Film
ellin.stein
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild. The other difference, of course, was that everyone knew what a hurricane entailed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When The Secret in Their Eyes beat the more fancied A Prophet and The White Ribbon to last year's Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, there was mild consternation. But Argentine Juan José Campanella’s film works both as a mystery with jigsaw pieces spread across a quarter-century, and an equally fragmented, frustrated romance.Retired legal investigator Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) visits his old boss Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil) to discuss the novel he’s struggling to write based on their shared experiences around a savage murder case 25 years earlier, in 1974. Love and justice Read more ...
ash.smyth
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.In little over 50 years since Kwame Nkrumah's groundbreaking election as Africa's first black prime minister, Ghana has been through five military dictatorships and four republics. The most notable figure in all this chequered history is Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, who seized power in Read more ...
Dylan Moore
What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough. The brooding landscapes of the remote Olchon Valley in Wales’s Black Mountains are put to much the same use as they were in the book: claustrophobic and accompanied by threatening storm clouds, they serve as a pretty obvious Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At Thanksgiving in 1999, a 75-year-old retired widowed museum director came out to his family. He had only recently been widowed after a marriage lasting more than four decades. One of the people to whom he broke the news was his son Mike Mills, then in his early thirties and not yet a film director. This year the movie inspired by that moment was released, and it now appears on DVD.Beginners, written and directed by Mills, features a delightful and zesty performance from Christopher Plummer in the role of Hal, who announces his homosexuality to his son, a cartoonist played by Ewan McGregor. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.We’ve been to Australia’s suburban badlands before, in Rowan Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like a fist to the face of the traditionally insipid, female-fronted rom-com, Bridesmaids marks a departure from the oft-derided norm, not by being brassy or crude (OK, there might be a sizeable helping of the latter) but because of its authentic humour, credible character dynamics and the foregrounding of female friendships over romance. It is also wildly funny.Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the film with Annie Mumolo, who appears as “Nervous Woman on Plane”) is Annie, a thirtysomething singleton asked by her childhood chum Lillian (Maya Rudolph) to be her maid of honour. Despite her outstanding Read more ...