Film
Veronica Lee
The Ozarks, situated mostly in Missouri, are not on most tourists’ itineraries when they visit the United States. The area is not as pretty or dramatic as the Appalachians or the Rockies, and the mining and backwoods country is considered different, remote even, by many Americans. And while it has a distinct dialect and a rich oral and musical culture from its pioneer heritage of Irish, Scots and German immigrants who settled on the vast plateau in the early 19th century, the only representation many know of Ozark people is The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s in this self-contained world that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of all the schools of film which were allowed to sprout behind the Iron Curtain, it was in Czechslovakia which contrived to export its work most successfully to the West.Poland had Andrzej Wajda. Hungary had István Szabó. But Czech cinema seemed to sprout out of a fertile collaboration with its national literature. Before he wrote The Joke, lest we forget, Milan Kundera was a lecturer in world literature at the Film Faculty of Charles University in Prague. There are certainly other ways to measure these things, but Jiří Menzel won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967 with his magnificent Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a difference the Atlantic makes. An abused, underprivileged boy tries to escape his neglectful mother and through the kindness of an unrelated adult discovers he has a rare talent that - a few ups and downs notwithstanding - eventually brings him a happy and fulfilling life. I could be describing The Blind Side, which deservedly delivered a best acting Oscar for Sandra Bullock, or even Precious, about an abused girl.In fact it’s Brit flick The Kid, the second film by Nick Moran, who came to fame as a cockney geezer in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but is now a writer Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Either it’s a bizarre accident. Or there’s something in the water. Port Talbot, the unlovely steel town in Wales where smoke stacks belch fumes into the cloudy coastal sky, has been sending its sons to work in Hollywood for decades now. Richard Burton was the first to put his glowering blue eyes and golden larynx at the service of Tinseltown. Anthony Hopkins, for all his American passport, has never shed the native tinge from his accent. And in recent years there has been Michael Sheen (b. 1969).Right from the start it was clear that Sheen was more suited to playing oddballs and misfits than Read more ...
Nick Hasted
For 15 years after the death of his demon muse Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog made documentaries about equally obsessive visionaries, climaxing five years ago with Grizzly Man’s tale of Timothy Treadwell, who loved and was eaten by bears. Though the documentaries continue, Herzog is now finally re-engaging with feature films. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was made back-to-back with Bad Lieutenant and shares some of its cast. But where the latter berserk Nick Cage cop film saw Herzog consciously attempt to reach new, young audiences, My Son, My Son is a more gnomic, matricidal mystery, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
At the same time, those of a certain generation will be curious to see Jonah Hill breaking free from the Judd Apatow stable, playing the overgrown kid, 21-year-old Cyrus, of the title. But outshining both the fellas is Marisa Tomei, who completes the film's sexual and emotional geometry with charm and flair. I know she won her My Cousin Vinny Oscar nearly 20 years ago (hard to believe!), but Tomei's getting better as she gets older, as The Wrestler, her ongoing New York theatre work, and now Cyrus prove. Indeed, as was true of a ravishing performance opposite Mickey Rourke that was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A drop of menstrual blood spatters the ground in the opening shot of The Runaways, an insolent enough metaphor for the unstaunchable female energy that drives writer-director Floria Sigismondi’s bracing biopic of the pioneering all-girl teenage 1970s rock band until it heads up a narrative cul-de-sac. The blood is leaked by future lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), experiencing her first period while scampering to a club with her less innocent twin sister Marie (Riley Keough), who’ll soon be left in the slipstream of Cherie’s fame to become a drudge. The evening later finds them Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy pastoral, pitting town and country against one another in the dirtiest and most gleefully anarchic of fist-fights. Heaving bosoms, brooding farm-hands and a herd of murderous cows all await you in this rural idyll of a comedy, which proves that bucolic nastiness is not always confined to the woodshed.The opening sequence of Tamara Drewe might as well have “A Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's a fascination that comes with films/ plays/ you choose the art form that contain within them their own critique: the sort of thing you find, for instance, in Chekhov done badly when one character or another opines about how "boring" proceedings have become, and you are tempted to nod in assent. But it's been some while since I sat through anything that shoots itself in the foot with such witless insistence as Dinner for Schmucks, the sickliest and most craven of the numerous "bromances" to come down the cinematic pike of late.For a brief while, it's rather entertaining cataloguing the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full of fearsome but unfulfilled ideas on the terrors waiting at your front door.For the first few minutes, as middle-aged Mike (Tom Butcher) and Christine (Rachel Blake) settle down in their north London semi after work, uncorking the wine and preparing dinner, the atmosphere is indefinably uneasy, the conversation faintly dislocated. Mike’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Every year the European Film Academy asks film-goers to become an electorate. They have the chance to vote on their favourite film for the People’s Choice Award. Last year they plumped for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. Previous winners include Volver, Life is Beautiful and Amélie. Which film will it be in 2010? You decide.This year the winner will be picked from one of 10 very disparate films - the candidates include a French cartoon, a British political thriller, Swedish fantasy and an Italian domestic comedy. Not all have yet been released in the UK. Have a look at theartsdesk's What's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three languages. It’s the latest of la bella Toscana’s many starring roles in what’s been - let's face it - a chequered sort of film career.The film is curious and gets curiouser. Shimell’s art historian, as he reveals in his opening lecture to a respectful audience, is a kind of prophet in his own land. He is presenting a new book on fakes and copies to a Read more ...