Film Reviews
SwandownWednesday, 18 July 2012
It all starts so promisingly; film-maker Andrew Kötting and writer Ian Sinclair “liberate” a swan pedallo from its moorings in Hastings to launch it into the sea. Naming the absurd craft “Edith” after King Harold’s mistress Edith Swan-neck, they plan to pedal the vessel 160 miles from Hastings to Hackney via the rivers of Kent and the Thames, finally ending up at the site of the Olympic Games. Read more... |
Seeking a Friend for the End of the WorldFriday, 13 July 2012
In romantic comedy, the task of the leads is to overcome whatever obstacles are thrown in their way to find true love before the closing credits. In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, that imperative takes on a particular urgency. A larger obstacle awaits than the mutual antipathy that usually keeps the hero and heroine apart: namely, the eponymously predicted End of Days. An asteroid is heading Earthwards. Read more... |
The GiantsFriday, 13 July 2012
It’s hardly incredible for a film to focus on teenagers running wild, not least because teens are such reliably enthusiastic cinema-goers. US cinema in particular is riddled with youthful misbehaviour, with suburban kids coming of age whilst living large in films as variable in quality and tone as Thirteen, Youth in Revolt and Project X. Read more... |
DetachmentThursday, 12 July 2012
The lugubrious soulfulness of Adrien Brody is not to all tastes, and in many cases is wholly inappropriate, but his casting in Tony Kaye's downbeat meditation on education, or the lack of it, is masterly. Brody plays Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher drafted in to plug a temporary gap in a failing school in some unspecified American city. He has a natural gift for teaching, but by never taking up a permanent post he's able to avoid painful emotional attachments. Read more... |
Magic MikeWednesday, 11 July 2012
Having spent the last few years alternating deftly between high-profile, star-studded blockbusters (the Ocean’s trilogy, last year’s Contagion) and smaller, more niche projects starring largely unknowns (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience), Steven Soderbergh may have found his perfect middle ground. Male stripping dramedy Magic Mike pairs big names (Channing Tatum,... Read more... |
Salute/Chariots of FireTuesday, 10 July 2012
Apparently it’s the taking part that counts, which would explain why recent weeks have brought unseemly howls of protest and threats of litigation from British athletes who have failed to make it into the Olympic squad. You’d like to sit these people with their adamantine sense of entitlement in front of a couple of this week’s releases. One we know all about. Read more... |
BlackmailSaturday, 07 July 2012
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling, beguiling, resonant celebration of the city and its greatest film-maker. Read more... |
7 Days in HavanaFriday, 06 July 2012
The most famous hotel in Havana is the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, since the 1930s the only place to stay for writers, mobsters and, most of all, film stars. During the city’s film festival, the Nacional is the hub, with dozens of filmmakers sitting in the garden bars that overlook the Gulf of Mexico. Read more... |
The Amazing Spider-ManTuesday, 03 July 2012
Let’s be honest – there is no non-cynical way to justify remaking a barely 10-year-old franchise film. With a Batman “reboot” already on the cards for after Christopher Nolan ends his directing tenure with the upcoming Dark Knight Rises, and a similar fate rumoured to be in store for the Twilight saga, Hollywood seems to have embraced its inner Ouroboros and resigned itself to an infinite cycle of re-stagings. Read more... |
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is PresentSaturday, 30 June 2012
For three months in the spring of 2010, New Yorkers were gripped by Abramovic fever. The mania owed its origins to a somewhat unlikely source – a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of a 63-year-old Serbian performance artist. Read more... |
Your Sister's SisterFriday, 29 June 2012
Lynn Shelton’s follow-up to 2009 Sundance hit Humpday doesn’t immediately seem to share much common ground with its predecessor. Where that film could be summed up (albeit reductively) in a single attention-grabbing sentence – “Two straight male friends decide to have sex as an art project” – there is no unifying device in Your Sister’s Sister, which can best be described as a study of three people struggling to define what they need from one another. Read more... |
Dark HorseFriday, 29 June 2012
Todd Solondz is the indie king of American dysfunction. But the director of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse has served a strange fish for his latest film, and that’s not just because of the awkward terrain of his subject matter. Veering confusingly between comic realism and the protagonist’s flights of fancy, Dark Horse is a film that falters and swerves in a whole mess of directions. Read more... |
Killer JoeThursday, 28 June 2012
Some movies are defined by sounds and Killer Joe is most certainly one of them. The squeak of a stripper’s heel on a clear plastic floor, the crack of thunder, the thrum of a motorcycle engine and the thump of a bouquet of flowers landing on a coffin – which unquestionably spell sex, trouble and death. Read more... |
King of Devil’s IslandThursday, 28 June 2012
Although tinged throughout with blue, the Norwegian drama King of Devil’s Island is so grim it might as well be grey. Basing it on real events pitches the film as a cautionary tale, but the message is hard to determine. Everything shies away from explanation. Norwegians might have the context, but the rest of us need to fill in the gaps. Read more... |
Friends with KidsMonday, 25 June 2012
Can your BFF also be the father (or mother) of your child, not to mention the lover with whom you share both body and bed once all platonic constraints have been cast aside? It's in the DNA of the Hollywood romcom to contrive suspense out of so many foregone conclusions, and I doubt anyone watching Friends with Kids will be in any way surprised at the outcome. Read more... |
ClocloFriday, 22 June 2012
Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic. Read more... |
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