Film Reviews

Hugo

Matt Wolf Thursday, 01 December 2011

It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time...

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The Thing

Adam Sweeting Thursday, 01 December 2011

John Carpenter's original The Thing from 1982 had punch, pace, shocks, horror, dramatic tension and Kurt Russell in the lead. It also had a great intro, with its scenes of an apparently blameless and photogenic husky being pursued across Antarctica by gunmen in a helicopter. How we cheered when the animal was saved. How we shouldn't have.

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The Big Year

Veronica Lee Thursday, 01 December 2011

There are times when one marvels that some films ever get the green light; whether it's difficult subject matter, unknown leads or first-time directors, they each have their own, different hurdles to cross with studios more interested in the bottom line than creating art.

50/50

Demetrios Matheou Saturday, 26 November 2011

It’s always struck me as an odd sort of desire: to go to see a movie in which you know someone is going to die a long and painful death, while someone else – or maybe a whole gaggle of people – stand and watch, shedding tears and beating breasts. Of all genres, the “terminal illness movie”, if we can call it that, seems altogether perverse.

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My Week With Marilyn

Graham Fuller Friday, 25 November 2011

My Week With Marilyn depicts the supposedly sweet dalliance between Marilyn Monroe – an actress in over her head played by an actress, Michelle Williams, reaching her peak – and eager-beaver gofer Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) during the fraught Pinewood production of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956.

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The Deep Blue Sea

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 24 November 2011

The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.

Moneyball

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 23 November 2011

It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the...

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Dream House

Nick Hasted Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Dream House’s crude selling point is the chance to see newly married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz co-star as Will and wife Libby, in the film they made just before their first date. In bed and around the home their characters have moved to with their two young daughters, they’re appropriately, easily affectionate.

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We Were Here

Ellin Stein Tuesday, 22 November 2011

The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward.

An African Election

ASH Smyth Tuesday, 22 November 2011

How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.

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Resistance

Dylan Moore Monday, 21 November 2011

What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough.

Snowtown

Nick Hasted Friday, 18 November 2011

Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals.

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Welcome to the Rileys

Graham Fuller Wednesday, 16 November 2011

As supremely silly as they are, the Twilight movies are made watchable by Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, whose combination of fidgetiness and aloofness puts me in mind of James Dean’s Cal Trask and Jim Stark.

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

Adam Sweeting Monday, 14 November 2011

Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making.

The Awakening

Matt Wolf Friday, 11 November 2011

Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot.

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The Rum Diary

Nick Hasted Thursday, 10 November 2011

In later years, when callow reporters would be sent to interview the wrecked legend Hunter S Thompson in his Colorado compound, at some point in the weekend, in between the drugs, booze and random gunfire that punctuated his days, the Gonzo journalist would betray unaccustomed nerves, and point his guest to a pile of typewritten pages. This was The Rum Diary, an attempted novel from the early Sixties he picked at for four decades.