Film
emma.simmonds
A sultry Scarlett Johansson picks up hitchhikers with a nefarious agenda; an astronaut that looks suspiciously like Sandra Bullock is cast out into space; a monstrous Michael Fassbender beats the man he keeps as his slave; Joseph Gordon-Levitt struggles to tear himself away from his porn; and vampire lovers Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are reunited. I think you'll agree that's quite a lot to take in on a Wednesday morning - and it's just for starters. These are some of the clips guests were treated to at the London Film Festival press launch, compered with genial elegance by Festival Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The question of what makes a romance click on screen – what combination of elements goes into creating that indefinable spark between two projected faces – is one of the most eternal for filmmakers. David Lowery’s wistful, lyrical neo-Western has just over 10 minutes to make you invest in doomed lovers Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) before fate and justice do them part, and succeeds with breathtaking ease.Their snatched moments together, like most of Lowery’s film, settle over you like half-remembered dreams, images that burrow deep into your subconscious and re-emerge Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The news that Richard Curtis will not direct any more films after About Time (which he also wrote) was met with sadness in some quarters and undisguised glee in others. Curtis co-wrote Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Mr Bean, created Comic Relief and is an all-round good egg, but none the less stirs up real venom in those who find his other creation, the modern British romcom, sickeningly sweet.Me, not so much, but then again I'm partial to a bit of schmaltz and any kind of four-wheel event on film – christening, wedding or funeral – will have me in tears before you can say Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Hannibal Lecter meets Jason Bourne”: that’s how director Ryuhei Kitamura unbeatably sells No One Lives’ indestructible serial killer hero. But his film is at its most interesting before it’s clear who Driver (Luke Evans, pictured below) is, or where we stand with anything that’s happening.We meet this coldly urbane charmer as he motors through the American South, checking into a motel with a woman with an ambiguous relationship to him – maybe an accomplice to the murders glimpsed on TV, and certainly jealous of another woman who, we eventually discover, is being transported in the boot of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marianne Faithfull hasn’t got much time for her 1968 starring vehicle The Girl on a Motorcycle. In her autobiography Faithfull, she described it as “terrible…soft porn” and said of her co-star Alain Delon that he was a “pompous git". The trailer promised that while seeing it “you know the thrill of wrapping your legs around a tornado of pumping pistons”.The Girl on a Motorcycle was ludicrous, but not as bad as all this suggests. A game attempt at a trangressive coupling of sexual abandonment with the power of the motorbike, it was awarded an “X” certificate for it’s UK release. Faithfull Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Paolo Sorrentino's latest opens with a Japanese tourist keeling over at the mere sight of an ancient Roman vista: he takes a snap and wipes the sweat from his brow before his fatal fall to the floor. As the Small Faces sang in "Itchycoo Park", for this gentleman at least, "It's all too beautiful." The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a love letter to Rome, in the vein of and as grandly ambitious as a Fellini, but don't be fooled by the title. Sorrentino's sixth narrative feature isn't merely a celebration of the city's already much celebrated beauty. It follows a man in existential and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th anniversary it is being revived at Hampstead Theatre. It is a homecoming in a sense: the play is set in the Hampstead home of Sigmund Freud, where he receives unexpected visits from Salvador Dalí and a young woman who cannot keep her clothes on. Freud will be played by Antony Sher.The intimate nature of a psychoanalytical exchange would seem to make Doctor Freud an ideal subject for theatre. In fact he has many more screen than stage credits. Indeed, if you scroll through this edition of Listed Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Michael Bay’s fleet-footed, queasy crime-comedy stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie but the less you know, the more you might like it. This is because the more you know, the less it seems an acceptable source of entertainment. Not that Hollywood and movies in general have any qualms about morality, ethical behaviour or what constitutes "entertainment": we shouldn’t laugh at the cry of “She’s in the attic!” when discussing an actress’s bad performance as Ann Frank, but, unfortunately, we do. Terrible stories often grip us the most.So, let’s get the true horror out of the way Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arriving in Paris from New York after graduating from university and splitting with his girlfriend, Simon has no idea what he’s going to do there beyond trying to find the focus lost during the break-up. What he actually does is the subject of Simon Killer, an unsettling, atmospheric yet not wholly satisfying second film as director from Antonio Campos, the producer of the more-recent Martha Marcy May Marlene, which also featured Brady Corbet. Simon Killer was devised while that was being completed.As the repellent and unfathomable Simon, Corbet is on screen the whole time. He may or may not Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Shane Carruth directs films in the same way as Aaron Sorkin writes scripts: seemingly oblivious to the fact that we are trailing in his wake. Sorkin can sometimes leave you floundering with his spitfire recitations of information and dazzling repartee, Carruth with the opaqueness of his ideas. Does either expect, or wish us to keep up? I suspect not. Buying into their work is a tacit agreement to be stretched.But while Sorkin’s material (the new series of The Newsroom is currently airing in the US) is as deliciously entertaining as it can be exasperating, Carruth has less of a care even to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-age films have frequently featured inebriated antics and ill-advised hook-ups, but it's usually the teenagers behaving badly. The Way Way Back sees a family decamp to an East Coast beach house for a summer vacation described witheringly by one teen as "Spring Break for adults". The film is the directorial debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (two of the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants), who also pen the excellent screenplay and take supporting roles.Duncan (Liam James) is a painfully shy 14-year-old from Albany who hangs uncomfortably in his own skin and can't seem to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You’re Next has chutzpah. It’s a home invasion horror made with the vigorous energy and imaginative violence of a Warner Bros cartoon. Feeling like a record that starts at a stately 33 rpm and finishes at 45, it becomes progressively more crazed and comic, even as the screen swims in gore.Simon Barrett’s screenplay has the nerve to pause at length to note the smug, feuding unpleasantness of the upper-middle-class Davisons at their family reunion, before a crossbow bolt crashing through a window into a neck begins their bloody, mysterious elimination. Petty sibling bullying, parental Read more ...