Film
theartsdesk
Yesterday our film writers brought you numbers 10 – 6 in our movies of 2012 countdown. Looking back over that list it’s hard to imagine a clutch of finer films. Yet, testament to a year of remarkable filmmaking, it’s a hell of a race to the finish, taking in sex addiction, murder, spies, hostages and cults. And so we present our final five. Drumroll please…5 – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)Road movie, rumination of the meaning of life and death, shaggy dog story about dealing with a corpse, manual on the best in yoghurt, depiction of the transgressions which break Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” observes Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) in Northern Irish director Jon Wright’s creature feature. And, credit where it’s due, the mirthfully monikered Grabbers presents us with some classically mad shit. Set on the fictional Erin Island - a fishing village off the coast of Ireland - Grabbers is Wright’s second feature after 2009’s Tormented.After a prologue involving the fatal molestation of fisherman by an unseen sea monster, we’re introduced to Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle). He’s rebounding off rock bottom, drunk and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Not-long into this farrago, Peter – the former Pete - Doherty opines that “nothing is beyond romance, except for the pain that is killing me every day”. Thankfully, the pain here is limited to the close-to two hours that Confession of a Child of the Century takes to trudge towards its conclusion.That the dialogue is so risibly apt cannot entirely be lain at Doherty's or director Sylvie Verheyde’s door. A faithful adaptation of Alfred de Musset’s dark 19th-century romance Confession d'un enfant du siècle, Confession… employs literal translations from the novel. But with a film this dull, this Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
If 2012 is to have a cinematic legacy, it may just be remembered as the year big-screen time travel came of age. While Rian Johnson’s pulpy noir Looper explored the moral and spiritual implications of a world in which decade-hopping has become the norm, first-time director Colin Trevorrow hones in on the concept’s core emotion. Our universal longing to go back, to recover, to alter the past, is both what makes time travel such an enduringly popular trope, and what sustains Trevorrow’s particular offbeat, quietly joyous take.Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is a disillusioned college grad living out much Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the end of 2012 nearly upon us it’s time for a spot of reflection. We’ve polled our film writers for their picks of the year and bring you our top 10 in all its drama and diversity. This is cinema at its very best, representing the numerous shades of the filmic rainbow: spectacular, plucky, horrifying, challenging, comedic, harrowing, joyous and strange. With each of our writers acting as a film’s individual champion, we begin with a rundown of numbers 10 to six (two films tied for eighth spot.) Join us tomorrow for the final five.10 – Rust and Bone (dir. Jacques Audiard)There's much to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s always the second-rate fiction which makes first-rate films, because there’s nothing to lose but plot. Midnight’s Children, lest anyone be allowed to forget, is first-rate fiction. It has won the Booker, the Booker of Bookers and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes and is listed somewhere or other as one of the Great Books of the 20th Century. That year you missed the broadcast it probably won Miss World. The novel has been sitting around on the runway awaiting adaptation since the late 1990s, when production in Sri Lanka was pulled at the last minute. To help it along this time round, it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Berberian Sound Studio has the quirky flavour of an academic treatise on shlock horror with lively slide illustrations. Peter Strickland’s claustrophobic homage to the Italian giallo – in which diabolical dismemberings are perpetrated upon female innocents - would seem an odd leap from Katalin Varga, his brooding revenge drama set in rural Romania. But both films bring an outsider’s all but ethnographic eye to the rituals of Euro-barbarity. The game changer is that Berberian Sound Studio is also funny.A meek British sound engineer called, improbably, Gilderoy is hired by an Italian film Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are spitting feathers that their fictional hero is being played by Tom Cruise. This is not least because in the books, Reacher is a hulking fellow built like a giant redwood with fists the size of dustbins (he's six foot five and 250 pounds). And probably not a Scientologist. Tom is 5'7" and weighs practically nothing.But as ever, the obsessive Cruise has gone into the project with beady-eyed gung-ho-ness, and if he doesn't measure up to anyone's ideal of Reacherhood, there's no doubting his energy and commitment. At 50, he's been putting in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Thanks first to a David Holmes cover version then to some recent reissues of his records, I knew the approximate story of Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez. Roughly speaking: intelligent but borderline down-and-out Detroit musician is discovered, makes two amazing albums in the early 1970s, fails to sell anything, and turns his back on the industry to find steady work and raise a family.Meanwhile his records become the centre of a cult among white liberals in South Africa and symbol of the struggle against Apartheid. South Africans assume he's dead, and thanks to some industry Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.The first thing Pitch Perfect gets right is its cast. Oscar and Tony nominated actress Anna Kendrick ( Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Blessed with the finest (and most infuriatingly catchy) soundtrack of any Christmas film, Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 movie-musical Meet Me in St Louis is a festive classic of a simpler, happier time. Small girls roam the streets in safety getting up to all kinds of wholesome mischief, bigger girls sing songs around the piano and fall for the boy next door. As a cinematic metaphor for the virtues of the small-town life it’s enough to make any commuter swap their season ticket for picket-fence.“We don’t have to come here on a train or stay in a hotel, it’s right in our own home town, right here Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A film for those who see the festive period as a never-ending trudge from bar to bed via a shedload of booze, Terry Zwigoff’s delightfully deviant offering from 2003 gives us a trash-talking, beer-slugging Father Christmas, unimprovably played by Billy Bob Thornton. This chaotic Santa becomes the unlikely guardian of a troubled child. Wildly funny and oddly cheering, Bad Santa puts the crass in Christmas.Bad Santa is brazenly drunken from start to finish, it even begins in a bar. Willie (Thornton) is a misanthropic, alcohol-dependent, suicidal safe-cracker. For the past seven Christmases he’s Read more ...