Film Reviews
Celebration DaySaturday, 13 October 2012
At the end of 2007 Led Zep’s reunion concert took “hottest ticket in town” to melting point. Everyone now knows 20 million fans chased 18,000 seats at the O2. What we hear less about is, given previous disastrous reunion efforts, how hard the pressure was on. And yet they pulled it off. Five years later people have still been asking for a tour. Earlier this week, however, the band categorically stated they’ve called it a day. Read more...
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LFF 2012: LoreSaturday, 13 October 2012
Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house. Read more... |
LFF 2012: SisterSaturday, 13 October 2012
Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Robot & FrankFriday, 12 October 2012
Set in the near future on the outskirts of New York, Robot & Frank sees a grizzled ex-con warm to his mechanical helper, eventually enlisting him as a criminal accomplice. It might sound like the plot of a genre flick (Short Circuit springs to mind) but, like the robot in question, this little movie will knock you sideways with its soul. Read more... |
LFF 2012: SisterFriday, 12 October 2012
Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Read more... |
LFF 2012: 3Friday, 12 October 2012
With the gloriously deadpan comedies 25 Watts and Whisky, co-writers and directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll were the leading lights of Uruguayan cinema, not exactly heading the kind of renaissance seen in other Latin American countries in the 2000s – the country’s industry is miniscule – but certainly making two of the region’s most idiosyncratic films. Then Rebella killed himself, a tragedy that threw his friend into a grief that seemed to end his career also. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Dead EuropeFriday, 12 October 2012
The title couldn’t be more resonant, as the economic crisis makes the one-time First World visibly slip another notch. But in Tony Krawitz’s adaptation of Christos Tsolkias’s novel, the meaning is also literal: this is a bloody continent of unquiet ghosts. Read more... |
Ruby SparksFriday, 12 October 2012
From the makers of Little Miss Sunshine comes a funny, ethereal love story in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sunshine’s not all they have in common. Read more... |
LFF 2012: UndergroundFriday, 12 October 2012
As Julian Assange continues to hold the world’s authorities at bay behind embassy doors, this new biopic offers Young Assange: a Melbourne teenager among the first generation of computer hackers, who cracked the Pentagon’s code on the Gulf War’s eve. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Normal SchoolThursday, 11 October 2012
Argentine Celina Murga’s two feature films to date, Ana and the Others and A Week Alone, mark her out as one of the most original voices in a country chock full of talent. Those films are concerned with individuals – respectively, a young woman and a group of children – in search of an identity, in a society that is giving them little direction. Her first documentary, Escuela normal, investigates this question at source. Read more... |
LFF 2012: End of WatchWednesday, 10 October 2012
Often portrayed as corrupt or, at best, on the front line of a war zone, the officers of the LAPD are regulars on the big and small screen. On TV, Southland and The Shield have examined the LAPD in microscopic detail and earlier this year Rampart intermittently impressed with its focus on one cop in freefall. Read more... |
Hotel TransylvaniaWednesday, 10 October 2012
Through a haunted forest and entered by a secret doorway is Dracula's castle - but this isn't where virgins are deflowered by the Transylvanian count; rather it's where he, a widower, dotes on his daughter and runs a hotel for his his monster mates. Hotel Transylvania is where Frankenstein's Monster and his wife Eunice, Wayne and Wanda Werewolf, the Invisible Man and all manner of ghouls and ghosties go for their holidays to take refuge from those nasty humans outside. Read more... |
On The RoadTuesday, 09 October 2012
This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze). Read more... |
Love Tomorrow, Raindance Film FestivalMonday, 08 October 2012
For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Read more... |
Liberal ArtsFriday, 05 October 2012
Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't. Read more... |
Taken 2Friday, 05 October 2012
Like a Dirty Daddy Harry, Taken saw bad people get rough justice: if you kidnap a covert operator’s daughter, you'll be mercilessly tracked down and dispatched with giddy, impossible violence. In Taken 2, the whole family gets 'taken', making this sequel a study in scary togetherness. Conceived as a schlocky action vehicle for durable star Liam Neeson, Taken was a surprise hit. Read more... |
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