Film Reviews
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... |
MarshlandWednesday, 05 August 2015
Marshland is set on possibly the last section of the Andalusian coastline which doesn’t have high-rise condos planted all over it. Imagine the Kentish marshes of Great Expectations, but with a harsh sun cracking the parched earth, while overhead the sky throngs with geese and flamingos. It’s in this inhospitable corner of Spain that young women keep disappearing, apparently lured away to the big city, never to be heard from again. Read more... |
Hard to Be a GodTuesday, 04 August 2015
Don’t on any account be late for the first couple of minutes of the woolly mammoth that is Russian director Alexei German’s last film, Hard to Be a God, since the opening narrative voiceover gives a rare suggestion of explanatory background to a work that, put mildly, does not greatly trouble itself, over a lumbering length of just under three hours, with much in the way of plot explication. Read more... |
The GiftMonday, 03 August 2015
People who live in glass houses should be careful who they antagonise. That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand... Read more... |
Mission: Impossible – Rogue NationFriday, 31 July 2015
Stepping in for Brad Bird, who helmed 2011's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, director Chris McQuarrie has brought a high-speed sheen and effortless technical assurance to this fifth outing for the franchise. In so doing, he at least partially erases memories of his previous directing job with its star Tom Cruise, 2012's misfiring Jack Reacher. Read more... |
Man With a Movie CameraTuesday, 28 July 2015
Dziga Vertov’s narrativeless “city symphony” Man With a Movie Camera celebrates the modernity and energy of the post-Bolshevik Revolution metropolis – a composite of Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow and Odessa filmed over three years. Propaganda for the harnessing of machinery in the building of the Soviet Union’s future, it was much more besides – a masterpiece of avant-garde experimentalism and, fleetingly, an unexpected critique of the continuing class struggle. Read more... |
SouthpawFriday, 24 July 2015
The boxing movie has been a gift to filmmakers virtually since the dawn of cinematic time. In 1932 Jimmy Cagney was swinging for the title (and the gal) in Winner Take All, but some say 1947's Body and Soul, starring John Garfield as boxing champ Charley Davis, is the one most of the other screen boxers are indebted to, from Sly Stallone's Rocky to Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Read more... |
DVD: While We're YoungFriday, 24 July 2015
As Noah Baumbach moves into his forties, his youthful archness is becoming increasingly tempered with a wry melancholy. Read more... |
The Legend of Barney ThomsonThursday, 23 July 2015
Its title may hint at exotic worlds – a Western, even – but Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is anything but. Carlyle himself plays the title character, one of life’s losers (“haunted tree” being one of the more memorable descriptions we get of him) who’s barely getting by as a Glasgow barber until the story, and his own unplanned actions, pitch his mundane existence to another level altogether. Read more... |
MaggieThursday, 23 July 2015
We can’t seem to move these days without stumbling into the path of a zombie movie, making one wonder why walking dead with a penchant for fast food are suddenly so alluring. When George A Romero effectively created the genre in the late Sixties and Seventies, zombies were a device for satire; today they seem to reflect a communal sense of societal breakdown. While comedies such as Warm Bodies and Zombieland make broad fun of post-apocalyptic decay,... Read more... |
EdenWednesday, 22 July 2015
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. Read more... |
Ruth & AlexWednesday, 22 July 2015
All the charm in the world provided by two seasoned pros can't make a satisfying whole out of Ruth & Alex, a glutinous portrait of a longtime marriage that is gently tested when the eponymous couple decide to move house. Read more... |
Best of EnemiesTuesday, 21 July 2015
It wasn’t quite Ali vs Frazier. But the 1968 debates between William F Buckley, Jr and Gore Vidal were as bruising (nearly literally) as TV had seen, and haunted the protagonists for the rest of their lives. Morgan Neville and Robert Gordan’s documentary claims its aftershocks also damaged TV and America in ways we’re still suffering through. Read more... |
The Salt of the EarthSaturday, 18 July 2015
Had Wim Wenders not used the title Until the End of the World for his most ambitious road movie, it would have suited his biographical portrait of Sebastião Salgado. Since 1973, the Brazilian photographer has traversed the planet to document its natural beauty and diversity on one hand, and the greed, destructiveness, and murderous ferocity of man on the other. Read more... |
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