Film
emma.simmonds
Presented a clear fortnight ahead of the Oscars, while the BAFTAs might have little, if any, bearing on the decision making there, they at least provide an opportunity for the Brits to have a go at the glitz and glamour before award fatigue sets in. With treacherous weather an inauspicious portent, how the night would go was anyone's guess - for, as the ceremony began, only Daniel Day-Lewis and Anne Hathaway were clear favourites in their respective categories.Taking place at the Royal Opera House, this year's ceremony was presented by Stephen Fry who's had the gig on and off since 2001 (this Read more ...
james.woodall
Great fun on day three in Berlin: Scarlett Johansson co-stars in a porn movie. Well, a movie about a young man’s love of porn sites, in which she flashes her famous curves - and starts sleeping with Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But Jon, a swanky, body-building Roman Catholic, is soon dumped; Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman sees no future in being jilted by a laptop and tissues.Don John’s Addiction might on the surface seem a deeply tasteless excuse to cash in on raw sex and Johansson’s nakedness (kept, in fact, to a suggestive minimum), yet it’s much cleverer and wittier than it sounds. Read more ...
David Nice
Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.Yet you can’t fault Prokofiev’s spirited response to every war situation in this propagandist masterpiece about the stalwart 13th century prince who sees off an invasion of Teutonic knights in a battle on a frozen lake. It was made at a time when the German threat Read more ...
james.woodall
Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural America to enable his New York employers Global to start deep drilling for massively lucrative natural gas.In a failing Pennsylvania small town Butler runs up against ancestral devotion to farming and an incomprehensible aversion to instant fortune, and into (of course) a pretty schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie De Witt). In her inherited home she’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A colourful confection which is certain to satisfy both the young and young at heart - and above all, gamers - Wreck-It Ralph is the conceptually fabulous, aesthetically various tale of a brick-brandishing brute who longs to be a hero. The cinematic debut of TV director Rich Moore (Futurama/The Simpsons), it features the voice talent of John C Reilly and Sarah Silverman and boasts not just a third dimension but a meticulously constructed universe.Continuing US animation's recent trend of aligning us with evildoers (see Megamind and Despicable Me - the latter is returning for a sequel this Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult to categorise Benh Zeitlin's feature debut, which is engaging and flawed in equal measure. Part drama, part dream-like experience, it was made as a riposte to the catastropically poor management of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.We don't know when this story is set, though; it could be modern-day or it could be just as easily in a post-apocalyptic future when climate change is wreaking havoc in the bayous of southern Louisiana, whose strange beauty the camera lingers on in several scenes without drama or dialogue.It's set in a wetland area called the Bathtub by its poor and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would think of a film that applies rudimentary psychology to a celluloid classic that gets under the skin to an extent Gervasi can only dream of. Thank heavens, at least, for the committed performances of a cast headed by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Mr and Mrs H, two classy talents in a film that otherwise feels as if it was made for some Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Although I Give It a Year seems to have more than a whiff of a Richard Curtis rom-com about it, don’t be fooled as this is the debut of British writer-director Dan Mazer, the co-writer of the emphatically more outré Brüno and Borat, along with various incarnations of Ali G. Furthermore he’s lobbed Scary Movie's Anna Faris and Bridemaids' Rose Byrne into the mix. The message is thus: while it's certainly not averse to plundering the fridge for cheese, for the most part I Give It a Year puts the emphasis on broad, bawdy comedy.Hastening through the schmaltz, the film begins with a courtship Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
There’s an episode in the first season of Mad Men in which the ad execs of Sterling Cooper brainstorm a campaign for Richard Nixon, just prior to the 1960 presidential election. Dramatic irony being what it is, it’s a rare opportunity to watch our anti-heroes working on a pitch (based chiefly around smear tactics) that is predestined to fail. By contrast, Pablo Larraín’s No chronicles how a team of ad men in 1980s Chile, led by Gael Garcia Bernal’s maverick René, put together a campaign to topple a dictator that we know will succeed against all odds.No is the third film in a loose trilogy Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Years before Cleopatra (1963), Richard Burton played an orphaned shopkeeper in a quaint melodrama. It was his film debut. The Last Days of Dolwyn is written and directed by Emlyn Williams, a fellow Welshman, who gave Burton his first stage role in 1944. In Dolwyn, out five years later, Burton is magnetic.The film zooms in on a Welsh village under threat from English gentry planning to supply Liverpool with water and flooding the area in the process. Burton seems awkward at times, but lends a rich complexity to his sensitive and volatile character, Gareth. Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Both on screen and off, Montgomery Clift was sensitive, hesitant, introspective, self-destructive and often tortured. A personality that expressed itself on film as if afraid of what the camera would reveal. There were at least three faces of Clift. The early public one of the dark, romantic, handsome star of the fan magazines; the face of extraordinary beauty marred after a car accident in 1956, and the private face of drink, drugs and a series of unloving homosexual encounters. Although the accident itself had not really disfigured him too seriously, it seems to have scarred his character Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Often it takes a generation or two before a country can address its dark days on films; Hitler didn’t feature in a central role in a German film until Downfall, in 2004. This timorousness was certainly the case in Chile, where in the immediate years following the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1990, the local cinema was dominated by sex comedies.But the renaissance in the country’s film industry over the past decade has been accompanied by a willingness to look back. Andres Wood’s Machuca led the way, in 2004, with a powerful child’s-view account of the days leading to the army Read more ...