Cuban boxers have always punched above their weight in the world arena: the little island has clocked up no fewer than 63 Olympic medals - 32 of them gold - in the last 40 years. Enjoying extraordinary access to the mysteries of the Havana Boxing Academy, this emotional documentary follows the fortunes of three ten-year-old lads over eight months as they submit to a punishing regimen of training for the National Boxing Championship. But, as with the best sports films, Sons of Cuba is about more than winning or losing. It's about more, even, than boxing itself.
film reviews
Veronica Lee
Teenagers David and Emily are inseparable friends, who live year-round on a crummy seaside caravan park on the East Anglian coast. They play games of chase among the caravans, scare sheep in surrounding fields and steal from the sweet shop on site. The friends, although the same age, are at different stages of their development; he still looks boyish, she is already flirting with Steve, the much older security guard on site. But the pair are equally emotionally inarticulate and struggling to understand their nascent lust; as the increasingly dark story unfolds, we understand that The Scouting Book for Boys is a snapshot of that moment in our lives when our minds and bodies are caught in a battle between child and adult.
alice.vincent
The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the guitarist from drone doom band Sunn O))), expectations were hard to form. The organisers must have realised the mystery - four sheets of A4 were thrust into our hands last night by ushers upon entry as a means of explanation, although the itinerary was hardly kept to.
sheila.johnston
The opening scene of Martin Scorsese's new film - a storm-tossed ferry buffeting its way to an isolated island off America's East Coast - bears an unmissable resemblance to that of Roman Polanski's The Ghost. So too does its premise, of a vulnerable young man who falls under the sway of a powerful, indefinably sinister older one.
Adam Sweeting
It seems both Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass felt it was time to leave the Bourne franchise on the shelf for a while, fearing they would corner themselves into making The Bourne Redundancy. Instead, they have transposed their working partnership into this Iraq war saga. The result is a fast-moving conspiracy thriller, but with an underpinning of actualité in the way Greengrass alludes to a war waged on a false premise, and spotlights the criminal ignorance and stupidity of American attempts to rebuild Iraq.
Graham Fuller
When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.
Tom Birchenough
For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.
sheila.johnston
High summer in Paris. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, the boulevards are bright, leafy and humming and Grégoire, a good-looking man in his mid-forties, scuttles along the street, mobile phone glued to ear. He's troubleshooting on a truly international scale: the Koreans are arriving mob-handed, the Georgians are so demanding and that nutty Swedish director's budget is spiralling out of control. Grégoire is a movie producer, and Father of My Children starts out as a light-hearted, slightly madcap addition to the capacious genre of films about film-making.
Jasper Rees
Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than he. Breakfast on Pluto found Cillian Murphy’s girly boy swishing around working-class Dublin in frocks and furs. And now comes Ondine, Jordan’s reimagining of the watery fable transplanted to the rugged shores of Cork.
sheila.johnston
Must rush, have to hurry: like the fretful White Rabbit with his pocket watch, fans have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice, which finally arrives in cinemas this week, albeit for a limited period following the controversial decision to push the film out quickly on DVD. Mindful of this, I hastened to the IMAX, Waterloo to catch it in 3D, larger than life and twice as natural, on the very biggest screen available. 30,000 people have already pre-booked tickets for Alice at the London IMAX. Is it worth the wait?
The action is set within a framing story. Alice, now aged 19, is about to be pushed by her widowed mother into an engagement to a smug upper-class twit. So down the rabbit hole she plunges to escape to a parallel life that she dimly remembers from her childhood dreams. Her adventures invoke Lewis Carroll's familiar line-up of fabulous creatures, even if these don't always appear quite in the order they do in the books.
The indispensable star cast - some seen caked in extraordinary make-up, others heard voicing CGI characters - includes Michael Sheen (the Rabbit), Alan Rickman (the Caterpillar), Barbara Windsor (the Dormouse), Stephen Fry (the Cheshire Cat), Timothy Spall (Bayard the Hunting Dog) and, not least, Johnny Depp, kitted out with an orange fright wig and green cat's-eye contact lenses as the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter as a grotesquely distorted Red Queen.
Burton and Carroll, those twin dark fantasists, should have been a marriage made in heaven. But there's a third party in this union - Walt Disney Studios - and so things get a bit crowded. The director makes the point that the books are episodic, with Alice wandering through a suite of loosely linked encounters. To make the narrative more film-friendly, he sends her on a trite inspirational trip towards personal empowerment in the company of humorous, loveable sidekicks, courtesy of the screenplay by Linda Woolverton, a seasoned Disney alumna (Beauty and the Beast; The Lion King).
Mia Wasikowska looks gorgeous as Alice and gives a very spirited performance, but you sense Burton is secretly more interested in the Mad Hatter (when, after all, did he last create a great female character?); the role is vastly beefed up for the benefit of Depp, the director's long-time collaborator and male muse, who has, it must be said, tremendous fun with it. The climax is a by-numbers joust between Alice and the Jabberwock, a monster controlled by the Red Queen (the contradictory script endorses her rebellion against her mother, while requiring her reluctantly to embrace this pre-ordained destiny as dragon-slayer). It's all surprisingly ordinary.
Visually the film is eye-popping, though the luxuriant blue-tinged tropical Wonderlandscapes, with their strange creatures whizzing through the air would have been a good deal more impressive if I hadn't already seen Avatar to which this bears a marked family resemblance. The 3D isn't always all it might be either, especially in the "real-world" scenes, and, sitting near the front of the IMAX auditorium, I experienced ghosting at the fringes of my field of vision.
For a truly strange Alice you could do worse than to watch the first ever screen version, recently restored by the National Film Archive and available to view here. In 1903, this bizarre little nine-minute fragment, made decades after Carroll first published his original stories, represented the state of the cinematic art. Today it comes closer than all the extravagances of Hollywood to capturing their fragrant spirit. Curiouser and curiouser.
ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN
Alice, Scottish Ballet. It should be a capital crime to attempt an Alice ballet - off with their heads
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet. Even the best butter would not help this plot-less evening
Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Barbican. Gerald Barry's crazy velocity berserks both Alice books in rude style
Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican. A curious tale gets a riotous operatic telling from composer Unsuk Chin
Alice Through the Looking Glass. Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp back in inventive if unfaithful Carroll sequel
Jan Švankmajer's Alice. The great Czech animator's remarkable first full-length film
wonder.land, National Theatre. Damon Albarn’s Alice musical has fun graphics, but a banal and didactic storyline
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Alice in Wonderland