Film
Jasper Rees
Are films for the senior demographic the new rock’n’roll? As the population ages and people keep their marbles for longer, entertainments for the grey pound, as it’s charmingly called, must be laid on. The job of films like The Last Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and now Song for Marion is to tend towards the cheerful and the redemptive. Age is a bugger, they all accept, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings – or in the case of Song for Marion, till Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp have given their leathery larynxes a public work-out.In this case old age really is flirting with age- Read more ...
james.woodall
The 2013 Golden Bear in Berlin has gone to Poziţia Copilului (Child's Pose), by Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer. Starring Luminita Gheorghiu as a mother, Cornelia, drumming up support for her son Barbu, arraigned for killing a little boy in a speeding offence, the Berlinale winner is a much-favoured mix of - in this festival - a film combining steely contemporaneity and political fearlessness. Its documentary-like texture and compelling theme, along with Gheorghiu's hugely imposing performance, make it a popular winner.A Silver Bear goes (as happily predicted by theartsdesk) to Paulina Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The great German-born director Max Ophüls admired Goethe, Stendhal, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and the four films he made in France, following his unfulfilling post-war sojourn in Hollywood, are characterised by supreme literary elegance and wit. Their prime subject is the transient nature of love and the particular sorrow of women. His elaborate tracking shots and bravura pans are brilliantly harnessed to mirror the inexorability with which emotions alter over time.Changing critical tastes haven’t been especially kind to La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de… (1953), and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Film fans will not need reminding that next weekend knees all over Tinseltown start quivering at the prospect of the Academy Awards. To get you in shape for the big night, theartsdesk is running a week's worth of Oscar-related features starting on Monday.On Monday Nick Hasted considers the film career of Daniel Day-Lewis, the star of Lincoln considered a dead cert to win his third Best Actor statuette having already snaffled the BAFTA last weekend. On Tuesday, Demetrios Matheou considers the political films in the light of Argo’s spectacular marriage of Hollywood and grim events in Read more ...
james.woodall
Big hitters have graced Berlin, with the festival now reaching its close - Damon, Huppert and Binoche have been and gone, Deneuve is yet to come - but one of the more anticipated visits this week was Steven Soderbergh’s. He has said that Side Effects will be his last feature as he “retires” at 50.If he’s really putting himself out to grass, this slick thriller is an impressive last testament. Jude Law plays psychiatrist Jonathan Banks, who's drawn into murky money and labyrinthine deception as he tries to deal with a patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), who seems to “forget” Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skyfall is the rarest of Bond films, dividing critics and wowing doubters with extraordinary cinematography and memorable theme tune. Nominated for five Oscars and eight BAFTAS (and winning two), it is the first Bond film to earn more than £1 billion at the global box office.People who may not see another film at the cinema for years will make an effort to see Bond, and the challenge to Mendes and Eon Productions was how to refresh a spy story for the 23rd time. Effectively a Bond reboot without rebooting the lead actor, director Sam Mendes took an intricate script by Bond regulars Neal Read more ...
theartsdesk
“I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” This weekend is the 30th anniversary of one of the best-loved films in British cinematic history. There are louder movies than Local Hero, comedies with bigger laughs and more telegraphic intentions. But one of the reasons Bill Forsyth’s pocket masterpiece has earned a place in so many hearts is the gentleness of wry wit, the modesty of its wisdom, and underpinning it all a profound humanity.This weekend we celebrate the birthday of Local Hero in the company of its writer-director Bill Forsyth and its two stars, Denis Lawson and Peter Riegert Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet another drubbing. But that was then. And this is 25 years on from Die Hard's first outing: the day A Good Day to Die Hard makes it five.The joke of the Die Hard/Harder/Hardest franchise is that a comic-book cop takes a battering as he goes about the important business of deleting scumbags at the point of a machine gun. The villains, as villains will Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The shock of no longer being young and carefree – that’s the message in director Judd Apatow’s funny and poignant fourth feature, a ‘sort of’ sequel to Knocked Up. In the long tradition of Fellini and Woody Allen - where a lead actor is the director's alter ego - Judd Apatow's onscreen self is Paul Rudd. As Pete married to Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real life wife), he plays a father and husband confronting the scariest mundane thing in life: the idea that he's no longer young. In fact, the couple experience a collective fear that they’re losing their grooviness - and so soon!?The symptoms Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet. Side by Side is partly a manual in how films are made, the way in which light pours through camera apertures to create images, Read more ...
james.woodall
They’re in trouble. They had to be. Otherwise there’d be no drama. And if you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) skip the next two paragraphs to avoid knowing where, physically, temporally, Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have arrived since the poetic ending of the 2004 film.Location: Greece. They’re together: unsurprising fact. They have twin girls. They’re on holiday in the Peloponnese, guests of an elderly writer called Patrick, played by Walter Lassally (a cinematographer who lives in Crete and, as it happens, won an Oscar for Zorba Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sally Potter has forged an admirable career as an independent British filmmaker. She has avoided formulas, made daring visual experiments, and been committed to a highly personal art cinema. Among her movies, there have been two dazzling achievements, The Gold Diggers and Orlando, and an audacious vanity project, The Tango Lesson.It’s arguable, however, whether Potter has developed as a muscular storyteller. Set in 1962 against the background of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Cuba missile crisis, her depiction of the collapsing friendship of 17-year-olds Ginger (Elle Fanning) Read more ...