Film Reviews
Dinner for SchmucksThursday, 02 September 2010
There's a fascination that comes with films/ plays/ you choose the art form that contain within them their own critique: the sort of thing you find, for instance, in Chekhov done badly when one character or another opines about how "boring" proceedings have become, and you are tempted to nod in assent. Read more... |
Cherry Tree LaneThursday, 02 September 2010
Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full of fearsome but unfulfilled ideas on the terrors waiting at your front door. Read more... |
The SwitchMonday, 30 August 2010
Step aside Prince Charming – there’s a new fairy tale in town, and your only substantive contribution fits into a small plastic sample pot. At some point in the last few years the Shangri-La, the unattainable dream of romantic comedies, shifted from man to baby. Read more... |
The Girl Who Played With FireSaturday, 28 August 2010
This middle adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium crime trilogy will be followed almost instantly by the last. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the elfin abuse victim and avenger who is the heart of the Larsson phenomenon, remains compelling. Read more... |
The Maid (La Nana)Thursday, 26 August 2010
Domestics of varying kinds have always figured prominently in the cinema, from Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Mary Reilly. (Julia Roberts playing the hired help? Read more... |
Scott Pilgrim vs The WorldTuesday, 24 August 2010
Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (... Read more... |
MotherTuesday, 24 August 2010
Director Bong Joon-ho watched Psycho as he prepared his latest film, one of the most discomfiting visions of mother-love since Norman Bates last ran a motel. There is Hitchcockian perversity, too, in Bong’s casting of Kim Hye-ja, an iconic Korean actress specialising in benign mothers, as a far more troubled maternal spirit. This nameless mother will do anything for her son, which feels like a threat as much as a promise, as Bong’s gothically atmospheric melodrama plays out. Read more... |
Diary of a Wimpy KidSunday, 22 August 2010
NB Since it was co-opted by the New Labour project to make them sound like humans, I’ve gone off the word “kids”, but let’s make an exception for a film called Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Read more... |
Le RefugeFriday, 20 August 2010
Amid the cinematic dog days of late summer, François Ozon's Le Refuge comes aptly named: a character-led, intimate tale in the style of the late Eric Rohmer that will infuriate those who like their films more purely driven by plot even as it offers a refuge to moviegoers for whom the curves of a pregnant belly or a handsome young man's spine contain within them their own narrative. Read more... |
SaltWednesday, 18 August 2010
With no Bonds or Bournes on the immediate horizon, no more Bauer with the end of 24, and the future of the Mission: Impossible series reportedly hanging in the balance, there appears to be an opening for a new secret agent franchise. It remains to be seen if Salt will plug the gap, though I for one will be more than happy if it does. Read more... |
The ExpendablesMonday, 16 August 2010
“You guys aren’t gonna start sucking each other’s dicks, are you?” Bruce Willis asks Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger - an image any gay porn producer would triple the trio’s fees to see happen. It’s typical of a tone which teeters between knowing and not caring, in writer-director Stallone’s all-star homage to his Eighties action lunkhead prime. Read more... |
PianomaniaMonday, 16 August 2010
Nobody can remember seeing a film about a piano tuner before. Happily, Pianomania isn’t merely unique; it’s a riveting documentary into the bargain. It takes as its subject the micro-detailed and nit-pickingly demanding routine of Stefan Knüpfer, Master Tuner for that Rolls-Royce of the piano industry, Steinway & Sons. Among Knüpfer’s celebrated clients are such titans of the keyboard as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner and Julius Drake, all of whom appear in the film’s... Read more... |
The Secret in Their EyesThursday, 12 August 2010
This is one of those films it’s impossible to imagine being fashioned by an Anglo-Saxon sensibility. Part legal procedural, part autumnal romance, The Secrets in Their Eyes is an intriguing weave of tones and colours. It flirts at once with melodrama and slapstick while never finally deviating from a commitment to intense seriousness and emotional intelligence. No wonder it won this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Read more... |
Five Easy PiecesWednesday, 11 August 2010
Five Easy Pieces is the nominal sibling to Easy Rider, which put Jack Nicholson a step from stardom in 1969. But Pieces, this 40th-anniversary reissue reminds you, was a very different film. The soundtrack is Patsy Cline, not Steppenwolf, and we first see Nicholson working in a hard hat, the music and garb of pro-‘Nam hippie-bashers in 1970. But the cultural action is mostly in Nicholson himself, and the simmering storm of dissatisfaction and high intelligence in... Read more... |
Benda Bilili!Friday, 06 August 2010
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! Read more... |
Knight and DayFriday, 06 August 2010
Director James Mangold says he "set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic". Somehow he ended up with Knight and Day, which feels completely unreal and is modestly amusing in places. Tom Cruise, playing CIA super-agent Roy Miller, is so "real" that he can survive lethal assaults by swarms of assassins, plummet unscathed from high windows, swim underwater for miles and leap off flyovers onto speeding vehicles. Read more... |
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