Gloria is 58. Divorced 12 years earlier, she’s intent on living life. Her two children are grown up, she works in a characterless office and is open to almost anything. She’ll try cannabis, attends a class where instruction is given on releasing laughter and tackles yoga for the first time. Beyond keeping in touch with her son and daughter, her greatest efforts are directed towards her nightlife. On her own, Gloria goes to ballrooms, bars and nightclubs where she hopes to make a connection. Then, one evening, she encounters Rodolfo. His opening line is “are you always this happy?”
film reviews
emma.simmonds
Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins.
Nick Hasted
We have plenty to be paranoid about in the most surveilled country in the world. British contributions to the conspiracy thrillers that bloomed so fruitfully in the US around Watergate have, though, stayed slim. Maybe that’s one reason Closed Circuit’s extreme Secret Service behaviour in the aftermath of a bomb atrocity at London’s Borough market feels so fake.
CIA agents snuffing out inconvenient people on city streets is cinematic second nature. MI5 hunting Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall’s high-powered barristers through Dalston back-alleys takes more swallowing. So does some of the dialogue in Steve Knight’s bumpy script, despite having Jim Broadbent, Anne-Marie Duff, Ciaran Hinds and Julia Stiles to help speak it.
Bana and Hall (pictured right) are excellent as ex-lovers Martin Rose, the defence for surviving bomb plotter Farroukh Erdogan (Denis Moschitto), and Claudia Simmons-Howe, the Special Advocate defending him in closed court. The potential for abuse and fundamental unjustness of the latter process when dealing with alleged terrorists is one of the film’s most fascinating themes, if it only had the courage to stick with it. Aussie Bana particularly enjoys Rose’s blowhard articulacy, barely hiding bitter vulnerability after a work-wrecked marriage, and theatre aristocrat Hall (Sir Peter’s daughter) matches his comfort at posh, powerful sparring. Riz Ahmed’s nervy, dangerously idealistic MI5 man, Ann-Marie Duff as his venomous boss and Jim Broadbent’s oily Attorney General (pictured below), with so many Tory and New Labour apparatchiks to inspire him as he bullies and lies with a beaming smile, are also fine. But though writer Knight’s work include London thrillers Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things and Brum gangland saga Peaky Blinders, there are leaden lines the cast deserve danger money for lifting.
Closed Circuit’s head-thumping improbability as a thriller also stands in stark contrast to its great efforts at legal realism. MI5’s reasons for a post-bombing cover-up which develops into an attempted mid-trial massacre of anyone who knows what they’ve been up to are convincingly extreme, and the idea of British agents being so ruthless on British streets is usefully challenging. James Bond’s sprint down Whitehall to protect the liberty of the British state in Skyfall is turned inside-out. But when the intended victims are Julia Stiles’ top New York Times reporter, and Bana and Hall’s elite lawyers on what is repeatedly called the Trial of the Century, Stalin’s KGB seem better candidates for the job. As blundering hitmen attack our heroes the night before the trial, a phone-call to any newspaper would make their deaths instantly unthinkable. D-notices be damned. They’d have to blow up the printing presses (and the internet) to stop that coming out.
Director John Crowley’s previous film Is Anybody There? combined bleak, comic and sentimental moods as Michael Caine declined in an old people’s home. Closed Circuit feels compromised and half-cooked. Walking out of one of Closed Circuit’s inspirations, the fine British conspiracy thriller Defence of the Realm, in 1986, newsstand headlines of the nearly government-toppling Westland affair greeted me, and film and murky reality seemed to merge. No chance of that here.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Closed Circuit
Tom Birchenough
With a hero who’s an aspiring actor and an ensemble of theatrical types trapped outside time as supporting cast, the staginess of Ferzan Ozpetek’s A Magnificent Haunting comes as little surprise. It makes for sometimes nicely camp overplaying, though the comedy that made the Turkish-born director’s latest film a hit in his adopted Italy doesn’t travel easily beyond borders. Some elements, including gay traces, transvestite cameos and females at nervous breakdown levels, hint at eccentric sensibilities akin to those of Pedro Almodóvar.
Kieron Tyler
“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.
Karen Krizanovich
It's dueling stars when Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson go quite delightfully toe-to-toe as Walt Disney vs P L Travers, author of Mary Poppins, in Saving Mr Banks, the closing film of the London Film Festival 2013. The title suggests the Russian doll-like nature of the story – a story within a story wrapped in an enigma, with seriously fabulous hair and make-up turning both Hanks and Thompson into characters you can almost completely believe in.
Kieron Tyler
Common sense indicates it’s a rare film which retains the impact it had on first exposure. Films can often reveal new depths and fresh detail with repeated viewing, but that initial effect is tough to duplicate. This new release of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens actually captures the thrill of the first-time experience. Partly, that’s due to the extraordinary restoration. It’s also because experiencing the film in the cinema is utterly unlike seeing it at home.
Demetrios Matheou
Jim Jarmusch's characters have always been ineffably cool, whether the slackers of Stranger than Paradise, the accountant lost in the Wild West of Dead Man, or the hit man with samurai pretensions of Ghost Dog. It goes without saying that if he makes a film about vampires, they’ll be dripping with style.
Demetrios Matheou
One of this year’s Oscar contenders, Lincoln, covered the ending of the American Civil War as it played out in the comfortable confines of the Capitol. 12 Years a Slave, an exceptional film that will surely be in the running next year, reveals the “fearful ill” that set the country alight in the first place.
Adam Sweeting
Earlier this year we saw Tobias Lindstrom's A Hijacking, a Danish-made thriller based on true events, about a freighter hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Featuring familiar faces from Borgen and The Killing, the film skipped the part where the vessel was seized, and focused on the excruciating and seemingly infinite negotiations between the hijackers and the shipping company in Copenhagen. Harrowing and claustrophobic, it evoked the sufferings of the crew incarcerated below decks while businessmen calculated what value they could afford to ascribe to their lives.
But Hollywood isn't interested in all that, and instead has fastened upon the juicy hero-battles-the-odds story of Captain Richard Phillips. He was in command of the container ship Maersk Alabama, which ran into the seaborne Somali menace in 2009 while en route for Mombasa, and Captain Phillips is based on his book about the episode. The Alabama's crew put up some resistance, but weren't able to prevent their captain being taken hostage on one of the ship's lifeboats.
The drama is so enveloping that you're hooked from intro to final credits
It's a powerful premise for an action thriller, and director Paul "Bourne" Greengrass makes the perfect man for this particular season (his father was a merchant seaman, as it happens). As the maker of earlier innocent-citizens-in-jeopardy dramas Bloody Sunday and United 93, as well as the Iraq war mystery Green Zone, Greengrass has burnished his credentials as a director of turbocharged action thrillers grounded in real life events, with a greater or lesser degree of political controversy bubbling along in the background.
The politics in Captain Phillips has been turned down to a low simmer while Greengrass concentrates on action and character, but the story is "political" simply by virtue of having taken place. It's located in the hot zone where a web of international interests clash, where Al Qaeda is ominously active in the Horn of Africa, and where any American ship might easily be construed as a provocation. Greengrass gives us a brief introductory scene where Phillips (Tom Hanks) is driving to the airport from his home in Vermont to fly out to Oman to join his ship. He and his wife (Catherine Keener) chat about their children and family stuff, but the undertone of anxiety about his voyage into the watery badlands is unmissable.
There's an equally economical set-up sequence of the Somali pirates ashore. They're depicted as impoverished, desperate and driven to bloody competition by bandit leaders to fight for places on the hijacking boats, which amount to their own brutalised version of the National Lottery. They're all zapped on khat, which they chew perpetually. The convergence of the twain unfolds inexorably amid steadily-ratcheting tension, with Greengrass deploying juddering hand-held camerawork and seasickness-evoking speed-cutting to formidable effect.
After a spate of recent hijackings, Phillips is tense from the off, scouring the internet for information and keeping a close watch on radar. When he sees two blips coming up fast astern, you feel his adrenalin-jolt of alarm. He triggers emergency manoeuvres and prepares the ship's array of fire-hoses to ward off the approaching boarders, and it's hard to grasp how a handful of pirates in battered wooden skiffs could ever pose a threat to a towering ocean-going leviathan like the Alabama. But... (Boarders ahoy, pictured below)
A battle of wits ensues as Phillips lures the pirates, led by the sinister and skeletal Muse (Barkhad Abdi), away from where the rest of his crew are hiding, and tries futilely to buy them off with the wad of cash in the Alabama's safe. Fast forward to the skipper in the lifeboat with the bandits, heading back to the Somali coast, as the episode escalates into a major international incident. Soon the little craft is surrounded by a US Navy task force, while a SEAL team (appropriately led by Max Martini, reprising his character from TV's The Unit) is parachuted in to take control. As the pirates grow increasingly hysterical and unstable, the Navy remorselessly turns the screw. The director subtly plants the question of how much force is too much, and lets you take it away with you.
At 134 minutes this isn't a short film, but the drama is so enveloping and the pulse so skilfully controlled that you're hooked from intro to final credits. Hanks comfortably commands both his ship and the trajectory of Phillips's ordeal, but even if he hadn't there was no way Greengrass was going to slacken his grip. This is a cracking good thriller, even if it does perforce view the world through Hollywood-tinted glasses.
TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks is the reason to see Dave Eggers's sentimental Saudi comedy
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance
Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic
Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson as PL Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney track the journey of Mary Poppins from page to screen
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism
Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Captain Phillips