Film
Jasper Rees
Lance Armstrong is a Hollywood villain who just happens to be real. He bullies, lies, manipulates, cheats and destroys lives until righteous crusaders hunt him down and drive a stake through his heart. And that, more or less, will be the plot of the movie Stephen Frears is working on now. Popcorn munchers demand nothing less than a comeuppance for the bad guy. To cite Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily: that’s what fiction means. It’s not quite what happens in The Armstrong Lie.Alex Gibney, who has made uncompromising films about Enron and WikiLeaks, was the ideal director Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After his outsized triumph as conman Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle, Christian Bale is gaunt and stringy again (Jennifer Lawrence will be happy to hear) in this minor-keyed, intensely atmospheric story of two brothers in an America that time forgot. It's set in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, a ghost town all but abandoned by its devastated steel industry. "Born down in a dead man's town", as the Boss put it in "Born in the USA". As the camera roams over its poor, pinched houses in the rain, you know nothing good is about to happen here.Bale plays Russell Baze, still clinging to his job at Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Just what kind of beast is Peter Berg's Lone Survivor? A jingoist justification for the continuing conflict in Afghanistan? A cautionary tale questioning the rules of engagement? War porn? An intense vehicle for its talented stars? Or, in fact, a critique of the American war machine which sends young men out to be slaughtered and provides them with scant support? Seemingly improbably, Lone Survivor can be viewed in all of these ways and thus looks set to divide audiences, perhaps along national lines, perhaps along political ones. Only one thing is for certain: it's a film that will get Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The DVD release of this devastating film brings its impact even closer. Watching it at home is a squirm-inducing experience which brings moments where it’s hard to fight the urge to leave the room or put your hands in front of your face. The overpowering effect stems from more than the discomfort of watching the young boys Arbor and Swifty attempting to navigate through a world which is against them, out to exploit them and, ultimately, probably going to exclude them despite the integrity of their friendship.The Selfish Giant hinges on the extraordinary, magnetic presences of Connor Chapman Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who'd have thought that buried deep within the bromance antics of That Awkward Moment, the latest essay in celluloid dude-dom to confirm the notion that guys will be guys, would lurk a Shakespeare comedy? But forsooth, writer-director Tom Gormican's feel-good essay in three lads larking about in New York takes as its inspiration none other than Love's Labour's Lost, that Bardic study in the limits of celibacy and high spirits dampened down near the final curtain by death.Not that it will make a farthing of difference if you don't know your Shakespeare comedies and just want some frat-house, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s hard to believe your eyes when you see a film now actually exists in which Stallone meets De Niro in the boxing ring. It’s Rocky v Raging Bull, of course, a fantasy match-up no one sane ever fantasised about. It sounds like the result of a Hollywood pitch meeting gone mad, stunt casting of imperial chutzpah.But here they really are: Stallone, the Orson Welles of action, whose career has been a constant disappointment since the heartfelt brilliance and nerve of writing Rocky and insisting he star in it; and De Niro, an enigmatic, exacting genius for 10 years who, tired, came back to earth Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In a world where men still dominate the voice-over industry, one woman triumphantly defies the odds. Lake Bell’s directorial debut in which she also stars is a satirical sort-of feminist exposure of this little-known strand of the film world, cushioned by light romantic comedy.Bell plays Carol Solomon, an eccentric, slightly hopeless heroine who strives to break into this unfamiliar showbiz niche as a voice-over artist, only to end up competing with her famous father Sam Soto (played with perfectly enunciated self regard by Fred Melamed). Despite her endearing flaws she overcomes vanity, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Assuming you care at all, your favourite incarnation of Tom Clancy's industrious CIA agent Jack Ryan is probably Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Before him came Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, and afterwards there was Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears.But Affleck's Ryan was a dozen years ago, enough of a gap to give fresh-faced new boy Chris Pine (who has also rebooted Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk) some space to put his personal stamp on the role. This new episode is a kind of Ryan prequel, a story created by screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen's brooding homage to the Greenwich Village folk scene, is set in 1961 (January probably), just before Bob Dylan's revelatory songs popularised it. The film is named for its protagonist, a working-class singer-guitarist suggested by the seminal Village folk-blues performer and musicians' mentor Dave Von Ronk. The undomiciled Llewyn also inherited Phil Ochs's habit of crashing on other performers' couches.Portrayed with consummate weary restraint by Oscar Isaac, Llewyn is not a prepossessing movie hero. Selfish and self-destructive, capable of being Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Anything planned as Oscar-bait never works – although the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that underpins the film August: Osage County has a pedigree to please the Academy. By some accounts, it began with a lunch between Harvey Weinstein and Emmy-winning director/producer John Wells (The West Wing). Before you knew it, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts were cast, along with Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch and Sam Shepard.Tracy Letts's black comedy - seen on stage first in Chicago and then Broadway and the National Theatre in London - was a deft mix of funny and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The “Good War” was so vast and intricate, its moral perspectives shift according to dozens of national points of view. 1944: The Final Defence lands us in the middle of Finland’s second battle for national survival against the Soviet Union, whose 1939 invasion had been startlingly defeated. The Finns were among the eastern nations who, caught between a rock and a hard place, then joined Nazi Germany in its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. In June 1944, D-Day meant little to Finns as the Soviets rolled back in, battering their defenders towards a line around the village of Tali.Tali-Ihantala Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It's no discredit to Sandra Bullock and George Clooney that they didn't venture into outer space when filming Gravity – setting aside other considerations, the insurance costs would have been prohibitive. There is little doubt, however, that had Buster Keaton begun his film acting career in 1987 (instead of 1917) and cast himself as an astronaut who must dodge a blizzard of high-speed debris and become unmoored while spacewalking, he would have insisted on performing such stunts himself high above Earth, having first won his NASA badge. Yes, Keaton would have drifted off into the void, Read more ...