Film
Veronica Lee
Anyone who has ever sat through a Las Vegas show – whether in the Nevada desert city or on tour – will instantly recognise the cheesy, overblown nonsense being lampooned throughout this movie. Whether they'll find it as funny is another matter. For while The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its moments, two thoughts interrupted my viewing enjoyment: one, the big-blown magic shows on the Strip are surely beyond parody; and two, if they are going to send them up, the makers of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have done it so much better.But hey, it's funny enough to be getting on with. We Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For anyone who missed Sightseers in the cinema, purchasing it on DVD is a must. Its blend of the shocking and what initially seems a quirky, Mike Leigh-style British road movie is audacious. Mischievously subverting the familiar, it’s funny, pathos-filled and openly questions the nature of morality. It’s hugely entertaining too.By now, the adventures of Steve Oram’s ginger-faced Chris and Alice Lowe’s angry-woman Tina have been recounted endlessly. Both their performances are sure to fuel cult fandom, with Sightseers assured an afterlife akin to that of Withnail and I. Director Ben Wheatley Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a socialist family between the Great War and the General Strike. Hope in 1945 resided not in the kind of militancy that emerged in Britain following the Russian Revolution, however, but in the idea that the people who had won World War II together could build the peace together.Constructed from archival footage and on-camera oral reminiscences of socialist Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Over the last few years the Poles have been pumping money into the arts, partly as a way of branding the country (it works according to their research – many of us are now as likely to think of jazz musicians as plumbers when we think of the country).There was Polska! Year in 2009/10 – with hundreds of artistic events, setting up international orchestras and, on now, the increasingly adventurous and influential Kinoteka, the Polish Film Festival which runs until the end of the week.A couple of extraordinary films have already been shown including the UK premiere of Fuck For Forest (on Read more ...
emma.simmonds
You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical. A tawdrily entertaining tale, shot through with youthful lust and romantic delusion, The Paperboy might not deserve to be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For all the brilliance of its leads – Jean-Louis Trintignant back in the cinema after many years, Emmanuelle Riva cruelly pipped for an Oscar – it’s easily forgotten that Amour is a zeitgeist film. As the First World’s population ages, narratives of old age are starting to grow on trees. The difference is that Michael Haneke’s resounding chamber piece about fractured geriatric identity is not in the business of saccharine consolation.A romance set in the deep midwinter of a married couple’s final years, Amour watches pitilessly as Georges and Anne – refined equals in intellect and taste – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a finely drawn portrayal of loneliness and solitude encouraged by bottled-up emotions, Shell would be noteworthy enough. But it also contains two scenes – father and daughter interactions - that are deeply uncomfortable viewing. First-time feature director Scott Graham’s encapsulation of the life of 17-year old Shell and her father Pete’s life at an isolated Scots garage isn’t going to be quickly forgotten.Shell’s mother left years ago, for unspecified reasons. With an epileptic father, her routine, such as it is, is set by the infrequent customers that stop to fill up on the journey Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Romanian New Wave continues producing cinema with a visceral power that’s hard to match anywhere in Europe, though to say it was alive and well would hit the wrong note, given the bleakness of the world it goes on depicting. Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, his lacerating abortion story set in Ceaucescu’s Romania, and last year his Beyond the Hills took high honours there again - the best screenplay and best actress awards, the latter shared between its two newcomer leads, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan.Alina, played by Flutur, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It’s no exaggeration to say that The Wizard of Oz has a special place in the hearts of millions. For many, their last trip over the rainbow will have been watching its 1985 sequel Return to Oz, a commercial flop berated at the time for a too tenebrous tone. Yet Return to Oz was the stuff of numerous childhood nightmares, and so it's gone on to achieve cult status. That film's mixed fortunes proved what anyone could have guessed - that following in the colossal footsteps of Victor Fleming's 1939 MGM musical was never going to be easy.In Sam Raimi's prequel Oz The Great and Powerful, he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Master is one of several remarkably challenging epics which have somehow been financed in 21st-century Hollywood. Like Tree of Life, Synecdoche New York (also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman) and There Will Be Blood (also written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), it attempts a fractured, literary grab at the American soul. The Master’s calamitous box-office means it might be the last.Joaquin Phoenix returns to acting after the career-immolating performance art of I’m Still Here as Freddie Quell, a dislikeable World War Two vet on the run from the post-war US dream, and everything Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen Soderbergh would have us believe that this might be his last movie, which is difficult to believe. But if so, he's bowing out with one his sharpest, most devious and most watchable pictures, in which a shrewdly-chosen cast does full justice to a screenplay over which Scott Z Burns has pored painstakingly for more than a decade.Our subject at first seems to be the evils of Big Pharma, the giant drug corporations which seek to exploit human weakness and the stresses of 21st century life to keep their market share high and their stock prices soaring. Their questionable ethics and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I'm so worn out with it," a character remarks in a different context well into Rufus Norris's film Broken, to which one is tempted to respond, "Ain't that the truth!" A dissection of so-called "broken Britain" in all its jagged disarray, stage director Norris's debut film wants to be excoriating but is instead mainly exhausting and feels infinitely longer than its briefish running time. Norris gets good performances out of a notable cast, and it's interesting (to put it mildly) to see certain actors cast defiantly against type, but the material suffers from being a continuous, non-stop Read more ...