Film
Adam Sweeting
As a capsule description of Pacific Rim, "giant monsters versus giant robots" will do nicely. It tells the fantastical story of mankind's battle for survival against a bunch of enormous killer reptiles from outer space, known manga-ishly as "Kaiju", which now live in a "dimensional rift" at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.These things keep lumbering ashore and laying waste to cities around the eponymous Pacific Rim, and though they're not quite indestructible, conventional tanks and planes can't get the job done. Thus the earthlings fight back by building vast fighting machines the size of Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“I hate these kids. Hate ‘em,” says Tanner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a handsome, mature commando who wants to help a bunch of high school football players save America from, yes, a North Korean invasion in the 2012 remake of John Milius’ and Kevin Reynolds’ 1984 right-wing fightfest Red Dawn. Competently directed by second unit/experienced stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, Red Dawn was shot then shelved before being recut by the studio marketers. This means Red Dawn never had a chance to shine. Hence, it has little to recommend it in any department – not music, direction, makeup, production design Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Blancanieves seems to come on the back of the world-conquering The Artist, it was actually conceived before the French tribute to silent-era cinema. Rather than being about silent cinema, Blancanieves is a silent Spanish take on Snow White which, through sheer panache, verve and eccentricity, can’t fail to seduce. But like The Artist, it has an unforgettable animal actor. It’s impossible to see a cockerel in the same way ever again.Blancanieves is also defined by Maribel Verdú’s Encarna, a character who is evil incarnate; Macarena Garcia’s passionate yet sensitive grown-up Carmen; Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The story you think you know slides beneath your feet in this rigorous investigation of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. “I’m a combative person," WikiLeaks’ founder says, setting out his motives. "I like crushing bastards.” Director Alex Gibney’s intentions are more nuanced. An Oscar-winner for Taxi to the Dark Side’s exposé of US abuses in Baghdad, he has similarly probed the poisonous roots of banking (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and the paedophile-protecting Catholic church (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God). Gibney’s restless filmography also includes the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s practically a pub game for overgrown children: factoring in the technical awesomeness, the solid virtues of the plot, the script’s adult-friendly appurtenances of irony and wit, what in your considered opinion is the best film in the Pixar backlist? It could be any one of the Toy Story trilogy, it could easily be The Incredibles, and there are those who would tick the box marked Monsters Inc.The last had all of the above and something else – a fully imagined world mixing elements of children’s fable and outlandish sci-fi. It was so perfectly in and of itself there was nowhere else to go Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the following year. Its small Chekhovian story - adapted later by Peter Flannery for a successful run at London’s National Theatre - resounded far above its weight.Red Army hero-general Sergei Kotov (Mikhalkov himself, a fine actor, main picture) felt the chill winds of the Stalinist 1930s. The reappearance of Mitya (Oleg Menshikov), a friend now turned Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
If Mae West was once described as a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor, clad in gold and covered in real diamonds, is Hollywood’s ideal in Cleopatra (1963). Sumptuously restored to 2K DCPs and rereleased on the big screen, Taylor’s beauty and the chemistry with future husband Richard Burton remain throbbingly alive - in a production so mired and luckless that it tried to spend its way out of trouble.Winning four Oscars, Cleopatra became the highest-grossing film of its year. Its $300m modern equivalent production cost will forever be outshone by its own scandal: Taylor and Burton’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone somewhere is plotting the movie. Currently the story of the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency looks like it could still play out as farce, but it may yet turn to tragedy.Whistleblowers are bad news for governments and major corporations but, as this week’s Listed demonstrates, gold-dust for storytellers. The narrative arc is more or less the same: hero or heroine of lowly status takes on big bad villain and gets to be heard, at some personal cost. Works every time. It Read more ...
Nick Hasted
What goes on in some homes would scare the sturdiest horse. Take Anna (Maria Hofstatter), whose daily routine might strike some serial killers as pathological. Semi-naked self-flagellation and circuiting the house on bleeding knees is the least of it. “Sexual wildness destroys”, a kitchen homily reminds a woman whose desires are buried in punishing Catholicism. But when paraplegic Muslim husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh, pictured below with Hofstatter) reappears demanding his conjugal rights, anyone’s faith would shake.Paradise: Faith is the middle film of a trilogy by Austrian director Ulrich Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There is a burgeoning of Scottish films that refuse to romanticise the Highlands and islands. Writer-director Scott Graham’s feature debut Shell does not satirize the capitalistic exploitation of the nation's heritage culture as do several of the movies directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. However, the braes and mountains surrounding Shell's single location, a remote petrol station by a loch, have a bleaker and more implacable presence than is usual in Scottish cinema. Yoliswa Gärtig's spare, wintry cinematography makes no concessions to pictorialism or iridescence Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This movie has a couple of key advantages - it doesn't have any serial killers or zombies in it. It also pays the audience the compliment of assuming that it has a certain amount of intelligence, enough at least to appreciate being bamboozled by its relentless cleverness and convoluted trickery.It's a strange beast, though. I thoroughly enjoyed about 70 per cent of it as it took off on a whirling thrill-ride which seemed to defy the laws of physics and probability. But perhaps inevitably, all those spinning plates came crashing back to earth as director Louis Leterrier struggled to tie Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
For the child who wants to see everything, Japanese anime Studio Ghibli’s Blu-ray double bill of 1989’s Kiki’s Delivery Service and 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies – called one of the saddest movies ever made – brings a fresh truckload of emotion. Based on novels, both films are award-winners pivotal in the history of Japanese animation. In Kiki’s Delivery Service (aka Witch’s Delivery Service) a young witch, according to custom, spends one year in another town surviving on her own magic. Grave of the Fireflies tells the harrowing tale of a young boy and his younger sister in the harsh climate Read more ...