Film
emma.simmonds
Following in the footsteps of Star Wars: The Force Awakens another popular film series which began in the 70s is passed over to a young, admiring pretender. And just as JJ Abrams succeeded there, Ryan Coogler – who announced his talent unapologetically with the searing Fruitvale Station – does so in emphatic fashion here. This add-on to the Rocky franchise boasts a comparably deft mix of crowd-pleasing familiarity and freshness, particularly in the shape of its canny new casting – a combination that’s set to excite a new generation of fans.When we last saw Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Read more ...
Jasper Rees
About a dozen years ago the publishing industry cottoned on to the sex lives of women. Memoirs in which women wrote with complete candour about their sex lives appeared in sudden profusion, from Belle de Jour's blog-turned-book and The Sex Life of Catherine M to Jane Juska’s account about what happened when she advertised in the NYRB, aged 67, for sexual partners. At the younger end of the market there was One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by a Sicilian teenager known only (at her parents’ insistence) as Melissa P. Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl feels like a late Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Like the seven previous movies written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight is violent, verbose, and self-regardingly funny. It’s also ingeniously structured (in Godardian chapters), as much so as Pulp Fiction. The eagle-eyed will spot a visual clue in the first half of the narrative that anticipates the hairpin bend it takes in the second. The knowledge that Tarantino never staunches blood for long meanwhile augurs the inevitable carnage that likens this slow-burning post-Civil War frontier mystery to Reservoir Dogs especially.Typically for a filmmaker engrossed by genre Read more ...
mark.kidel
Andrew Haigh’s portrait of a marriage on the rocks has plenty of style, and a near-funereal pace suffused with the decay that gnaws away at long-term relationships. He has also elicited brilliant performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. And yet, there is something missing, as if the characters were speaking their lines rather than living them.The story is simple enough: the film follows Kate and Geoff, as they prepare for their 45th wedding anniversary. At the start of the week, Geoff hears that the body of his life’s love, Katya, as been discovered in the Alps, frozen in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Tobias Lindholm is something of a specialist in exploring the fate of enclosed groups under stress, charting how the dynamics of behaviour between men develop in crisis. I say men, though the Danish director’s name may still be better known in some quarters as a writer on Borgen, the outstanding political series set in another closely defined world where crisis followed crisis, though it's surely the female characters from there who endure more in the memory.Lindholm has obviously kept the loyalty of the Borgen cast, most of all Pilou Asbaek, who played its conflicted spin doctor, Kasper. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Sex sells, except in the cinema. So although it denies viewers the sight of Karl Glusman’s erect penis swinging towards them across a giant screen in 3D, home video is Love’s natural home. Director Gaspar Noé’s attempt to “make movies out of blood, sperm and tears” which also “truly depicts sentimental sexuality”, as his surrogate Murphy (Glusman) declares, has been overshadowed by further 3D close-ups of a penis ejaculating and entering a womb. But the pounding, excessive attempts at the visionary of his previous films Irreversible and Enter the Void are quieter here. Love begins with a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Few rock managers deserve a full-length documentary as much as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who breathed life and inspiration into a lively young Mod group the High Numbers, and transformed them into The Who.They were an unlikely duo – a partnership which reflected the class-busting mood of London in the 1960s. Lambert was brilliant, cosmopolitan and gay: he had been to public school and Oxford, and his father was the composer Constant Lambert. Stamp was the son of a Thames tugboat captain, a cockney chancer with a sharp intelligence and a great deal of ambition.In a fast-cut, restless Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Look what they make you give," as Clive Owen's dying assassin puts it in The Bourne Identity, and the way that success is as much a matter of taking the blows and dragging yourself to your feet again as it is about inspiration or even perspiration is part of the message of Joy. It's based on the real-life story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop, and not the least of the film's accomplishments is the way it manages to turn the QVC shopping channel into a cockpit of high drama.Whether the real Ms Mangano is able to radiate the same aura of self-belief, tolerance, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tweaked and polished to within an inch of its life, The Danish Girl is the latest shamelessly awards-seeking effort from British director Tom Hooper, whose last two period films The King’s Speech and Les Misérables were certainly showstopping pieces of cinema. Yet, despite the latter’s ostensible grit, both specialised in human anguish prettily presented for your viewing pleasure; Hooper’s unapologetically indulgent, highly embellished approach isn’t to everyone’s taste but you’ve got to admire his bravado.The Danish Girl is based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalised account of the life story Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first face seen in The Gunman belongs to Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan. In a seemingly real broadcast, he says “the Democratic Republic of Congo is the scene of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The conflict is fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth, with all sides suspected of deliberately prolonging the violence to plunder natural resources.” Genuine footage of conflict, starving people and the mines in question accompany this commentary.According to The Gunman, the 1990s civil war was sparked by the assassination of the country’s minister responsible for mining. Read more ...
theartsdesk
The autumn cinema schedules of 2015 were assailed by the double whammy of Spectre and The Force Awakens– at times making it hard to find a screen showing anything else. Yet you’ll see that neither that latest instalment in the Bond franchise – though it’s been acclaimed as among the very best – nor the much-anticipated return of Star Wars appears on our list. Does that place us at the higher-brow end of the spectrum? Or sticking to a more determinedly eclectic ground, with Asif Kapadia's remarkable documentary Amy, Bill Condon’s unexpected addition to the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Distributor Second Run’s second collection of the Czech New Wave (strictly speaking, Czechoslovak, although the three films included here are from the Czech side of the movement) reminds us what an astonishing five years or so preceded the Prague Spring of 1968. What a varied range of film-makers and filmic styles it encompassed, making any attempt to impose any external category – whether political or artistic – redundant.The fate of the directors involved was as varied as the works they produced during that short-lived period of political thaw and formal experimentation. Many of those who Read more ...