Film
Tom Birchenough
Three hours is a testing length for any film. Directors may stretch to that because they’re telling a huge story with plenty of plots and characters, but in Aurora, Romania's Cristi Puiu pares down plot, such as it is, to an absolute minimum. Elements of semi-documentary set in, as we watch his hero Viorel (played by Puiu himself in his first screen role) move disaffectedly through contemporary Bucharest. He takes the first half to bring himself to action, the alienated coldness of which, when it comes, leaves us stuck in his troubled soul – and, by extension, the soul of his city.The only Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
No one can resist a story based on declassified truth and in Argo’s case, no one should. The broad strokes of this so-ridiculous-it-must-be-true tale involve six American hostages who escape the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1979. They hole up at the Canadian ambassador’s house while the Iranian military are slowly discovering that some of their hostages are missing and the American government is trying all sorts of idiotic plans to get these hostages back. It’s a pincer movement heading straight for our hapless hostage heroes.The third of director Ben Affleck’s films is, so far, the best Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julien Temple’s directing career has been struck seemingly stone-dead twice. After working with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1979), then again after the flop big-budget British jazz musical Absolute Beginners (1986), he was made a notorious cinema untouchable in the UK. Exiled in Hollywood, he fell back on his parallel life as a landmark pop video auteur.But during the last decade Temple has bounced back to become the world’s most exhilarating and influential rock documentarian, with films using cut-up, rapid-fire film grammar to tell a story of post- Read more ...
james.woodall
With her jewel-blue eyes and intense presence, Emily Blunt can illuminate anything – a screen, a stage, a red carpet, any location for any old interview. She might seem unable to put a foot wrong. With five film credits in 2011 alone (including the DVD under review) and two this year, she’s one of the UK’s most bankable stars, and presumably has a lot of say in exactly what should and should not do.How much did she really want to do Your Sister’s Sister? Originally lined up to play her character Iris’s older sister Hannah was compatriot Rachel Weisz, replaced by Rosemarie DeWitt, who’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Considering that his last film was set in a prison, it’s perhaps appropriate to say that Jacques Audiard has an arresting track record. The French director has made a handful of very impressive features (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) but it was when he donned a knuckle-duster for his unflinching tale of prison life, A Prophet, that Audiard really knocked many of us sideways. Expectations are then high for the film that follows. Whilst little could match the impact of his previous picture, by taking things down a notch Audiard has delivered something really quite strange and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Shining isn’t the worst horror film ever made. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about blocked, alcoholic writer Jack Torrance’s deadly winter as caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel is certainly as extraordinary as anything he directed. Its early scenes especially, as Jack (Jack Nicholson), wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and six-year-old son Danny (Danny Lloyd, both pictured below right), wander the hotel as it shuts for winter, have a chilly strangeness.The demented, byzantine theories on The Shining’s meaning explored in the new documentary Room 237 focus on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Internationally he may be Russia's best-known film director, but Alexander Sokurov’s fame - his unique single-frame Russian Ark from 2002 aside - hasn’t travelled as widely as it might. Critical reaction has often been mixed, but at least the majority of his main films from the last two decades are available outside his homeland.This Artificial Eye collection brings a welcome couple from the very end of the 1980s (without any extras, however). Both are from scripts by Yury Arabov, Sokurov’s most frequent collaborator, and are simultaneously mesmeric and challenging to watch, their intensity Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American indie director Ira Sachs’s last film was Married Life, and he returns to similar territory in Keep the Lights On, which could just as easily be titled Scenes from a Relationship. Episodes over the decade from 1998 onwards tell the story of the coming together - and falling apart - of a New York gay relationship, one that Sachs has said draws on his own life.Sachs is writing implicitly from the point of view of his character, Erik, a blond, slightly gap-toothed and emotionally open Dane (Thure Lindhardt) who’s floating happily in Big Apple life. The film’s title doesn’t refer to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As the title suggests, It Always Rains on Sunday wasn’t one of Ealing Studios' famous comedies, but a film suffused with resignation and realism. That’s not to say the 1947 classic is monotonous: how could it be when it’s a bickering domestic drama, a panoramic portrait of Bethnal Green street culture, and a thriller that draws on French poetic realism and American film noir? And given its provenance, it does at least include a wryly comic story about petty criminals.It’s not hard to divine why the film’s director, Robert Hamer (better known for the elegant aristocraticide of Kind Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Jacques Tati is probably the most famous French comic of all time. Monsieur Hulot is one of those well-loved outsiders, rebels by default rather than vocation and melancholy clowns pitted against the conventions of bourgeois society and the false promises of progress.The latest in the BFI’s very thorough re-releases of Tati’s major works include Mon oncle (1958) (the second Hulot which followed his celebrated holiday adventures), an eccentric's critique of modernist excess, and the earlier Jour de fête (1949), in which he plays François, the bicycle-riding postman, persuaded by his fellow- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Elena is a story of two households, two families each unhappy in their own ways. Linking them is the title character (played by Nadezhda Markina, outstanding in a screen role that could have been written for her) who moves between two very different worlds that both speak truthfully about contemporary Russia. Zvyagintsev has changed tone from his more philosophical festival-winners The Return and The Banishment, but the sheer visual mastery of those two remains central in this film where family tension is more down to earth.The director has worked throughout his career with cinematographer Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A tale of life at the foot of the slopes, French-Swiss director Ursula Meier’s follow-up to her likeably askew debut Home finds her once again zeroing in on an unusual domestic set-up. This time the focus is on a dysfunctional family, perilously pared down to just a 12-year-old boy and his irresponsible adult sister, who are scraping by on the money generated by the youngster’s gift for theft. The winner of the Silver Bear at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, Sister (French title: L’enfant d’en haut) features an extraordinary young performer at its heart and an international cast Read more ...