Film Reviews

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

Jasper Rees Monday, 02 August 2010

She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known to all and sundry as Coco, is making an entrance. Another one.

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Separado!/ Gruff Rhys, BFI Southbank

Kieron Tyler Sunday, 01 August 2010

Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community.

Film: Beautiful Kate

alexandra Coghlan Friday, 30 July 2010

Sophie Lowe's open-faced Kate seduces her audience as completely as her family

Finding a cheerful Australian film these days is quite a challenge. Having discovered the particular affinity between Australia’s parched and expansive landscape and the genres of horror and misery memoir, the nation’s filmmakers have set about exploiting it with an enthusiasm that reliably finds a pile of corpses – physical or emotional – bloodily heaped by the time the closing credits roll. Beautiful Kate is no exception, but if you can brave its confronting gaze you’ll find one...

Down Terrace

Nick Hasted Thursday, 29 July 2010

Tired of the slick, pastiche world of the post-Lock, Stock... British crime movie? Then Down Terrace may be the address for you. Director Ben Wheatley’s micro-budget, naturalistic debut details the paranoid decline of a drug-dealing family in the back end of Brighton. They’re the Royle family with access to hand guns - a deadly and funny combination.

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The A-Team

Neil Smith Monday, 26 July 2010

As played by the late George Peppard in the original A-Team TV series, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was wont to say he loved it when a plan came together. Alas, whatever plan that might have justified this botched retread of the Eighties small-screen favourite soon gets lost amid a wearying welter of gunfire, pyrotechnics and not-so-special effects, all of which appear haphazardly hurled on screen with all the care an incontinent pigeon might deploy while despoiling parked cars.

Gainsbourg

Anne Billson Sunday, 25 July 2010

Serge Gainsbourg, like Charles Bukowski, is one of those blokes who should be banned as a role model for impressionable young men, who may start imagining they too can behave like disgusting old soaks and pull any gorgeous bird who comes into their orbit. Note to Gainsbourg wannabes - this only works if you're a creative genius as well.

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Baarìa

Jasper Rees Friday, 23 July 2010

Giuseppe Tornatore is known overwhelmingly for one international hit. There have been sundry other films from him in the 21 years since Cinema Paradiso won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but none which have sold such a seductive vision of Italian village life. Though damned to backwardness, stymied by introspection, Tornatore’s evocation of Sicily in 1950s was awash with vitality and colour. In Baarìa he finally goes home.

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Splice

Adam Sweeting Thursday, 22 July 2010

Although it has taken over a decade to come to fruition, Splice still feels like a timely piece of work with its macabre and gruesome take on notions of genetic mutation for commercial gain and the god-like delusions of the scientific community. In addition, it spits out poisonous barbs in the direction of dysfunctional parents who visit their own inadequacies on their hapless offspring.

The Rebound

Veronica Lee Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons.

Toy Story 3

Neil Smith Sunday, 18 July 2010

The 15 years since Disney released the original Toy Story have seen a seismic boom in the computer animation field that has prompted every major movie studio to get in on the act. Relatively cheap to make, accessible to both adults and children and easily converted to 3D, these digital cash cows have become as much a part of a Hollywood balance sheet as the action-packed thriller, low-brow comedy or all-star contemporary reboot.

Bluebeard

Anne Billson Saturday, 17 July 2010

Sex, blood and shocking - these are the things Catherine Breillat does well. So long as she's busting taboos wide open you can forgive her the longueurs, the wilful refusal to attend to fundamental principles of storytelling, her characters' inclination towards such dreary soliloquising you feel like yelling, "For heaven's sake, shut up and get back to the full-frontal fornicating!" At first glance, the story of Bluebeard would appear to be right up her street.

Inception

Nick Hasted Friday, 16 July 2010

Inception is as lucid and heartfelt as summer blockbusters get these days. It is a rigorously built action spectacle about the persistence of memories and ideas, with an intelligent, committed cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio.

The 7th Dimension

Nick Hasted Thursday, 15 July 2010

The friendship between level-headed Sarah (TV’s Hustle star Kelly Adams) and impulsive Zoe (Lucy Evans) is the emotional core, as Zoe dumps her college course to surprise teacher boyfriend Malcolm (David Horton) in his flat and declare her undying love. There is a vague sense of unease in glimpsed locations, apparently in East London, where a bag lady squawks Cassandra-style warnings.

The Concert

Tom Birchenough Thursday, 15 July 2010

Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.

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London River

Jasper Rees Monday, 12 July 2010

But the theme of not knowing is by no means confined to the agony of uncertainty. Brenda Blethyn plays Elizabeth, a mother who sees the 7/7 bombings on the news and instinctively picks up the phone to check, as millions of other parents will have on that day, if her daughter is alive and well.

The Twilight Saga - Eclipse

Anne Billson Friday, 09 July 2010

It's the eternal human-vampire-werewolf triangle, and at times it feels as though it really will go on for ever and ever. The story so far: in the small North-West Pacific town of Forks, where the sun hardly ever shines, a teenage girl called Bella loves Edward, a 100-year-old vampire who is perfect in every way, except of course that he drinks (non-human) blood, and has a tendency to sparkle on those rare occasions when the sun does come out.