Film
Karen Krizanovich
Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel of the same name – itself akin to Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (famous in French schools for the vivid voice of its female narrator, the unfinished novel is mentioned early in the film), Kechiche’s sympathetic feature stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park.The drama of the hazardous decontamination work has its own rules: preconditions for workers include the fact that if their personal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter. They’re just expendable pawns in bigger, evil games being played out in eerie countryside, and the parched streets of an Aboriginal part of town which looks like it’s been left in the sun to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Alexander Payne has never been one for flashy features and in his latest he tones things all the way down to monochrome, as if his intentions are more bittersweet than ever. It's a fittingly subdued aesthetic for a tale of a man on his last legs, reluctantly forced to confront his past.Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, a man who's just won a million dollars - or so he thinks. When he receives postal notification of his big win it's an obvious scam but, still, he's itching to collect. While his credulity is met with irritation by his wife Kate (June Squibb), his son David (Will Forte) understands Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Jean Cocteau, who died 50 years ago today, was a poet/novelist /playwright /film director/designer/painter/stage director/ballet producer/patron/myth-maker/friend of the great/raconteur/wit. A Jacques of all trades and master of all. “Etonne-moi!” (“Astonish me!”) were the words with which Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, challenged Cocteau. The result was the ballet Parade (1917), designed by Pablo Picasso, composed by Erik Satie, and set to a scenario by Cocteau. The latter continued to astonish ever after.It is difficult to isolate the films Cocteau directed and/or wrote Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When piano-playing Vegas sensation and all round American entertainer Liberace (Michael Douglas) finds that his new live-in lover, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), is bisexual, he responds by saying, “Good for you – I wish I could be that flexible.” For these sort of snappy camp comebacks alone, of which the first half of the film contains plenty, Behind the Candelabra is enjoyable enough. What really makes the film, however, is the performances of its two leads.Director Soderbergh lays out a familiar Hollywood tale, that of the wide-eyed ingénue (although gay bar-cruising Thorson is hardly an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no end to The Fifth Estate. Instead, like those outtakes at the end of cartoons and comedies, there are cut-ups from an interview with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. “A WikiLeaks movie?” he says wryly. “Which one?” Well quite. Assange is box office, and it’s the argument of both The Fifth Estate and the documentary We Steal Secrets that deep down this is what he always wanted: to be a screen hero.This isn’t the real Assange, of course, but Benedict Cumberbatch’s beguiling take. Quite what constitutes a convincing impersonation of such a slippery and unknowable Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth.A team of US astronauts are space walking outside their shuttle. Mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) calmly tells jokes while he enjoys the view; Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a scientist on her first mission, is a bag of nerves. Suddenly they receive a message from Houston that the debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is speeding towards them. Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
In a deranged world where Charlie Sheen is President of the United States, Hollywood gets a much-deserved and highly amusing roasting. Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to Machete goes straight for the jugular by mocking Hollywood's golden child, that "galaxy far, far away" film franchise - which doggedly refuses to sling its hook. Rodriguez not only flips his middle finger at reboots and outworn action clichés, he also takes jabs at US foreign policy and the controversy surrounding the Mexican border fence.In keeping with the absurd humour of the previous film, POTUS demands that Machete (played Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be partial, because out of the 10 opera productions from the iconoclastic French actor-director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 68, I’ve seen but two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 films. Yet they all had a tremendous impact, one way or another.Not in a good way - let's get this over with first - as far as Intimacy is concerned: on a blistering hot summer day in Paris, "film by Patrice Chéreau"’ on the poster outside a small cinema in the Beauborg – a poster, moreover, showing a gathering at a cocktail party, suggestive of Rohmer Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
What would happen if a top Hollywood and TV director decided to take actors familiar to him to make a Shakespearean comedy? Something very interesting, especially to those enamoured of The Bard.Joss Whedon, creator of TV series like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse and the beguiling Firefly, used Shakespeare to cleanse his palette after the hard graft of Avengers Assemble. Shot in 12 days, using many of his favourite ensemble actors dressed in modern clothing, this lively black and white comedy emphasizes the screwball nature of Much Ado before it pulls an emotional sleight of hand Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the joys of autumn is the seasonal return to films about - and intended for - grown-ups, and movies don't come much more crisply and buoyantly adult than Le Week-End, at once the latest and best from the director/writer team of Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi. The abundant wisdom of the pair's third screen collaboration within 10 years surely reflects the growing awareness that comes with age of the derailments, large and small, that lie scattered along life's way.But whereas one might expect a gathering dourness from this excavation of marital fissures as they are laid bare Read more ...