Film
Matt Wolf
When Immanuel Kant, the existentialists, and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point all get referenced right from the start, there can be no doubt that Irrational Man is on its way toward achieving the "total heaviosity" that its writer-director Woody Allen famously lampooned in Annie Hall. That the latest in Allen's record-breaking annual output of films manages not to send itself up but to engage pretty much throughout owes a lot to a terrific leading man in Joaquin Phoenix, who on this occasion makes you wonder what sort of partnership he and Hitchcock might have made had their careers aligned. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When filming Vivre sa vie in 1962, Jean-Luc Godard made his wife and star Anna Karina wear a wig resembling Louise Brooks’s black-lacquered art-deco bob. Karina’s Nana was less immaculately coiffed than Brooks’s Lulu in G.W. Pabst's Pandora’s Box (1929), however, and her hair didn’t taper into pincers, like those that lay against Lulu’s cheeks. Nana is more vulnerable than her iconic antecedent – her glum stares at the camera replacing the devastating smiles Lulu bestows promiscuously.Godard’s fourth feature (and third with Karina) ostensibly traces Nana’s downward spiral as an aspiring 22- Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s a strong word, misery. It makes you think of unremitting sorrow, a darkness it’s difficult to see a way out of, unforgiving conditions that make life well-nigh unbearable. A fertile backdrop for a career in stand-up comedy, you might assume. But despite the promise of his film’s title, it’s a subject that veteran US actor and comedian Kevin Pollak hardly dares to touch in his bright, breezy but frustratingly lightweight debut feature.Instead, he goes for quantity over quality, and assembles interviews with what’s admittedly an astonishing roll-call of more than 50 comedians and comedy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead? Writer-director Brian Helgeland knows his way around screen violence - he scripted LA Confidential – and he has been a tourist in England before: he paid a knockabout visit to the Middle Ages with A Knight’s Tale. The traditional thing to say about foreign directors on such Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The off-the-wall premise of The New Girlfriend could have been one adapted by Pedro Almodóvar. After married woman Claire’s close childhood friend dies, she gives an undertaking to look after the widowed father David and the couple’s daughter, to whom she is godmother. While keeping her promise, she accidentally discovers he is a secret transvestite – David says his wife knew of this. Claire helps him into the outside world in his female persona (which she names Virginia), learns the reasons for the cross-dressing, falls for him in his female guise and, in the process, discovers she isn’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Randolph Scott had ridden long in the saddle before Budd Boetticher directed him as a driven loner with a painful past in the six harsh “Ranown Cycle” Westerns (1956-60). His apprenticeship began with ten 1930s Zane Grey oaters, mostly made by Henry Hathaway, and concluded with the B-Westerns he starred in for Edwin L. Marin and André de Toth after World War II. Marin’s rousing Abilene Town (1946), newly released on Blu-ray, augured Scott’s becoming a genre icon.Though it lacks the melancholy poetry of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (also 1946), Marin’s Western similarly evokes postwar Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Any consideration of Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain will inevitably be through the prism of how it was made, and the director’s current position in his native country. It’s his second work, after This Is Not a Film from 2011, to be made despite the 2010 prohibition from the Iranian authorities that (along with a range of other curtailments of his freedom) the director should not engage in cinema for a period of 20 years.It’s rather more ambitious – though not in terms of its setting, the interiors of a single house on the shore of the Caspian – than the relatively simple Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Cartel Land opens with a group of crystal meth cooks at work somewhere in the dead-of-night Mexican wilderness. They boast about the quality of their goods: they have the best production equipment, and were even taught their expertise by a visiting American father-and-son team. They know the harm their drugs do, but what, they ask, are they going to do? They come from poverty. If life had gone another way, “We would be like you.”Matthew Heineman’s powerful documentary challenges our assumptions of loyalty – like you, like us? – as well as of good and evil. What happens when people rebel Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not even the Altman, charted that relation with quite as much complexity and ferocity as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which no-one emerges well from the class struggle.Written in 1888, the play represented Strindberg’s attempt to bring a new degree of naturalism to theatre. Its style and psychological acuity lend itself well to cinema; though being a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg specialises in claustrophobic, asphyxiating atmospheres, from his breakthrough family abuse tale Festen to the more recent study of small-town paranoia, The Hunt. Moving from domestic close-up to the Wessex wide shots and cosmic panoramas of Thomas Hardy, there’s a grinding of gears, and choosing Far From The Madding Crowd as his Hardy debut, when John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation is so revered, seems provocative.The Wessex countryside comes across as postcard-pretty rather than awesome and bleakVinterberg has cast well, and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Read more ...