Film
Adam Sweeting
The Wachowskis' sci-fi blockbuster has been getting a kicking from the Stateside critics, but perhaps that's because it's a bit of a shape-shifter with multiple personalities. Part dystopian fantasy, part fairy tale, part cosmic epic, all rolled up in a whole lot of astonishingly vivid special effects, Jupiter Ascending is like spending a day at Alton Towers with your brain marinating in mescaline.Admittedly I was fortunate enough to see this on an IMAX screen in 3D, but I tottered from the exit afterwards with my senses authentically jangled. Two hours of intergalactic travel aboard space Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was made by Sidney Bernstein as World War II drew to a close. It was a gathering of massed concentration camp footage and detailed explanations that he hoped would be shown worldwide but, especially, to the German people, so that they might consider their complicity. André Singer, previously best known as a producer, notably of The Act of Killing and Into Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bringing a real-life story with a well-known and shocking outcome to the screen has an inherent major difficulty. When the end does come, it won’t shock. Amour Fou dramatises the suicide pact of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, a woman at the heart of high society who had been diagnosed as terminally ill. They both died on 21 November 1811.Amour Fou solves the problem of being burdened with an in-built spoiler by assembling a cast whose engrossing performances are enacted as if under hypnosis and by devising a mise-en-scène so striking that it becomes as important to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. She pitches her film perfectly, presenting an intimate portrait of a man struggling to live up to his own legend and maintain the momentum of a movement, filtered through the powerful story of a series of initially small, eventually seminal protests in the town of Selma, Alabama.Beginning in 1964, it follows King's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize with a crime of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The images have a painterly precision in Uberto Pasolini's Still Life, as one might expect from a writing-directing effort from the onetime producer of The Full Monty that co-opts a style of painting as its title. Lead actor Eddie Marsan is often positioned at the centre of the shot, the meticulous visuals of a piece with a movie about a 44-year-old man who is himself fastidious to a fault as he goes about his job. That said employment has involved 22 years at Kennington Council tracing the relatives of people who have passed away means that John May (Marsan) spends a lot of time thinking Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When a film is all about unreliable narrators, it’s difficult to talk about it without ruining things for others. But it’s also a problem for filmmakers. When Gillian Flynn’s bestselling Gone Girl (1.2 million in UK paperback) was recalibrated by the author for the cinema, it was possible for the marketing material to refer to no more than the first 54 minutes of the movie. So explains director David Fincher in the commentary which is this release’s only extra. If they gave the game away, he adds, it wouldn’t be worth making the film.For Gone Girl first timers, there’s plenty to feast on in a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of the tacit jokes in John and Roy Boulting’s I’m All Right, Jack concerns the parentage of Liz Fraser’s Cynthia. How could the lugubrious communist shop steward Fred Kite (Peter Sellers) and his pocket battleship missis (Irene Handl) have produced a daughter so resplendently lovely – and so aflame with desire for a dithering toff like their lodger Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael)? The answer is: even they were young once.Learning that her dad has evicted Stanley for breaking a strike Fred called at his sweet factory, Cynthia starts bawling. “W-what am I to do with his suspenders?” she Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The director Stephen Daldry has always worked beautifully with young actors, whether on film or stage, so it's not difficult to see what might have drawn him to Trash, the Richard Curtis-scribed adaptation of the Andy Mulligan novel about life on the Rio de Janeiro scrapheaps. An opportunity for three Brazilian unknowns to take centre-screen in a film spoken almost entirely in Portuguese, the movie gives an instant career to its three male newcomers while otherwise remaining mired in the feel-good Hollywood muck that even the most elaborate change in locale can't shift.Equal parts adventure Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With its combination of a Tom Waits lament and visuals tracking over art works by Viennese modernists like Klimt and Schiele, the opening of Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 Bad Timing stays in the memory – its mood remains just there. The territory is defined gradually: variations on obsession, sexual but not exclusively. One line in the script suggests “lineaments of gratified desire”, though the elements of gratification here remain dubious for all concerned.Bad Timing came at the end of Roeg’s glorious 1970s, after Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now. He came on a variation of the script through Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes – and Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cracking part-homage, part-pastiche of the James Bond franchise (and other British spy movies) done with knowing comedy, élan and obvious affection. It's based on The Secret Service comic book created by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar, and is directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class), and here he reunites with Jane Goldman, who also provided scripts for his previous works.It's about a British spy organisation staffed mostly by Savile Row-suited toffs, including the impeccably Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Thomas Pynchon and PT Anderson: too good to be true? News that the director of There Will Be Blood and The Master was adapting America’s greatest and most hiply profound living novelist certainly sounded like a heavenly equation. Better yet, Anderson had chosen Pynchon’s most consistently funny and approachable novel, Inherent Vice, in which the author had effectively passed around a convivial and especially mind-blowing joint to his fans, as a reward for braving the heaving banquet of his preceding, testing masterpiece, Against the Day. With Anderson also coming off his own furthest-out film Read more ...
graham.rickson
Boyhood is an intimate film on an epic scale. Twelve years zoom past in 189 minutes, as we follow Mason Evans Jr.'s journey from primary school pupil to university student. That the film exists at all seems miraculous; you admire the producers’ nerve in funding such an open-ended project, and director Richard Linklater’s luck in securing a loyal cast willing to commit for 12 years. Especially the two young leads; Linklater’s daughter Lorelei as Mason’s sister Samantha must have been a known quantity, but watching six-year-old Ellar Coltrane mature into such an engaging, confident screen Read more ...