Film
Nick Hasted
Romania’s cinema renaissance continues with this Golden Bear-winning study of smothering mother-love and social division. Director Calin Peter Netzer sneaks in outrageous black comedy and unsettling emotion, as architect Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) has her 60th birthday spoiled when her son Barbu kills a working-class child while speeding through a village.As with Italy’s post-war cinema, Romania’s current films combine humanity and social purpose. Cornelia and her doctor sister-in-law know money and status can fix almost anything. They enter a police station puffed up with protective fur Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Going from a talky debut with Margin Call, J C Chandor plunges Robert Redford into the solitary, (virtually) silent sea. All Is Lost is Hemingway for now. As the story of a solitary sailor in a single-handed adventure in the Indian Ocean, metaphor and meaning abound. Unlike some heavy, worthy piece of obtuse art house, however, Chandor wrests a tense, puzzling dynamic from a situation that could go cold in another filmmaker’s hands.Redford once said that for all his work with the Sundance Festival, no one ever returned the favour and gave him a job – until now. Chandor, a laudable Sundance Read more ...
theartsdesk
We at The Arts Desk are as fond as the next person of swans-a-swimming, partridges and pear-trees, not to mention gold rings, but be honest: 'tis already the season to be jolly sick and tired of all those knee-jerk compilations of Slade, sleighbells and Celine Dion's "O Holy Night". Without wishing to audition for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s time to admit that not everything made in the name of Christmas is of the highest artistic merit. But, it turns out, there’s gold in them there hills – snow-capp'd, natch.Tireless champions of excellence that we are, we’ve raided our memory banks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Since it’s Christmas time and everyone’s in office party mode, here’s the pub chat verdict on The Conjuring: “It’s that bloke who did Saw, starts off a bit naff, then gets quite scary for a bit, but blows it in the end. You getting them in? Mine’s a pint of Cobra. What? No, they always boil all the alcohol out of mulled wine in pubs, but I’ll have a port, if you’re buying. Yeah, there are a couple of bits that make you jump, like when this zombie-witch thing leaps off a wardrobe but it’s not as scary as the trailer made it look. Cheers! No, I’ll sip the port, not down it in one, thanks.” Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The exquisitely eclectic David O. Russell is fast becoming the go-to director for Oscar hungry actors. His last two films, 2010's The Fighter and 2012's Silver Linings Playbook, garnered their respective casts an astonishing seven Academy Awards nominations between them, including three wins. His latest, American Hustle, combines key cast members from those two films, creating an awards monolith (the New York Film Critics Circle would agree - they named it Best Picture earlier this month). But if the cast might make it seem impossibly worthy, the best thing about American Hustle is that it's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was released in 2004 it became a sleeper hit and has since appeared on several “Funniest Movies of All Time” lists. Fans have had to wait nearly a decade for a sequel to see how the eponymous news anchor’s life has panned out, and what has happened to his KVWN colleagues – co-anchor Veronica Corningstone, weatherman Brick Tamland, sportscaster Champ Kind and field reporter Brian Fantana – since they worked together on San Diego's local television station in the 1970s.Finally Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is upon us, after a huge Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It’s very unusual to hear ballet dancers talk. The extent of ballerina acting is normally a flamboyant point at a ring finger to announce a wedding, dramatically wiping away tears to express sadness or furrowing a heavily pencilled brow to portray anger. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to see that the two ballet dancers employed for the main parts - soloist Cindy Jourdain, formerly of the Royal Ballet, and Arionel Vargas, principal dancer with the English National Ballet – can manage the theatrics as well as they do in this sweet little independent film, directed by Christopher Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Perhaps 20 people in thick puffa jackets and clumpy boots crouched behind a wooden sea wall on a shingle beach in Whitstable. Or Islington-on-Sea, to give it its modern name. The north coast of Kent glittered in the sun. Across the Medway you could see the contours of Essex in stark outline. The shelled-out husk of a matinee idol, silver mane flying wildly in the bitter wind, hobbled to his mark on the other side of the sea-wall. He was on crutches after breaking a hip in a Christmas tumble. When the first AD called “Action!”, Peter O’Toole began to play out his last scene on the last day of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, in his symbolic walk to freedom as he emerged on foot from captivity in 1990, his astute performance at the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and then finally in death, announced just as an epic new film of his life was being premiered in London, the seat of the old colonial power.Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, which opens in early January, is by no means the first film to feature Mandela. Hollywood has co-opted him, as has television in South Africa, Britain, America and, first of all Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Unless Peter Jackson and his team decide to mine The Silmarillion for three more J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations, their films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will, by this time next year, comprise a complete hexalogy – or, at least, two consecutive triptychs. Setting aside for the moment the crass exploitation of the 317-page The Hobbit, which is being stretched thinner than Gollum's hair over eight hours, it would have been hoped that the entire gargantuan undertaking would be yielding a consistent vision that honours the author's conception of an alternative English myth.
This is not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney perhaps hoped their Lone Ranger reboot, replete with hamming Captain Jack Tonto at its heart, would be a draw in the league of director Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean series. They were gravely mistaken. The kids don’t like cowboys, something Hollywood should have gauged after the resounding flop that was Cowboys & Aliens. Grown-ups however, do still enjoy the Wild West, it seems, as the age bracket drawn to the cinema by The Lone Ranger was often higher than expected. Maybe these were parents and grandparents seeking innocent, old-fashioned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film too often comes over as a prettily decorated edition of a sick spinster’s diary” was how the Monthly Film Bulletin concluded their review of The Innocents in January 1962. After seeing Jack Clayton’s intense adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw more than 50 years on, the impression left now isn’t so much of an attractively presented chronicle of a breakdown, but a film which paints little of its substance in so clear-cut a fashion. As it is with the literary source, the audience is left to draw their own conclusions as to what is real, what is unreal, and what is Read more ...