Film
Katherine McLaughlin
It comes as no surprise that this sequel, based on the Channel 4 TV series of the same name, which saw four awkward male teenagers bond over their insecurities, offers little more than a shitstorm of juvenile humour and one-note female characters who are presented as objects to lust over. Lowbrow comedy doesn’t get any lower, and writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris (who also take on directorial duties) predictably push the limits of acceptability which makes for occasionally funny viewing.The Inbetweeners 2 offers its most laddish character and pathological liar, Jay (James Buckley), the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love. The connection is stretched by cultural differences, and only exaggerated by differences (and therefore misunderstandings) of language.Lilting moves between a loose, if undefined realism, and a certain kind of hallucination. That tone is set in its Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
I sit down with Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou to talk about his experience making his first feature film, Lilting, which showed at Sundance film festival in competition, took home the award for best cinematography in the world cinema category, and opened the 28th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival to great acclaim. A cheery mood fills the room, his softly-spoken, intelligent musings inflected with an excitability which is utterly endearing. After working in film distribution for years, Khaou finally decided to take the leap over to full-time filmmaker last Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Now that the shock and dismay over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death has subsided, we have the chance to see his final performances and recall an actor like few others. I can’t think of many who managed to emit so much power and convey so much human complexity without an iota of visible “acting”.His spy thriller A Most Wanted Man is released later this year, followed by what he’d managed to get in the can for the final instalments of The Hunger Games. And that will be that. First, there’s God’s Pocket, whose other notable credit is that of John Slattery, the actor best known for his suave and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Depardieu as an imaginary version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was always likely to be a study in grossness. Add director and co-writer Abel Ferrara, the hardcore extremist behind Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, and a white-knuckle night out is guaranteed. Depardieu’s powerful French banker Devereaux is a creature of grotesque and relentless appetites, alright, a bloated sex addict and rapist. But actor and director also insist he is human and shamelessly so, even as he sacrifices others to his desires.There is a sense, too, that Welcome to New York is autobiography even more than biography. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We were making a film about the ideal summer holiday,” says actor Sophie Neville in one of the extras on this "40th Anniversary Special Edition" of the 1974 adaptation of Arthur Ransome's book Swallows & Amazons. As Titty Walker, she played a girl camping out with her three siblings on a Lake District island while engaging in wholesome outdoor fun and mounting a play war against the Blackett sisters, the Amazons of the title.Swallows & Amazons is the evergreen and totemic book from 1929 in which Ransome celebrated the Lake District and its power to delight. The 1970s cinema version Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Against the background of the spectacular scenery of Patagonia, Argentinian director Lucia Puenzo creates a tight, subtly unnerving thriller in her third film Wakolda. Its American release title “The German Doctor” reveals its subject more immediately, which is the time spent by Nazi physician Josef Mengele (Alex Brendemuhl) in Latin America after his flight from Europe.But Wakolda is a very long way indeed from the other film that springs to mind on that subject, The Boys from Brazil. Instead it tells a chamber story of how Brendemuhl’s character, travelling under the name Helmut Gregor, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The long march of history pales next to the clamped-down passions and pulpy theatrics of A Promise, the first English-language film from that often most sinuous and witty of French directors, Patrice Leconte. Wit, alas, is nowhere to be seen on this occasion, which may just mark the worst foray into non-native celluloid territory since The Lives of Others' Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck gave us The Tourist four years ago.Leading lady Rebecca Hall gets to wear an array of nice hats, and classical music devotees will thrill to the overuse of Beethoven to amplify the mood; everyone else will Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Marvel takes a risk with the origins story of an eclectic crew of potty-mouthed thieves and criminals based on a little known comic book series, and it pays off thanks to Nicole Perlman’s and James Gunn’s confident script which follows the superhero formula yet sprinkles it with a charming off-kilter quality.The threat of mass genocide looms heavily over the galaxy, with evil beings chasing a mysterious orb which holds the power to destroy civilization with one fell swoop. However, an unwitting hero named Peter Quill (or Starlord as he prefers) is set for glory and a whole heap of trouble Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The magically off-kilter Mood Indigo is based on Boris Vian's posthumously celebrated Surrealist novel L'écume des jours (1947), one translated title of which is "Froth on the Daydream" and another "Foam on the Daze". Literally, it means "The foam of the days" or, more ominously, "The scum of the days". As it transpires, director Michel Gondry gradually skims away the froth from the movie's surface to find a layer of poisonous scum underneath.What starts out as a pleasurably light boy-meets-girl fairytale gives way to a Gothic tragedy thick with decay and despair. Although its cause is a Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Action film fans should stay away from this Roman Polanski duet. But those who like their sexual politics served in symbolic form will be delighted. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner stars as an actress, Vanda, and Polanski-lookalike Mathieu Amalric as the writer-director Thomas.It's not entirely an adaptation of the 1870 novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom the word masochism derives), but a version of the David Ives play about the link between sexual obsession, pleasure and pain. Venus in Fur is like a play: the entire 95 minute duration is set within the confines of a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Daniel Patrick Carbone is a director who makes his viewers work. That's not meant to sound intimidating at all, because the rewards of his first feature Hide Your Smiling Faces are considerable. But part of its achievement is that by the end we feel that we have assembled the truth, or rather a part of a truth, behind its spare, elliptical story rather in the way the director did in making it.Atmosphere and nuance are far stronger than narrative or dialogue. The atmosphere comes from a rural landscape of woods and a river on the edge of a barely depicted small town community which, given that Read more ...