Film Reviews

Gilda

Graham Fuller Thursday, 21 July 2011

What would loving Gilda Farrell be like? I do mean Gilda, and not Rita Hayworth, who was 27 when she portrayed her. The flamboyantly seductive persona Gilda has adopted to drive men crazy obscures the true nature of a woman who learns it brings out the worst in them and that it's a heavy burden to carry. As the actress ruefully remarked of her husbands, “They all married Gilda, but they woke up with me” - a telling putdown of the erotic artifice in which she herself was draped.

Comment

The Lavender Hill Mob

Demetrios Matheou Thursday, 21 July 2011

One should never pass up an opportunity to revisit an Ealing comedy. Invariably arch, ingenious and wonderfully played, these dozen or so films made between 1947 and 1957 offer a lovely snapshot of a Britain long gone, while the films themselves still feel remarkably fresh. The Lavender Hill Mob isn’t quite there with the very best of them, but a digital restoration on its 60th anniversary is still irresistible.

The Big Picture

alexandra Coghlan Thursday, 21 July 2011

There’s no denying that the French have a way with a thriller. Whether it’s the sleek noir of L’appartement, the corner-of-the-eye tension of 2006’s La tourneuse de pages or the altogether more brutal thrills of Cavayé’s recent Pour elle, there’s a quality to the films that sets them apart from even our finest English-language attempts.

Comment

Horrible Bosses

Adam Sweeting Thursday, 21 July 2011

Wage-slave purgatory in three different flavours is the subject of Seth Gordon's comedy, as his trio of downtrodden leads decide that the only way to break free from remorseless professional abuse is by murdering their respective bosses. George Cukor this ain't - in fact, Gordon has succeeded in making Carry On up the Khyber look like a revered art-house masterpiece - but as long as you leave your brain in "Park", there are just enough laughs to drag you to the closing credits.

Beginners

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 19 July 2011

The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the hip at CGI baddies, they are falling head over heels. So it is in Beginners, but with one or two eye-catching variants. Hal, just widowed after 44 years of marriage, now wishes to play the field. He’s 75.

Cell 211

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 14 July 2011

A mean, muscular and unflinching display of concentrated brutality and shaved-down storytelling, the Spanish thriller Cell 211 is armed with the furious intensity of its caged environment and a chain of events which cascades like dominos over and beyond its prison walls. It’s an unlikely candidate for award-season acclaim, but Daniel Monzόn's film cheeringly arrives laden with Goyas - as if Spain’s strongest man had triumphed at a beauty pageant.

Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Sarah Kent Wednesday, 13 July 2011

In the days before there were any paparazzi to catch celebrities unawares, the pictures of the stars that reached mere mortals like ourselves were carefully staged by the film studios. Establishments like MGM, Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures employed stills photographers to produce atmospheric shots of the action as it...

Bobby Fischer Against the World

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 12 July 2011

Chess grand masters have a reputation for possessing the kind of brilliance that’s inclined to tip into madness. Victor Korchnoi claimed he'd played against a dead man, while Wilhelm Steinitz insisted he'd played chess against God by wireless.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (3D)

Jasper Rees Monday, 11 July 2011

So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard.

Last Year in Marienbad

james Woodall Sunday, 10 July 2011

Comment

Socialisme

Nick Hasted Friday, 08 July 2011

Jean-Luc Godard has lived in self-exile for most of his film-making life, a now 80-year-old enfant terrible. After the seismic ruptures to film grammar in his self-aware, playful Sixties work, he largely abandoned narrative and popularity at the start of the Seventies.

Holy Rollers

Adam Sweeting Thursday, 07 July 2011

Great idea. Geeky Hasidic kid from Brooklyn's claustrophobic Jewish community finds his attention wandering during his rabbinical studies, and falls under the raffish spell of the older and wilder Yosef Zimmerman. He finds the slope is slippery indeed, and with head-spinning speed he's enmeshed in a transatlantic drug-mule racket. He's making big piles of wedge, but losing his immortal soul in the process.

The Tree of Life

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 07 July 2011

At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky.

Comment

Super

Jasper Rees Monday, 04 July 2011

If you had a quid for every time a nerdy character in a contemporary comedy made reference to Star Wars, in particular to the gnomic wisdomous utterances of Yoda, you’d be richer. Maybe not as rich as George Lucas. But it happens. It happens a lot. A country short on mythology sources its gods and heroes in kiddie lit and stores them in the toy box. Over here we’ve got Homer.

Trust

Matt Wolf Sunday, 03 July 2011

Do you know where your teenagers are? If they're smart, they'll be somewhere watching Trust, the sophomore directorial effort from actor David Schwimmer that turns out to be as deftly compelling as it is unnerving.

As If I Am Not There

Jasper Rees Thursday, 30 June 2011

The capture and arraignment of Ratko Mladic has brought atrocities committed in Bosnia back onto the front page. As Martin Bell used to argue, the Bosnian war struggled to hold the world’s attention even when it was going on. Two much more major conflicts, in which we have been doing the bombing rather than the peacekeeping, have since sent Bosnia plummeting down the squash ladder of important contemporary conflicts.