Film Reviews
Amour FouThursday, 05 February 2015
Bringing a real-life story with a well-known and shocking outcome to the screen has an inherent major difficulty. When the end does come, it won’t shock. Amour Fou dramatises the suicide pact of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, a woman at the heart of high society who had been diagnosed as terminally ill. They both died on 21 November 1811. Read more... |
SelmaWednesday, 04 February 2015
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. Read more... |
Still LifeTuesday, 03 February 2015
The images have a painterly precision in Uberto Pasolini's Still Life, as one might expect from a writing-directing effort from the onetime producer of The Full Monty that co-opts a style of painting as its title. Lead actor Eddie Marsan is often positioned at the centre of the shot, the meticulous visuals of a piece with a movie about a 44-year-old man who is himself fastidious to a fault as he goes about his job. Read more... |
TrashFriday, 30 January 2015
The director Stephen Daldry has always worked beautifully with young actors, whether on film or stage, so it's not difficult to see what might have drawn him to Trash, the Richard Curtis-scribed adaptation of the Andy Mulligan novel about life on the Rio de Janeiro scrapheaps. Read more... |
Kingsman: The Secret ServiceThursday, 29 January 2015
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes – and Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cracking part-homage, part-pastiche of the James Bond franchise (and other British spy movies) done with knowing comedy, élan and obvious affection. Read more... |
Inherent ViceWednesday, 28 January 2015
Thomas Pynchon and PT Anderson: too good to be true? News that the director of There Will Be Blood and The Master was adapting America’s greatest and most hiply profound living novelist certainly sounded like a heavenly equation. Read more... |
Big Hero 6Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Following the critical and commercial hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney's latest is a film which will win you over with its charming WALL-E-esque antics, oddball coupling and simple slapstick before it – somewhat annoyingly – reveals itself as a kids' first comic book movie, entering the superhero movie stratosphere by transforming into an origin story for the titular crime-fighting team. Read more... |
Holocaust: Night Will Fall, Channel 4Sunday, 25 January 2015
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. Read more... |
Beyond CluelessSaturday, 24 January 2015
Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, a Kickstarter-funded film essay about the deeper meaning of post-1990 coming-of-age movies, aspires to be one of those Arena programs that takes a fresh look at a seemingly trivial or minor pop form to reveal deeper truths about the culture at large. Don’t get me wrong – I love teen movies and I think there’s a rich seam here to be mined. Read more... |
Ex MachinaFriday, 23 January 2015
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of artificial, attractive intelligence rings subtle changes on familiar s.f. ideas, while keeping within the clean lines of a mostly three-hand drama. When callow internet search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a... Read more... |
A Most Violent YearWednesday, 21 January 2015
JC Chandor is rapidly turning into one of the most fascinating (and gifted) filmmakers out there, as A Most Violent Year proves in almost every way. Read more... |
La Maison de la RadioTuesday, 20 January 2015
Beyond being a portrait of a day in the life of French national broadcaster Radio France, it is hard to work out what La Maison de la Radio might be about. There is nothing about what the institution is meant to be for, little hinting at the attitudes defining the content aired and a lack of context for the people seen on screen. No one is specifically identified by name or role, and the nature of what is in production or being broadcast is hard to determine. Read more... |
Testament of YouthSaturday, 17 January 2015
If proof were needed that war exists in some quarters as an excuse for beautiful images, along comes this screen account of Vera Brittain's celebrated 1933 memoir Testament of Youth to offer up prettified pain in abundance alongside some fine performances that do what they can to break through the prevailing gloss. Read more... |
WhiplashFriday, 16 January 2015
Among the many pleasures of Whiplash, the low-budget indie film that is now up for five Oscar nominations (Best Picture included) and by rights deserved more, is a final sequence so breathlessly exciting that if this were a stage show, the ending would induce an instant ovation. Read more... |
Oscars 2015: Selma largely snubbed, Brits aplenty, and Meryl enters record books - againThursday, 15 January 2015
The Brits are back in the Oscar race big-time, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, and Rosamund Pike among the first-time Academy Award hopefuls who will be duking it out in the leading categories. Read more... |
American SniperWednesday, 14 January 2015
First there’s an “Allahu Akbar”, then an American tank’s rumble and clank. It’s an ominous and wearying start, the sound of Islam and invasion intermingled in the Iraq War, a violent conflict that today simply expands. When director Clint Eastwood lets us see, too, we’re by the treads of the tank, then within seconds we’re on a rooftop with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who spots a woman in a hijab with her child. They have a grenade, and he lines them in his crosshairs. Cut. Read more... |
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