Film Reviews

The Help

Veronica Lee Tuesday, 25 October 2011

The source material for a film like The Help - a story about the black maids who worked for white families in the American South and raised their children as their employers busied themselves with making money and playing bridge - would normally be a memoir or a news archive. But The Help is adapted from the novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, published in 2009.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 25 October 2011

It’s been a long time coming, and an extremely nervous wait for millions of fans who grew up on the boy reporter and his alliterating whisky-soaked maritime sidekick. Steven Spielberg first acquired the cinematic rights to The Adventures of Tintin in 1982, the year ET came out. In the interim he’s gone off on tangents featuring war and genocide, dinosaurs and sci-fi. They’ve all been thrillingly different, but all clearly bearing Spielberg’s kitemark.

Comment

The Ides of March

Veronica Lee Monday, 24 October 2011

If you were to play a game as to who should play former US President Bill Clinton in a fictionalised account of his life, then George Clooney – liberal, politically active and drop-dead gorgeous – would surely be your number-one choice. So he must have been a shoo-in for the role of Democratic presidential hopeful Governor Mike Morris - who is charming, decent, ironic and very attractive - in The Ides of March.

Blood in the Mobile

Nick Hasted Friday, 21 October 2011

Maybe it’s a quirk of night-filming that the minister’s eyes look blood-red. But the earth in the Democratic Republic of Congo is Martian too, especially near the hell-hole where many of the minerals that power our mobile phones and laptops are mined. Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen enters that hole, motivated it seems by unusually visceral guilt that, even in liberal Scandinavia, casually used electronic paraphernalia is linked to terrible crimes.

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

joe Muggs Friday, 21 October 2011

This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 20 October 2011

Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary precision. Steeped in a magnificent malice and caked in frosty beauty, We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the lead up to and aftermath of a high-school massacre, and gives us every parent’s worst nightmare – spawning a monster.

Comment

Contagion

Matt Wolf Monday, 17 October 2011

What goes around, well, goes around in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which manages the dual feat of being at once scare-mongering (hypochondriacs should stay well clear) and stultifyingly dull.

Sleeping Beauty/ Footloose

Nick Hasted Saturday, 15 October 2011

We first see Lucy (Emily Browning) as a receptacle, letting a medical tube snake painfully deep down her throat. Australian novelist Julia Leigh characterises such behaviour as “radical passivity”, and her Jane Campion-mentored debut as director makes Lucy find its degrading limit.

Comment

Albatross

Jasper Rees Friday, 14 October 2011

This is the kind of film you would very much like to like. It’s a low-budget British effort with a perfectly decent cast who are all easy on the eye. It makes the most of the windswept Isle of Man, where so many films just take advantage of tax breaks while pretending they’re in Barbados. You would like to like it. Unfortunately, as with so many low-budget British films, it just doesn’t come up to the mark.

Comment

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 12 October 2011

A movie about advertising and product placement entirely paid for by advertising and product placement? It's a Koh-i-Noor diamond of a concept, and zealous documentarian Morgan Spurlock has applied himself to his task with the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the tenacity of a corporate Salesman of the Month.

The Three Musketeers (3D)

ASH Smyth Wednesday, 12 October 2011

There is nothing good about The Three Musketeers. Nothing.

Tyrannosaur

Emma Simmonds Friday, 07 October 2011

If you can judge a man by his friends then the volatile Joseph would be something of a contradiction. His best mate is looking death in the eye, riddled with sickness and regret (and by all accounts left that way by the lifestyle they both shared). Then there’s the wheeler-dealer prone to racist tirades. On the redemptive side is the charming, if porcelain-fragile friendship that he strikes up with dedicated Christian Hannah.

Midnight in Paris

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 05 October 2011

Waiting for Woody Allen to turn in a half-decent movie is bit like inching through a recession. The green shoots of recovery are constantly hoped for, but slow to show. Now and then the new one will come along and seem marginally less dire, but prove all too chimerical. How many of the films in the last decade does anyone remember for the right reasons? And don't say Vicky Cristina Barcelona with its atrocious voiceover and pervy lesbo snog.

Comment

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Emma Simmonds Tuesday, 04 October 2011

Saying that seven-year-old Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) is experiencing a nightmare childhood would be a whopping understatement. An anxious child, medicated into submission by her mother, she’s been sent to live with her father in a spooky mansion where tiny teeth-snatchers call to her from the shadows.

Johnny English Reborn

Adam Sweeting Monday, 03 October 2011

"Barclaycard? This man's in no state to go shopping!" Thus we remember the credit card commercials which formed the "origin story" of blundering secret agent Johnny English, then known as Richard Latham. Better name in fact, but no matter. Eight years after his big-screen debut, English is back, older and even more stupid.

Melancholia

Nick Hasted Friday, 30 September 2011

Lars von Trier wants us to see the big picture. When Terrence Malick similarly returned cinema to the cosmic with The Tree of Life, he tried to make us feel the terrifying wonder of creation as much as death. The prelude to Von Trier’s new film instead sees Earth smashing into an indifferent planet 10 times its size.