fri 29/03/2024

Film Reviews

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

Jasper Rees

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.

Read more...

Separado!/ Gruff Rhys, BFI Southbank

Kieron Tyler

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.

Read more...

Film: Beautiful Kate

alexandra Coghlan 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...

Read more...

Down Terrace

Nick Hasted

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.

Read more...

The A-Team

Neil Smith

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.

Read more...

Gainsbourg

Anne Billson

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.

Read more...

Baarìa

Jasper Rees

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.

Read more...

Splice

Adam Sweeting

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.

Read more...

The Rebound

Veronica Lee

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

Read more...

Toy Story 3

Neil Smith

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.

Read more...

Bluebeard

Anne Billson

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.

Read more...

Inception

Nick Hasted

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.

Read more...

The 7th Dimension

Nick Hasted

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.

Read more...

The Concert

Tom Birchenough

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.

Read more...

London River

Jasper Rees

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.

Read more...

The Twilight Saga - Eclipse

Anne Billson

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.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

MJ the Musical, Prince Edward Theatre review - glitzy jukebo...

In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of ...

Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War: A Scenario review - on the inco...

"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to...

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Marylebone Theatre review - f...

Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across...

Bach's Easter Oratorio, OAE, Whelan, QEH review - the j...

Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter...

Album: Jane Weaver - Love In Constant Spectacle

“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play tha...

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead...

The Origin of Evil review - Laure Calamy stars in gripping F...

A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...

Foam, Finborough Theatre review - fascism and f*cking in a G...

In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet...

Album: Ride - Interplay

What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties ...