Film
A Fuller LifeThursday, 14 May 2015
A master of visceral cinema, Samuel Fuller (1912-97) directed 23 features during his exemplary career, writing 21 of them and an unquantifiable number of others. Clips from many appear in A Fuller Life, an affectionate documentary conceived, co-... Read more... |
A Royal Night OutThursday, 14 May 2015
The ongoing penchant for all things royal reaches a momentary impasse with A Royal Night Out, an eye-rollingly silly imagining of what the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth might have got up to on VE Day. Its release timed to coincide with the... Read more... |
DVD: National GalleryThursday, 14 May 2015
A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much-... Read more... |
The TribeWednesday, 13 May 2015
In The Tribe, his feature debut, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy has created something totally unexpected, and viscerally powerful to boot. This dark tale of life among inmates of a Kyiv institution for the deaf avoids spoken language... Read more... |
Lambert & StampTuesday, 12 May 2015
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is... Read more... |
RosewaterFriday, 08 May 2015
Jon Stewart’s Rosewater falls into the micro-genre of films about foreign correspondents struggling with the moral imperative to move from observer to participant, not a question that keeps most viewers up at night. But where Peter Weir’s The Year... Read more... |
DVD: Pandora and the Flying DutchmanFriday, 08 May 2015
This is the sort of intoxicated, mythic romance rarely seen in Britain or Hollywood. It is a tribute from the latter’s defiantly literate maverick, Albert Lewin, to the former’s Powell and Pressburger. Using the hallucinatorally vivid colours of... Read more... |
Phoenix reviewFriday, 08 May 2015
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and... Read more... |
Spooks: The Greater GoodThursday, 07 May 2015
The idea of a movie spin-off from BBC One's spy show Spooks has been lurking with intent ever since the tenth and final series ended in 2011. Finally it's here, helmed by director Bharat Nalluri (who shot the first and last episodes for TV) and with... Read more... |
GirlhoodThursday, 07 May 2015
Confounding expectations from the first frames, Girlhood is the endearingly scrappy and staggeringly beautiful third film from French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Tomboy) and no relation to Boyhood. Intimate and exuberant, it's a coming-of-age... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Spooks, the movieWednesday, 06 May 2015
During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous... Read more... |
Stray DogsTuesday, 05 May 2015
Whatever you make of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (Jiao you), it’ll likely have you looking at your watch. If you’re hypnotized by its almost narrative-free, stretched naturalism – stretched so far as to become effectively... Read more... |
