Film
Adam Sweeting
It's Bond number 23, and if you were to suggest to me that it was the best of the lot, I might very well agree with you. This is a terrific James Bond movie, thoughtfully written, shrewdly cast and taking stock of everything that the 50-year-old franchise has come to mean. But even if it wasn't a Bond film, it would still be darn good.In this year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, it's also surprisingly and rather touchingly British, right down to Adele's stridently Bassey-esque theme tune. In a staggering feat of cross-marketing, they even got the Queen to appear in that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo, black magic.” That about sums up The Devil Rides Out, Hammer’s fantastic adaptation of Denis Wheatley’s devils ‘n’ demons page-turner. If you’d seen it in on its release in July 1968, it would have been billed with Slave Girls, made by Hammer as an opportunity to recycle sets and costumes from One Million Years B.C. There was nothing cut-rate about the deadly serious The Devil Rides Out, a stylish dig into the wild wild world of Satanism.The Devil Rides Out was filmed between 7 August and 29 September 1967. It might have been the Summer of Love, but darkness was in Read more ...
bruce.dessau
We currently seem to be awash with rockumentaries. The Rolling Stones have yet another retrospective out, while Friday night on BBC Four would not be complete without dusting off the back catalogue of some mid-table band once adored by some nice middle-aged folk unable to find a babysitter. Status Quo fare better than a BBC Four slot, if less well than Jagger & co's la-di-da London Film Festival airing, with their very own doc, Hello Quo, enjoying a brief cinema release before coming out on DVD.While Quo might not have the cachet of the Stones, they do have a definite niche. Welcome to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As the London Film Festival finishes for another year, this study of the strain an ageing father’s decline puts on his daughter’s love will stay with me as much as anything. It’s Uruguayan director Rodrigo Pla’s third time at the LFF, but only The Zone (2007), his thriller about a young working-class robber trapped in a Mexican gated community after a murder, has found any sort of UK audience. The Delay confirms he’s a major talent whose films demand automatic release.The first thing we see is Maria (Roxana Blanco) washing her naked father Agustin (Carlos Villarino) in the shower, a moment of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s the suffocating inevitability of what is done to the girl that makes you keep grimly watching. Mexican director Michel Franco’s film is about people with nowhere to turn, expressed most brutally in the bullying of its teenage heroine Alejandra (Tessa Io). But the title refers to the death of her mother Lucia in a car crash Alejandra was also in, which has left her burly, loving father Roberto (Hernan Mendoza) floating close to the mental edge, moorings loose and numb with inexpressible pain. Off-limits for aid, then, for his quietly practical, persecuted daughter.The dangerously gaping Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Film critic and historian David Thomson has been writing on cinema for more than 40 years, and in that time has penned books both sprawling (1975’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film) and specific (2009’s The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder). His latest volume The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did To Us straddles the divide. It’s an ambitious but selective history of cinema, combining an overview (which is, by Thomson’s own admission, partial) with intimate, specific studies of noteworthy filmmakers. But more than a history of cinema, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity unruffled. Song for Marion pairs him with one of his great Sixties peers, Vanessa Redgrave, as long-married Arthur and Marion.Arthur’s hostility to expressing emotion has alienated son James (Christopher Eccleston), and he can’t change even as Marion suffers with cancer while singing in a choir he can’t bring himself to join, despite the entreaties of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet directors, most notably Elem Klimov in his visceral Come and See. Loznitsa’s film, with the exception of a wider opening scene, is almost a chamber piece: three characters, slow-moving action, dialogue without a voice raised, no musical score.Loznitsa’s background was in documentary, before he completed the acclaimed My Joy two years ago, a journey through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by passing contact with temptation. For Garrone’s far more sympathetic family, that’s the prospect of fame on Big Brother. Here, a child of Palermo scrap-dealer Nico Ciraulos (Toni Servillo) is killed during a botched Mafia hit.Cipri doesn’t bother trying to make us grieve, which the family don’t either after they realise that as Mafia victims they’re Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955) isn’t as celebrated as Gun Crazy (1950), his other great film noir, but it’s as perverse and violent as anything in the canon. A vehicle for the husband-and-wife team of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace, it’s about a dogged plainclothesman, Leonard Diamond, who has spent three years following Susan Lowell, a masochistic socialite enmeshed with suavely sadistic Mob boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) whose organisation, the Combination, leaves no traces. Diamond thinks Susan will lead him to expose Brown – but, of course, he’s fallen obsessively in love with her Read more ...
emma.simmonds
There’s more than a touch of the magic to come in Benh Zeitlin’s soaring 2008 short Glory at Sea, which sees a storm-ravaged community take to the sea to rescue their loved ones - who are anchored to the seabed in suspended animation. Zeitlin’s debut feature Beasts of the Southern Wild - which felled Sundance with its raggedy, semi-supernatural beauty – is certainly cut from the same generous-spirited cloth. Based on Lucy Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious, it’s as radiant and defiant as a string of fairy lights in the dark.Rather than being a romanticised view of life on the cusp of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A sex comedy with a disabled hero involving frank sex scenes, a poignant drama about a man struggling to live a full life against the odds, and a love story prompted by the assertion “my penis speaks to me, Father Brendan.” The Sessions is all of these things and more, a rare animal that has one roaring with laughter while deeply touched by a story that is tender and profound.It’s based on the writings of Mark O’Brien, who was paralyzed from the neck down when he contracted polio as a six-year-old. Despite spending much of his time inside an iron lung, he succeeded in a career as a poet and Read more ...