Film
Veronica Lee
To describe this movie as slow-burn would be like saying snails live in the fast lane. The latest work from indie auteur Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA and Quiet City) who wrote, directed and edited, is 97 minutes long, but nothing happens for its first third and then when things do start happening - as the lead characters investigate the disappearance of a friend - the film abruptly ends. It may be layered with all manner of subtexts but they pretty much passed me by.Doug (Cris Lankenau) has dropped out of college in Chicago and moved back to his home town of Portland in Oregon to share a flat Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end, the media-industrial complex which takes responsibility for entertaining the planet doesn’t put your needs and mine near the top of the pile. But I think we know this already. Why am I even saying it? Saying it again. Bears make their toilet in the woods, pontiffs wave from balconies and highly remunerated people in Hollywood with popcorn for brains chair meetings the usual product of which are brazenly cheap concepts like Your Highness. Then they feed it to post-pubescents with an insatiable hunger for jokes about penises.Your Highness takes the spirit and the ethos of the gross- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The secrets and lies, delusions and foibles of a group of thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething friends are laid bare in French director Guillaume Canet’s third feature, following his breakthrough international hit Tell No One (2006). This alternately genial and scathing comic drama explores the dynamics of friendship and the fragility of romantic relations. It’s a story fuelled by the friction and frissons between companions, who come together in the aftermath of a tragic accident, and take off on a misguided getaway which becomes a fortnight of reverie and recriminations.Little White Lies is a Read more ...
james.woodall
I’ll confess it straightaway: I’m biased about this picture (as it surely would have been known in 1930) – wholly, shoutily in favour of it. I watched it last September at the Cambridge Film Festival on a big screen in Emmanuel College, with two pianists playing along, live, as this silent marvel told its really quite sophisticated story. I’d had no idea what to expect and came away mesmerised.
Modern moviegoers, as we all are, might be predisposed to ignore or be bored by it. A love story from the silent era: why bother? FW Murnau is probably best known for his early-1920s Nosferatu and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Once upon a time, Gary Oldman acted in the plays or films of Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett, bringing a deliberately disorienting intensity to whatever the role. But here he is in Red Riding Hood snarling commands like “You will die now, beast!” in a film in which considerable members of the cast – spoiler ahead! – go down for the count. That said, at least Oldman gets to appear in focus, which is more than can be said of the gauzy haze with which the director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) smothers most of Oldman’s co-stars. This film – let’s be beast-like about it, shall we Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963-64. As well as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Asti, who's still acting, had appeared in the pimp's tale Accattone, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who employed Bertolucci as an assistant director. (Bertolucci made his directorial debut on the 1962 serial-killer drama The Grim Reaper, written by Pasolini and about to be Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine a special two-hour-plus resurrection of that wannabe extravaganza Stars in Their Eyes. "So, young maestro André de Ridder, who are you going to give us?" "Well, in addition to showing my special flair for contemporary music in Ligeti, I'm going to be Herbert von Karajan conducting On the Beautiful Blue Danube to a ballet of spacecraft." With another rigorously calibrated turn of the screw, it can only be the unique counterpoint of music, sounds, speech and silence with vision that is Stanley Kubrick's 2001.Let me try and explain what I mean by de Ridder "being" Karajan. I'd completely Read more ...
David Nice
Forty years ago, my childhood self wasn't in the least bored by Frederick Ashton's balletic animal magic: I saw it twice in cinemas large and small and asked for the soundtrack LP of John Lanchbery's masterly Victorian-potpourri ballet score for my birthday. If I get a bit restless now, it might be because I want more, which is less, in terms of pace; the best stories here are all in the first half, the picnic finale is interminable and no doubt there's something odd about the mice, the frog, the pigs and the fox ending up together and all the same size. Otherwise it's good to see it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tomorrow, When the War Began, Australia's highest-grossing movie of 2010, was written and directed by Stuart Beattie. It was adapted from John Marsden’s novel of the same name, the first in his seven-book Tomorrow series for teenagers, published 1993-1999. They tell the story of Ellie Linton and a group of her high-school friends who have to try to save their country from an invading militia after their hometown of Wirrawee has been taken over, their families taken prisoner and their homes destroyed.Ellie (a winning performance by Caitlin Stasey) and her best friend Corrie (Rachel Hurd-Wood) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If war is such hell, why do we keep doing it? This may be one of the questions you'll be asking yourself after sitting through the taut and gruelling 100 minutes of Armadillo, Janus Metz's remarkable account of a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan with soldiers of Denmark's Guard Hussars.Metz and his cinematographer, Lars Skree, wrote their wills before setting off to Helmand Province in 2009, where they joined the Danish troops at Forward Operating Base Armadillo. It's tempting to make a lazy assumption that the Danish soldiers are something of a political fig leaf helping to make the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are certain film-makers who like to give themselves a headache. Buried confined its only character to a coffin. Phone Booth stuck Colin Farrell in – what else? – a phone booth. Essential Killing imposes another kind of confinement on its main character: it maroons him in silence. It could be argued that cinema has long experience of keeping its mouth shut. They did without dialogue until 1927. But give or take the odd bravura exception – say, the eloquent first 15 minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West - film has lost the habit of making do without words.The actor tasked with carrying Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Matthew Bissonnette’s third feature Passenger Side is a mellow, honey-hued road movie which sees two discordant brothers combing the streets of Los Angeles with an initially mysterious purpose. A likeable diversion, for the most part it’s a nicely played two-hander depicting the rekindling of a sibling bond.The reluctant but ultimately obliging driver is Michael (Adam Scott), the older brother of Tobey (Joel Bissonnette), who takes his seat on the passenger side. Michael has agreed to chauffeur Tobey around for the best part of a beautiful sun-blushed day, without knowing why, and they make Read more ...