Film
Kieron Tyler
Although the collaboration between Jane Arden and Jack Bond was truly two-way, their films were wholly driven by a female perspective. They also evolved from Arden’s explorations into the nature of self and how external forces affect that. Yet instead of being a form of therapy, the Arden-Bond films are magical journeys blurring the boundary between the real and unreal.Separation (1967) has some mod-ish trappings: music by Procul Harum, visuals from light-show artist Mark Boyle and clothing from Ossie Clark. The character Jane (Arden herself) drifts through a world where she interacts with a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Animated 11th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star of Disney Pixar’s Brave. She’s a snappy, arrow-shooting, red-haired Scottish princess who’ll do anything not to end up like her mum. Who wouldn’t love a feature-length 3D animated film shining with the vocal talents of Kelly Macdonald, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, Billy Connolly and half-Glaswegian Emma Thompson and five propriety software Read more ...
james.woodall
The most radical Locarno ever: it's in the upper 20s Celsius in the southern Alps. The sky is cloudless blue. Moreover, not for one, or two, or three, or four nights in a row, but for FIVE has it not rained in this small resort. Next year no doubt it will again be the normal business of deluges in the Piazza Grande, and an air of anti-climactic, soul-freezing damp will prevail.Good weather helps the mood but does not, of course, affect the quality of films. Of the ones I’ve seen in the Piazza (not in competition) only Pablo Larraín’s No, about a 1988 referendum in Chile to extend or bring an Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Alfred Hitchcock’s atmospheric boxing silent The Ring pivots on the allure of WAG-dom, 1927-style, for Lillian Hall Davis’s Mabel. At the start, she is the ticket-seller for the fairgound booth in which her pugilist boyfriend, “One Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), takes on all-comers. And one can tell by the way she chews gum that she’s bored.When a fight manager pits the unrecognised Australian heavyweight champion Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) against Jack, to see if he’d be worth signing, Mabel is smitten by the smooth-talking hunk. Hall Davis’s amorous glances never suggest vulgarity, though Read more ...
fisun.guner
Every year, FHM produces its 100 sexiest women of the year list. It follows a simple formula, since sexiness, as determined by the magazine’s readers, is predicated on fame – a particular type of fleeting, red-top tabloid fame. So this year, top of that list is Tulisa of the sex tapes. Likewise, every year Art Review does its 100 most powerful people in the art world list. So what is it to be the most powerful person in the art world? What is its relationship to fame, market value and fashion?Last year, it was Ai Weiwei, who still holds the title. One isn’t suggesting that the two title- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Britain’s New Towns – constructed to address post-World War II housing shortages – were meant to be places of dreams. Modern amenities abounded. The clean lines of post-Le Corbusier architecture screamed “this is the future”. Yet there was no sense of community, more a sense of alienation for residents. That wasn’t an issue for on-message government agency the Central Office of Information, whose 1974 film New Towns painted them as places of wonder. Retitled A Dark Social Template, this ad for the miracles of concrete, bathrooms and a bank on your doorstep has been recast with a new Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Whenever the name of Ivor Novello is mentioned, which is not often these days, the term “matinee idol” is inevitably appended. Novello, now best known as a songwriter, had already starred in nine silent films before Hitchcock chose him to play the title role in 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. In a way, Novello, whose well-carved profile, smouldering dark eyes and bow lips gained him the reputation of Britain’s answer to Rudolf Valentino, was cast against type as a possible serial killer. (Not so the creepy Laird Cregar in the 1944 remake.)
The influence of German Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Blood feuds and mobile phones are not something you expect to find in the same film narrative. But they are both part of the landscape of American director Joshua (Maria Full of Grace) Marston’s Albanian-language The Forgiveness of Blood, which shows that while a small Balkan nation has caught up with the modern world in some technological respects, age-old traditions of clan revenge survive. Murder must be avenged with murder, making for generations-long disputes.The kind of simmering disputes between neighbours that end in bloodshed were a part of William Faulkner’s American South. In the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s a standard dilemma in film. What to do with the body? In this case, the answer can be seen coming but when it does, it isn’t one that could have occurred outside the world created for the otherwise all too generic Jackpot.Although based on a story by the Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbø and co-scripted by him, Jackpot (Arme Riddere) isn’t hard-boiled like his Harry Hole books or intrigue-laden like Headhunters, his novel also recently adapted for film. Instead, it sidesteps depth in favour of a cartoon-style punchiness. Despite it’s washed-out palette, Jackpot isn’t brooding Nordic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alfred Hitchcock isn't the only director who appeared in his own movies - François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and M Night Shyamalan are among many others who have done the same - but he is by far the one who has done it most frequently. He appeared, to the best of film historians' knowledge, in 39 of his 53 films.It's not definitively recorded why he did it - ego, necessity, habit, superstition, a private joke, perhaps all of those - and biographers differ in their views. What we do know is that he appeared in full shot, profile, blink-and-you-miss-it walk-by, or even, in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marvin Hamlisch’s three Oscars all came in 1974. "I think now we can talk to each other as friends," he said as he accepted his third award of the night. He composed the winning song "The Way We Were" (and the film's score) for Barbara Streisand, having started out on Broadway as rehearsal pianist in Funny Girl. A wizened sage warned Hamlisch that it didn't do to win so much so young, but he paid no notice and a year later went and wrote the music for A Chorus Line, his Broadway debut. When the inevitable Tony followed, Hamlisch had achieved every target he'd set for himself by the age of 31. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end only Robert Altman really knew how to do it: to take a spread of characters and somehow knit their stories together into a satisfactory whole. When filmmakers have attempted it in recent years they’ve tended to self-importance – Paul Haggis in Crash, Alejandro González Iñárritu in Babel – or risibility – Richard Curtis in Love, Actually. And now here comes 360, which riffs on La Ronde to daisy-chain the lives of several characters across the planet. Bring your passport.You’ve got to hand it to director Fernando Meirelles and writer Peter Morgan: they’ve aimed high with a story Read more ...