Film Reviews
The ImposterMonday, 20 August 2012
In 1994, a boy vanishes from Texas. Over three years later, he is found by Interpol alive in Spain and shipped back to his family in San Antonio. As improbable as this is in itself, it marks the beginning of an even more incredible story revealed in gobsmacking glory by writer/director Bart Layton. This documentary proves not only that truth is stranger than fiction, but that sometimes truth is so strange it makes even the wildest imagination cower in the corner. Read more... |
The Wedding VideoFriday, 17 August 2012
The potential minefield that is the run-up to marriage brings filmgoers back to the altar once again courtesy The Wedding Video, an English romcom that is quite a bit better than one might at first expect. Read more... |
Take This WaltzWednesday, 15 August 2012
The great Leonard Cohen has brought his trademark poetry and pain to a whole host of film and TV soundtracks: the cynical “Everybody Knows” accompanied the bump and grind of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica; the raggedly beautiful “Hallelujah” brought soul to Watchmen and best of all is his melancholic musical backdrop to Altman’s heartbreaking McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Read more... |
The Bourne LegacyTuesday, 14 August 2012
We haven't had a Bourne movie since 2007's Bourne Ultimatum, so Hollywood naturally felt it was high time to reheat the much-loved franchise. Back comes Tony Gilroy, screenwriter for the first three Bournes and now writer/director on this one. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: George Sanders, RebeccaTuesday, 14 August 2012
Many an English actor has found himself playing a suave and supercilious Hollywood villain, but none has done it with the exquisite finesse of George Sanders. His performance as Jack Favell in Rebecca only brought him a handful of scenes in a movie running over two hours, but he's not just one of the major pivots of the drama, but perhaps the most memorable character in a film teeming with splendid turns. Read more... |
BraveMonday, 13 August 2012
Animated 11th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star of Disney Pixar’s Brave. She’s a snappy, arrow-shooting, red-haired Scottish princess who’ll do anything not to end up like her mum. Read more... |
Ai Weiwei: Never SorryFriday, 10 August 2012
Every year, FHM produces its 100 sexiest women of the year list. It follows a simple formula, since sexiness, as determined by the magazine’s readers, is predicated on fame – a particular type of fleeting, red-top tabloid fame. So this year, top of that list is Tulisa of the sex tapes. Likewise, every year Art Review does its 100 most powerful people in the art world list. So what is it to be the most powerful person in the art world? Read more... |
The Forgiveness of BloodThursday, 09 August 2012
Blood feuds and mobile phones are not something you expect to find in the same film narrative. But they are both part of the landscape of American director Joshua (Maria Full of Grace) Marston’s Albanian-language The Forgiveness of Blood, which shows that while a small Balkan nation has caught up with the modern world in some technological respects, age-old traditions of clan revenge survive. Murder must be avenged with murder, making for generations-long disputes. Read more... |
JackpotWednesday, 08 August 2012
It’s a standard dilemma in film. What to do with the body? In this case, the answer can be seen coming but when it does, it isn’t one that could have occurred outside the world created for the otherwise all too generic Jackpot. Read more... |
360Tuesday, 07 August 2012
In the end only Robert Altman really knew how to do it: to take a spread of characters and somehow knit their stories together into a satisfactory whole. When filmmakers have attempted it in recent years they’ve tended to self-importance – Paul Haggis in Crash, Alejandro González Iñárritu in Babel – or risibility – Richard Curtis in Love, Actually. Read more... |
UndefeatedSaturday, 04 August 2012
There’s a lot of sport about at the minute, and those of us who get off on it are filling our boots. So it’s perhaps not the ideal moment to release a sporting documentary, however rousing, however laudable, especially one about that most unOlympic of team games, US football. If Undefeated makes a legitimate claim on the attention, it’s because it is all about legacy, that ubiquitous buzz word of London 2012. Read more... |
London: The Modern BabylonFriday, 03 August 2012
Julien Temple’s new documentary is a timely accompaniment to the London Olympics. While the Games casts a spotlight on the capital, the film offers a wondrously dense and evocative, warts-and-all portrait of the city. Read more... |
A Simple LifeFriday, 03 August 2012
Plenty of great films have been made about old age, about the humiliations, emotions, fragilities and joys of the end of life. Wild Strawberries, Harold and Maude, Venus, Driving Miss Daisy, even Pixar’s Up probably has a claim on this category, but Asia, with its regard for the elderly, has always had a special cinematic affinity for the subject. Read more... |
Eames: The Architect and the PainterThursday, 02 August 2012
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. Read more... |
TedWednesday, 01 August 2012
Seth MacFarlane is the equal opportunity offender responsible for a trio of animated sitcoms: Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. The hardest-working man in TV comedy is known for his colourfully un-PC style and agreeably obnoxious humour, marrying American brassiness with sharp satire, and for turning a baby into a maniacal genius. Read more... |
Woman in a Dressing GownFriday, 27 July 2012
The British new wave came ashore with its angry young men – foremost among them those played by Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1959), Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), and Richard Harris in This Sporting Life (1963), all but Courtenay’s rebellious Nottingham borstal boy bloody-minded Northerners. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
theartsdesk on Vinyl 86: Molly Tuttle, Depeche Mode, Pharoah...
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Hannah Scott Absence of Doubt (Fancourt Music)
...
Disclaimer, Apple TV+ review - a misfiring revenge saga from...
It seems to be silly season for big-name directors...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opera North review - one of the b...
Martin Duncan’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of the best and funniest things Opera North has ever done – back...
Rose Matafeo, Arcola Theatre review - Starstruck star muses...
Rose Matafeo knows how to make an entrance, as she enters the stage with a choreographed dance. She's useless at ending things, she says – shows,...
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Hatfield House review - mus...
“Sero sed serio”: so runs the Salisbury family motto on the carved coat-of-arms in the lavishly panelled and painted Marble Hall of Hatfield House...
Album: MC5 - Heavy Lifting
MC5 were the original proto-punkers who led the charge against wafty hippy music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were touted by...
A Raisin in the Sun, Lyric Hammersmith review - of race and...
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also...
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remake
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw...
Music Reissues Weekly: Arvo Pärt - Tabula Rasa
In 2022, Spritualized’s Jason Pierce described his musical goal as "trying to find somewhere between Arvo Pärt and The Stooges.” Amongst the most...