Film
Tom Birchenough
Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.First-half depictions of contemporary Russia work more assuredly on the comedy front, even if this concert’s brand of humour quickly slips considerably south of Moscow to lodge somewhere in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
But the theme of not knowing is by no means confined to the agony of uncertainty. Brenda Blethyn plays Elizabeth, a mother who sees the 7/7 bombings on the news and instinctively picks up the phone to check, as millions of other parents will have on that day, if her daughter is alive and well. When no reply comes to several increasingly anxious messages, she comes to London and is gradually forced to confront the truth that she no longer has any idea who her daughter is, nor what sort of changing society she lives in.London River is in effect a two-hander, but one in which the characters Read more ...
David Nice
Fifty years ago this April, a city-loving film-maker already internationally famous for such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries took the ferry from Gotland to the windswept, still snowy island of Fårö (the nearest we can get in terms of pronounciation might be "Four-er"). While resisting Svenska Film's attempts to deflect him from filming his latest project, Through a Glass Darkly, on Orkney, Ingmar Bergman saw Fårö and - to shed the ironic parentheses he insists upon in his marvellous autobiography The Magic Lantern - he fell in love. Not only did he make his next Read more ...
anne.billson
It's the eternal human-vampire-werewolf triangle, and at times it feels as though it really will go on for ever and ever. The story so far: in the small North-West Pacific town of Forks, where the sun hardly ever shines, a teenage girl called Bella loves Edward, a 100-year-old vampire who is perfect in every way, except of course that he drinks (non-human) blood, and has a tendency to sparkle on those rare occasions when the sun does come out. But, as we all know, girls like sparkly things, so that's OK.But hey, it's complicated, because Bella also loves Jacob, a Native American of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kristin Scott Thomas possesses an altogether singular beauty: classical yet faintly wistful, intimidating at times but equally capable of enormous warmth. And because this English rose has professionally blossomed not just in the Anglo-American cinema (and theatre) but also in France, there's something faintly "other" about her. That, in turn, has been useful to this actress's stage turns in Chekhov and Pirandello and accounts for her infinite variety on screen. After all, not everyone could move with ease from John Lennon's Liverpudlian aunt to her latest film role as a French doctor's Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The original Predator from 1987 is perhaps best remembered for taking Schwarzenegger’s borderline homoerotic body-fetishism to new heights, as he stripped naked to mud-wrestle the titular alien hunter. It was among the more efficient of the big, dumb action movies which defined Arnie in the Eighties. But for this fourth sequel, Sin City director Robert Rodriguez, producing here, has convinced himself he is returning to a rich, iconic mythos, and lured a cast led by Oscar-winner Adrien Brody to prove it.Predator benefitted from the post-Star Wars trend for science-fiction movies to have their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have barely been off the stage in productions all over the world. The Menier Chocolate Factory shrewdly revived the pair of them Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Isabelle Huppert has always had a wandering soul, ever since she cropped up as a strawberry blonde cowboy’s moll in Michael Cimino’s fabled folly, Heaven’s Gate. That was 30 years ago. Middle age has by no means withered but certainly has hardened her pretty freckled moue into something fierce and obdurate. The owner of that forthright jawline ploughs a self-sufficient furrow these days. The characters she chooses to embody are, for one reason or another, doing it for themselves out on society’s limb.In Villa Amalia a betrayed wife dumps every vestige of her marital existence to embark on an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The fourth and last instalment of the ogre animation is a belter. It’s in 3D for one thing and, while the pop culture and film references have been toned down in Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke’s screenplay (directed by Mike Mitchell), in order to tell a gentle morality tale, it takes as its inspiration Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. And that’s a very good starting point for any movie.Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers), now living in connubial bliss with his beloved Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and their three babies - a trio of burping, farting little green ogres - is in a rut. He may be a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oh, how we like to moan when the inevitably grubby world of Hollywood gets its mitts on one or another European "classic". The Birdcage, we're told, wasn't as good as La Cage aux Folles (actually, I preferred it), and the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle, Vanilla Sky, isn't a patch on its 1997 Spanish forebear, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes): I'm with the nay-sayers on that. Now comes the French popular success, Heartbreaker, starring Vanessa Paradis as an ice queen who melts in the hands of a bodyguard who is not in fact what he seems, and word has it that Universal Pictures and Working Title have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the Danny Sugerman-Jerry Hopkins biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, that kicked off the Doors death cult 30 years ago, at a point where the band's reputation was wallowing low in the water. Previously it had been quite acceptable to regard much of their work as cheesy pseudo-jazz with stupid lyrics, and their posturing vocalist Jim Morrison as a tedious drunk with a Narcissus complex.Then suddenly The Doors were propelled into Classic Rock nirvana, their collective efforts elevated to "Great American Band" status and Jim Morrison canonised as sage, seer and sex god. There they Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.The new broom brought new disorganisation. At the festival village ticket Read more ...