Film Reviews
Closed CurtainThursday, 03 September 2015
Any consideration of Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain will inevitably be through the prism of how it was made, and the director’s current position in his native country. It’s his second work, after This Is Not a Film from 2011, to be made despite the 2010 prohibition from the Iranian authorities that (along with a range of other curtailments of his freedom) the director should not engage in cinema for a period of 20 years. Read more... |
Cartel LandWednesday, 02 September 2015
Cartel Land opens with a group of crystal meth cooks at work somewhere in the dead-of-night Mexican wilderness. They boast about the quality of their goods: they have the best production equipment, and were even taught their expertise by a visiting American father-and-son team. They know the harm their drugs do, but what, they ask, are they going to do? They come from poverty. If life had gone another way, “We would be like you.” Read more... |
Miss JulieTuesday, 01 September 2015
The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not even the Altman, charted that relation with quite as much complexity and ferocity as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which no-one emerges well from the class struggle. Written in 1888, the play represented... Read more... |
45 YearsFriday, 28 August 2015
“I can hardly be cross with something that happened before we existed.” Andrew Haigh is a two-hand specialist intrigued by the space between lovers. His much praised debut Weekend told of two young homosexuals getting to know each other on a Saturday and a Sunday. In 45 Years, based on a story by David Constantine, he has shuffled the deck. Read more... |
En ÉquilibreThursday, 27 August 2015
En Équilibre addresses the impact of disabling and irreparable injury, thwarted ambitions, the questionable practices of insurers, and the connection between two dissimilar, yet both frustrated, characters. Despite its different strands, the film adeptly draws them together into a coherent and unexpectedly enthralling whole. Read more... |
Good PeopleFriday, 21 August 2015
London property prices could well plummet, not to mention James Franco's ever-wayward career, if enough people see Good People, a staggeringly inept London-set gorefest that casts James Franco as an expat London property developer and Kate Hudson as his schoolteacher-wife who likes buying major appliances for friends as gifts. Read more... |
The WolfpackFriday, 21 August 2015
A few months ago I saw a documentary called Ming of Harlem: Twenty-One Storeys in the Air, about a man who kept a tiger and an alligator as pets in his tiny New York apartment. It was a staggering thing to comprehend, not just because of the logistics involved, but the blithe cruelty in doing that to an animal, even a savage one. Then I saw The Wolfpack. Read more... |
The PresidentThursday, 20 August 2015
What’s it really like to be a dictator? Or president, if we put it more circumspectly, as Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf does in his new film of that name – though this President clearly believes he’s of the “for-life” variety, if not even a rung higher given that the mode of address in this contemporary court is, “Your Majesty”. Read more... |
The Dance of RealityWednesday, 19 August 2015
The British release of the first film made by Alejandro Jodorowsky since 1990’s The Rainbow Thief is an event. Although the Chile-born director disowned that, his reputation was secured with El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973) and consolidated with 1989’s Santa Sangre. In all, after his 1968 debut Fando y Lis, he has only completed six other films. Read more... |
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.Friday, 14 August 2015
The TV series on which Guy Ritchie has based his new spy-buddies movie first appeared on the small screen (in black and white) in 1964, when Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin welcomed us into their secret lair in New York and introduced themselves as "enforcement agents" for U.N.C.L.E., apparently a sort of UN/CIA hybrid. The grandfatherly Mr Alexander Waverly, resembling a retired bank manager in venerable tweed, announced himself as their boss. Read more... |
Mistress AmericaFriday, 14 August 2015
People talk at and not to one another in Mistress America, the latest collaboration between director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig and the first to make me wonder whether the unarguably gifted real-life couple might benefit from an outside eye to let them know when enough is enough. Read more... |
TheebThursday, 13 August 2015
The epic and the intimate combine impressively in Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s debut feature Theeb. The epic is there is the scale of the stunning desert landscapes that are the backdrop – though the desert itself almost feels like a character here, and generic allusions to the Western abound – to his World War One story of complicated Bedouin loyalties played out on the edges of the Ottoman Empire. Read more... |
The Diary of a Teenage GirlFriday, 07 August 2015
Multiple stars are born in The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the conventionally titled film premiered earlier this year at Sundance that turns out to be unconventional in every way that matters. Read more... |
ManglehornFriday, 07 August 2015
When Al Pacino burst into the spotlight as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, his celebrated co-star was Marlon Brando, who for years had been giving eccentric performances and making a mockery of his talent, but was about to offer audiences a reminder of the innately consummate actor he was. Read more... |
DVD: My Darling ClementineFriday, 07 August 2015
In John Ford’s rueful 1946 allegory about the human cost of America’s new role as global peacekeeper, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to clean up Tombstone, Arizona, as a pretext for revenging his teenage brother's murder by Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his rustler sons. Read more... |
52 TuesdaysThursday, 06 August 2015
An affectingly restrained Australian drama of adolescent development coloured by the repercussions of a parent undergoing gender transition, 52 Tuesdays may initially seem understated in its exploration of the balances (and imbalances) of family relationships under stress, but finally achieves something rather deeper than its innovative broken-up narrative style at first suggests. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...
Music Reissues Weekly: The Hamburg Repertoire
The blurb on the front of the double-CD set The Hamburg Repertoire says it collects “The original recordings of songs...
Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - mi...
“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events...
Ben and Imo, Orange Tree Theatre review - vibrant, strongly...
Back in 2009, there were Ben and Wystan on stage (Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art). Last year came Ben and Master David Hemmings (Kevin...
The Great Gatsby, London Coliseum review - lavish and lively...
In 2012, an eight-hour long version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby...
Stelios review - Athenian rhapsody in blues
The English title of a new film about the legendary singer-guitarist Stelios Kazantzidis, who popularised rebetiko, which is often called “the...
Album: Dr Robert & Matt Deighton - The Instant Garden
There’s this mod milieu, harking back to the Eighties. Weller at the forefront; Dr Robert and his Blow Monkeys; all righteously hate Thatcher;...
The Accountant 2 review - belated return of Ben Affleck...
It’s been nine years since Ben Affleck’s original portrayal of Christian Wolff in The Accountant, who’s not only an accountant but also a...
The Inseparables, Finborough Theatre review - uneven portrai...
The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war France, where...