Film
joe.muggs
I've been to a fair few spoken-word events in my time, and as a rule the more upmarket they are, the worse they tend to get. The bigger the celebrity or cult cachet of an author, the more likely they are to attract a crowd that turn up mainly to be seen basking in their reflected literary glory – pulling theatrical "concentration faces" during the reading then shooting to the bar to network wildly as if the writer were mere sideshow. So it was with no little trepidation that I braved the flurries of snow to join the scrum of expensively dressed people shouting “I am on the guestlist, I am, I Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Easier with Practice is a film about phone sex based on a short story that appeared in GQ magazine. It’s enough to make any right-thinking filmgoer not in the Will Ferrell/Chuck Palahniuk/American Pie core demographic head for another screen – any other screen. But peek under the covers of this indie debut from writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez, a decorated hero of this year’s festival circuit, and you’ll find an unexpectedly tender meditation on intimacy – a film set to do for phone sex what 2007’s charming Lars and the Real Girl did for sex dolls.Easier with Practice is a film about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Ozzy Osbourne puts it, “He’s just Lemmy. You just take him or you fucking don’t, and he doesn’t give a flying shit whether you do or not.” It’s this irreducible Lemmyness of Lemmy which lies at the core of the gnarled heavy metaller’s mystique. Beyond fashion, as ageless as a rock’n’roll Flying Dutchman and with a constitution seemingly forged from buffalo hide and wrought iron, Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister is surrounded by his own private myth-bubble wherever he goes.Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski spent three years shooting this documentary. Though it sometimes meanders shaggily, it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With a script co-written by the Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her 2004 book of the same title, Miral follows the interconnected lives of four women caught up in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s a sprawling, epic affair, directed by the New York painter turned film-maker Julian Schnabel.The 40-year story starts in 1948 war-torn Jerusalem, where the well-heeled Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) comes across a few dozen orphaned children huddled together, terrified, in a side street. She takes them to one of her family homes, gives them shelter and later founds the acclaimed Dar Al-Tifl Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It has been one of the most surprising hits this year in French cinemas - a mostly male film which poses deep and pertinent questions about religion or, more specifically, religions. Its ultimate theme is the price of Christian devotion. Of Gods and Men is set in, of all the uncinematic locations, a still, often silent Cistercian monastery in North Africa, from which it derives its muted aesthetic tone and extremely careful pace.The cast all give performances of great humanity and individualityAlthough it never specifically says as much until the end credits roll, the film is based on events Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Joy Division brought Anton Corbijn to England in 1979 and, nearly 30 years later, made him a cinema director. The sleeve of the band’s album Unknown Pleasures fascinated him so deeply he felt compelled to leave Holland for the country where such mysteries were made. The photographs he took of them for the NME helped make an icon of their singer Ian Curtis even before his 1980 suicide, and were themselves icons of a school of serious, black-and-white rock photography.Corbijn restlessly challenged himself to change styles through the 1990s, making rock videos as well as portraits. Finally, in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
They say that crime doesn’t pay, yet the criminal underworld has certainly been good to William Monahan. His slick screenplay for 2006’s Boston-Irish gangster flick The Departed won him an Oscar, and now London Boulevard – a mean-streets-of-south-London, Lock, Stock knock-off, casual knifing of a film – sees him make the upgrade to the coveted writer-director credit. With Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley and Ray Winstone along for the ride (and the likes of Anna Friel and David Thewlis squashed into the back seat), Monahan takes a cinematic tour of London’s seamier sites and scenarios, Read more ...
neil.smith
It is not uncommon for opportunistic film-makers to put together a flashy promo in the hope it will attract enough investors to turn it into a full-length feature. When Robert Rodriguez made the Machete trailer for 2007 double-bill Grindhouse, though – an all-action spoof featuring striking bit-part actor Danny Trejo as its titular knife-wielding protagonist – he had no intention of taking this parodic in-joke any further.Watch the original Machete trailer:Three years on and countless fan entreaties later, Rodriguez has expanded that earlier gambit into a 104-minute opus whose “strong bloody Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes d’Or-winning fifth film replaces Hollywood’s blaring emphasis with a story of gentle transitions. Supernatural and natural, human and animal and life and death blur as Uncle Boonmee expires in the haunted forests of north-east Thailand. It expresses the director’s Buddhist belief in the transmigration of souls, and of cinema as a man-made equivalent, creating lives and memories that will outlive us. In this earthily transcendent film, the sex scene between a princess and a catfish is a bonus.Boonmee is based on a man who saw past lives that Weerasethakul Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“How many derelict gasworks can you shoot?” director Patrick Keiller asked almost in despair, at an early screening of his third psychogeographic amble through Britain. Not too many more may be the answer, as Robinson in Ruins significantly misses the mark set by its predecessors, the wonderful London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). This long look at the landscapes of Oxfordshire and Berkshire does still find sharp moments of beauty and oppression in England’s rolling hills.Keiller’s original conceit had Robinson, a fictional, shifty type, wandering obsessively through first London then Read more ...
sue.steward
On-screen kissing rarely works; even the sexiest, most practised Hollywood couples usually can’t manage it. But when the eponymous Chico and Rita turn to each other against smoochy strains of “Besame Mucho” and their lips touch for the first time, it looks - and feels - like the real thing. Even though the couple were conceived with pencil on paper and born into a digital world, their kiss actually feels erotic. Animation never was my favourite medium, but within minutes of the start of Chico and Rita, I was hooked.The Spanish directors of this sensational film are three multimedia film- Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Adrift (A Deriva), Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia’s third feature film, is a sensuous coming-of-age story as well as an ode to the Brazilian beach landscape of Buzios and the band of gorgeous bikini-clad teenagers who run wild in it. Although Dhalia says the film is not strictly autobiographical, he concedes that it partly mirrors his own childhood beach holidays near Recife and his parents’ divorce when he was 10.The family in Adrift - which is set in the 1980s (you can tell because a typewriter features heavily and there are no iPods or mobiles) - seems idyllically happy at first Read more ...