Film
theartsdesk
It's that time of year again, with autumn casting a shroud over London and the LFF offering the perfect tonic. The only problem is that with 238 fiction and documentary features over 10 days, even diehard cinephiles with no desire for human contact or fresh air would be hard pressed to sift and select. The festival programmers attempt their customary guidance, with films tucked (sometimes too neatly) into themes such as Love, Thrill, Debate and Dare. For our part, theartsdesk's film writers offer some very personal tips – films we've seen and would highly recommend, others that we ourselves Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce.The Son's Room dealt with the raw anguish of the sudden, violent demise of a child that rips through a happy family like a tornado. Mia Madre, on the other hand, is a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antonioni’s celebrated trio of films, L’Aventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, established the Italian director as a major and influential force in world cinema. All three of the works deal with the failure that resides at the heart of human relationship, offering a Mediterranean mirror to the Nordic angst associated with Bergman’s films of the same era.The women in Antonioni’s films – often played by Monica Vitti, his wife and muse – invariably upstage the men. Vittoria, in L’Eclisse, leaves her rather limp boyfriend Riccardo (Francesco Rabal) and drifts away from the wreckage of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
It has never been easier for cinema to capture the terror and splendour of the mountains. Cameras can do what they never could before, which is why Everest, released this week, gets audiences as close to the roof of the world as any multiplex experience ever will. But mountains are about more than altitude. In this edition of Listed, we clamber about the history of cinema looking for the movies which tell us about the men and women - though it seems to be mostly men - who have brought summit fever to the big screen. The Epic of Everest (1924)“This isn’t Hollywood,” said Mallory. “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I don't usually suffer from chattering teeth and attacks of vertigo while watching a movie, but as this panorama of Himalayan disaster reached its climax I began to fear that I might need paramedics and an emergency evacuation. Everest might not top the all-time charts in terms of plot development or character psychology, but as an immersive account of a horrific chain of real-life events, it reaches – I nearly said "summits" – its objectives with distressing potency.A shelf-load of books has been written by survivors about what happened on the world's most imperious mountain in May 1996, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The repercussions of the revelations about intelligence gathering by American and other surveillance services made by US whistleblower Edward Snowden have proved huge. Laura Poitras’s documentary CitizenFour is no less revelatory about the process of their appearance, about just how Snowden came to be in that Hong Kong hotel room with reporter Glenn Greenwald, and what happened there.To call their encounter, the centrepiece of the film “eight days that shook the world” might be an overstatement, but not by much, so acute did the revelations make the question of the relation between Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tangerines has a simple premise which is executed straightforwardly. Yet it proves affecting to a degree seemingly out of proportion to the proposition behind the film. A man living in a war zone finds that the conflict has, literally, come to his door. He takes in an injured survivor from each of the opposing sides and, as they come back to health, steers them to confront and accept each other’s humanity. Where there was neither, tolerance and respect are cultivated.And that's it, the plot of Georgian director Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines. The film’s impact stems from the subtlety of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When a lead character is warned that “it’s easier to be scrutinised in a small town”, it’s instantly clear they are not going to take the advice, keep their head down and make sure they don’t attract attention. In South Korean director July Jung’s first full-length feature, police chief Young-nam inevitably makes her presence felt soon after her arrival from Seoul in the southern coastal region of Yeosu.Although A Girl at My Door explores small-town hierarchies and tensions, and the rifts and violence barely below the surface, it has to be taken as a commentary on South Korea overall as well Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a barrel; beside him stands a white woman with a filthy face. The former looks like he had enough wits to survive the squalour for a while, the latter looks doomed. As ghosts immobilized in time by the Danish journalist and reformer Riis’s camera, they open the door to the ghosts, alive and dead, who populate the post-colonial misery of Costa’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although The Tribe is disquieting, seeing it at home rather than experiencing the full immersion of a cinema screening raises questions of what gives it its impact. theartsdesk’s review coinciding with the theatrical release pinpointed what makes director Miroslav Slaboshpitskiy’s strange Ukrainian film tick: from its use of sign language to its commentary on Ukraine. But are there individual stylistic elements which leap out as signifiers of its singularity?Time will tell whether or not Slaboshpitskiy can follow his first full-length feature with another film as striking, and whether working Read more ...
theartsdesk
This week Legend opened in cinemas starring Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy. The actor’s double turn as the Kray twins is only the latest in a surprisingly long tradition of actors taking more than one role in a film. To show off their range, and give the audience a bit of fun, actors have doubled (or trebled, or more) up as twins, siblings, parents and children, doppelgängers and often characters who are entirely unrelated. For this edition of Listed, theartsdesk revisits some of the stellar turns by those actors taking more than one credit in the cast list. Deborah Kerr, The Life and Death of Read more ...