sat 02/11/2024

Film Reviews

House of Tolerance

Graham Fuller

In his previous films, the French director Bernardo Bonello has demonstrated a non-judgemental affinity for pornographers, prostitutes, and other transgressors. In his latest, House of Tolerance (House of Pleasures in the US), his sympathy is with the languid courtesans of a doomed high-class fin-de-siècle Parisian brothel, who are united in their contempt for the wealthy, condescending men who subject them to fetishes, diseases, and violence.

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Patience (After Sebald)

Fisun Güner

Diehard Sebaldians may seek to retrace the footsteps that formed the basis of WG Sebald’s meditative masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. Or they may choose to watch Grant Gee’s film tribute instead. Patience (After Sebald) takes as its fulcrum the German expatriate’s category-defying memoir-cum-history, travelogue-cum-novel – which was published in 1995 and is considered by many to be his greatest work – and it attempts to recreate the book's physical and mental landscape.

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The Descendants

Emma Simmonds

“Paradise can go fuck itself”: the candid words of a disillusioned middle-aged man in director Alexander Payne’s latest road-to-redemption dramedy. He’s referring to the irritating presumption that Hawaii’s idyllic surroundings in some way shield its residents from the mire and misfortunes of life.

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Like Crazy

Matt Wolf

Romance follows a recognisably rocky path, and visa issues don't help much either, in Like Crazy, a small but seriously affecting movie that is sure to hit many filmgoers where they live. An Anglo-American tale of love's vagaries that doesn't follow the expected Hollywood arc, Drake Doremus's 2011 Sundance Film Festival darling raises niggling questions on various plot details while getting the large-scale issues right.

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Acts of Godfrey

Jasper Rees

It must have been gruelling to pitch. A cynical modern satire set in a motivational conference for salesmen would have been a hard enough sell on its own. So too the choric figure who comments on the action directly to camera. But the bold USP of Acts of Godrey is the script: it's entirely in rhyming couplets.

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Coriolanus

Matt Wolf

Ralph Fiennes' commitment to the theatre, not least the classical repertoire, has long been a source of wonder, bringing legions of Voldemort followers to see him live, most recently as a movingly hirsute, brooding Prospero in an otherwise heavy-going account of The Tempest. So Fiennes deserves double credit for transmuting the Bardic passions that launched him on stage to the global marketplace of the screen, especially with a title that exists some way from the Hamlet

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J. Edgar

Jasper Rees

People tend to know three things about J.Edgar Hoover: that he was in charge of America’s internal security for four decades; that he kept secret files on the political elite; and that the most powerful unelected man in the nation's history liked to throw on ladies’ attire.

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W.E.

alexandra Coghlan

“I’m not a beautiful woman,” Wallis Simpson once declared. “I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.” Madonna’s second feature W.E. operates under a similar philosophy – with rather less success. Never knowingly under-dressed, under-designed or under-directed, the film contorts itself into ever more stylish poses in a desperate attempt to stun its audience into a couture-induced coma of submission.

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Haywire

Demetrios Matheou

The protean director Steven Soderbergh has offered us many things, from the art house individualism of his debut, sex lies and videotape, to glossy mainstream hits like Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brockovich, the sci-fi of Solaris to the satire of The Informant!, and the meticulous biography of Che to the eccentric, experimental Schizopolis.

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Shame

Sarah Kent

When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon, a successful thirtysomething New Yorker. His screen presence is so appealing that one could ogle him for hours and if, indeed, that is his body sauntering naked past the camera, he is well hung as well as handsome.

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A Useful Life

Tom Birchenough

Richly nuanced in its sideshot view of Uruguay’s film world and Montevideo street atmosphere, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is a small film that picks up on suppressed emotions which are only released in its second half. Its black-and-white images (actually transferred from colour, in a manner consciously evoking previous eras) recalls something of European cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.

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War Horse

Matt Wolf

The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play.

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Margin Call

Jasper Rees

Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near.

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Tatsumi

Nick Hasted

The Western image of manga comes from the thick volumes of knicker-flashing schoolgirls and lurid s.f. teenage boys pore over, and the anime (cartoon films) which adapt them. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of five stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, framed by details from his graphic autobiography A Drifting Life, reveals a radically different medium.

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The Iron Lady

Jasper Rees

There is a moment some way into The Iron Lady when its titular heroine presides over a celebratory domestic soiree. Around the table are arrayed ageing Tory nabobs and their peachy consorts, one of whom at the evening’s end tremulously approaches her hostess, sitting apart in an upright chair.

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Goon

Adam Sweeting

A capsule summary of Goon doesn't sound very appetising - slow-witted hockey player with awesome fighting skills helps lift the Halifax Highlanders out of their low-achieving doldrums. Yet within the film's oafish wrapping lies a touching little tale of oddball relationships and characters struggling to find their place in the world, set against a melancholy backdrop of small-town Canada in iron-hard winter weather.

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