Film Reviews
Once Upon a Time in AnatoliaMonday, 12 March 2012
A police procedural played out over a long dark night of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the magnificent sixth feature from Turkish writer / director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys, Uzak). So much more than a simple thriller, it transforms a murder investigation into something gratifyingly profound and perversely beautiful; its grizzled, largely unfamiliar faces and their tales of woe will remain with you long after the end credits roll. Read more... |
TrishnaFriday, 09 March 2012
Literary adaptations are a godsend to an industry that loves a good story but is too busy blowing the budget on chase sequences and explosions to pay a decent screenwriter. Read more... |
Bel AmiThursday, 08 March 2012
Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod - is to the celluloid manner born. Read more... |
CleanskinThursday, 08 March 2012
Hats off to independent British writer/producer/director Hadi Hajaig, who has doggedly piloted his thriller Cleanskin to the screen and picked up distribution support from Warner Bros in the process. Hajaig was never going to be splashing around in a Bourne- or Bond-sized budget, but he has played up the flick's British roots with pungent use of some prime London locations. Read more... |
The Decoy BrideTuesday, 06 March 2012
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. Read more... |
Blank CitySunday, 04 March 2012
Céline Danhier’s Blank City is a useful but slightly frustrating primer on the grass-roots No Wave cinema movement that blossomed in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side in the post-punk era of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Read more... |
MichaelFriday, 02 March 2012
Michael is a work of fiction, but it is also clearly an amalgam of real-life events. For first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer (former casting director for Michael Haneke, whose influence you may detect), the subject must have particular resonance: in this story of a child abduction by a lone paedophile, it’s unavoidable that we think of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, as well as Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux. Read more... |
This Means WarThursday, 01 March 2012
Forget the action movie trappings of the aggressively titled This Means War: the latest film from the enigmatically named McG has a plot that Noel Coward might well have loved. Whether Sir Noel would have approved of the witless dialogue and the decidedly coy sexual politics is another thing altogether, though he doubtless would have admired the three stars' physiques. Read more... |
CaranchoWednesday, 29 February 2012
In the UK we call them ambulance-chasers, those personal injury lawyers who prey on the victims of accidents, encouraging them to seek compensation, in return for a tidy fee. The Argentines, as the title of Pablo Trapero’s new film suggests, have their own word for this mucky breed – vultures. Read more... |
If Not Us, Who?Wednesday, 29 February 2012
The Red Army Faction was Germany's key revolutionary force for a decade from the late 1960s onwards, and its story, especially the characters of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, has proved highly attractive to the country's filmmakers. Uli Edel’s 2008 The Baader Meinhof Complex told the key political story in lengthy detail through to its end in 1977 when four of its key members (in the official version) committed suicide in prison. Read more... |
The AdoptedFriday, 24 February 2012
Following her nuanced turn last year in Mike Mills’ quietly wrenching Beginners, Mélanie Laurent makes her directorial debut with another dimly idiosyncratic tale of thirtysomethings finding love and facing grief. Alas, while Laurent and her co-writers Morgan Perez and Chris Deslandes initially set up some intriguing dynamics, they give way all too swiftly to predictable scenes and a crushingly saccharine third act that’s no less risible for being heartfelt. Read more... |
The Best Exotic Marigold HotelTuesday, 21 February 2012
Travel, health permitting, knows few age barriers (if it did, there would be no Elderhostel), nor does charm, so there are two reasons up front why The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fully deserves to win over the so-called "grey pound" market and much more besides. The story of a septet of British retirees abroad who need to leave home in order to learn any number of home truths, John Madden's film provides a welcome corrective to our youth-obsessed celluloid age without going to the... Read more... |
RampartTuesday, 21 February 2012
A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late Nineties, it takes as its target one (fictional) Los Angeles law enforcer and his towering demons. Harrelson’s Dave Brown is an intelligent but difficult man, buckled into the straight-jacket of thuggery. Read more... |
HadewijchSaturday, 18 February 2012
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a 13th-century mystic whose poetry had a formative influence on Dutch literature. Though influenced by the courtly love tradition, the subject of her poems was the love of God and the mysteries of the divine. She was probably not a nun but a beguine – a devout noblewoman in a self-denying contemplative order that carried out works of Christian charity. There is a suggestion in her letters that she may have been exiled from her sisters and yearned to rejoin them. Read more... |
The Woman in the FifthFriday, 17 February 2012
Challenging the boundaries of reality and the way in which characters exist in and redefine their worlds has become something of a hallmark of director Pawel Pawlikowski. Considering his previous film My Summer of Love, one critic wrote of it as a study of worlds that “exist somewhere on the periphery of normality”. Read more... |
Extremely Loud and Incredibly CloseWednesday, 15 February 2012
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer once described his approach to the writing process as “trying to stop making sense, and create something that just has an effect”. It’s an intention that’s easy to track in his sophomore novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which uses an idiosyncratic mix of prose, pictures and blank pages to spin its two narrative strands. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
The Fifth Step, Soho Place review - wickedly funny two-hande...
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter....
Josefowicz, LSO, Mälkki, Barbican review - two old favourite...
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two...
Mr Swallow: Show Pony, Richmond Theatre review - magic trick...
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative...
The Great Escape Festival 2025, Brighton review - a feast of...
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on...
Parsifal, Glyndebourne review - the music flies up, the dram...
There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions...
The Bombing of Pan Am 103, BBC One review - new dramatisatio...
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s ...
Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works, Royal Ballet review - th...
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in ...
Album: Robert Forster - Strawberries
“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however,...
Music Reissues Weekly: Chapterhouse - White House Demos
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...