Film
Demetrios Matheou
Cemetery Junction is no ordinary day in the office for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Anyone seeing their names above the title (or, indeed, Gervais’s inappropriate presence on the poster) could be forgiven for expecting their acute observational comedy, fronted by Gervais’s shtick for wince-inducing egomania. Think again.This is clearly a deliberate sidestep for the writing-and-directing pair, a reining-in of their comic inclinations for an altogether different sort of film: a period coming-of-age story, laced with broad comedy, romance and social commentary. But while one might admire Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Making movies has never been cheaper. Learning how to make them is another matter altogether. Film courses abound, but they invariably cost many times more than, say, Marc Price claims he spent on Colin, his £45 zombie flick. Mindful of this, the East End Film Festival is offering impecunious would-be producers a chance to learn the business for a mere tenner. Subsidised by Skillset, the one-day course takes place on 28 April and consists of "training, mentoring, peer review and networking". There are just 10 places, so hurry while stocks last. The application form can be downloaded here and Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Roman Polanski's vice-like paranoid thriller received its world premiere in Berlin in February amid the Chilcot inquiry and headlines about MI5's complicity in torture at Guantánamo Bay, and its topical echoes will rumble on uncomfortably (for some) in the run-up to next month's UK elections. Based on Robert Harris's best-seller, The Ghost (or The Ghost Writer, as it's titled in certain territories), it features an ex-prime minister accused of precisely such crimes and the perhaps even more heinous ones of being in possession of bouffant hair, a cheesy, unconvincing grin and a manipulative, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Somehow the title sounds more sonorous in Italian. Io Sono l'Amore is a big, fat, full-blown melodrama, a film with the button marked "passione" forced up to 11. It looks exquisite, is a glittering showcase for Tilda Swinton as the restless Russian trophy wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist and is elegant in spades: the cuisine, the couture, the shoes, the decor, the diamonds, the lipstick, they're all to die for. So what if it's also just a bit kitschy around the edges?The film, by the hitherto little-known Sicilian director/co-writer Luca Guadagnino, opens in style with a series of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Justin Kerrigan was only 25 when he made Human Traffic. A bristling portrait of rave culture at the dawn of New Labour, it did well enough commercially and enjoyed a cultish afterlife on DVD. That was 11 years ago. Kerrigan hasn’t made another film since. Or hadn’t. With I Know You Know he returns with a script from his own pen. Whenever a promising debut is followed by a long silence, the question is always the same: was the wait worth it?It’s hard to say, and that’s partly to do with the character at the heart of a perplexing portrait of psychiatric breakdown. Robert Carlyle plays a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the face of it, The Infidel should be a hoot. The screenwriting debut of comic David Baddiel, one half of two of the cleverest comedy duos of the past 20 years (Newman and Baddiel, Baddiel and Skinner), and starring stand-up comedian Omid Djalili, it tells the story of a Muslim who discovers after his mother’s death that he was adopted and his birth parents were Jewish. (Let’s overlook for one moment that a similar scenario was given a very funny treatment in 1992’s Leon the Pig Farmer.) The Infidel, directed by Josh Appignanesi, could mine an endless seam of tasteless - offensive, even - Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Whip It is not about nefarious S&M practices, nor the art of patisserie, nor even dog racing - although it has trace elements of all of the above. Instead, Drew Barrymore's sweet and swaggering maiden trip as director is a confection set in the rough-and-tumble world of female roller derbies, at which rival teams hurtle around a curved rink like bats out of hell, inflicting grievous bodily harm on each other in the process. For those unversed in the finer points of the sport, the film helpfully explains these near the beginning. Basically, though, it involves "hot girls in Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A sensational performance by Sylvie Testud is the singular reason to catch this rambling biopic of Françoise Sagan - bestselling novelist, high-rolling playgirl, multiple addict, flamboyant bisexual, monstre sacré - which plays in repertory throughout April at the French Institute's Ciné Lumière. Testud, one of France's best young actresses (also currently to be seen illuminating Lourdes as a desperate young pilgrim), takes no prisoners in her electrifying account of the writer's train wreck of a life over half a century, from the precocious literary star who stormed the world in 1954 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just don’t say you weren’t warned. "The Legend Begins in 3D," it says outside the Odeon Leicester Square in rather boisterous capitals. This is very much episode one of what the moneybags on Mount Olympus, working out of their Hollywood 91601 address, envisage as an all-whizzing, all-banging trawl through the Greek legends. The formula is as you were. It’s the age-old cinematic derby, yet another epic widescreen face-off between man and special effect.Things have moved on a tad since the last time Clash of the Titans played across our screens. That was in 1981, when visual trickery was in Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A public telephone rings, unanswered, in the middle of the desert; a young girl pushes her grandmother in a rusty wheelchair, jerkily inching their way across the flat red expanse of the outback; a boy digs deep into the sand and lies brownly submerged in water the colour of his skin. The winner of last year’s Caméra d'Or for Best First Feature at Cannes, Samson and Delilah has bucked recent trends in Australian film, having already achieved substantial success both at home and abroad. It’s the least romantic love-story you’ll see all year, but probably also the least cynical.The story of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly presumed guilty - stalk his movies and television shows and now provide the inspiration for Double Take. Loosely based on a short story, August 25th, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges, it starts with the idea of the Master locked in a murderous mano a mano with his own double. "Two of you is one too many," as he puts it.That alone would be a juicy premise Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with their huge talons and fiery breath, steal their sheep and set fire to their houses as they attack on a regular basis. The opening scenes of How to Train Your Dragon, presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG (Shrek, Madagascar) in 3D, which portrays such an attack, are certainly vivid.The story by Will Davies, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (Lilo & Read more ...