Film
Graham Fuller
The first image in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) shows clusters of mist hovering over the darkened Andes. Mirroring the implacability of the terrain, Popol Vuh’s synth score evokes a celestial choir hymning the mountains' numinous might, worried though the music is by faint high-pitched vibrations. In a short series of downward tilt shots, the camera – unseen, but a “felt” presence throughout, as drops of moisture on the lens later testify – picks out insect-like figures tentatively making their way in single file down a narrow path hundreds of feet above the Amazon.Much nearer, the men that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Losing your pet mouse would be distressing enough. But misplacing the white rodent on a school trip to the Tower of London is beyond careless. It’s downright irresponsible. But that’s routine compared with turning yellow and then encountering a man who travels via the electric current he feeds from. Obviously, the errant school kid ends up set for a beheading in the Tower. All of which happens to John in The Boy Who Turned Yellow, a 1972 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) production that’s bizarre, even by their eccentric standards.The captivating Boy Who Turned Yellow is one of the three CFF Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The party's over in more senses than one in Behind the Candelabra, the Steven Soderbergh film dedicated to the proposition that all that glitters is most definitely not gold. It charts the downward spiral of the relationship between the American king of piano-playing glitz, Liberace, and his onetime "chauffeur" and companion, Scott Thorson. The movie finds two major Hollywood names, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, in head-turning form, only to wed them to a drearily predictable and none-too-illuminating script that is itself as pro forma as the personalities it deals with are singular to a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Titling their long-delayed second album The Second Coming meant The Stone Roses had run out of religious metaphors for their 2012 reunion. They already had a song called “I Am the Resurrection”. Still, with super-fan director Shane Meadows on hand to capture their return, actions spoke louder than words. At their homecoming concert in Manchester’s Heaton Park, he caught their singer Ian Brown touching the outstretched hands of the faithful, anointing them with his mystic power.To some, the return of The Stone Roses after their messy demise in 1996 was tantamount to a spiritual rebirth. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I wouldn't describe this movie as an air crash, but the fact that it isn't is largely down to its flabbergasting near-disaster sequence, in which veteran pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) manages to crash-land his crippled airliner after it suffers a catastrophic mechanical failure. Six people die but 96 are saved, in a heroic feat of airmanship which brings gasps of admiration from press and public. The shot of the aircraft flying upside down at treetop height is probably worth its own techie Oscar.However, Whip has a dirty secret. He's an alcoholic whose pre-flight routine stipulates Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ariel Vromen's third film, and his first to command a major cast, is the story of mob contract killer Richard Kuklinski who, from his incarceration in 1986 (charged with just a fraction of the murders he supposedly committed) until his death in 2006, was the subject of media fascination based on the proflicacy of his criminal career and his willingness to tell his story. The Iceman features an eclectic ensemble fronted by Michael Shannon at his most formidable, and is worth watching for his performance alone.Just ahead of his turn as General Zod in Man of Steel, Shannon plays Kuklinski - he's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The life of the stand-up is a balance, often precarious, between those stage moments when things seem to be going just right, and the ones which look like they're about to go very wrong. The hero of Tom Shkolnik's debut feature The Comedian, Ed (Edward Hogg), seems to be making decent progress with his club appearances, but when the chance of a new relationship comes along it puts the previously settled balance of his life right out of kilter.There's something immediately attractive, almost provocatively downbeat about Shkolnik's film that announces a director who knows what he Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, into a secular Muslim family with Orthodox Slavic roots, the filmmaker Emir Kusturica has long been a polarizing figure in the Balkans. A patriot of the former Yugoslovia, he is regarded by his enemies, who condemned him as an apologist for Slobodan Milošević during the Bosnian War, as a Serbian nationalist; as recently as April, the Bosnian stage director Selma Spahić withdrew the play she was bringing to the current Sterijino Pozorje Theatre Festival in Novi Sad because Kusturica was invited to open it.Time was – before his second Palme d Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature debut is a perky French rom-com which brings together the talented, easy-on-the-eye trio of Déborah François, Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo. Set in the late 50s it contains oodles of delicious period detail along with shades of the much-loved Amelie and the adorable 60s TV series Bewitched. It should be likeable; it should be full of fun. So why doesn't it work? Two words seal its fate: speed typing.The year is 1958 in the small town of Saint-Fraimbault and - against the wishes of her conservative shopkeeper father - Rose Pamphyle (François) is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You gotta love Diane Keaton all the way from Annie Hall to Something's Gotta Give, but even her natural effervescence can't enliven The Big Wedding, a starry celluloid venture that is landing in cinemas briefly on its way presumably to an airplane near you. An in-flight video might in fact minimise the overriding coarseness of a venture whose brazen impulses don't hold up well to large-screen scrutiny. Whatever the context, Keaton's ageless charms are worth pondering, as is a film industry that increasingly seems not to know what to do with any of its senior crop of actresses, with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s something profoundly infantile about Quentin Tarantino’s quest to right the wrongs of history. Last time round he was retroactively bitchslapping the Nazis for the Holocaust. Here he’s punishing Americans who accrued obscene wealth out of slavery. In both films baddies galore get royally ketchupped. What’s next? Backdated justice for the Injuns? Oh shoot, Disney already pulled off that judicial backflip in Pocahontas.Django Unchained is a kind of spaghetti Blaxploitation epic. It’s immensely entertaining in bits – usually when Christoph Waltz is on screen reprising his casuistical Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Byzantium is a vampire flick which in look and tone seems fashioned to resemble Tomas Alfredson's magnificently humane (if that's the right expression when speaking of the undead) Let the Right One In. Wonderfully, unlike most pictures of its ilk, the focus is almost entirely on the fairer sex, with its bloodsucking protagonists, played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, out to prove the female of the species more deadly than the male. It's the latest film from Irish director Neil Jordan, best known for The Crying Game and - more appositely here - Interview with the Vampire, with a Read more ...