Film Reviews
We Have a PopeFriday, 02 December 2011
In his home country, the release of the latest film by Nanni Moretti is always an event, all the more so in the case of We Have a Pope – a bittersweet psychological comedy with tinges of tragedy about a cardinal who is elected to the throne of St Peter, has a panic attack, and does a runner leaving the Catholic Church in crisis and the world media with a bonzer news story. It arrives a full five years after his last outing, Il caimano. Read more...
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Las AcaciasFriday, 02 December 2011
As gentle and emotionally affecting as they come, Argentinian director Pablo Giorgelli’s feature debut is the tenderly told story of the burgeoning bond between a migrant mother and a slightly grizzled, taciturn trucker, which gingerly moots the possibility of romance. It’s a wise and disarming tale of hope and unspoken sadness which, though you’ll barely notice it doing so, will work its way right under your skin. Read more... |
HugoThursday, 01 December 2011
It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time... Read more... |
The ThingThursday, 01 December 2011
John Carpenter's original The Thing from 1982 had punch, pace, shocks, horror, dramatic tension and Kurt Russell in the lead. It also had a great intro, with its scenes of an apparently blameless and photogenic husky being pursued across Antarctica by gunmen in a helicopter. How we cheered when the animal was saved. How we shouldn't have. Read more... |
The Big YearThursday, 01 December 2011
There are times when one marvels that some films ever get the green light; whether it's difficult subject matter, unknown leads or first-time directors, they each have their own, different hurdles to cross with studios more interested in the bottom line than creating art. Read more... |
50/50Saturday, 26 November 2011
It’s always struck me as an odd sort of desire: to go to see a movie in which you know someone is going to die a long and painful death, while someone else – or maybe a whole gaggle of people – stand and watch, shedding tears and beating breasts. Of all genres, the “terminal illness movie”, if we can call it that, seems altogether perverse. Read more... |
My Week With MarilynFriday, 25 November 2011
My Week With Marilyn depicts the supposedly sweet dalliance between Marilyn Monroe – an actress in over her head played by an actress, Michelle Williams, reaching her peak – and eager-beaver gofer Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) during the fraught Pinewood production of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. Read more... |
The Deep Blue SeaThursday, 24 November 2011
The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better. Read more... |
MoneyballWednesday, 23 November 2011
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the... Read more... |
Dream HouseWednesday, 23 November 2011
Dream House’s crude selling point is the chance to see newly married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz co-star as Will and wife Libby, in the film they made just before their first date. In bed and around the home their characters have moved to with their two young daughters, they’re appropriately, easily affectionate. Read more... |
We Were HereTuesday, 22 November 2011
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Read more... |
An African ElectionTuesday, 22 November 2011
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election. Read more... |
ResistanceMonday, 21 November 2011
What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough. Read more... |
SnowtownFriday, 18 November 2011
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. Read more... |
Welcome to the RileysWednesday, 16 November 2011
As supremely silly as they are, the Twilight movies are made watchable by Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, whose combination of fidgetiness and aloofness puts me in mind of James Dean’s Cal Trask and Jim Stark. Read more... |
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool PlaceMonday, 14 November 2011
Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making. Read more... |
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