Film Reviews
Hollywood’s Lost Screen Goddess: Clara Bow, BBC FourMonday, 31 December 2012
“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for dinner in a swimsuit. Her father was an alcoholic and banned from sets. She revealed her deprived background to the press, undermining the myth that stars sprang fully formed from the Elysian Fields. Read more...
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GrabbersFriday, 28 December 2012
“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” observes Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) in Northern Irish director Jon Wright’s creature feature. And, credit where it’s due, the mirthfully monikered Grabbers presents us with some classically mad shit. Set on the fictional Erin Island - a fishing village off the coast of Ireland - Grabbers is Wright’s second feature after 2009’s Tormented. Read more... |
Safety Not GuaranteedThursday, 27 December 2012
If 2012 is to have a cinematic legacy, it may just be remembered as the year big-screen time travel came of age. While Rian Johnson’s pulpy noir Looper explored the moral and spiritual implications of a world in which decade-hopping has become the norm, first-time director Colin Trevorrow hones in on the concept’s core emotion. Read more... |
Midnight's ChildrenWednesday, 26 December 2012
It’s always the second-rate fiction which makes first-rate films, because there’s nothing to lose but plot. Midnight’s Children, lest anyone be allowed to forget, is first-rate fiction. It has won the Booker, the Booker of Bookers and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes and is listed somewhere or other as one of the Great Books of the 20th Century. That year you missed the broadcast it probably won Miss World. Read more... |
Jack ReacherMonday, 24 December 2012
Fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are spitting feathers that their fictional hero is being played by Tom Cruise. This is not least because in the books, Reacher is a hulking fellow built like a giant redwood with fists the size of dustbins (he's six foot five and 250 pounds). And probably not a Scientologist. Read more... |
Pitch PerfectFriday, 21 December 2012
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: Bad SantaThursday, 20 December 2012
A film for those who see the festive period as a never-ending trudge from bar to bed via a shedload of booze, Terry Zwigoff’s delightfully deviant offering from 2003 gives us a trash-talking, beer-slugging Father Christmas, unimprovably played by Billy Bob Thornton. This chaotic Santa becomes the unlikely guardian of a troubled child. Wildly funny and oddly cheering, Bad Santa puts the crass in Christmas. Read more... |
Life of PiWednesday, 19 December 2012
It’s not a real tiger, is it? Well, sometimes, actually, it is. In director Ang Lee’s long-awaited adaptation of Yan Martel’s feel-good parable of 2001, The Life of Pi, we learn that real tigers are good swimmers and even the best CG programme in the world would find it hard, now anyway, to digitally reproduce a big, wet, muscular cat that wants to eat the hero. Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: ScroogeWednesday, 19 December 2012
Thanks to its unalloyed Dickensianism and Alastair Sim’s wondrous Ebenezer, 1951’s Scrooge is the definitive adaptation of A Christmas Carol – so richly atmospheric it has rendered all other versions irrelevant. Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: Merry Christmas, Mr LawrenceTuesday, 18 December 2012
David Bowie already had a bit of previous with Christmas, of course, after pa-rum-pa-pumpum-ing through the tinsel with Bing back in 1977. He plays a very different kind of drummer boy in Nagisa Oshima’s uneven but oddly haunting 1983 film, in which he stars alongside Tom Conti (last seen in Miranda, of all things) and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Read more... |
Boxing DayTuesday, 18 December 2012
You don’t need to know that Bernard Rose’s Boxing Day is an adaptation of the Tolstoy story Master and Man, but it does help - somewhat. You may well know it anyway, given that it’s the third film in a loose series that Rose started just more than a decade ago with Ivansxtc, a dark satire on Hollywood’s agenting world and human burnout based on the writer’s lacerating The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: The Shop Around the CornerMonday, 17 December 2012
In the early years of the talkies, they sure did a lot of talking, and no actor mastered the tricky art of gabbling on screen quite like the young James Stewart. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was a perfect vehicle for the versatile but somehow always gawky all-American everyman who had starred most recently as Frank Capra’s leading man in You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: Black ChristmasSunday, 16 December 2012
Flanked by the wonderfully weird tagline, “If this picture doesn’t make your skin crawl…it’s on TOO TIGHT”, 1974’s Black Christmas is amongst the first fully formed slasher pics. Based on a series of murders that took place in Quebec, this Canadian contribution to the festive canon is dripping with seasonal cynicism. Read more... |
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?Saturday, 15 December 2012
Here’s a rancid little hors d’oeuvre for the holiday season. The deliciously loathsome Gothic horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 50 years old and back in cinemas, never ceases to amaze as director Robert Aldrich’s strychnine-laced missive to Hollywood – his second, following 1955’s The Big Knife – and as a psychodrama of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s unfeigned hatred for each other. Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: Rare Exports - A Christmas TaleSaturday, 15 December 2012
The Scandinavian countries can duke it out amongst themselves as to which of them Santa Claus is from, but this Finnish claim for being the whiskery fellow’s true home neither makes you want to enter his grotto or sit on his knee. A bizarre and wonderful fantasy, Rare Exports nods to old northern Europe’s Saint Nicholas, the mythical figure meting out punishment to children rather than doling out presents. This is a Santa Claus to be avoided at all costs. Read more... |
Neil Young JourneysFriday, 14 December 2012
"There is a town in north Ontario," sang Neil Young in 1970's "Helpless", and in this third collaboration between Young and film-maker Jonathan Demme, we get to go there. It's the little rural outpost of Omemee, where, as Young tells the camera, he used to catch turtles and fish and look after his chickens. Young's casual asides and remembered fragments as he drives from Omemee to Toronto, to play a concert at Massey Hall, form the somewhat flimsy spine of Demme's film. Read more... |
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