Film Reviews

LFF 2012: Song for Marion

Nick Hasted Saturday, 20 October 2012

Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity unruffled. Song for Marion pairs him with one of his great Sixties peers, Vanessa Redgrave, as long-married Arthur and Marion.

LFF 2012: In the Fog

Tom Birchenough Friday, 19 October 2012

In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet directors, most notably Elem Klimov in his visceral Come and See.

LFF 2012: It Was the Son

Nick Hasted Friday, 19 October 2012

Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by passing contact with temptation. For Garrone’s far more sympathetic family, that’s the prospect of fame on Big Brother.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 18 October 2012

There’s more than a touch of the magic to come in Benh Zeitlin’s soaring 2008 short Glory at Sea, which sees a storm-ravaged community take to the sea to rescue their loved ones - who are anchored to the seabed in suspended animation. Zeitlin’s debut feature Beasts of the Southern Wild - which felled Sundance with its raggedy, semi-supernatural beauty – is certainly cut from the same generous-spirited cloth.

LFF 2012: The Sessions

Demetrios Matheou Wednesday, 17 October 2012

A sex comedy with a disabled hero involving frank sex scenes, a poignant drama about a man struggling to live a full life against the odds, and a love story prompted by the assertion “my penis speaks to me, Father Brendan.” The Sessions is all of these things and more, a rare animal that has one roaring with laughter while deeply touched by a story that is tender and profound.

Frankenweenie

Karen Krizanovich Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Who knew that Tim Burton remaking himself would, in effect, bring him back to creative life? Of three highly anticipated horror-based "family films" released this Halloween season, Burton’s Frankenweenie would seem like the rank outsider. A stop-motion animated feature about a boy who loves his dead dog isn’t the kind of thing you’d take little Emma to see. It isn’t the kind of film to discuss at the family dinner table. Nor should you.

LFF 2012: Everyday

Nick Hasted Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Michael Winterbottom’s Channel 4 commission for a film on prison life resulted in this five-year experiment in the passage of time for jailed Ian (John Simm) and his young family left on the outside. The oldest of the four child actors was almost teenage by the shoot’s end. More prosaically, Ian’s time inside is marked on his wearily hardening face.

LFF 2012: The Hunt

Emma Simmonds Tuesday, 16 October 2012

Featuring a towering, Cannes-award-winning performance from Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt (Jagten) is a humane and horrifying story of the power of accusation from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen).

Comment

Ginger & Rosa

Emma Simmonds Tuesday, 16 October 2012

The latest film from innovative firebrand Sally Potter is something of a surprise given her back catalogue. Her last feature, Rage (2009) premiered on mobile phones and the internet and comprised a series of to-the-camera monologues; the one before that Yes (2004) was told in iambic pentameter; and, she is of course the maestro behind gender-bending masterpiece Orlando (1992).

LFF 2012: The Sapphires

Nick Hasted Tuesday, 16 October 2012

A film about an Aboriginal soul quartet in the Vietnam War should at least have originality covered. This adaptation of the hit Australian musical by Tony Briggs based on his mum and aunt's Saigon adventures rings most changes, though, in being a resolutely uplifting Aboriginal story. Australia’s deep racism in 1968 is well-caught when sisters Gail (Deborah Mailman), Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) and Julie (Jessica Mauboy) powerfully harmonise at a spitefully rigged small-town talent contest.

5 Broken Cameras

Tom Birchenough Tuesday, 16 October 2012

A story of six years of conflict in the West Bank set against more timeless details of life in the Palestinian town of Bil’in, 5 Broken Cameras brings the reality of resistance to the expansion of Israeli settlements – a conflict between unarmed locals and the Israeli army with its modern armaments - to the viewer in a far fuller way than we see in news reports.

Comment

LFF 2012: Beware of Mr Baker

Nick Hasted Monday, 15 October 2012

In case you doubted the title, the great Cream drummer Ginger Baker breaks director Jay Bulger’s nose with a crack of his walking stick, after Bulger’s lived at his subject’s South African ranch for four months. Like a zoo-keeper thinking for a fatal second the tiger was his friend, Bulger found that Baker still bites.

LFF 2012: In the House

Emma Simmonds Sunday, 14 October 2012

Balancing cool calculation with a touch of Potiche’s farce, In the House (Dans la Maison) sees French director François Ozon return to the story-within-a-story structure and enigmatic imposter subject matter of Swimming Pool.

Skyfall: The World Premiere

Karen Krizanovich Saturday, 13 October 2012

This could be the best Bond yet: light on sex, heavy on storytelling, hard on action. This is 100 percent pure Bond - a distillation of beauty, action, surprises and locations. Let's start with the latter: perhaps it’s best to stay away from Istanbul, given Taken 2 and now the exciting chase scene in the opening of Skyfall. It's a chase scene, sure, but with stunts and camera angles that make you sit up and take just enough notice.

Celebration Day

Russ Coffey Saturday, 13 October 2012

At the end of 2007 Led Zep’s reunion concert took “hottest ticket in town” to melting point. Everyone now knows 20 million fans chased 18,000 seats at the O2. What we hear less about is, given previous disastrous reunion efforts, how hard the pressure was on. And yet they pulled it off. Five years later people have still been asking for a tour. Earlier this week, however, the band categorically stated they’ve called it a day.

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LFF 2012: Lore

Nick Hasted Saturday, 13 October 2012

Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house.