Film
mark.kidel
Tarantino’s latest bloodfest is a claustrophobic piece of cinema in which a very wild bunch, holed up in a Wyoming shack in the middle of a blizzard, confront their various pasts, recent and less so, and gradually eliminate each other in a stunningly staged series of surprises, reversals of fortunes and outbursts of homicidal frenzy.Tarantino is the master of meta-narrative, subverting genre and yet paying homage to it. This is a riveting story of the old frontier but also a meditation on the Western, not least the sub-genre that draws on the violent heritage of the Civil War, which Tarantino Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In the world of the concentration camp, clothes or the lack of them sealed your fate. What you wore marked out your role; whether it was the blue-gray Waffen SS uniform, a doctor’s grubby white coat, the striped suits given to slave-workers, or your own clothes from your former life. The first images of Son of Saul are a soft blur of figures in a distant wood, but walking swiftly to camera and into sharp focus is one man, Saul Auslander (Géza Röhrig). He’s wearing an overcoat with a big red cross on its back, an easy target if he should try to escape. His deep-set eyes bear the expression of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s fascinating to revisit Tootsie, some 30 years after its original success – in 1982 it was the biggest comedy hit of all time (though it was overtaken by Ghostbusters shortly after). Dustin Hoffman gives a pitch-perfect performance as an overly serious East Coast theatre actor who takes to cross-dressing when his agent (played by the film's director Sydney Pollack) can no longer get him work. He "passes" as a frumpy middle-aged actress and wins a part in a terrible daytime soap playing a feisty feminist. He falls in love with its star, Jessica Lange, who unfortunately wants to set him up Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s a great film waiting to be made about the demographic crisis – old-age poverty, worthless pensions, abuse of the elderly, ramshackle retirement homes, disregard from the young. Likeable though it is, this breezy tale of ageing bank-robbing Robin Hoods from writer/director John Miller (with a little help from TV’s Nick Knowles as co-writer/exec producer) isn’t that film.It’s ironic, in fact, to preface the movie with Dylan Thomas’s lines about not going gentle into that good night when the last thing the film does is to rage against the dying of the light. Gentle the film’s good- Read more ...
Ed Owen
How would you behave if your wife was killed in a random car accident? In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Davis, a wealthy banker, is almost relieved – he can ditch his job, his house, nearly everything of his old life, and shack up with a total stranger.Over the course of his three previous English-language films, Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée has created successive award-winning tales with stand-out craft, scripts and performances. Whether Emily Blunt in Young Victoria adapting to life as queen, Matthew McConaughey fighting an HIV diagnosis in the Dallas Buyers Club, or Reese Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This rousing instalment from the Marvel universe shares self-evident similarities with Batman vs Superman, the latest effort from their DC rivals. In both films we see superheroes at loggerheads, and in each case it's because they find themselves in a changing world where it's no longer acceptable for super-beings to roam around the planet leaving massive swathes of collateral damage in their wake.But what this latest Captain America has, which the DC flick sorely lacks, is – despite episodes of incredible violence and emotional anguish – exuberance, exhilaration, humour and even joy. It's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the Ealing Studios’ melodrama Pink String and Sealing Wax was set in the 1880s and based on a play first performed in 1943, the film hit cinemas in late 1945 when World War II was barely over. The war saw a fundamental shift in the role of women in British society and the film’s scenario reflected this in how it revealed a devastating female reaction to an abusive relationship. After the empowered Pearl Bond takes matters into her own hands, it was clear that her husband Joe will not come out of it well.Pink String and Sealing Wax is also a drama of class as well as gender. Pearl is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Beautifully restored and transferred by Criterion, this is a magnificent edition of Howard Hawks’ ripping yarn. Cary Grant plays Geoff Carter, a former WWI pilot (like Hawks himself) running a daredevil outfit flying mail planes across the Andes.So dangerous were these rackety machines that their pilots were often dubbed “the suicide club“ in real life. Set in the fictional port of Barranca (nearly always filmed at night, it’s teeming with exotic South American locals and rowdy bars), Grant and his gang of flying leather jackets engage in intense male bonding, interspersed with romantic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Catching the essence of the mercurial, secretive and notoriously abrasive Miles Davis on film might reasonably be described as a mission impossible, but Don Cheadle has put his heart and soul into it. He directed it and plays the title role, he co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman, and he put some of his own money into it. A jazz saxophonist since his youth, he took tips from Wynton Marsalis about playing the trumpet for the movie.The results are both better and worse than you might have expected. Cheadle succeeds remarkably well at embodying Davis in the different periods in his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This Paris-set thriller was one of several films which had its release date postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital last November, giving the impression that it might be shockingly violent or provocatively political. In fact, it's a slightly uneasy mix of caper, buddy-movie and spy adventure, as its protagonists battle a high-level conspiracy involving the mother of all bank robberies.You can imagine that director Jason Watkins (The Woman in Black) and screenwriter Andrew Baldwin may have had in mind such vintage Parisian adventures as Charade or Polanski's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“By their beginnings, you shall know them” is a useful motto for cinematic rediscovery. Rather than predicting how a director’s creative path may develop in the future, you go in the opposite direction to see which way, starting from his or her earliest works, the web has been spun.“Spinning a web” is a phrase appropriate for Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2000 debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon (Dokfa nai meuman), as ingenious an exercise in playful narrative development as can be imagined. Beginning with that classic storytelling trope, “Once upon a time…”, it develops in an Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity.This outpouring in the House of Representatives provides the title and sets the scene for Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbarto. We have to wait until the closing shots, though Read more ...