Film
Katherine McLaughlin
Sprawling over the East End of London for the next thirteen days and boasting an illuminating line-up of new voices, retrospectives and debate in its 13th year, the East End Film Festival ensures no cinematic rock is left unturned with its bold programming choices.Monte Hellman’s controversial Cockfighter gets a rare outing at Red Gallery, a grand Masonic Temple is home to a weekend of macabre cinema and the opening night gala proves the festival’s dedication to championing filmmakers they believe in with the world premiere of Ross Clarke’s first feature, New Orleans-set drama, Dermaphoria. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Twelve minutes into the Icelandic film Of Horses and Men something occurs on screen which was obviously going to happen, but actually seeing it happen is astonishing. It’s something which would normally either occur off screen or be alluded to. Of Horses and Men has many such uncomfortable moments. It’s also funny, heart-warming and poignant – a one-off.Of Horses and Men is set and filmed in rural Iceland. About the residents of a valley, their loves and their symbiotic relationship with their equine companions, it draws parallels between the behaviour of horse and human. What the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In 1921, Anton Phibes was killed in a fiery car crash. Horribly disfigured, he returns to avenge the death of his beautiful wife. So goes the set-up for The Abominable Dr Phibes, one of the UK’s finest cult horror films and very clearly a precursor to the Saw franchise, among others. Originally released in 1971, it has lost none of its camp splendour. This is a film like no other – except, of course, its sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again. Vincent Price is the eccentric and cruel Phibes, Caroline Munro (uncredited) is his wife. Terry-Thomas and Joseph Cotton are among his victims.Presented as the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet is best known and loved for his early work: Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and (conveniently ignoring Alien: Resurrection) Amélie. These films introduced him as a director with a very particular, rather charming vision; they were sublime, sometimes twisted works of partial fantasy which the more recent A Very Long Engagement and Micmacs didn't quite live up to. With his latest, T.S. Spivet, Jeunet does something quite exciting: he takes the highly characterful way he sees the world and fashions it into three dimensions. It makes for a vibrant Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"We're too old for this shit," quips Jenko (Channing Tatum), quoting one of the greats of weary screen policing - Lethal Weapon's Murtaugh - in response to his latest nonsensically spectacular brush with death. "We started off too old for this shit," shoots back his partner Schmidt (Jonah Hill). Welcome to 22 Jump Street: a film that wears a lack of originality not just on its sleeve but as its whole outfit. Its predecessor 21 Jump Street was the big screen remake that promised little but delivered in belly laughs. But surely a sequel is stretching the joke too thin?Thankfully this turns out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir excels at catching both individuality of character and wider background context in her second feature, When I Saw You. The initial background is a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, where displaced families arrive from their lost homes across the border after the Six-day War (the film’s title alludes to the fact that Palestine is so close as to be almost visible, at the same time almost impossibly far away). And the character is 11-year-old Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa, main picture), a mischievous yet thoughtful boy who’s there with his mother Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal), as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of Charles Dickens's shortcomings as a novelist was his inability to breathe authentic emotional life into young women characters (Bella Wilfer and Estella possibly excepted). The likes of Dora Spenlow, Lizzie Hexam, Esther Summerson, Ada Clare, Pet Meagles, and the "Littles" – Em'ly, Dorrit, and Nell – are scarcely three-dimensional. A rebel like Tattycoram has to be tamed. Dickens favoured long-suffering child-women who gratefully accept domestic servitude.Or, in the case of Nelly Ternan, his mistress, romantic and sexual servitude. In one of several excruciating scenes in Ralph Fiennes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Their reformation was one of the most convincing in recent years, in part also due to quickly bowing out after returning and the favour they brought to the listening public by not writing any new, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sometimes a film captures the imagination of the critical establishment for all the wrong reasons, and there's a scramble to see who can file the most entertainingly bitchy copy. And so it is with Grace of Monaco, which emerges from the vipers' nest that is the Cannes Film Festival (and from a very public spat between director Olivier Dahan and the co-chairman of the film's US distributor, Harvey Weinstein) covered in vicious puncture wounds, ridiculously ruffled and resigned to take it all over again on general release. But can it really be that awful?As expected - and as anyone looking Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In 2007 Annemarie Jacir made her debut feature, Salt of This Sea, the first film directed by a Palestinian woman director. Her follow-up, When I Saw You, is released this week in the UK, after festival acclaim that saw it receive prizes at Berlinale 2012 (the Netpac award for “Best Asian Film”) and “Best Arab Film” at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. The story of a boy coming of age in a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, and his complex relationship with his mother and his surroundings, it was the Palestinian submission for the 2013 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Jacir's short films Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Two movie-obsessed high-school students Owen and Matt (Owen Williams and Matt Johnson, who also writes and directs) are making a short movie about bullying for their film class. After they show it, to widespread derision from their classmates, the bullying gets worse (by boys they call the "dirties") and so the two teenagers decide to make a new version, incorporating secretly filmed footage of them being harassed and assaulted.As Owen and Matt develop a narrative for the foul-mouthed, Tarantino-esque movie, it becomes increasingly about enacting revenge on the dirties. Matt is the driver of Read more ...
ellin.stein
In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. After an escalation of anxiety and machismo on both sides, one of the BART police shot the unarmed, handcuffed Grant in the back (he later claimed he thought he was firing his Taser) as the train waited in the station. The event Read more ...