Film
alexandra.coghlan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Richard Curtis walk into Ann Summers… It’s not the setup for a joke but it is essentially the starting point for Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria – a film the director herself has dubbed “the vibrator movie you can take your mum to”. Wexler gamely takes on the true story of this Victorian medical innovation, folding Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It's not like we don't already love him, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt couldn't possibly get more adorable than he is as the fearsomely skilled bike-riding good guy in Premium Rush - a film that may remind older moviegoers of a 1986 bike messenger film Quicksilver. Anyone who remembers that film can now forget it because Premium Rush is so much more exciting and almost completely more plausible than its predecessor that it upends the whole bike messenger film genre, much in the way The Imposter upped the ante for documentaries. Yes, you could say Premium Rush was a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Described by Peter Falk as, “a love story between a woman who’s half wacky and a guy who’s inarticulate”, John Cassavetes’ seventh feature from 1974 is without doubt one of his finest achievements. It’s one of several collaborations between Cassavetes and his actor wife Gena Rowlands, here giving a performance of show-stopping complexity.Falk plays Nick Longhetti, an overworked construction foreman. Rowlands is his wife Mabel and the mother of his three young children. She’s struggling with mental illness and - though their relationship is placed under violent strain - their love for each Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even Meryl Streep, bless her, is allowed the odd dud, and Hope Springs is a snore. Much has been made of the film shifting Hollywood’s attention toward the middle-aged – meaning, in their terms, anyone 20 or older. But director David Frankel’s reunion with his Devil Wears Prada star merely proves that dogged earnestness can be just as soul-sapping as the latest teenage gross-out venture. One can’t imagine Prada’s Miranda Priestly sitting this one out without a well-aimed mot juste.Perhaps Streep just wanted a complete about-face after the demands of The Iron Lady, the actress turning for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Woody Allen plays tour operator (yet again) in the excruciating To Rome With Love, and the result is not a pretty sight. Oh, sure, the Eternal City looks great, in the manner of one of those vibrant, come-hither videos that one might expect at a travel convention. But continuing his pan-European jaunt that has taken in London (three times over), Barcelona, Paris, and now Rome, Allen hits close to rock bottom in a portmanteau effort in which the parts, not to mention the whole, don’t begin to add up.Part of the deep frustration is one's sense of what the film aspires to be – a breezy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you saw previous Nick Love efforts like The Football Factory or Outlaw, you'll know he likes nothing better than a lairy swagger down Geezer Street while slaughtering innocent bystanders. He's at it again here, with this glaringly unnecessary remake of Seventies cop show The Sweeney, a TV institution that very nearly justifies the use of the crassly abused-to-death term "iconic".Love rightly decided that merely mimicking the original was neither possible nor desirable. Love wrongly decided to cast Ray Winstone as DI Jack Regan and Ben "Plan B" Drew as his stalwart sidekick, George Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The onset of puberty is difficult, and especially so for girls in art house films. Marta is 12 and has been away from Italy for 10 years. In the days after returning with her mother and sister, she contends with being prepared for her first communion and her changing body. Quietly, as if not there, Marta observes the hypocrisy of adults. Dog-tired from working in a bakery, her mother is forced into the background.As Marta, Yle Vianello is terrific, a watchful presence who tries hard to do the right thing but is frustrated, who keeps a distance but is forced to interact. She bakes a cake for Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A wondrous antidote to digital movies’ colonisation of the darkening continent of cinema, Miguel Gomes’s luminously black-and-white Tabu is a tripartite paean to the past: to the perils of Portuguese imperialism in Africa; to Hollywood silent movies as they transitioned to sound; to an adulterous affair that trapped its enraptured lovers for the remaining 50 years of their lives.It’s also a picture with a few meta-movie tropes – a waterlogged camera lens, a home-movie shoot with a malfunctioning Bolex, an irrational sideways shot – that addresses the storytelling impulse and the undiminished Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The third sensitive feature written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve is a semi-autobiographical realist drama about a young woman making the agonising emotional transition many endure after their initial romance. It gives little away to disclose that at the start of Goodbye, First Love, 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) is in the process of being devirginised by her boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and that at the end she is in a settled relationship with another man. It’s how she gets there, via heartbreak, self-pity, and a spell in which she allows herself to become a liar and a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”. But for all the deliberate theatrical artifice of a movie about a society that knows a thing or two about putting itself on display, the delicious paradox of the occasion is this: in framing his Tolstoy adaptation as if it were a piece of theatre, Wright has made the least stagey film imaginable.Staginess, in any case, has less to do with sets than a state of mind, and there’s no doubt from the off that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page realist novel and choke it in the grip of meta-theatrical conceptualising and Brechtian by-play. Anna Karenina feels as though its director just discovered the fourth wall and felt the need to graffiti all over it: “Joe Wright woz ere.”Apparently it was all a question of budget. Denied expansive tracking shots of snow-covered vistas and bustling St Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Being such a massive phenomenon has made The Hunger Games an easy target to tilt at but the truth is that, staying close to the Suzanne Collins novel, this film adaptation is a lean, smart science fiction thriller that there’s much to like about. The premise is that in the future the USA has become a nation called Panem, 12 serf states ruled by the Capitol who organise an annual televised competition designed to engender obedience in the populace. On it a pair of "tributes" from each district fight to the death on the live TV show of the title. Sixteen-year-old poacher Katniss Everdeen ( Read more ...