Film
Graham Fuller
n Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, Larry David plays the fourth-wall-breaking narrator and protagonist Boris Yetnikoff. In his early sixties, Boris is an atheist, hypochondriac, divorcee, failed suicide, blowhard existentialist, and world-class curmudgeon, who’s abandoned his career as a nearly-Nobel-level physicist. He’s the most acridly loquacious - and easily the funniest - Woody Allen manqué yet, vehement in his conviction that life is futile, ready to assume that he has thyroid cancer, who wakes screaming “The horror! The horror!”, as mouthed by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (and Apocalypse Read more ...
neil.smith
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather trilogy has been here of course, his 1982 flop One From the Heart leading him to declare bankruptcy and spend a decade or more doing derivative hack work to pay off his debts. This time around, though, he has taken a self-sufficient route, using profits from his Californian vineyard and other businesses to finance modestly budgeted indies that enable Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The fifth collaboration between iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert and director Benoît Jacquot tells the story of Ann (Huppert), a concert pianist who leaves her partner of 15 years after she sees him passionately kiss another woman. She decides to abandon her life, leaving no trace of her previous existence, and only one friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade), is allowed to know her plans. She has met Georges for the first time since childhood by a ridiculous contrivance but, as with so much in this film, it helps to go with the flow because Huppert, who appears in almost every scene, is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Charity begins at home - or maybe not - in Nicole Holofcener's lovely film, Please Give, which joins the superlative Greenberg as one of the beacons in a summer movie line-up given over to sequels, franchises and pitches that should never have got beyond the story board. (Die, Killers, die!) Like a kinder, gentler Woody Allen, and without the peculiar prurience that has crept into Allen's films as he's got older, writer-director Holofcener anatomises middle-class Manhattanites in all their ever-mutable contradictions. This is the sort of film where a mother won't fork out dosh to a teenage Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Last night’s gala opening of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival may have been touched by living history – in particular the presence of Sean Connery (pictured below, arriving at last night's screening), who strode up the red carpet looking sharp and dapper in black – but the film on show, Sylvain Chomet’s ravishing animated feature, The Illusionist, was haunted by old ghosts. Not only the private phantoms of the late comic all-rounder Jacques Tati, who wrote the original script, but also memories of Edinburgh’s past. The audience even enjoyed the strangely dislocating experience Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What is it with horror films and water? Think back through all the watery episodes in the horror canon, not the grandiose creature-from-the-deep type but the more domestic scenarios – beaches, showers, baths, bathrooms. From Hitchcock’s originary shower scene onwards, the list is long and gory. Most recently we've seen the elegant atmospheric manipulations of Juan Antonio Bayona’s El Orfanato with its plot-significant headland setting and dark tidal caves; now following close behind is fellow Spaniard Gabe Ibanez with his first feature Hierro.Sharing a mentor in Guillermo del Toro and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This 1969 Italian movie has accrued a somewhat baffling mystique, not least because of the way it has been lavished with praise by the excitable Quentin Tarantino. This DVD issue includes a hilariously amateurish short of Tarantino hosting a low-rent showing of the film in Los Angeles, followed by an onstage chat with director Enzo G Castellari, clearly amazed to have been invited. He doesn't have to say much, since Tarantino just keeps babbling non-stop about how great he is. His Inglourious Basterds was, they say, hugely inspired by Castellari's Quel maledetto treno blindato, from 1978.In Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually manage the word "bonjour". Small wonder that a vacationing, newly single Katherine Heigl falls for this clearly keen linguist in a lift in Nice. His bared torso has nothing to do with it - surely, not! After all, a fella's skills with the bench press look even better accompanied by a self-evident immersion in the back catalogue of Berlitz.If only Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an odd enough statistic that only four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays have been made into films. Odder still that, of those, three are the work of Alain Resnais, the grand old man of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it was a curious moment when the director of Last Year in Marienbad got into bed with the author of Bedroom Farce. The last of those films, Coeurs, was no more than a mildly engaging romantic roundelay, but it was freighted with Anglo-Saxon certainties. Things like plot, meaning, a vague interest in the needs of the audience. Not far shy of 90, Resnais has for the first time adapted a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
For the second time in four years, John Ford’s Stagecoach - the epochal black-and-white 1939 B-western that made a star of John Wayne and an icon of Monument Valley, and anticipated Ford’s unequalled run of westerns over the next quarter-century and the psychological westerns of the Fifties - has been remastered and reissued in a substantial two-disc DVD package. The eyes of Ford and Wayne completists should thus light up like those of the alcoholic Doc Boone (Oscar-winner Thomas Mitchell) relishing a couple of days’ proximity with the milquetoast whisky drummer Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek) Read more ...
anne.billson
Hollywood westerns and Japanese samurai movies have long been generic companions. Akira Kurosawa borrowed from the films of John Ford for his chambara (a term referring to period drama with swordfighting), while Hollywood borrowed back again by remaking The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven, and Sergio Leone launched the spaghetti western subgenre by remaking Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars.Toshiro Mifune, star of both The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, was the only Japanese actor of his era who might have been reasonably described as world-famous; he had already appeared in Grand Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Note to lovers of those periodic lists of all-time international cultural landmarks: I seem to remember that Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth once came in at number 82 in one such “best films ever” critical appraisal. Though that may place it somewhere in the lower third division, its release on the Mr Bongo label is a very welcome event if, like me, you probably last saw it decades ago on a bad 16-mm copy. It comes trumpeted as fully restored, in the full (that is, uncensored) version, complete with a stunning score that has an effect almost comparable to that of the images themselves. It's an Read more ...