Film Reviews
London RoadFriday, 12 June 2015
So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-... Read more...
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Jurassic WorldFriday, 12 June 2015
Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic Park franchise to hatch. The last film was 14 years ago and this fourth instalment seems to have been on the development slate almost ever since. Now that it's here at last, what’s new? Read more... |
The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were DeadThursday, 11 June 2015
What Wes Orshoski’s new documentary points out, above everything, is how much pop success relies on an ordered narrative and an easily understood package. First-wave British punk band The Damned, on the other hand, wrote as many great songs as their peers, but their career has been a mess of random creativity, changing line-ups and dreadful business decisions.... Read more... |
The Look of SilenceWednesday, 10 June 2015
Any suggestion that the companion piece to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, his disturbing documentary on the state-supported mass killings undertaken for Indonesia’s Suharto regime, could actually be a more troubling film might seem surprising. The Act of Killing was extremely unnerving. The Look of Silence is even more distressing, even more frightening. Read more... |
WestTuesday, 09 June 2015
As its title might suggest, Christian Schwochow’s West (Westen) takes us back to the time of Germany divided. It's almost a chamber piece, catching the very particular experiences of a woman and her young son who leave East Berlin and end up in a refugee centre in the city’s American sector, where they’re forced to reappraise their expectations of what their new life in the West will be. Read more... |
Black Coal, Thin IceSaturday, 06 June 2015
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Winston Churchill’s famous words on Russia serve as a very apt verdict on Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo), the third film from Chinese director Diao Yinan. Read more... |
Queen & CountryFriday, 05 June 2015
In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world. Read more... |
Listen Up PhilipThursday, 04 June 2015
Artists can be selfish bastards. Yoko Ono didn’t pay her babysitters; Bob Dylan has frozen out nearly all his friends; Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and William Burroughs shot his. Philp (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist who sociopathically meanders through Alex Ross Perry’s new film, causes no fatalities. Which is where his positive qualities peter out. Read more... |
San AndreasFriday, 29 May 2015
Time gets called on California in San Andreas, a bone-headed disaster movie that sends huge swathes of the West Coast toppling to its doom even as one particular family not only makes it through intact but is even enriched in the process. Who'd have thought that the demise of several cities full of unnamed people would act as a perverse sort of marriage counselling for a couple in nuptial distress? Read more... |
Man UpFriday, 29 May 2015
American actress Lake Bell turns in a rather charming performance in a romcom written by newcomer Tess Morris, who handles the insecurities of a thirty-something woman looking for love in a funny and energetic way. There's a manic screwball edge to the comedy and some witty one-liners but also present are some of the worst pitfalls of this genre. The Inbetweeners director, Ben Palmer, takes the reins in a film which dashes across famous London landmarks and the back roads of... Read more... |
TimbuktuThursday, 28 May 2015
The imposition of a brutal jihadist regime is relayed with formidable articulacy and a surprising lightness of touch in this gut-wrenching drama from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako. Although its narrative events are as horrifying as those of any thriller Timbuktu avoids the manipulative tricks of genre cinema. Read more... |
Danny CollinsThursday, 28 May 2015
Al Pacino gives it his barnstorming all as Danny Collins, an ageing, coke-rattled rocker who calls it quits in order to reconnect with his family and recharge his life. Sentimental (but not brazenly so) and buttressed by an ace supporting cast, the film finds Pacino hurtling through his 70s in irresistibly energiser bunny mode. Whereas such contemporaries as Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson have pretty well faded from view, there's plenty of life in this celluloid mainstay yet. Read more... |
The New GirlfriendFriday, 22 May 2015
François Ozon’s sly fascination with radical family units takes another, surprisingly gentle twist here. Based on a Ruth Rendell story but equally inspired by French protests against gay marriage, this is an affecting romcom starring a secret male transvestite and a woman, brought together by their love for the same dead person. Read more... |
A Girl Walks Home Alone at NightThursday, 21 May 2015
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”. Read more... |
Only Angels Have WingsSaturday, 16 May 2015
Howard Hawks and Cary Grant made five films together. Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was A Male War Bride and Monkey Business were all screwball comedies, made by two of the genre’s leading exponents. As an adventure film, Only Angels Have Wings was the odd one out, but certainly no ugly duckling. Read more... |
Mad Max: Fury RoadFriday, 15 May 2015
There is still much to be said for George Miller's original 1979 Mad Max, a cheap but ferocious tale of rape, murder and vengeance in a gang-infested dystopia. However, only two sequels later, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) found the franchise blimping out into a steroidal freak-show. After a 30-year intermission, Fury Road is much more of the latter, now saturated with digital enhancements while almost dispensing with plot entirely. Read more... |
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