poland is emerging slowly, for understandable reasons, which makes Malgoska Szumowska’s accomplished, if somewhat traditional drama In the Name of something of a ground-breaker. Not least because its story is centred around the country’s most established institution, the Catholic church, putting the subject of homosexuality squarely into the national debate. Interestingly, and encouragingly, the film topped local box office results for its opening weekend last autumn.It has a very different setting from the more sophisticated urban milieu of last year’s other gay film from Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The opening days of the Berlinale have seen mixed reactions to high-profile English-language offerings. With its stylish sense of mittelEuropa, the festival’s premiere, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, apparently went down a treat. Much less kudos, though, went to George Clooney’s The Monuments Men (released in the UK this week, reviewed on theartsdesk today).More interesting, though not completely satisfying, was Rachid Bouchareb’s Two Men in Town (***), part of the Franco-Algerian director’s continuing exploration of the interaction between Islam and contemporary America. Bouchareb Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Nazi war machine had great taste: it wanted all of the world’s art treasure for itself. Someone had to stop them .Based on Robert M Edsel’s book, George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s screenplay takes a starry stab at telling a culturally serious World War Two story. Shot in both the UK and Germany, its moral values are high, but this tasteful war heist/thriller hits the ground flat-footed and doesn't get better.The story is cast with Clooney and, it seems, a handful of his friends who play art experts. After going through basic training with real ammunition, the slick seven land in Normandy Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
José Padilha’s glossy reimagining of RoboCop is entertaining but mostly forgettable. Geared towards the profitable 12A market, its good looking but illogical action sequences are no replacement for the grimy, grubby and magnificently realised dystopian world from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 scathing satire.Just like Verhoeven did back in the 1980s, Padilha is making his way into the Hollywood arena thanks to his adept hand at fast paced action sequences, which can be witnessed in his superb Elite Squad films. Unlike in Verhoeven’s version however, the screenplay penned by newcomer Joshua Zetumer Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Supposedly the first full-length film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first directed by a Saudi woman, Haifaa al-Mansour's Wadjda is also the first Saudi movie to be entered for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. That it wasn't selected is dispiriting. Oscar visibility would have drawn attention to Mansour's eye for telling images and the discretion with which she depicts Islam's suppression of women.The film's focusing on a young girl's symbolic quest for freedom was possibly considered a cliché in the wake of such affecting Iranian New Wave entries as The White Balloon ( Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Delve into the personal life of Charles Dickens and she emerges, revealing another side of an author whose stories seem so wholesome. According to The Invisible Woman author Claire Tomalin, Ralph Fiennes’ film about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is very different from the book upon which it is based. Scripted by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady and Shame), The Invisible Woman, in which Fiennes stars and well as directs, gives us a more complex view of Dickens-as-man, albeit through a dark lens, literally and metaphorically.Ellen Lawless Ternan (Felicity Jones) lived from 1839 to 1914, yet almost Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Extreme physical transformation is a double-edged sword for actors. Setting aside the metabolic repercussions of shedding huge amounts of weight from an already lean frame, as Matthew McConaughey did for the role of rodeo cowboy and accidental AIDS activist Ron Woodroof, there’s a risk that the aesthetic will distract from the work.This is a performance for which McConaughey is almost guaranteed to net the Best Actor Oscar next month, composing the highest peak yet in what has been one of the most efficient and absolute career turnarounds ever witnessed in Hollywood. It’s a full-blooded Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Le Week-End is the third film written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell to probe late-flowering lust. So empathetically do the duo depict Anne Reid's character in The Mother (2003), Peter O'Toole's in Venus (2006), and now those played by Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent that the unofficial trilogy constitutes a revolt against the cultural hegemony of teen movies.Nick (Broadbent) is a lecturer just fired by his Birmingham poly for making a racist remark to a female student. Initially unaware of his crisis, his wife Meg (Duncan) yearns to quit her job as a secondary school Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the letters, the readings; the charitable works, the endless walks; the awful childhood, the army of children, the abruptly terminated marriage, the puzzling relationship with two sisters-in-law, the long and clandestine affair.Vanishingly few of those biographers have been women. One of the many virtues of Claire Tomalin’s compact life of Dickens – it just Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The news that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died at the age of only 46 robs cinema of - almost unarguably - the greatest screen actor of the age, and certainly its outstanding character actor. Where once there was Charles Laughton, or Ernest Borgnine, for the past two decades there has been Philip Seymour Hoffman. They are all great film actors whom fate has fashioned in doughy clumps of misshapen flesh. The matinee idols got the looks and the girls: the character actors got the meatiest roles and the longevity. His death deprives all lovers of cinema of a longer career that would undoubtedly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The history of motor racing films is littered with detritus. While the sport itself, particularly back in the Sixties and Seventies, undoubtedly pitted man and machine against each other in circumstances where the smallest wrong-headed twitch could be fatal, Hollywood’s response has mostly been turgid: either po-faced, petrol-head fare such as Le Mans, Grand Prix and the Tony Scott/Tom Cruise turkey, Days of Thunder, or affable slapstick gibberish such as The Cannonball Run and Monte Carlo or Bust. This lame record, combined with director Ron Howard’s record of stirring unnecessary added Read more ...