Film
emma.simmonds
Some films quite rightly have awards glory etched into their DNA, and when the admirably uncompromising Steve McQueen announced that his next project, focussing on the subject of slavery, would feature that cast, only a fool would have bet against it collecting armfuls of prizes. Moreover, the brutality and societal impact of slavery has seldom been seen on screen; thus in the words of its director, 12 Years a Slave fills "a hole in the canvass of cinema".Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup (as told to David Wilson) and adapted for the screen by John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave sees an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The agony of war and of surviving it almost destroyed Eric Lomax. A British POW after the fall of Singapore who was put to work by the Japanese on the Burma Railway, he suffered brutal and prolonged torture, trauma he dealt with in subsequent decades by sealing it inside him, and plotting revenge on his abusers as he fell into troubled sleep. Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man describes this and the reconciliation with one of his captors which finally defined his life.The week after Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Jonathan Teplitzky’s film again shows a man’s extraordinary capacity for forgiveness Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sacrilege alert: half the films released in the cinema can almost as happily be seen on a smaller screen. Flatulent Hollywood comedies, low-budget domesic dramas, most romcoms, the oeuvre of Leigh and Loach. The Great Beauty is not one of those films. As it comes out on DVD, it is important to advise anyone contemplating a purchase that the cinema is, if at all possible, the place to see this magnificent love letter to Rome, la città eterna. But it may not be possible, which is why this DVD is still an essential purchase. And even if you’ve already had the pleasure, this is also a covetable Read more ...
fisun.guner
Frances Ha has been likened most obviously to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, but the influence of French New Wave cinema, with films such as Godard’s Breathless, can also be seen. This very likeable and stylish film certainly captures the look and texture of both.But while Sam Levy’s black and white cinematography may not be a match for Gordon Willis’s stunning photography on Manhattan, the film’s New York location is just as key: as a wry study in aspiration and real estate, the film’s episodic narrative follows the impecunious Frances as she drifts through various apartments, her living Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History has been told in many ways on film, but Rithy Panh achieves something new, something unique and unsettling, in The Missing Picture. It’s the story of his native Cambodia, specifically the years from 1975, when the Khmer Rouge occupied the country's capital Pnomh Penh: driven by an ideology (a mixture of Marx and Rousseau, as it's described here) that sought to exterminate individuality in society, they created Democratic Kampuchea, an attempt at a new classless world that tried to do away with everything from the past, and killed a large part of the population in the process. It’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It took the last 16 years of Nelson Mandela’s life, almost to the day, to bring his autobiography to the screen. South African producer Anant Singh eventually handed Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to British director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson to make a film for international audiences. The iconic weight of a violent rebel who became a living saint can’t wholly be thrown off in this authorised (though freely made) biopic. It does, though, remind you that Nelson Mandela was very far from Mother Teresa. Rough and earthy struggle preceded his Robben Island refinement into Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)Writer-director Quentin Tarantino proves once again he’s a master filmmaker with this double Oscar-winning revenge drama which reinvents the Western for a modern audience. The central cast are all Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Upstream Colour charts the stages of a relationship. First, Kris is introduced as external forces impact on her, turning her life on its head. She then encounters Jeff. As they get to know each other, a medical crisis brings them closer together and they get married. They then realise these forces are affecting them both and are drawn towards a way of taking control by eradicating them. The film ends with them, and others also affected by what was out of their reach, taking charge of their own destiny.Upstream Colour (the film is actually titled Upstream Color and appears thus in its credits Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.So why have us film bods at theartsdesk plumped for a top 13 this year? Well, 13 is the number of TAD's film critics that voted in our end-of-year Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hollywood’s sexism and obsession with youth half-hobble this lunge for the grey dollar. In a cast seemingly assembled by birth certificate more than likely chemistry, 69-year-old Michael Douglas is playboy businessman Billy, whose Vegas stag weekend before marriage to a thirtyish beauty requires the presence of childhood pals Paddy (Robert De Niro, 70), Archie (Morgan Freeman, 76) and Sam (Kevin Kline, 66, pictured below).The four have mixed feelings as they ready their creaking bones for Sin City debauchery, and inevitable life lessons. Bored Kline’s wife sends him off with a condom and her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This progressively darkening Liverpool love story centres on scenes of sadomasochistic sex. Its 90 minutes divide neatly after 45, when Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) wrecks her relationship with Victor (Julian Morris) by carving his back with broken glass. But Kieran Evans’ feature debut is mostly gentler and sadder than that.The violence Kelly brings into the bedroom after she meets Victor at a club intensifies sex as a place of dangerous refuge from the outside world’s storms. When Kelly goes to her erratic mum’s for tea, she finds her violent ex-boyfriend there too; Victor’s happy-go- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Patchy but visual, actor/director Ben Stiller ignores the Hollywood motto of not remaking anything good to create an all-encompassing take on the daydreamer Walter Mitty.Stiller’s dramatic romantic comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is far from the beloved 1947 original starring Danny Kaye based on James Thurber’s magical short story of 1939. This glossy reboot written by Steven Conrad (Pursuit of Happyness) sees Stiller as Walter, an exceptional everyman (if there can be such a thing) whose life is spent in heroic daydreams as he copes with what he sees as a non-heroic life. Losing his Read more ...