Film
Tom Birchenough
The struggle of the migrant journey from Mexico and Central America to el Norte has been much in the news recently, and, coincidentally, it’s a theme that cinema has been following too. After Diego Quemada-Diez's recent The Golden Dream, about teenagers who set out on that difficult route, Marc Silver’s drama-documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal? shows us a similar experience, though through a somewhat different lens.It’s a story that begins, as it were, at the end. In this case the discovery of a dead body in Arizona’s Sonora desert, not far from Tucson – one of the many immigrants who don’t Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Raya Martin's Independencia (2009) begins during the brutal Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, the prelude to four decades of US occupation. When distant gunfire interrupts a joyful Filipino national holiday, a tough middle-aged woman (Tetchie Agbayani) and her grown-up son (Sid Lucero) flee to the rainforest and set up home in a cabin abandoned by Spanish colonists.
They adapt well, breeding chickens and living off the land, though the mother is perturbed when the son finds and tends a young woman (Alessandra De Rossi) who had been raped by an American soldier. Much later, it is the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
There’s so much high drama and scandal surrounding the production of Orson Welles’ feverish cruise through the dark side of human nature it’s no surprise the resulting film is a bizarre labyrinthine of twists and tightly strung lunacy. Welles’s exorcism of personal and professional demons in this impassioned and witty tale of moral bankruptcy remains as compelling and confounding today as it was back in 1948.Already on the fringes of Hollywood, Welles got himself into considerable debt on the making of Around the World in 80 Days, and in a desperate move contacted Henry Cohn, head of Columbia Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Grecian palace on a studio lot. Gods wander about among the plywood and polystyrene looking deific. As a child is raised to the heavens a voice(over) is heard to intone the following legend.Oracle: You don’t want to believe those myths you’ve read in boys’ own books about the heroes of ancient times. That Roger Lancelyn Green is so tediously on-message. Take the dozen labours of the demi-god Hercules…Young mother of Hercules (from the pages of Playboy): Wait up while I flash a 3D breast at everyone's goggles, but just once or we'll never get our PG rating. Now let’s get on with the retarded Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Purge is the night each year when the US government turns off the law and lets mayhem rule, allowing crimes including murder and rape. Just let it all out of your system, citizens, goes the official logic, and crime on the other 364 days will plummet.Writer-director James DeMonaco’s concept in the original, box office-topping The Purge limited the action to a home invasion in the suburbs, and promised all sorts of illicit nastiness. But as this expansive sequel proves, he’s more interested in the social implications of the people becoming their own bread and circus. With the New Founding Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Too Late Blues has many individual aspects which, on their own, would make it notable. Released in 1961, it was John Cassavetes’ second film as a director following the ground-breaking Shadows, one of America’s first full-length expressionist art films. As Shadows had, it centres on jazz and depicts a world which was then thriving, showing it from the inside. It stars Bobby Darin, one of America’s most important and multi-faceted musical figures. When taken together, with the added impact of its female star Stella Stevens, its inclusion of black cast members and disabled children, Too Late Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Gordon Green is a director who's certainly not afraid to confound. His CV includes indie gems George Washington, All the Real Girls, comedy smash Pineapple Express and medieval misfire Your Highness. His previous feature Prince Avalanche was made in secret and starred Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as mismatched highway workers; it was sensitively shot, unpredictable and determinedly oddball. With Joe Green manages to harness Nicolas Cage's mad energy and channel it into something spectacular - something only a handful of directors have accomplished (David Lynch, Mike Figgis and Werner Read more ...
David Benedict
In what is undoubtedly one of the earlier recorded examples of the single entendre, the original ad campaign for Some Like It Hot yelled “Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom Companions”. Well, the posters may not have minced words, but there’s more than a little mincing on screen as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon escape the mob and the St Valentine’s Day massacre and go on the lam by joining a band. An all-girl band. Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters, to be precise, who are to be holed up beneath the sheltering palms of a millionaire-strewn Florida hotel. That’s a whole lot better than being held Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Divine is a lot more than dog poop. The minute you mention Divine – born Glenn Milstead in Baltimore, star of John Waters’ cult classics such as Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble – mention of the famous scene in Pink Flamingos where the performer actually does consume canine faeces is almost obliterated.That almost is the door through which director Jeffrey Schwarz
takes us, using archive stills, footage as well as new interviews with Waters, Mink Stole, Ricki Lake, Tab Hunter and many more. More effective than a DeLorean, we are right back in the day, when Divine was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finding a new angle for a forbidden romance film must be tough. Telling the story of a couple where one is married, in a relationship or in some other situation impeding the path of true love or lust is not enough. New settings are needed. In the French drama Grand Central, the problem is solved when love blossoms inside a nuclear power station and the surrounding encampment.Grand Central tells of Gary (Tahar Rahim) and Karole (Léa Seydoux). From near Lyon, he has pitched up in the Rhone Valley and finds a job as a decontamination worker at a nuclear power plant. Karole works there and is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That 1971’s Harold and Maude still confounds and delights in equal measure is a tribute to its timelessness. Despite evocative, period-specific music from Cat Stevens, and settings and trappings which place it as a film conceived and completed as the Sixties still cast a shadow, it still hinges on finely honed characterisations and a story which was, and remains, unique. Although mainstream, it played with the nature of romance and what is or isn’t acceptable in the day-to-day to such an extent that it continues to be both uncomfortable viewing and engender warm-hearted feelings. Reactions Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Humankind's desperate struggle for survival is exquisitely rendered in this post-apocalyptic set sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves, the director of another end of the world type scenario in found footage film Cloverfield, takes the reins of this smart and attractive franchise and runs confidently with visceral wanton destruction and a blunt message about gun control.Living a peaceful existence in the wilderness of a San Francisco forest, the apes have carved out a life without humans who they presume have long died out due to the simian flu virus (seen taking hold Read more ...