humour
emma.simmonds
"I'm so embarrassed, I'm not a real person yet," Frances apologetically tells her date after she's forced to make a calamitous cashpoint dash when they're asked to settle their restaurant bill. This is the seventh film from writer-director - and sometime Wes Anderson collaborator - Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale). This time he co-writes with luminous star and indie-darling Greta Gerwig and it's a terrifically fruitful collaboration. Frances Ha is a film about female friendship, artistic expression and getting your shit together in your twenties, whose monochrome elegance Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"What makes you think all this is funny?" businessman Ricardo Galán (Guillermo Toledo) snaps after a particular high-spirited episode in Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's latest, and it's undoubtedly a remark that will resonate with some members of the audience. Almodóvar is one of modern cinema's finest auteurs - a director for whom we reserve the highest of expectations. However his latest is camper and more booze-fuelled than Christmas, coming after the comparably tortured The Skin I Live In and Broken Embraces this is the cinematic equivalent of a blowout.So yes, this is one very silly Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie Nugent. The format of the film is recognisable from countless documentaries: talking heads giving us the lowdown on a crime. But in Bernie Richard Linklater boldly combines fact and fiction and handles the darkest of subjects - the real-life murder of an elderly woman by her younger male companion - with the lightest of comic touches and, by god, if Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Proving that laughter is the only sure-fire cure for the January blues, this year's London Comedy Film Festival took place over four days from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th January. Known commonly and affectionately as LOCO, it once again showcased the best of comedy filmmaking from around the world, lined-up alongside a range of imaginative events - a programme seemingly designed to give the most depressing month of the year a well deserved kick up the arse.Giving the intriguing but daunting sounding "Laughter Yoga" a wide berth on Thursday morning, I opted instead for Thursday evening's BFI Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” observes Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) in Northern Irish director Jon Wright’s creature feature. And, credit where it’s due, the mirthfully monikered Grabbers presents us with some classically mad shit. Set on the fictional Erin Island - a fishing village off the coast of Ireland - Grabbers is Wright’s second feature after 2009’s Tormented.After a prologue involving the fatal molestation of fisherman by an unseen sea monster, we’re introduced to Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle). He’s rebounding off rock bottom, drunk and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.The first thing Pitch Perfect gets right is its cast. Oscar and Tony nominated actress Anna Kendrick ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A film for those who see the festive period as a never-ending trudge from bar to bed via a shedload of booze, Terry Zwigoff’s delightfully deviant offering from 2003 gives us a trash-talking, beer-slugging Father Christmas, unimprovably played by Billy Bob Thornton. This chaotic Santa becomes the unlikely guardian of a troubled child. Wildly funny and oddly cheering, Bad Santa puts the crass in Christmas.Bad Santa is brazenly drunken from start to finish, it even begins in a bar. Willie (Thornton) is a misanthropic, alcohol-dependent, suicidal safe-cracker. For the past seven Christmases he’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ben Wheatley’s last film Kill List was unmistakable in its moniker, aggressively advertising its deadly subject matter. Taken on title alone Sightseers suggests something more far more innocuous. Depending on your capacity for twisted thrills, you’ll get a nasty or nice surprise; the name may give no hint of the macabre but Wheatley’s third film is hardly less violent than its predecessor. It is, however, a lot funnier. Behind the façade of beauty spots and parochial quirkiness lurk “a ginger-faced man and an angry woman” - two cold-hearted killers primed to pounce. This couple don’t get mad Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they more than a cockney slanted, pie ‘n’ mash Wurzels? This programme, prompted by their 2009 retirement, made a valiant – heroic – attempt to elevate them to the level of the greats. Peter Doherty declared them “just like The Clash, The Smiths, Keats”. Obviously, he was thinking of “Snooker Loopy”.They are pretty great. But by not taking their good-time Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric. Following on from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which chose to set its verbose and violent social critique in a white stretch limo, Holy Motors uses a similar vehicle both to transport and transform its protagonist.The short prologue sees the film’s French director, Leos Carax, fumbling blindly about a hotel room, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite Lilyhammer’s sub-zero, snow white Norwegian setting, it is initially difficult to divorce Frank Tagliano from The Sopranos’ Silvio Dante. They’re both played by Steven Van Zandt and both are Mafia men. The suit they wear is the same. Yet Lilyhammer is not The Sopranos in Norway and, by plonking this stereotype into the most unlikely of locations, Van Zandt reveals a flair for nuance formerly obscured by the shadows of others.In The Sopranos, as in the E Street Band, he cemented his image as a side man. Being Bruce Springsteen’s long-term guitarist is probably enough to secure Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For all that’s been said about Orson Welles – usually focusing on his towering genius and sizable ego - he was above all a great contrarian. In interviews he was often genial and self-effacing and of course a scintillating raconteur. During his later years he could be avuncular, entertainingly unpredictable and very funny, like a mischievous lecturer. His The Lady From Shanghai (1947) is so loaded with eccentricity it’s positively cock-eyed and Welles was of course an outcast in Hollywood, that is until he cast himself out. So while those familiar with the legend alone might find F for Fake ( Read more ...