Film Reviews
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... |
Silent SoulsFriday, 22 June 2012
Fully retitling a foreign-language film for international release is a risky business. But it works very well with Russian director Alexei Fedorchenko’s melancholic drama Silent Souls. Read more... |
Lay the FavoriteWednesday, 20 June 2012
Stephen Frears is one of a trio of great old British lags who’ve been knocking out films for the past four decades. But while you know where you are with Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, with their deadly serious careers as auteurs, Frears is a more elusive figure. A directorial pragmatist, he has always unfussily followed the scent of a good story. Read more... |
CosmopolisFriday, 15 June 2012
Once again bringing to screen the seemingly unfilmable (see also Naked Lunch and Crash), the audacious David Cronenberg takes on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel - a novel which in the last decade has become frighteningly pertinent. Respectfully retaining much of DeLillo’s original dialogue, Cosmopolis is a paranoid, loquacious nightmare, a sly, searing study of the alienated super rich, a meditation on greed, emptiness and jealousy. Read more... |
Rock of AgesThursday, 14 June 2012
There's nothing wrong with the film adaptation of the stage show Rock of Ages that more raunch and noise - oops, I meant noize - might not put right, assuming that an amiably dopy immersion in Eighties rock pop is your thing. Read more... |
PolisseWednesday, 13 June 2012
Hailed in some quarters for its gruelling realism in the depiction of the work of the Paris-based Child Protection Unit (the French call it La Brigade de Protection des Mineurs), Polisse is another French cop drama but with tiresome pretensions of social concern plastered on top. Read more... |
A Thousand Kisses DeepTuesday, 12 June 2012
The wish to go back into your past, and change things with the knowledge you have in the present, must be a universal one. It’s the subject of Israeli-US director Dana Lustig’s A Thousand Kisses Deep, which manages to make fantasy come alive for its heroine Mia (Jodie Whittaker, outstanding in the role). With the help of time travel. Read more... |
Fast GirlsTuesday, 12 June 2012
Nicely timed to coincide with London 2012, Fast Girls is a kind of athletic Bend It Like Beckham, although I doubt it will have that film's impact, either at the box office or on the careers of its stars. While the leads, playing a group of young female sprinters, are likeable and engaging, the film is a rather predictable story of overcoming hardship and conflict through sporting endeavour. Read more... |
The ApartmentSaturday, 09 June 2012
“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. Read more... |
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