Film
Nick Hasted
First there’s an “Allahu Akbar”, then an American tank’s rumble and clank. It’s an ominous and wearying start, the sound of Islam and invasion intermingled in the Iraq War, a violent conflict that today simply expands. When director Clint Eastwood lets us see, too, we’re by the treads of the tank, then within seconds we’re on a rooftop with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who spots a woman in a hijab with her child. They have a grenade, and he lines them in his crosshairs. Cut.American Sniper is a leanly muscular film, reviving Eastwood’s best qualities as a director after several worthy duds. Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Stream-of-consciousness is a tough thing to pull off in the movies. Voice-over narration has now fallen so far out of favour that no internal monologue survives the journey from page to screen even remotely intact, and having your lead character slavishly deliver chunks of a novel seldom recreates the odd magic of reading those same words in one’s own head.But with his deft adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s bruising memoir Wild, Nick Hornby has pulled off an unusually close approximation of the literary stream-of-consciousness. Blending hazy voice-over and staccato flashbacks alongside a near- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Walter Summers (1892-1973), formerly Lt. Summers of the East Surreys and a highly decorated veteran of the Western Front, had already directed the Great War reconstruction films Ypres (1925) and Mons (1926) for Harry Bruce Woolf’s British Instructional Films when he embarked on BIF’s docudrama The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). This silent but thunderous war film, galvanized by Simon Dobson’s tense new score, is remarkable for its impartiality.Though it centres on the two devastating naval confrontations off South America in late 1914, convincingly recreating what happens Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of memories. Of all those conversations, there was one in particular which Lanzmann held back. After the three and a half hours of The Last of the Unjust, it is clear why.Benjamin Murmelstein was a Viennese rabbi who in 1944 became the third and last Elder of Theresienstadt. Also known by its Czech name of Terezín, this was the so-called “model ghetto” with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Woods and forests were given a fresh impetus as a psychic terrain for the cinema by Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the other sylvan spaces so ethereally or threateningly rendered in The Lord of the Rings films and, to a lesser extent, by the Mirkwood of the second Hobbit movie. All distorted black boles, labyrinths of tangled branches, knobbly roots, and conically sun-strafed clearings, they were movie woods to rival the great Gothic forest of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) and the magical Athenian wood Warner Bros. crafted at Burbank for Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Steve Carell makes the move from the light comedy of the American workplace to the dark side of that country as delusional blue-blood John Eleuthère du Pont in a transformative and creepy performance that borders on the grotesque.Foxcatcher is based on a shocking true story set in the wrestling world. Though some of the events occurred in the 1990s and over a longer time period, director Bennett Miller sets his film towards the end of the 1980s. Miller’s previous feature, Moneyball, was also set in the sports world but instead of focusing on the players he chose to look at the maths behind Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The octogenarian Frederick Wiseman is a cult documentary film maker, with his own idiosyncratic and recognisable idiom. He has both vast experience and extraordinary independence. Characteristically, he makes long, prize-winning, fly-on-the-wall inside-the-institution films: reportorial, non-judgemental, loosely narrative, and wide in subject – from a hospital for the criminally insane, to a high school, the largest university in California (Berkeley), or the Paris Opera Ballet.The newest, aired (and winning prizes) at international festivals, is an extraordinary view of the National Gallery Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. After seeing his work for the first time in the early 1970s, Rivière expressed her admiration in a letter, which led to a succession of parts and culminated with her appearing as heroine Delphine in Rohmer’s 1986 The Green Ray (Le rayon vert): the part was in some way centred on the experiences of the actress, who was allowed to develop the story through almost total improvisation. Rivière herself went on to make a documentary about the director which was finished shortly before Rohmer's death in 2010. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stories of outsiders set in the Oregon wilds, the recent independent films directed by Kelly Reichardt are quiet, unhurried, and sparing with incidents. Their minimalist lyricism and sympathy for nature in the face of ruinous civilisation is the source of their emotional power and political resonance. Like Old Joy (2008), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves is trenchant and unsentimental. As a psychological thriller, it generates unease organically, unlike rote Hollywood suspensers.Three eco-terrorists prepare and execute a plan to blow up a hydroelectric dam. Farm Read more ...
theartsdesk
Continuing on from yesterday where great British comedy sat alongside Turkish slow cinema in our countdown of the best films from 13-6, here are our top five films of 2014. Another diverse selection which celebrates ambitious and immersive storytelling, technical prowess and breathtaking sights.5. Inside Llewyn Davis (dirs. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)The Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961 felt like their distilled essence. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart, as the folkie scuffling round New York who doesn’t get the breaks, and whose Read more ...