Film Reviews
The Two Faces of JanuaryFriday, 16 May 2014
Discussing what appealed to him in Patricia Highsmith’s simmering thriller The Two Faces of January, first-time director Hossein Amini landed on the deliberate lack of character motivation: “She doesn’t really explain why people do things.” This very obfuscation drew attention at the time of the novel’s 1964 publication, when the reader at Highsmith’s publisher identified “a frightening sense of the neurotic” in her... Read more... |
GodzillaThursday, 15 May 2014
Born in an era when the Japanese were censored out of making a straightforward post-Hiroshima film, King of the Monsters Godzilla – or aka his infinitely cooler Japanese name Gojira – is a hero, cultural phenomenon and metaphor: he represents nature that can both kill and save. As a film star, however, he’s moved from ultra low-budget to high in over 28 films of various quality. Read more... |
A Touch of SinWednesday, 14 May 2014
Speaking at the BFI's recent preview Jia Zhang-ke revealed that his surprisingly bloodthirsty latest is in fact, contrary to the shift it seems, the next logical step in his journey as a filmmaker: an amalgamation of his interest in personal crisis and his great love for the work of John Woo. Jia described A Touch of Sin as the film where he finally puts a "gun in the hands" of his beleaguered protagonists. Read more... |
An Autumn AfternoonTuesday, 13 May 2014
The classic Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu named a number of his films after the seasons, but he restricted himself to spring, summer and autumn. I don’t believe he ever titled one after winter - not that his work doesn’t touch on the closing of the year, and its associations with death. Read more... |
In SecretMonday, 12 May 2014
As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Read more... |
Before the Winter ChillSaturday, 10 May 2014
French cinema is full of long-term marriages hit by a meteor in the form of an attractive younger female. So there is a heavy sense of déjà vu to Before the Winter Chill. It also features another increasingly common trope of modern French film, which is Kristin Scott Thomas playing a perfect French speaker with an English heritage, and accent. So is there a twist? Sort of. Read more... |
The CanyonsFriday, 09 May 2014
“At the time, I was bored, and I needed something to do,” Tara (Lindsay Lohan) says, trying to explain her participation in a film. “And now…I’m looking for something else to do.” And she gives a small, bottomless sigh. The notorious, bedevilled Lohan is the hot spot in Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis’s chilly nightmare about love in Hollywood. Her Marilyn-style on-set unreliability led every pre-release story about their experiment in micro-budget, Kickstarter-funded cinema. Read more... |
The Wind RisesThursday, 08 May 2014
Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises is grand, sweeping and bursting with the kind of beautiful animation we've become accustomed to from Studio Ghibli (which celebrates its 30th birthday next year). Miyazaki delves into Japanese history with a soaring autobiography of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi, which also acts as a tribute to the writer Tatsuo Hori - who penned the original short story "The Wind Has Risen". Read more... |
Paths of GloryTuesday, 06 May 2014
Paths of Glory (1957) stars Kirk Douglas as a First World War colonel who's as fearless leading his poilus on a suicide mission as he is arguing for mercy for three of the survivors. A lawyer in peacetime, he defends them when they are tried as cowards before a panel of French officers who have no intention of exonerating them. Read more... |
The Truth About EmanuelTuesday, 06 May 2014
The growing pains of teenager Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario, best known for TV's Skins) are ably handled in Francesca Gregorini’s gentle and melancholy drama about grief, mortality and motherhood. Emanuel is obsessed with her mother’s untimely passing at childbirth and when new neighbour Linda (Jessica Biel), who bears an uncanny resemblance to her, moves in, Emanuel can’t help but become attached. Read more... |
Silent SonataMonday, 05 May 2014
The forces of death and life come up against each other in the strange, somehow impressive Slovenian war drama Silent Sonata. I say “Slovenian” only because director Janez Burger hails from there, and that’s where some of the filming took place (the rest was in Ireland, which was the major, but not the only European co-producer of the film), but the cast and crew are markedly international. Read more... |
Bad NeighboursFriday, 02 May 2014
Zac Efron has well and truly left behind his cute High School Musical persona. First he bared all in That Awkward Moment and now in Bad Neighbours he plays his first unsympathetic role – but his fans will be delighted to know that he gets lots of opportunities to show off his six-pack again in Nicholas Stoller's winning comedy. Read more... |
Willow CreekThursday, 01 May 2014
The Bigfoot legend rests on something close to found-footage: 1967’s grainy film of a large ape-like creature loping through the remote American North-west. The Patterson-Gimlin expedition’s reels are the Sasquatch conspiracy theorists version of the Zapruder footage. Read more... |
PompeiiThursday, 01 May 2014
Best known for the Mortal Kombat twosome, the Resident Evil franchise (one of the DVD extras noted how the zombie dogs constantly ate off their zombie makeup) and big, bulging swipes at other genres with Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs Predator and The Three Musketeers, director Paul W S Anderson’s Pompeii has been neither a critical nor box office hit in America. It is not, however, without charm. Read more... |
A Thousand Times Good NightWednesday, 30 April 2014
Juliette Binoche gives a powerful performance at the heart of a thought-provoking, very topical drama, whose flaws reflect its difficult subject matter. The Frenchwoman plays Rebecca, a highly-rated war photographer, whose single-minded pursuit of the perfect shot and the game-changing scoop has compromised both her attitude to family life and her professional ethics. When she nearly dies on an assignment, she is forced to take stock. Read more... |
Blue RuinWednesday, 30 April 2014
Ah, revenge. Why does something so bad sometimes feel so necessary? Particularly in its most bloodthirsty form, it's a concept well explored onscreen, from almost every western and martial arts film to the final act of so many horrors – and the entirety of the spectacularly absurd TV series currently showing on E4, which is so obsessed with the idea it couldn't be called anything other than Revenge. Read more... |
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