Film
Karen Krizanovich
Do not miss this film. I don’t say it lightly. Even on the small screen, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch's Cannes Palme d'Or nominee is a warm love story, no, a cool vampire tale, no, a wry comedy, no, all of these things in Only Lovers Left Alive. Stealing the title from David Wallis' 1964 science fiction book, this is an adaptation of Mark Twain’s satire The Diaries of Adam and Eve for the undead, and the casting couldn't be better. It's a film of mood and wit, of profundity and imagination: watching Only Lovers Left Alive will put you in a delicious mood.Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For someone who tags himself rock and roll's greatest failure, John Otway hasn’t done too badly. Anyone attempting to navigate their way through a career in rock ‘n’ roll wouldn’t do badly looking to Otway as an example to follow. He’s had chart singles, headlined the Royal Albert Hall, written two autobiographies and has a massive, loyal fan base. At age 61, he’s still at it over 40 years after the 1972 release of his first single. Judging from Otway the Movie, he does what he does full time, has a roof over his head, has a wife and an enviably articulate daughter. Failure? Hardly.The Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
An ageing misanthrope is given a new lease of life and a fresh outlook by a pretty, young woman. Woody Allen wheels out this tired old trope for his 44th feature film set in his favourite era on the French Riviera with a light romantic yarn between Colin Firth and Emma Stone playing out as predictably as one might imagine. Thankfully this old fashioned unravelling mystery proves to be a far more enticing affair than anticipated due to the striking backdrop of glitzy 1920s fashion, sparkling evening soirees and expertly curated jazz accompaniment.Chinese conjurer Wei Ling Soo is the talk of Read more ...
Debbi Lander
The emergence of digital both as a technology and a culture has fundamentally changed the world in which short film now exists. Now short film has public, industry and social value and its role and routes have fundamentally changed.Short film is one of the most creative art forms on Earth, a space for research and a format in which an artist can experiment, take risks, explore their craft and develop their cinematic vision. The Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival champion it as an art form, place for information communications and a talent development space. It’s a flexible, powerful Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Hugely underrated, The Two Faces of January packs more filmmaking power than, at least, its poster would ever suggest. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, which puts it streets ahead of most films, Two Faces... has a superb ensemble cast: Viggo Mortensen is the alluring Chester MacFarland, travelling with his equally alluring wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) and their accidental tour guide, the charming Greek-American Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac). Set in 1962, the couple are sightseeing and become entangled with Rydal, a small-time crook. Coming to their hotel quite innocently, Rydal sees Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.Visual artists Forsyth and Pollard’s first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Haven’t we met before?” We hadn’t, but Stellan Skarsgård’s friendly greeting immediately sets the tone for an encounter which is so relaxed that thoughts of the explosive Nils, the quiet man who boils over in In Order of Disappearance, almost evaporate. How did this affable, chatty and thoughtful Swede become a man who kills repeatedly and so gruesomely on screen?Balancing this with his role as a world-weary banker in the recent Hector and the Search for Happiness and, less-recently as possible-dad Bill in the Mamma Mia! film as well as his recurrent portrayal of Dr. Erik Selvig in the Thor Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law is back in British cinemas 28 years after it joined Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in galvanising the embryonic American indie movement.The original catalyst was Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), an affectless account of a young Hungarian visitor (Eszter Balint) to Manhattan who short-circuits the hostility of her downtown slacker cousin (John Lurie) on their road trip with his friendlier gambling buddy (Richard Edson). The writer-director's second film, it led critics to re-mint words like "deadpan", "laconic", and " Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Other films have been and still will be released featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, since his death earlier this year. But A Most Wanted Man is the one that serves as the final testament to what’s been lost. Here is not just a final great performance, but a character one might otherwise have imagined revisiting.That character is Gunter Bachman, created by John Le Carré in his 2008 spy novel, who compares with George Smiley as a skilled and honourable spy, swimming against the tide of more treacherous peers.Bachman is the head of a highly secretive German counter-terrorism unit based in Hamburg Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s war in the world outside and much conflict at home in Norwegian director Eric Poppe’s A Thousand Times Good Night. The film is centred in every sense around the poised, taut performance of Juliette Binoche as war photographer Rebecca, whom we first encounter at work in Afghanistan, as she follows the detailed preparations of a female suicide-bomber being prepared for martyrdom. The opening minutes are extremely gripping cinema, quietly understated but no less powerful for that, and raise the question of whether Binoche’s character has stepped over a professional line.But it’s the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Buried deep in the final credits for theatre director Matthew Warchus's second feature film, Pride, is a shout-out to his late father for teaching his son the twin virtues of compassion and comedy. Both those qualities, as it happens, are on abundant display in this buoyant venture from Warchus fils which works on multiple levels, all of them richly engaging.In its broadest sense, the film reminds us that society works in different, often extraordinary ways, as is clear from this account of that period 30 years ago when the gay and mining communities came together to mutually enriching effect Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?Rasoulof has had plenty of problems with the regime in his native country over the years, including arrest back in 2010, in the same campaign that saw his fellow director Jafar Panahi imprisoned and later banned from working in cinema. Just as Panahi responded to those circumstances by working outside any official structures with his This Is Not a Film, so Rasoulof made Manuscripts…, which arrived at Cannes last year shrouded in Read more ...