Film
Tom Birchenough
This is an unashamed, fulsome, extravagant tribute from Peter Greenaway to his cinema idol. The British director – though that description is probably more point of origin these days than allegiance – has long acclaimed his Russian-Soviet counterpart Sergei Eisenstein as the most adventurous figure that the film industry has ever known, one whose ground-breaking experiments and discoveries are as alive today as they ever have been.There’s experiment aplenty in Eisenstein in Guanajuato, making the result much more of a fiesta than we have had from the director in a long time; the energy levels Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a risky venture, remaking a much-loved Disney classic, but Jon Favreau has tackled The Jungle Book with considerable enthusiasm, creating a digital 3D spectacular complete with hundreds of computer-generated animals and one real boy (Neel Sethi). It’s based on the original Rudyard Kipling stories featuring man-cub Mowgli lost in the jungle, raised by wolves and torn between staying or finding his way back to humanity.But this time it’s not all singing, all dancing – there’s a notable shortage of the witty songs and soft-shoe shuffling which made the 1967 original so charming. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“All over the world, young people between the ages of 14 and 20 gradually spend more and more of their time away from the good influences of their homes and schools. What sort of people are they growing up to be?” Although the stuffed-shirt narrator cannot bring himself to say the word “teenager” of the film’s subjects, it’s a question asked in the 1954 Government-sponsored Central Office of Information short film Youth Club (1954) included as a crazy extra on a new package of Expresso Bongo (1959). The main feature and the same year’s Beat Girl answer it. But not in a way the squares behind Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
In Jaco Van Dormael’s black comedy, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is an alcoholic arsehole living in 21st-century Brussels, who maliciously causes destruction across the world while bullying his silent wife and daughter Éa. As with much of Dormael’s work, the surreal, in his own words “not yet civilized” vision children have of the world inspires the lens through which we experience the film. Éa (Pili Groyne), God’s rebellious but moral 10-year-old daughter, narrates chunks of the story and is its strong protagonist. Accompanied by her gaggle of eccentric apostles, she flees her prison and sets out Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) has a problem: she suspects that a British woman who converted to Islam and tops the international terrorism hit list is holed up in a house in a suburb of Nairob controlled by Al-Shabaab. Can her local agent (Barkhad Abdi) fly his tiny spy drone inside the house and confirm the terrorist’s identity? And are the local military ready to capture the terrorist if she leaves? Powell is orchestrating the operation from an army hangar in Sussex thousands of miles away, with all the stern precision of a Jane Tennison in camo uniform. Director Gavin Hood has Read more ...
Ed Owen
Spying is not what it used to be. Old-schoolers beat the baddie, beat the house at roulette and then beat someone to death without even creasing their shirt. Today’s spy seems ill-equipped. Take Ryan Reynolds’s Bill Pope. We know he’s in the CIA because he’s dodging around the City of London looking conspicuous. Anarchist hacker Heimbahl (Jordi Molla) easily hookwinks and kills him.This is bad news because Pope knows where The Wormhole is. This is the ultimate hacking device, allowing the user to control anything – launch a nuclear missile, turn off your central heating – anything. Heimbahl, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, adapted by him from the first part of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Hardyesque A Scots Quair Trilogy (1932-34), is a farming family tragedy that morphs into the story of the young heroine’s doomed marriage during World War I. Lambently photographed by Michael McDonough, it succeeds as a paean to the spiritual tug exerted on Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) by the landscape of the Mearns in north-east Scotland. Yet by Davies’s impeccable standards, the film is oddly disjointed and underwhelming.Like his masterful Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), it evokes its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robin Williams’s final released film is built around one of his finest performances. Perhaps fittingly, it shows the quiet, melancholy side of a star who first dazzled and after a while exhausted with his manic flights and weakness for sentimentality. As Nolan, a bank employee suffocating in suburban limbo, he rarely raises his voice, remaining devastatingly true to a state of depressed repression.Nolan has worked in the same bank branch for 25 years, and has been with his wife Joy (Kathy Baker) since they met at a Godard film in 1977. Seemingly his only friend, sardonic college professor Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Traumatic obsession is hard to get right in film, to draw us as viewers into a situation far beyond our usual experience, make us believe in it, and fix us there. Sometimes it means pushing towards the frenetic energy of madness, which can bring a degree of moment-to-moment tension – no small dramatic advantage. Or there’s the opposite: when we’re invited deep into the withdrawal of catatonic grief, which can come with almost stuporous slowness and silences.The second is surely harder to engage with, and Belgian-born director Tom Geens faces up to the challenge head-on in his debut for the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The extraordinary workings of an unusual mind are reduced to TV-movie proportions in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the latest and least re-telling of the too-short life of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose tale has previously been told in novel form (David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk) and as an Olivier Award-winning play (A Disappearing Number). Now along comes American writer-director Matthew Brown with a tentative take on the intriguingly knotted story of the Madras-born Ramanujan (played this time out by Dev Patel) and the eventual acclaim and renown Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Migration is the lead story of modern geopolitics. So it’s surprising – even baffling – that so few films tell the migrant’s tale. British and French films across the broadest spectrum have dramatised the quest of colonial incomers to assimilate – from Bend It Like Beckham all the way across to La Haine – but Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan goes right back to the source.It opens in the northern region of Sri Lanka where the Tamil Tigers have been defeated and refugees are clamouring to leave. The narrative alights on three of them as they make their way to Paris. The twist is that the man, woman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of writer-director Jeff Nichols might detect echoes of his hair-raising 2011 film Take Shelter in his latest effort, not least the presence of regular Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon as one of the leads, but this time his scope has broadened hugely. Cosmically even, since Midnight Special hints at hidden universes and galaxies far, far away, even though it's firmly rooted in the everyday detail of the rural American South.In creating a kind of supernatural fable, Nichols has studiously avoided in-your-face effects or pedantic exposition, instead keeping his narrative lean and Read more ...