Film Reviews

Legend

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 08 September 2015

Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead?

American Ultra

Jasper Rees Friday, 04 September 2015

The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.

That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till...

Closed Curtain

Tom Birchenough Thursday, 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.

Cartel Land

Tom Birchenough Wednesday, 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.”

Miss Julie

Demetrios Matheou Tuesday, 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...

45 Years

Jasper Rees Friday, 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.

En Équilibre

Kieron Tyler Thursday, 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.

Good People

Matt Wolf Friday, 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.

The Wolfpack

Demetrios Matheou Friday, 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.

The President

Tom Birchenough Thursday, 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”.

The Dance of Reality

Kieron Tyler Wednesday, 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.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Adam Sweeting 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.

Mistress America

Matt Wolf Friday, 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.

Theeb

Tom Birchenough Thursday, 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.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Matt Wolf Friday, 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.

Manglehorn

Demetrios Matheou Friday, 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.