Film
How I Ended This SummerMonday, 18 April 2011
If ever there’s a film where the landscape itself seems to become a main character, it’s Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer. Action, such as it is, unfolds in the remotest Arctic regions of Russia’s Far East, where the personal conflict... Read more... |
Adèle Blanc-SecSunday, 17 April 2011
BD, pronounced bédé, is short for "bande déssinée", the French equivalent of the comic strip or graphic novel, which has long been accorded a popular affection and cultural standing well beyond that of its anglophone equivalent. Luc Besson says he... Read more... |
DVD: Of Gods and MenFriday, 15 April 2011
At the risk of sounding falsely pious, as this stunning film never is, Des hommes et des dieux, to give its differently emphasised French title, should be screened in every school and to every faith around the world. Xavier Beauvois sensitively... Read more... |
Meek's CutoffThursday, 14 April 2011
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and... Read more... |
Cold WeatherWednesday, 13 April 2011
To describe this movie as slow-burn would be like saying snails live in the fast lane. The latest work from indie auteur Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA and Quiet City) who wrote, directed and edited, is 97 minutes long, but nothing happens for its... Read more... |
Your HighnessTuesday, 12 April 2011
In the end, the media-industrial complex which takes responsibility for entertaining the planet doesn’t put your needs and mine near the top of the pile. But I think we know this already. Why am I even saying it? Saying it again. Bears make their... Read more... |
Little White LiesMonday, 11 April 2011
The secrets and lies, delusions and foibles of a group of thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething friends are laid bare in French director Guillaume Canet’s third feature, following his breakthrough international hit Tell No One (2006). This alternately... Read more... |
DVD: City Girl (1930)Monday, 11 April 2011
I’ll confess it straightaway: I’m biased about this picture (as it surely would have been known in 1930) – wholly, shoutily in favour of it. I watched it last September at the Cambridge Film Festival on a big screen in Emmanuel College, with two... Read more... |
Red Riding HoodSunday, 10 April 2011
Once upon a time, Gary Oldman acted in the plays or films of Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett, bringing a deliberately disorienting intensity to whatever the role. But here he is in Red Riding Hood snarling commands like “You will die... Read more... |
Before the RevolutionSunday, 10 April 2011
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963... Read more... |
2001: A Space Odyssey with live score, Philharmonia, de Ridder, Royal Festival HallThursday, 07 April 2011
Imagine a special two-hour-plus resurrection of that wannabe extravaganza Stars in Their Eyes. "So, young maestro André de Ridder, who are you going to give us?" "Well, in addition to showing my special flair for contemporary music in Ligeti, I'm... Read more... |
DVD: The Tales of Beatrix PotterThursday, 07 April 2011
Forty years ago, my childhood self wasn't in the least bored by Frederick Ashton's balletic animal magic: I saw it twice in cinemas large and small and asked for the soundtrack LP of John Lanchbery's masterly Victorian-potpourri ballet score for my... Read more... |
