Film Reviews
LFF 2013: Under the SkinWednesday, 16 October 2013
It's been nine years since Jonathan Glazer's last film, the courageous and underrated Birth. If that film had its moments of audacity then Under the Skin - an adaptation of Michel Faber's gloriously revolting novel - is a real feast of filmmaking flair, which elevates its director to the rank of auteur. Glazer resists the book's explanations, and ultimately its message, in favour of something more intriguing and unsettlingly ambiguous. Read more... |
LFF 2013: Night MovesWednesday, 16 October 2013
Jesse Eisenberg’s second film of the LFF is Kelly Reichardt’s low-budget, simmering thriller, confirming his work-led choices since The Social Network. “This was the only blockbuster I was offered,” he deadpanned, asked at the first screening’s Q&A about the giant roles that must be coming his way. “I sure was surprised when I got on set...” Read more... |
LFF 2013: Don JonWednesday, 16 October 2013
Playing against his wholesome appeal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's debut outing as a writer/director spins a comedy of internet porn addiction, love, family, church – and a man who loves to do his own cleaning. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Gordon-Levitt is Jon, a muscle-bound young greaser who loves the ladies but prefers his own hand. Read more... |
The Broken Circle BreakdownWednesday, 16 October 2013
The components of The Broken Circle Breakdown don’t seem as though they would make for a coherent whole. The film is Belgian with Flemish dialogue. Infatuated with bluegrass music and a mythical America, a leading character lives his life as a low-countries cowboy. It’s a poignant family drama. Yet little feels forced and nothing is played for novelty. You’d have to have a heart of coal to not tear up. Read more... |
Like Father, Like SonTuesday, 15 October 2013
From the simplest of precepts Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu spins a marvellously tender story of parents and children in Like Father, Like Son, as well as a subtle portrayal of the nuances of contemporary Japanese society. The emotions resound insistently but quietly, like the melodies of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that recur through the film, which won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes film festival. Read more... |
LFF 2013: Inside Llewyn DavisTuesday, 15 October 2013
Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart. Read more... |
Prince AvalancheMonday, 14 October 2013
Terrence Malick meets Judd Apatow: that was the expectation when Texan auteur David Gordon Green unexpectedly swerved into broad comedy with Pineapple Express. Prince Avalanche finally fits that bill, after three big Hollywood studio films where the Green responsible for the intensely beautiful and romantic George Washington and All the Real Girls seemed to be vanishing out of sight. Read more... |
LFF 2013: The DoubleMonday, 14 October 2013
Richard Ayoade's follow-up to the highly promising Submarine centres on another pretty hopeless young man; yet this time his protagonist's predicament is considerably more grave, even if matters are no less amusing. Based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and co-written by Ayoade and Avi Korine (brother of Spring Breakers' helmsman Harmony), The Double sees Jesse Eisenberg tormented by a duplicitous doppelganger. Read more... |
LFF 2013: Abuse of WeaknessMonday, 14 October 2013
In 2004 French director Catherine Breillat suffered a stroke. Three years later, she was cheated out of nearly a million euros by a known conman whom she was intending to cast in a film. She later suggested he took advantage of her still-reduced mental capacities. Read more... |
LFF 2013: Blue Is the Warmest ColourSunday, 13 October 2013
Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Read more... |
LFF 2013: Grand CentralSaturday, 12 October 2013
Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park. Read more... |
LFF 2013: Mystery RoadSaturday, 12 October 2013
Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter. Read more... |
LFF 2013: NebraskaFriday, 11 October 2013
Alexander Payne has never been one for flashy features and in his latest he tones things all the way down to monochrome, as if his intentions are more bittersweet than ever. It's a fittingly subdued aesthetic for a tale of a man on his last legs, reluctantly forced to confront his past. Read more... |
The Fifth EstateThursday, 10 October 2013
There is no end to The Fifth Estate. Instead, like those outtakes at the end of cartoons and comedies, there are cut-ups from an interview with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. “A WikiLeaks movie?” he says wryly. “Which one?” Well quite. Assange is box office, and it’s the argument of both The Fifth Estate and the documentary We Steal Secrets that deep down this is what he always wanted: to be a screen hero. Read more... |
LFF 2013: GravityThursday, 10 October 2013
As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth. Read more... |
Machete KillsWednesday, 09 October 2013
In a deranged world where Charlie Sheen is President of the United States, Hollywood gets a much-deserved and highly amusing roasting. Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to Machete goes straight for the jugular by mocking Hollywood's golden child, that "galaxy far, far away" film franchise - which doggedly refuses to sling its hook. Rodriguez not only flips his middle finger at reboots and outworn action clichés, he also takes jabs at US foreign policy and the controversy surrounding the... Read more... |
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