Film
Adam Sweeting
Mobster roles have helped define many of America's greatest screen actors, from James Cagney to Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Thanks to his portrayal of Tony Soprano in HBO's TV masterpiece The Sopranos, James Gandolfini has made an unforgettable addition to their ranks.Though he has died, apparently of a heart attack, at the shockingly early age of 51, Gandolfini's performance across the six seasons of The Sopranos felt more like a piece of American folklore than a mere acting performance. Violent and thuggish yet also confused and conflicted, Tony Soprano was the all-powerful Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community. From its Italian title Io sono Li (I Am Li), we might have expected a subject based on more documentary strands involving the life of the film's eponymous Chinese immigrant heroine, who’s paying off an unquantified debt to those who arranged her journey to Italy by working in any job she's assigned, but Sigre’s film develops far beyond that towards human drama of the subtlest kind.Li mostly Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
All this beauty in continuum is almost an overdose. Terrence Malick’s remarkable The Tree of Life brought this controversial American filmmaker’s skills to the forefront so much so that he didn’t follow his past form and wait five or six years to make his next film: To The Wonder came hard on the heels of the winning Tree of Life and seems aimed to capitalize on the previous film’s popularity.Starring Ben Affleck as Neil, a man caught between two alluring women (Olga Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace and Oblivion, and Rachel McAdams, recently seen in Midnight in Paris), the story loosely Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Before Midnight is the third part in Richard Linklater's romantic series starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as star-crossed lovers Jesse and Celine. It's a sequence of films that began in 1995 with Before Sunrise (pictured below right), where the two spent a night wandering Vienna, falling in love. That was followed nine years later by 2004's equally delightful and even more insightful Before Sunset, which followed them on an afternoon rendezvous through Paris. Although they had become somewhat jaded in the intervening years apart and despite complications, the end of that second movie was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story goes that Ben Affleck was in the running to direct the latest Superman "reboot", but decided against. "A lesson I've learned is not to look at movies based on budget," he said. "Story is what's important."And so it came to pass that Man of Steel was directed by Zack Snyder (who made Watchmen and 300, among others), cost £145m and clocks in at a sprawling 143 minutes. It's already recouped £110m through product placements, so somebody in the back end has their head screwed on, but nonetheless it's living proof of Affleck's Law. The flick is technologically dazzling and Henry Cavill Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Returning from Germany to her native Romania, Alina is reunited with her childhood friend Voichita, now resident in a convent. The pair return to Voichita’s orthodox sanctuary but Alina changes. Aggressive, hearing voices and seemingly suicidal, she disrupts the convent. Eventually, she is exorcised. The tragic consequences result in the nuns, including Voichita, and their priest being taken away by police who think Alina may have been crucified.Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills is based on a real case. Like his 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, it’s long and unfolds slowly – almost glacially Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ever wondered what Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel creator, not to mention superhero movie A-lister Josh Whedon, does during his down time? Well, apparently he gets his pals together to have a go at the Bard. And by way of proof, along comes Whedon's film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which plays like nothing so much as a home movie in Elizabethan tongue. The result is sure to take Shakespeare's most eternally transfixing comedy to parts of the American (indeed, global) heartland where it may have never played before, even I have to confess to being more bemused by the experience Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s more pulse-quickening than a visit from Denmark’s actual prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. This weekend Sidse Babett Knudsen, Borgen’s Statsminister Birgitte Nyborg, arrives in London to open Nordicana, an event dedicated to the ever-increasing amount of Scandinavian exports seen on our TVs. She will also be interviewed and take questions from the audience. Who needs real PMQs?Over Saturday and Sunday, Knudsen will be joined by the cast of Borgen’s fellow DR production Arne Dahl and Jan Arnald – the author of the books it’s based on, who writes as Arne Dahl. Also stopping off are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The likelihood of leaving a screening of PARADISE: Love without feeling either queasy or at least a little off balance is low. This realist-styled portrayal of middle-aged Teresa’s excursion to Kenya to seek intimacy and, inevitably, sex is awkward viewing. Some scenes are so uncomfortable to watch that their imprint will be permanent. PARADISE: Love is made all the more an assault on perceptions of acceptability by being entirely unjudgemental. Reactions are entirely up to the viewer. Director Ulrich Seidl offers no helping hand.Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is Austrian. She’s 50, a single Read more ...
Matt Wolf
People genuinely care about words in Josh Boone's directing debut, Stuck in Love, and that's as might be expected from a film that went by the name of Writers when it premiered in Toronto last autumn. So the first thing to be said is that this likable American indie is nicely written (a rarity in itself these days), notwithstanding an ending that trades heavily on the inevitable uplift that is the Hollywood norm even in such low-budget climes.And it's even better acted across the generations by an attractive cast, all of whom fully inhabit the cautious, often anxiety-laden byways of love and Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Few heroes of cult genre television ever manage the transition into mainstream financial success – although JJ Abrams hasn't been doing too badly for himself – and for many years Joss Whedon's deified status among fans of his various lovingly crafted, emotionally rich series was not reflected by broader recognition. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its spin-off series Angel, and space-western Firefly have all maintained a passionately devoted core of fans, despite all having been off the air for almost a decade, and it was largely thanks to fan campaigning that Whedon made his feature Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite its five Oscar nominations, in the end Zero Dark Thirty only won for Best Sound Editing, with the Academy showing a distinct preference for the more "thrillerised" version of US foreign affairs displayed in Ben Affleck's hugely entertaining Argo. Impressive in many respects, not least its unflashy - even, frankly, tedious - depiction of the nitpicking drudgery of intelligence work and the near-impossibility of achieving definitive answers, Zero Dark... eventually fails to be one thing or the other.Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have made claims for its partly- Read more ...