Film
Saskia Baron
Aiming for the trippy qualities of The Matrix and Inception, Doctor Strange is possibly the most enjoyable Marvel foundation story since the first Iron Man, mixing wit with visual pyrotechnics. Benedict Cumberbatch plays supercilious neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (wholly unrelated to the New Romantic singer responsible for “Fade to Grey”). A virtuoso of the scalpel, Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange has shades of Robert Downey Jr’s over-achieving Tony Stark – this is cinema art directed from the fantasy lifestyle of men’s glossy magazines.Dr Strange has the requisite underappreciated on/off Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The parallel universe of what was known as “race” cinema gets five packed DVDs here. Instead of cringing with sympathy at small, racistly conceived black roles in a classic Hollywood era which coincided with an American Apartheid, these are indie films made inside black neighbourhoods between the wars. Even when white writers or directors are involved – just as in the period’s record labels – authentic culture gets through.Hollywood itself produced some wonders aimed at the impoverished black cinema circuit (mostly musicals, such as the jaw-dropping song and dance bonanza Stormy Weather, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Most of the crime Ken Loach investigates with compassion and humour happens off-screen right at the start. As the opening credits roll, a woman’s voice with sing-song affability perhaps appropriate to a child, if not for its bureaucratic, box-tick chill, asks Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) a sequence of questions wholly irrelevant to his problem. He can lift his arms, he can walk on his legs. So never mind the heart attack which almost made him tumble off a ladder at his work as a carpenter. The outsourced US firm employed by the Department of Work and Pensions has more opaque, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser, of Twilight fame) and her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). With Mr Zander having been killed by a drunk driver, Alice and the girls are eking out a living with their fake spiritualist act, conning bereaved punters with bogus spirit visitations, sputtering candles and wobbling furniture. It's an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
True to its title, Pool of London is one of the great London films. More than this, it included British cinema’s first – albeit chaste – interracial romance and convinces as film noir. Filmed in 1950 and released in February 1951, it was passed by the British Board of Film Censors for screening with no cuts. But it did get an “A” certificate, which meant children had to be accompanied by adults. This no children’s film, though.Merchant seamen Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) arrive in London on the freighter Dunbar, which docks on the Thames in the heart of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Four years on from Tom Cruise's debut as Jack Reacher in Jack Reacher, here he is doing it again. Not a lot has changed. Cruise eerily continues not to age (does the Scientology robotics division know something we don't?), Jack Reacher is still the man from nowhere who mystically materialises when he's needed, and bad guys obligingly queue up to get their asses kicked and their noses broken.This time Edward Zwick directs, replacing Christopher McQuarrie, but this hasn't helped to bring any life to Cruise's leading character. Nothing quite gels in his portrayal of the rootless, apparently Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Among the myriad global offerings at the LFF, the resoundingly British Their Finest ★★★★★ , about a group of film-makers working for the Ministry of Information in London in 1940, is surely among the most sheerly enjoyable. Okay, it was directed by Denmark's Lone Scherfig (of The Riot Club and An Education), but the way it catches the Blitz-era mood of terror and uncertainty mixed with a determination to band together and carry on feels almost miraculous.Adapting Lissa Evans's novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, Scherfig and screenwriter Gaby Chiappe have created a hilarious but beadily Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Dan Brown is famed for calamitous language massacres that sell by the kerchillion to tone-deaf Renaissance cryptogram junkies. His sentences hurt eyes and his plots numb skulls. But one thing you can say for Brown is he checks facts like an obsessive-compulsive über-nerd. When the books are transplanted to the big screen, he gets less control over this stuff. The result, in Inferno, is unintentionally comical to anyone (which means pretty much everyone) who knows Florence.The film opens with a bearded redhead being chased by hunks in suits to the top of the campanile of the Badia Fiorentina Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Existential realism” is a term, contradictory though it might sound, that comes to mind when describing the work of the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. The films he made in the last five years of his life – The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colours trilogy – may be his best-known, but the director had already been exploring the same fundamental concerns for a quarter of a century by then. Working in both documentary and short-film forms, some of those earlier works are as distinctive as anything that Kieślowski went on to create after the changes of the late 1980s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s a business opportunity,” explains Jake (Shia LaBoeuf) to dreadlocked, wild-child Star (Sasha Lane). She’s eyeing him up in the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart while he dances around with a rag-tag, stoned young crew to Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. “We go door to door. We sell magazines. Come with us.” Sounds an unlikely proposition.Admittedly, 18-year-old Star doesn’t have much choice in the way of business opportunities. In the first scene, she’s dumpster-diving with two little kids outside that Walmart. Their biggest prize is a frozen bird. After they've hitchhiked home, the toddler sits Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on thrillers like The Parallax View, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American political conspiracies, and inevitably he portrays CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies. If you work for the CIA you'll hate Snowden (★★★★), but Stone has fashioned the story into a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Snowden starts out as a sincere young patriot, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs in 1965, he was intending to make a concert film. The backstage, limo and hotel room material was imagined as filler. But something unexpected happened: Dylan and his entourage, not least his constant companion road manager Bob Neuwirth, realised very soon that the performance didn’t end as the protest singer stepped out of the spotlight, high on Read more ...