Film
emma.simmonds
In Mammuth the immense Gérard Depardieu hits the road, on both a practical quest and spiritual journey, his enormous form testing the metal of a motorcycle. He is flanked on his travels by the glorious French countryside, wind whipping through his golden mane. It’s an image of unlikely but undeniable beauty.Directed by Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine, Mammuth is an uplifting and disarmingly idiosyncratic view of retirement. It begins on Serge Pilardosse’s final day at the abattoir, where he is subjected to a rather stilted leaving bash and an excruciating, scripted speech (“Our country Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If there's one thing Hollywood hates more than people bootlegging its latest blockbusters on mobile phones, it's letting a lucrative franchise go to waste. Thus, after the initial three X-Men films and 2009's Wolverine spin-off, you are invited to roll up for the prequel, skippered by Brit director Matthew Vaughn, of Layer Cake and Kick-Ass fame.The young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is a bright and breezy telepath, schmoozing the girls with his amazing intuitive powers in a supposedly 1950s Oxford University. By contrast, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), whom the world will come to know Read more ...
fisun.guner
This remarkable 1988 adaptation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice addressing the audience. “This is a story for children,” she tells us, before adding a teasing note: “Perhaps.” And that “perhaps” is worth noting, for Jan Švankmajer’s Surrealist Alice is full of cruel and violent incident.Paring the story down and dispensing with many of its most memorable characters – the Duchess, the Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat among them – the story becomes a disturbing duel between Alice and the White Rabbit. We first encounter the creature not hurrying across the lawn, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
There have been stunning films about surfing, like Riding Giants, and also at least one masterpiece about the slums of Rio - City of God. This documentary combines both. It focuses on the lives of two teenage boys, Fabio and Naama, and their dream of escaping the violence of Rio’s slums by carving out a career as surf pros. The only obvious alternative is a life of crime in the pay of drug gangs in the favelas, where the statistics say 15,000 are killed by guns in Brazil every year. The boys are, the film implies, surfing to save their lives.Rio Breaks, directed by Justin Mitchell, captures Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Movie stars and marriage have always helped the headline-writers. When in 1956 Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe tied the knot (he for the second time, she the third), they were dubbed the Egghead and the Hourglass. “Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde,” claimed the blushing bride. The civil wedding lasted five minutes. The marriage lasted five years. Fittingly, it all fell to bits on the set of The Misfits. As is amply testified by Weddings and Movie Stars, a new book of photographs depicting the stars in a state of nuptial bliss, actors can marry Read more ...
Graham Fuller
More phantasmagorically beautiful than it ever had any right to be given its subject, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now begins as a nightmare, or a delirium, with thup-thup-thupping helicopters ghosting in and out of the frame in front of the jungle and wisps of yellow smoke rising in the foreground. Cymbals, noodling guitar and a tambourine played by The Doors on the track preface the voice of Jim Morrison, who exhaustedly croons the opening lines of “The End”. An unseen napalm strike suddenly engulfs the palm trees. The camera pans to the right over the conflagration and the face of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frank is a primary school teacher in Berlin. His pupils love him as he treats them as individuals rather than little pegs for fitting into holes. What they don’t know - and what Frank doesn’t advertise - is that he is gay. Their dictation homework is marked in the cubicle of a public toilet while Frank sits waiting to see what’ll pop through a glory hole. Taxi Zum Klo is explicit – extremely so – but it’s also a deadpan, matter-of-fact depiction of a carefree lifestyle. The subject of bans, seizures and cuts in the early Eighties, this is its first release on DVD. It’s also uncut.It’s obvious Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a time not long ago when British films and television dramas were shot in the Czech Republic and Hungary, where the studios were cheap and the landscape looked roughly analogous to our own. In recent years what feels like the entire film industry has migrated south, principally to South Africa, also for budgetary reasons (although the light is ideal). While this is good news for South African film technicians, vanishingly few films which can describe themselves as South African are made, even fewer released internationally. Life, Above All is therefore a collector’s item.Needless to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Warner Brothers are anticipating that The Hangover Part II will gross $100 million over the coming Memorial Day weekend, which would put it comfortably on course to trounce the $470 million earned worldwide by its 2009 predecessor. It might even deserve it.If you saw the first Hangover, you'll know what to expect (wedding-party dudes experience surreal amnesiac gross-out with walk-ons by gangsters, hookers and animals), but you also get a guaranteed supply of hot-button sew-my-sides-together moments. For instance, I love the one where camp Asian gangster Chow (Ken Jeong) snorts a giant Read more ...
david.cheal
A young outdoorsman is shimmying through a canyon in Utah when a boulder falls and pins him by his arm. He is trapped for 127 hours before he severs the arm with a blunt knife and makes his way out. It’s a compelling scenario, but there are two difficulties that might have presented themselves to any film-maker planning on making the true story of Aaron Ralston’s survival into a movie.First, there’s the Touching the Void problem: we know how it will end (in Touching the Void: he cut the rope! In 127 Hours: he cut the arm!). Whence will the narrative tension derive? And second, it’s a static Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Last night Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, described by one critic there as “a hymn to the glory of creation”. At last year’s festival another film fitted the same description, only it achieved its ends in a leaner, far quieter fashion; and unlike Malick’s film, Le Quattro Volte can be seen not only as dabbling with the profound, but as being delightfully and accessibly tongue-in-cheek.Set in and around a Calabrian hill village, it opens on the person whom we imagine is to be the chief protagonist, an elderly shepherd. We follow this Read more ...
stefan.simanowitz
During the 1960s, when decolonisation movements were sweeping the world, it was joked that, after achieving independence, a country had to do three things: design a flag, launch an airline and found a film festival. Western Sahara has a flag but no airline and, despite a 35-year struggle, has yet to achieve independence. The closest Western Sahara comes to its own film festival is the Sahara International Film Festival (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, whose eighth edition took place this month in a refugee camp deep in the Algerian desert.FiSahara takes place Read more ...