Film Reviews
J. EdgarFriday, 20 January 2012
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. Read more...
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W.E.Thursday, 19 January 2012
“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. Read more... |
HaywireWednesday, 18 January 2012
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. Read more... |
ShameThursday, 12 January 2012
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. Read more... |
A Useful LifeThursday, 12 January 2012
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. Read more... |
War HorseWednesday, 11 January 2012
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. Read more... |
Margin CallWednesday, 11 January 2012
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. Read more... |
TatsumiMonday, 09 January 2012
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. Read more... |
The Iron LadySunday, 08 January 2012
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. Read more... |
GoonFriday, 06 January 2012
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. Read more... |
2011: The Arts Brought to BookMonday, 02 January 2012
In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Read more... |
2011: Tinker Tailor Minchin SheenMonday, 02 January 2012
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. Read more... |
2011: The Triumph of AuthenticityMonday, 02 January 2012
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Read more... |
2011: The British Are ClimbingSaturday, 31 December 2011
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris. Read more... |
2011: From Russia - With Love?Saturday, 31 December 2011
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Read more... |
2011: Ballerinas, Cuts and the Higgs Boson TheorySaturday, 31 December 2011
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell contract - it proved the innocent gloriousness of the human impulse to make art, a joy that has no expectation of reward but without which no existence is possible. Read more... |
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