Film
Demetrios Matheou
One might think that of all the national cinemas, the one that least needs its own festival in the UK is the French; after all, Gallic fare has a better showing here than most foreign language films.That said, distribution-wise it’s a large slice of a tiny pie. And with 30 new films, the 21st edition of the French Film Festival offers a glimpse of the breadth of French cinema that isn’t always apparent from general releases. For Francophiles in London, Warwick and a handful of Scottish cities, the next month promises quite a boon.The festival opens with the first live action film by Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The 65th Cannes film festival acts as the backdrop for this compelling, if somewhat misguided documentary from James Toback. Accompanied by Alec Baldwin, Toback sets out to shame Hollywood for its decision to continually churn out megabuck franchises and mediocrity rather than investing in risky, original cinema as the pair try to get funding for their own film project.From the outset their plan to reinterpret Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (set in Iraq starring Alec Baldwin and Neve Campbell) is questionable; is this a real project, or are they simply trying to provoke a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Within moments of World War Z beginning Piers Morgan is onscreen. Zombies, schmombies - this is surely the face of true horror. Where that smug mug blossoms, the apocalypse cannot be far behind. Morgan pops up among intercut US news-streams and media that open the film. This collage hints at eco-disaster before we settle into the everyday Philadelphia home life of Gerry and Karin Lane (Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos, who was the lead in the US remake of The Killing) and their two daughters. Gerry is a house-husband but, as we slowly find out, he used to be a superhero UN investigator. Before too Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Orgasms aside, it was When Harry Met Sally’s edict that sex always gets in the way of male-female friendships that hit home. Drinking Buddies comes to more nuanced conclusions, as we watch Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) steadily drink and comfortably banter during and after work at a Chicago micro-brewery, and wonder just when they’re going to leave their straitlaced partners, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick), pictured below. When a double-date weekend in the woods sees Kate strip off in front of Luke, and Jill dig into her rucksack’s wilderness gear for a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cornelia is 60 and increasingly frustrated with her 34-year-old son, Barbu. He doesn’t communicate with her, she doesn’t approve of his girlfriend and the way he leads his life. Convinced she has to take command of her immature son, she’s suddenly presented with an opportunity to exert control. The release of the Romanian film Child’s Pose in the same week as Gloria – the Chilean story of a 58-year-old woman making the most of life – is uncanny, as each offers a wildly different take on similar raw materials.Luminița Gheorghiu’s Cornelia has exacting standards which hardly anyone can match up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A film of contrasts, Short Term 12 manages to be simultaneously dark and humorous, casual yet intense. The relationships between staff and patients in the group home for troubled teenagers where it’s set – the facility is meant to be a place of refuge for up to a year, hence the title, though many stay longer – are both thick and thin, and as in the wedding vow must endure through difficult times. They’re thick because the bonds created when exploring the reservoirs of sadness that these kids bring along with them run so deep; thin, because the slightest alteration in mood risks disrupting Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Directed by a Frenchmen, Foxfire adapts an American book to create a film with an archetypical stance and setting which could rank it alongside The Outsiders, Stand by Me or even Rebel Without a Cause. The problem is that despite depicting a passionate, wayward and issue-fuelled gang, Foxfire is not animated enough. It unfolds in deliberate steps, like a stage play. The young women may be on fire, but the measured approach of the overlong film tempers their spirit.Foxfire - Confessions of a Girl Gang is Laurent Cantet’s rendering of the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name. It’s been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gloria is 58. Divorced 12 years earlier, she’s intent on living life. Her two children are grown up, she works in a characterless office and is open to almost anything. She’ll try cannabis, attends a class where instruction is given on releasing laughter and tackles yoga for the first time. Beyond keeping in touch with her son and daughter, her greatest efforts are directed towards her nightlife. On her own, Gloria goes to ballrooms, bars and nightclubs where she hopes to make a connection. Then, one evening, she encounters Rodolfo. His opening line is “are you always this happy?”Gloria could Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Schalcken the Painter looks like a documentary shot inside a Dutch Golden Age painting, out of whose black depths the Devil one day materialises. Taking the truly ghastly guise of the invincibly wealthy merchant Vanderhausen (John Justin), he buys Rose (Cheryl Kennedy) for his wife from the great Dutch painter Dou (Maurice Denham). Dou’s pupil Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde), though thinking himself in love with Rose, does nothing to save her, and as the years pass, ambition for his painting career (destined to be minor) and brothel visits replace his callow feelings for the girl. But neither she Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins. And perhaps even more importantly than that, whilst making her first film, the ingenious documentary The Arbor, Barnard encountered Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Though never really part of the country’s groundbreaking New Wave, František Vláčil was a Czech master who's best known for his films like Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, both complex historical works. His first feature The White Dove, which appeared at the very beginning of the momentous Sixties, is the exact opposite of those two large-scale movies: it's a small film of poetry and mystery, which has a fabular quality remote from any political dimension (very likely the reason why its production in 1960, a time of continuing censorship, was possible).The symbolic nature of Read more ...