Film Reviews
Berlinale 2013: Side Effects, Night Train to Lisbon, Reaching for the MoonFriday, 15 February 2013
Big hitters have graced Berlin, with the festival now reaching its close - Damon, Huppert and Binoche have been and gone, Deneuve is yet to come - but one of the more anticipated visits this week was Steven Soderbergh’s. He has said that Side Effects will be his last feature as he “retires” at 50. Read more... |
A Good Day to Die HardThursday, 14 February 2013
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet another drubbing. But that was then. And this is 25 years on from Die Hard's first outing: the day A Good Day to Die Hard makes it five. Read more... |
This Is 40Wednesday, 13 February 2013
The shock of no longer being young and carefree – that’s the message in director Judd Apatow’s funny and poignant fourth feature, a ‘sort of’ sequel to Knocked Up. In the long tradition of Fellini and Woody Allen - where a lead actor is the director's alter ego - Judd Apatow's onscreen self is Paul Rudd. As Pete married to Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real life wife), he plays a father and husband confronting the scariest mundane thing in life: the idea that he's no longer young.... Read more... |
Side by SideTuesday, 12 February 2013
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet. Read more... |
Berlinale 2013: Before MidnightTuesday, 12 February 2013
They’re in trouble. They had to be. Otherwise there’d be no drama. And if you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) skip the next two paragraphs to avoid knowing where, physically, temporally, Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have arrived since the poetic ending of the 2004 film. Read more... |
Berlinale 2013: Don Jon's Addiction, Charlie Countryman, Vic+Flo, GloriaMonday, 11 February 2013
Great fun on day three in Berlin: Scarlett Johansson co-stars in a porn movie. Well, a movie about a young man’s love of porn sites, in which she flashes her famous curves - and starts sleeping with Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But Jon, a swanky, body-building Roman Catholic, is soon dumped; Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman sees no future in being jilted by a laptop and tissues. Read more... |
Alexander Nevsky, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Brabbins, Barbican HallSunday, 10 February 2013
Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that. Read more... |
Berlinale 2013: The Grandmaster, Promised Land, More Than HoneySaturday, 09 February 2013
Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural America to enable his New York employers Global to start deep drilling for massively lucrative natural gas. Read more... |
Wreck-It RalphFriday, 08 February 2013
A colourful confection which is certain to satisfy both the young and young at heart - and above all, gamers - Wreck-It Ralph is the conceptually fabulous, aesthetically various tale of a brick-brandishing brute who longs to be a hero. The cinematic debut of TV director Rich Moore (Futurama/The Simpsons), it features the voice talent of John C Reilly and Sarah Silverman and boasts not just a third dimension but a meticulously constructed universe. Read more... |
HitchcockThursday, 07 February 2013
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would think of a film that applies rudimentary psychology to a celluloid classic that gets under the skin to an extent Gervasi can only dream of. Read more... |
I Give It a YearWednesday, 06 February 2013
Although I Give It a Year seems to have more than a whiff of a Richard Curtis rom-com about it, don’t be fooled as this is the debut of British writer-director Dan Mazer, the co-writer of the emphatically more outré Brüno and Borat, along with various incarnations of Ali G. Furthermore he’s lobbed Scary Movie's Anna Faris and Bridemaids' Rose Byrne into the mix. Read more... |
NoTuesday, 05 February 2013
There’s an episode in the first season of Mad Men in which the ad execs of Sterling Cooper brainstorm a campaign for Richard Nixon, just prior to the 1960 presidential election. Dramatic irony being what it is, it’s a rare opportunity to watch our anti-heroes working on a pitch (based chiefly around smear tactics) that is predestined to fail. Read more... |
A Liar's AutobiographyMonday, 04 February 2013
It is probably not unreasonable to argue that all of the original Monty Python's Flying Circus team – including lovely Michael Palin – were, and are, a complex bunch. But none were as complex as the late Graham Chapman. Gay, alcoholic and partial to smoking a pipe and playing authority figures such as army officers, there is more than enough meat there for a colourful film about his life. Read more... |
Bullet to the HeadFriday, 01 February 2013
We know Sylvester Stallone didn't do this movie for the money, since he's surfing the career revival wrought by the astounding success of The Expendables. Perhaps he wanted to work with Walter Hill, here directing his first movie in over a decade. Perhaps Sly just prefers working to loafing around the pool in between bouts of weight-lifting. Read more... |
Hyde Park on HudsonWednesday, 30 January 2013
Another week, another presidential movie. Another year, another lead role for a stuttering English monarch. Hyde Park on Hudson feels like the product of one of those irony-free meetings in Burbank. You know, the ones in which executives crank up a cinematic concept on the basis that if the audience liked X, they’ll suck up Y. And hey, why not hit them with some Z too? Read more... |
AntiviralTuesday, 29 January 2013
Body-horror proves a viable family business with Brandon Cronenberg’s writing-directing debut, a chilly, queasy successor to dad David’s best work. Cronenberg Sr.’s Videodrome (1983) – which caught its era’s potential for bootleg, endemic visual sex and violence and the interdependence of people and screens – is a decent comparison to Brandon’s Antiviral, which pushes our obsession with celebrity to satiric extremes. Read more... |
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