Film
Nick Hasted
After 10 minutes in the company of Fright Night’s vacuous US teens I was thinking, like Colonel Kurtz, “Kill them all!” One of the several virtues of this remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy is that its writer, Marti Noxon, feels the same way. Partnering this Buffy veteran with Craig Gillespie, the director of sensitive man-and-sex-doll romance Lars and the Real Girl, makes this deeply unpromising entry in the current cycle of Eighties horror reboots surprisingly engaging. A keen cast including Colin Farrell as king vampire Jerry and David Tennant as a burnt-out Vegas magic act add to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s pretty damn cold inside the Arctic Circle, but Eric Bana’s former CIA agent Erik Heller doesn’t notice. Striding out of his wilderness cabin into metres-deep snow, he’s fine in a business suit. Demanding a catering-sized suspension of disbelief, Hanna is - as ludicrous thrillers go - pretty special.Director Joe Wright was behind Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – Saoirse Ronan’s subsequently Oscar-nominated introduction to the world. Although it doesn’t seem so at first, Ronan’s Hanna echoes her Briony Tallis in Atonement. Both cause chaos and tragedy. More recently, Wright helmed the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ben Wheatley’s debut Down Terrace, about a Brighton crime family whose bickering resembles Abigail’s Party, then Macbeth, had almost no budget and was literally home-made. Many critics still realised that it was one of the best and most original films of 2010. With its cult success repeated in the US, Wheatley has quickly followed it with the most assured and troubling British horror film in many years. Kill List confirms his promise while pinning you to your seat with scenes of cold nightmare.We begin in a deceptively similar milieu to Down Terrace, at the suburban home of working-class Jay Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Attenberg Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari illustrates that there is no species on earth more peculiar than man. A hit at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, where its lead Ariane Labed rightfully claimed Best Actress, it is on first inspection something of a hodgepodge. On the one hand it’s a quietly confounding and deeply moving study of a woman’s alienated (and almost alien) existence and, on the other, it’s a joyously infantile amusement. With the occasional disconcerting dash of prurience, this is a film which blows a raspberry in the face of convention and decorum. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When I interviewed the great Hungarian film-maker István Szabó (b 1938) in his native Budapest, he took me on a tour of the city centre on the Pest side of the Danube. On the way we were distracted by a flashy café designed to lure tourists. It was called Mephisto – after the film by Szabó, presumably, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1981. “I don’t know if it’s named after the film," he said, "but I think it must be because they have used the same typeface.” Then he added, “I’ve never been in there.”Mephisto, based on Klaus Mann's novel, tells of a brilliant Brechtian actor Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution intriguingly juggles the political and the personal. Their public stories are presented through the personal prisms of their surviving daughters, who recount, with some coolness and with very different perspectives, how their own lives were affected by the revolutionary choices that their mothers made.Children may open with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinematic virtuoso Pedro Almodóvar’s contribution to the body horror subgenre is a sumptuous nightmare with the precision and looming malevolence of its psychotic surgeon’s blade. His 19th feature is a film for our age – an age which has seen radical and sometimes grotesque surgical reinvention - concerned as it is with the troubling question: what actually lies beneath?Based fairly loosely on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In reunites Almodóvar with his former leading man of choice, Antonio Banderas. Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a cutting-edge (excuse the pun), Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Watching Incendies leaves you winded. Although it can be read as a thriller, Incendies is a drama that offers no hints of where it’s going. When it gets there, it hits hard. It’s about more than Middle East conflict, more than a search for identity. As director Denis Villeneuve puts it in one of this DVD’s extras, Incendies is a “Greek tragedy with a thriller inside it”.Based on a Wajdi Mouawad play which premiered in Montréal, the scope and the use of sudden explanatory, digressive flashbacks are cinematic rather than theatrical. Although there are very few characters in the film, and the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.In fact, there’s little that looks specifically Danish here (though the film swept the board at this year's Danish Oscars), except a certain Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than a main by way of welcome. Sound unfair? Sure, but love - indeed life, as it is honestly and genuinely lived - hasn't a prayer up against the breathtakingly vacuous conceit that drives One Day, a film that makes zero sense except where these things matter most: the box office. I recognise that not all will share my scepticism, if the reaction Read more ...