Film
Tom Birchenough
How could we have expected the London 2011 riots to be brought back for the big screen? The least likely answer must be as a black comedy about a bicycle cop who after a bad concussion has woken up as a one-man vigilante who’s taking out the villains on his beat, but asking their permission first. That last detail explains the title of Stuart Urban’s May I Kill U?, which brings this particular wayward member of her majesty’s constabulary rather into Carry On territory, with a twist of Ealing comedy on the side.The odds are already stacked towards absurdity when your hero’s called Baz Vartis, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Contemporary homages to the silent age are tuppence are dozen, but none are quite as eccentric as Miguel Gomes’s Tabu. One of last year’s oddball gems, it joins The Artist and Hugo in sending a love letter to cinema’s formative geniuses and yet sets its swooningly romantic silent section in a Portuguese colony of Africa in the turbulent early 1960s. Its starcrossed protagonists have a scene of frank lovemaking, and one of the silent stars is a baby crocodile.Tabu’s two segments – which take the names of Paradise Lost and Paradise – are the story’s effect and cause. The first is set in wintry Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who ever said making a movie was a glamorous business? Shooting the climactic scene of his most recent film Boxing Day, British-born director Bernard Rose (pictured below right) found himself in the freezing Colorado mountains - so cold you couldn’t even see your breath - with just his two stars, Danny Huston and Matthew Jacobs, and a sound-recordist for company. Rose was his own cameraman, as well as editor, and a major inspiration behind the redemptive musical score.Rose may live in Los Angeles, and have made plenty of films on a much larger scale, but his ongoing series of adaptations of Read more ...
geoff brown
René Clément? Who he? Sixty years ago the question didn’t need to be asked: 1952 was the year of his greatest triumph, Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits), one of four titles being issued separately by StudioCanal to mark his centenary. A quick glance at The Deadly Trap (1971), a tension-free thriller, with Faye Dunaway and Frank Langella all at sea, will partly explain why his reputation faded. Poor material aside, Clément was also a victim of bad timing. Rising to fame just before the New Wave hit, he felt himself in his own eyes to be a New Wave precursor. To Godard, Truffaut and company Read more ...
emma.simmonds
We've pondered and pored over the films of 2012 and, while 2013 might have a lot to live up to, thankfully there's plenty of excitement on the horizon. So here are our picks of the coming months. Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino) - 18 JanuaryTarantino's back with his first fully fledged western. Told with plenty of his characteristic wit and swagger it's the story of Django (Jamie Foxx) - a slave who's liberated at the film's outset and sets out to free his wife. The deserved Oscar buzz is mainly focussed on which of the scene-stealing supporting actors (Christoph Waltz and Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
You will cry primal tears by the end of The Impossible, a family disaster drama by director Juan Antonio Bayona - because we can’t handle its overpowering truth. A delver of emotion, Bayona (The Orphanage) bases this spectacular drama on Sergio G Sánchez’s clear if sometimes curious script; the story itself comes from Maria Belon’s tale of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.Here, the Spanish family has been changed to a British one: Naomi Watts plays Maria herself, married to Ewan McGregor’s Henry. Travelling to Thailand for a Christmas holiday with children Lucas, Thomas and Simon (Tom Holland, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Assured, warm and comfy, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet is a tasteful farce of froths and strops. Hoffman’s always wanted to direct and it’s not like he hasn’t tried. Dead Poets Society slipped from his hands, both starring and directing, when he didn’t say yes quickly enough (Robin Williams got the part). In the 1970s Hoffman bought the screen rights to Edward (Runaway Train) Bunker's No Beast So Fierce, intending to direct. After a few weeks, he gave the job to his friend Ulu Grosbard. Things turned bad: Hoffman wasn’t happy with Grosbard’s vision of "his" film, with Grosbard Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" TS Eliot’s line could well stand as an epitaph to Jacqui and David Morris’s troublingly thoughtful film about British photographer Don McCullin, whose haunting images of conflict across the world over half a century have defined our perception of modern warfare (though his range of subjects goes far beyond that). The softly-spoken McCullin is our guide here to some of the stories behind this lifetime’s achievement, which is no less well summarized in his own words: “Seeing and looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.”It Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By declaring that You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet wasn’t his final film, the 89-year-old Alain Resnais might have been acknowledging his lack of a fixed relationship with time and memory, his continual exploration of their interchangeabilty. In his mind, final could mean anything at any given moment. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking he might pack it in and this would become his last. His next film is already in production.The Pirandello-esque You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Vous n’avez encore rien vu) is a deliberately paced, deliberately choreographed and deliberately stilted exercise. It’s slow Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With poorly heads and nostalgic hearts it’s time to look back over the year that’s passed. And what a year in film it was! For those who like their movies monolithic or miniscule, epic or slender, noisily spectacular or quietly mesmeric, pea-brained or near-impenetrably intellectual - 2012 delivered. In fact it was the year in which there was a 5-star film for everyone.Perhaps most strikingly, 2012 saw a major return to form for American cinema. US directors fledgling and seasoned gave us films as dynamic and different as The Master, Argo, Martha Marcy May Marlene (pictured below right), Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for dinner in a swimsuit. Her father was an alcoholic and banned from sets. She revealed her deprived background to the press, undermining the myth that stars sprang fully formed from the Elysian Fields. When it came to assessing the silent era in his seminal book The Parade's Gone By, film historian Kevin Brownlow didn’t mention her. For that slight, he Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In among the deluge of New Year Honours poured over Olympians (headed by Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Ben Ainslie, Dame Sarah Storey and Companion of Honour Lord Coe), there is a modest sprinkling over the arts world too. Roald Dahl's illustrator Quentin Blake becomes Sir Quentin, and another veteran entertainer, Jeremy Lloyd, co-writer of 'Allo 'Allo and Are You Being Served?, is made CBE. There are no arts Dames, but CBEs go to three well-known women, singer Kate Bush, artist Tracey Emin and choreographer Arlene Philips and to the less visible Cultural Olympiad chief, Ruth Mackenzie.Three other Read more ...