Film
Nick Hasted
Naomi Watts’s rare misstep with Diana is forgotten as this playfully provocative tale of female friendship and forbidden love unfolds. It’s an equally rare return to Australia for Watts, who plays Lil, whose deep childhood bond with Roz (Robin Wright) lasts into middle-age, as their respective teenage sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) join them in an idyllic life spent roaming freely between neighbouring beach-side homes. The ad hoc family’s laissez-faire attitudes are taken to extremes when Ian and Tom, both strapping 18-year-old Adonises, end up having sex with each other Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating and touched with despair, as Moodysson confronted how truly terrible lives can be.We Are the Best! is, in startling contrast, about a pair of 13-year-old punk schoolgirls in Eighties Stockholm, and fizzes with wide-eyed idealism. Based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel, Moodysson lets his young actresses Mira Barkhammer (as introspective Bobo) and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's been nine years since Jonathan Glazer's last film, the courageous and underrated Birth. If that film had its moments of audacity then Under the Skin - an adaptation of Michel Faber's gloriously revolting novel - is a real feast of filmmaking flair, which elevates its director to the rank of auteur. Glazer resists the book's explanations, and ultimately its message, in favour of something more intriguing and unsettlingly ambiguous. At the centre of this cinematic cyclone is Scarlett Johansson, who's not only got the requisite visual va-va-voom but who turns in a performance up there with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jesse Eisenberg’s second film of the LFF is Kelly Reichardt’s low-budget, simmering thriller, confirming his work-led choices since The Social Network. “This was the only blockbuster I was offered,” he deadpanned, asked at the first screening’s Q&A about the giant roles that must be coming his way. “I sure was surprised when I got on set...”Reichardt’s follow-up to her Western Meek’s Cutoff is another genre rethink, following darkly introverted Josh (Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning), a rich girl determined to prove her worth, and morally careless ex-Marine Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) as Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Playing against his wholesome appeal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's debut outing as a writer/director spins a comedy of internet porn addiction, love, family, church – and a man who loves to do his own cleaning. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Gordon-Levitt is Jon, a muscle-bound young greaser who loves the ladies but prefers his own hand.Between bedding attractive girls rated on a scale of 10 by his “boys” (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke), enduring stereotypical family meals (featuring a blowsy Glenne Headly, a chiseled Tony Danza and silent sister Brie Larson) and racing home to spend quality time with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The components of The Broken Circle Breakdown don’t seem as though they would make for a coherent whole. The film is Belgian with Flemish dialogue. Infatuated with bluegrass music and a mythical America, a leading character lives his life as a low-countries cowboy. It’s a poignant family drama. Yet little feels forced and nothing is played for novelty. You’d have to have a heart of coal to not tear up.Didier (Johan Heldenbergh, pictured on left, below right) is a bearded, Kris Kristofferson lookalike who beds down in a caravan on his run-down farm. A former punk, he tends chickens and a horse Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
From the simplest of precepts Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu spins a marvellously tender story of parents and children in Like Father, Like Son, as well as a subtle portrayal of the nuances of contemporary Japanese society. The emotions resound insistently but quietly, like the melodies of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that recur through the film, which won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes film festival.Issues of family have a long history in Japanese cinema, and Kore-eda continues that tradition: his last film I Wish was about the determination of children to reconnect a family unit Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.Speculation mounted in the wait for the Coens’ sixteenth that Davis’s resemblance in early footage to Dylan on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’s sleeve meant he’d be a satire on the singer. Actually, he’s Dylan’s shadow: the folkie scuffling round New York who then doesn’t get the breaks, and whose American dreams aren’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bees, whenever called upon, have always been ready for their close-up. They had a sizeable cameo in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, played the lead villain opposite Michael Caine in The Swarm and got to be heroes in Bee Movie. Most recently there was The Secret Life of Bees, in which Dakota Fanning’s grieving teen finds solace in beekeeping. That was in 2008. Five years later the world is waking up to the fact that in reality there’s no solace to be had from making honey. More Than Honey explains why.From a very left field indeed, this documentary about the catastrophic collapse in world bee Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Terrence Malick meets Judd Apatow: that was the expectation when Texan auteur David Gordon Green unexpectedly swerved into broad comedy with Pineapple Express. Prince Avalanche finally fits that bill, after three big Hollywood studio films where the Green responsible for the intensely beautiful and romantic George Washington and All the Real Girls seemed to be vanishing out of sight. Green made it in secret in fire-damaged forest outside of Austin, Texas, as if on a guerrilla raid back to his roots.Apatow regular Paul Rudd stars as pompous, uptight Alvin alongside Into the Wild’s Emile Hirsch Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Richard Ayoade's follow-up to the highly promising Submarine centres on another pretty hopeless young man; yet this time his protagonist's predicament is considerably more grave, even if matters are no less amusing. Based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and co-written by Ayoade and Avi Korine (brother of Spring Breakers' helmsman Harmony), The Double sees Jesse Eisenberg tormented by a duplicitous doppelganger. It's a moodily lit, impeccably designed neo-noir served with lashings of absurdist comedy.Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a worker at a data processing plant in an unnamed, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In 2004 French director Catherine Breillat suffered a stroke. Three years later, she was cheated out of nearly a million euros by a known conman whom she was intending to cast in a film. She later suggested he took advantage of her still-reduced mental capacities.While it’s wonderful that Breillat overcame such multiple hardships to return to filmmaking, it’s unfortunate that she has chosen to convey these experiences onscreen. Sometimes autobiography adds piquancy to proceedings; as often, proximity to the material kills it. The result, here, truly flatters to deceive.Isabelle Huppert stars Read more ...