Film
Nick Hasted
Retired spymasters, like retired diplomats, break their career reticence with particular relish, what they've known for so long in inverse proportion to what they can say. Dror Moreh’s remarkable interviews with the last six heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, shed light on strategies and tactics they were required to keep in the shadows in professional life. He focuses on actions among the colonised people of the Occupied Territories since Israel’s victory in 1967’s Six Day War, which made Shin Bet arguably more important than Mossad’s more famed, external spies. But Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"If you ride like lightning you're going to crash like thunder" Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendlesohn) tells his reckless partner-in-crime Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who will later be dubbed the "Moto Bandit". Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that threatens to do likewise, never quite keeping up with its own soaring ambition. Nevertheless it's a compelling, occasionally exciting saga with an invigorating aesthetic and a gently melancholic tone - akin to that of the director's previous picture Blue Valentine.With a narrative stretched over 15 years and a cast who zoom in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sigh: here's not much of anything for anyone, actually, to indulge a self-evident riff on the title of yet another in a seemingly ceaseless parade of subpar Brit-gangster films, this one from first-time writer/director George Isaac, who produced the Kidulthood/Adulthood celluloid duo. Notable largely for casting some rather rarefied actors deliberately violently against type, the film is best seen as the pay cheque that has helped allow at least two of its three leads to take on less lucrative theatre work of late. For that largesse, after a fashion: one star. Otherwise, well, you stand Read more ...
howard.male
These two 1960s movies have more than just their director, Joseph Losey, and their writer, Harold Pinter, in common. They also both star Dirk Bogarde, escaping his matinee idol mould to startling effect, and feature soundtrack composer John Dankworth, whose jazzy scores cleverly veer between generic sexy swagger and disorientating dissonance, as and when appropriate.Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the most self-consciously avant-garde of the two films that has dated the most. Accident (1967) is at times stilted and painfully slow. And although it might be argued that the pace is a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two’s company, three’s a crowd, four’s a string quartet. Classical music movies tend to focus on the cost of individual brilliance. See David Helfgott in Shine, Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, not forgetting the talented little man who features in Amadeus. A Late Quartet homes in on that subtle and complex quadratic equation, a string ensemble which thrives on the interplay of four barely subordinated egos.The Fugue String Quartet is all set to celebrate its 25th anniversary in New York when its cellist and senior member Peter (Christopher Walken) announces that after one last Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Whilst Zac Efron is getting urinated on in The Paperboy, his High School Musical co-star Vanessa Hudgens is taking the piss in an entirely different sense. In Spring Breakers Hudgens and Disney princess Selena Gomez bin their clean-cut images to hook up with James Franco's metal-mouthed miscreant during the US rites-of-passage party season. Harmony Korine's fifth feature gives us girls in bikinis packing heat. It revels in the fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me of it all and it's hard not to be seduced by its glamorously anarchic brand of entertainment.Spring Breakers follows four college Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In a just world, Papadopoulos & Sons should join Bend it Like Beckham, East is East and The Full Monty in the micro-genre of thoughtfully entertaining, low-budget British feel-good hits. But the UK cinema industry is not that world, as the makers of last year’s raw and hilarious East End entertainment Wild Bill, given up on before it got near an audience, would be only the latest to tell you. Greek-British writer-director-financier-distributor Marcus Markou’s debut has the odds stacked against it.His plot follows a well-worn path, as widowed, ruthless entrepreneur Harry Papadopoulos ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David O Russell's multi-Oscar-nominated film is a romcom with a difference, dealing as it does with mental-health issues. Bradley Cooper, more usually found parlaying characters with arrested adolescence, here plays Pat Solitano, a man with a condition for which he hates taking his meds because they make him both physically bloated and mentally foggyPat returns home after a spell in an institution, having lost his marriage, his home and his job, and he hopes to win back his adulterous wife. But Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), herself troubled after the death of her husband and who has been self- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.Both films are road movies, not in the "wham bam", eventful sense of a Hollywood road movie, but modest, small-scale, quiet journeys, involving Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail & I (1987), he embodied in Uncle Monty a predatory homosexual who, according to the film’s director Bruce Robinson, was based on Franco Zeffirelli. Many years later Griffiths found himself playing a character parked on the same spectrum in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2005). As Hector, the teacher with a roving mind and wandering hands, he bagged a notable brace of awards in the form of an Olivier and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an arresting moment towards the start of In the House when a character looks the camera – and by extension, the audience - directly in the eye. A warm trusting face and a slight squint hint at vulnerability (see clip below). His name is Rafa, and he is the best friend of Claude, who regularly visits Rafa's house after school to help him with his maths. But we soon learn that Claude’s furtive intention is to infiltrate an ideal suburban home as part of an observational writing assignment.Among the piles of vacuous contributions from his classmates, Claude’s account of what he did on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If you go down to the woods today, it’s possible a Huldra might be encountered. A Norwegian wood, that is. She goes by other names across Scandinavia, but this be-tailed woman is to be avoided. Men lured into her lair are never seen again. Thale turns the legend on its head and tells the tale of Thale, a Huldra who’s been captured by a man and imprisoned in his basement. The story of the Siren-like Huldra is one that’s ripe for a film treatment, especially after Norway’s Troll Hunter became an international hit. Unfortunately, Thale is somewhat undercooked.Thale’s just-over-70 minutes opens Read more ...