Film
ronald.bergan
The recent speculation as to whether Michael Phelps can be regarded as "the greatest Olympian" leads one to ponder the very notion of judging "greatness" hierarchically. If the only criterion for claiming Phelps as the "greatest" is based on his winning the most medals then it would be equivalent to judging the best film ever made on the amount of Oscars it had won. Step up Ben Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings, each of which gained 11 Academy Awards. Yet none of these three films featured prominently, or at all, in the decennial Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films ever made. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of sport about at the minute, and those of us who get off on it are filling our boots. So it’s perhaps not the ideal moment to release a sporting documentary, however rousing, however laudable, especially one about that most unOlympic of team games, US football. If Undefeated makes a legitimate claim on the attention, it’s because it is all about legacy, that ubiquitous buzz word of London 2012.The drama of this improving documentary unfolds in a working-class area of North Memphis, Tennessee, which has entered a downward spiral after the closure of the local industrial plant. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Julien Temple’s new documentary is a timely accompaniment to the London Olympics. While the Games casts a spotlight on the capital, the film offers a wondrously dense and evocative, warts-and-all portrait of the city.And oddly enough, it has echoes of the Olympic opening ceremony. Just as Danny Boyle used live spectacle, clips and music to celebrate the city’s enviable cosmopolitanism, so Temple draws on a treasure trove of archive material and his own deep familiarity with British music to present the complex story behind that multiculturalism.In essence, this is a history of London from the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Plenty of great films have been made about old age, about the humiliations, emotions, fragilities and joys of the end of life. Wild Strawberries, Harold and Maude, Venus, Driving Miss Daisy, even Pixar’s Up probably has a claim on this category, but Asia, with its regard for the elderly, has always had a special cinematic affinity for the subject. Following in the path of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, A Simple Life explores and exposes with infinite delicacy the relationship between an ageing Hong Kong servant and her employer.Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) has worked for the same family for 40 years, bringing up Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The final collaboration between Grant and Hitch also happens to be some of the helmer’s most deft, joyously irreverent work, light of touch and bereft of sentiment. Grant stars as a slick Mad Ave exec who’s mistaken for a spy and pursued across the US by a cabal of shadowy agents, a state of affairs that he takes impressively in his debonair stride.“Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then,” his Roger Thornhill quips drily, “but I have tickets for the theatre this evening.” A line like this could easily play as posturing, but Grant walks just the right razor’s edge between Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As a director François Ozon perpetually confounds, with a string of diverse films to his name (the intense 5X2 and the gambolling Potiche to name but two) and this effort from 2002 is characteristically capricious - is it crisp, contemplative drama, eroticism or thriller? In Swimming Pool former provocateur Charlotte Rampling finds her peace shattered, her sensuality re-awakened and her robust beauty upstaged by the brazen Ludivine Sagnier.Swimming Pool tells the story of artistically frustrated crime writer Sarah (Rampling) who retreats to France at the behest of her greedy publisher and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first time I saw Orlando, on general release in 1992, I was blown away by the beauty of Sally Potter’s homage to Virginia Woolf. Beginning in 1600 when Orlando (the suitably androgynous Tilda Swinton) is a young man, the film skips and hops through to the present day. The first scene, a banquet for Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp resembling a pantomime dame in a tall red wig) takes place after dark and, in the glow of candlelight, everything is burnished a rich golden brown.The aged queen gives Orlando the deeds to a grand house – on one condition: “Do not fade,” she commands; “Do not wither, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hitchcock’s penultimate film was the grubby, squirm-inducing Frenzy, and Barry Foster's depiction of the grim killer Robert Rusk is central to the disquieting aura it casts. The film’s production was problematic enough, having been cut by the BBFC before release. It also had casting problems – Michael Caine turned down the lead role. Hitchcock dismissed composer Henry Mancini from soundtrack duties after having commissioned him. Hitchcock’s first British production for two decades wasn’t an easy ride for the director or audiences.Students of London history can look to Frenzy as a time capsule Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s always a thrill watching The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) doing daredevil feats on the Flying Scotsman as it speeds across the Forth Bridge, kissing a Scottish crofter’s jealously guarded wife, and bringing down the house with an inane extemporized speech at a constituency meeting.A passive ex-Canadian rancher in London, Hannay must extricate himself from a murder rap and expose a spy ring by revealing unexpected daring, physical agility, and mental resourcefulness. Wrongly suspected of murdering a Mata Hari type (Lucie Mannheim) he thought was a prostitute but had no interest Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Seth MacFarlane is the equal opportunity offender responsible for a trio of animated sitcoms: Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. The hardest-working man in TV comedy is known for his colourfully un-PC style and agreeably obnoxious humour, marrying American brassiness with sharp satire, and for turning a baby into a maniacal genius. Ted, his largely enjoyable film debut, focuses on a man held in a state of arrested development by his bad-influence buddy, the twist being that said buddy is a teddy bear. Teddy Ruxpin he most certainly isn't.In last year’s child-friendly Hop the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Football and film: what is that? Let’s agree that it has not always been the happiest relationship. If you’ve observed Brian Clough’s brief encounter with the Leeds squad in The Damned United, you'll get the picture. They really ought to be best mates, both being forms of mass entertainment. They have the same values, dreams and indeed time frame: 90 minutes or thereabouts (depends who's reffing/directing). And at their most venal they both pray at the altar of profit. Somehow, though, they just don’t click.Why? Time for a bit of punditry, Ron. The main problem is no scriptwriter can make up Read more ...