Twelve minutes into the Icelandic film Of Horses and Men something occurs on screen which was obviously going to happen, but actually seeing it happen is astonishing. It’s something which would normally either occur off screen or be alluded to. Of Horses and Men has many such uncomfortable moments. It’s also funny, heart-warming and poignant – a one-off.
The French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet is best known and loved for his early work: Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and (conveniently ignoring Alien: Resurrection) Amélie. These films introduced him as a director with a very particular, rather charming vision; they were sublime, sometimes twisted works of partial fantasy which the more recent A Very Long Engagement and Micmacs didn't quite live up to. With his latest, T.S.
"We're too old for this shit," quips Jenko (Channing Tatum), quoting one of the greats of weary screen policing - Lethal Weapon's Murtaugh - in response to his latest nonsensically spectacular brush with death. "We started off too old for this shit," shoots back his partner Schmidt (Jonah Hill). Welcome to 22 Jump Street: a film that wears a lack of originality not just on its sleeve but as its whole outfit. Its predecessor 21 Jump Street was the big screen remake that promised little but delivered in belly laughs.
Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir excels at catching both individuality of character and wider background context in her second feature, When I Saw You. The initial background is a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, where displaced families arrive from their lost homes across the border after the Six-day War (the film’s title alludes to the fact that Palestine is so close as to be almost visible, at the same time almost impossibly far away).
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied.
Sometimes a film captures the imagination of the critical establishment for all the wrong reasons, and there's a scramble to see who can file the most entertainingly bitchy copy. And so it is with Grace of Monaco, which emerges from the vipers' nest that is the Cannes Film Festival (and from a very public spat between director Olivier Dahan and the co-chairman of the film's US distributor, Harvey Weinstein) covered in vicious puncture wounds, ridiculously ruffled and resigned to take it all over again on general release. But can it really be that awful?
Two movie-obsessed high-school students Owen and Matt (Owen Williams and Matt Johnson, who also writes and directs) are making a short movie about bullying for their film class. After they show it, to widespread derision from their classmates, the bullying gets worse (by boys they call the "dirties") and so the two teenagers decide to make a new version, incorporating secretly filmed footage of them being harassed and assaulted.
In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. After an escalation of anxiety and machismo on both sides, one of the BART police shot the unarmed, handcuffed Grant in the back (he later claimed he thought he was firing his Taser) as the train waited in the station.
Tom Cruise has smugly saved the day in dozens of films. In Edge of Tomorrow, he utterly fails to save the same day dozens of times, dying and trying again, in a loop caused by being plastered in the time-warping blood of one of the aliens currently occupying Western Europe.
For an artist who famously can't travel to America, Roman Polanski would appear to have an unstoppable passion for filming small-cast Broadway hits. On the back of Death and the Maiden and Carnage, both of which diminished their stage sources, along comes Venus in Fur, adapted from the David Ives play that had no fewer than three separate New York runs, making a star of its husky-voiced young leading lady, Nina Arianda, who won a 2012 Tony for her work.