Film
Demetrios Matheou
In the summer of 2005, Robert Redford, who died this week, attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, to collect a life achievement award. And his appearance in front of the media coincided with a startling news story that was rippling around the world. Just a week before, Mark Felt, a former deputy director of the FBI, admitted that he was the mysterious Deep Throat – the anonymous source who, in the 1970s, had offered Washington Post reporters information about Watergate, the conspiracy that would lead to the fall of President Richard Nixon. This Read more ...
graham.rickson
Westerns had long been popular with German cinema audiences, some of the most successful being early 1960s West German adaptations of novels by Karl May, a slippery late-19th writer whose books were hugely admired by Hitler. East Germany’s state-run studio DEFA responded by producing The Sons of Great Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin) in 1966, the first of East Germany’s "Indianerfilme".Offering an alternative, anti-imperialist take on the American frontier myth, producer Hans Malich explained that DEFA’s film would portray white settlers as oppressors, Native Americans (still referred to as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour. Some of its gags, like the amplifier that goes up to 11 and the stage prop of a miniature Stonehenge, ought to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if the band themselves are seen Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It can be a hostage to fortune to title anything “grand”, and so it proves with the last gasp of Julian Fellowes’s everyday story of posh folk at the turn of the 20th century. The Granthams are facing a lowering of their status, and it’s time to move on out. Fellowes has just two hours to make something significant out of his plot strands, and a certain amount of corner-cutting was predictable. Exposition is pretty minimal, so good luck to anybody who didn’t give up on the series halfway through. Characters are studiously referred to by their new married names, so that relationships Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
From its ambiguous opening shot onwards, writer/director Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands is a tricksy animal, which doesn’t just keep you guessing about its characters and plot, but about what kind of film it is we’re watching.It takes its time before tiptoeing into noir territory, specifically the kind that swaps nocturnal shadows for sun-bleached locations, where characters are led astray less by racy dialogue and treachery than heat-induced lethargy, tinged with lust. But Gerster (Oh Boy) also offers intimations of Antonioni’s great existential mystery, l’Avventura, along with Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
You won't find Sam Riley lying at the pool in a holiday resort – unless it's for work. "I'd rather stay home to be honest", says the Berlin-based Yorkshireman, who plays a washed-up tennis player turned coach living on the Canary island of Fuerteventura in Jan-Ole Gerster's slow-burning psychological thriller Islands. "I'm sure it's great to drop the kids off for a while and enjoy some peace and quiet. But my idea of relaxation is quite different."No surprise there. Riley, 45, might have become a well-known actor, but, in his heart, he's always been a rock star. At least that's the Read more ...
James Saynor
The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream. After an extended run of successes from Blood Simple (1984) up to but excluding Intolerable Cruelty (2003), intermittent irritation has greeted some of their 21st century offerings, a few Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I never abandoned you,” says Jule (Ophélia Kolb; Call My Agent!) to her 10-year-old daughter Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer), setting a fairly low bar as far as motherhood is concerned.Swiss-American director Jasmin Gordon’s first feature, with a screenplay by Julien Bouissoux, is a compelling, though too mysterious, portrait of a single mother versus society. Set in a wealthy town in the mountainous Lower Valais in Switzerland, Jule, a woman on the margins, gazes out from her window at the murmuring trees that, in a hypnotic, recurring motif, seem to offer a portal for escape.She lives in a Read more ...
John Carvill
Can a film’s classic status expire, or be rescinded? If it can, I’d say The Graduate is a potential candidate.Yes, it was formally groundbreaking (within the context of American cinema), and is often read as a metaphor for the clash of generations, the burgeoning freedoms and battles for equality being waged as the 60s reacted against the grey flannel stultification of the 50s. But try watching it back to back with, say, Bonnie and Clyde, and some aspects come across today as surprisingly staid, almost atavistic. Roger Ebert labelled Dustin Hoffman’s Ben Braddock an “insufferable creep Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Taking its title from a Sonic Youth track whose lyrics describe someone who seems good on the outside but is bad inside, this debut feature from the Slovenian director Urska Djukic is a small miracle. Its 90 minutes deftly draw us into the psychology of pubescent teens in a fresh, often funny, always transporting way. The narrative focuses on Lucia (Jara Sofia Ostan), an introverted, daydreaming 16-year-old who has joined an all-girls choir at her Catholic school. When her mother arrives to collect her from choir practice, it’s clear Lucia is kept on a tight rein. Her mother deplores the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Not even an animal would do what she did.” Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is speaking about her biological mother, who abandoned her when she was a baby, leaving her to grow up in care. Now Jessica, a teenager, is pregnant, just as her mother was, and is obsessed with finding her. She demands answers, as well as love.Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 13th feature film won the best screenplay award at Cannes (they’ve won the Palme d’Or twice) and it’s an extraordinarily compelling picture of life in a maternal support home. Less harrowing than some of their work, it’s set in Liège, Belgium, Read more ...
graham.rickson
British audiences of a certain age will note Finis Terrae’s similarity to Finisterre, one of the 31 sea areas listed in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Or previously listed – it was renamed Fitzroy in 2002 to avoid confusion with another Finisterre off the coast of Spain.This title translates as "End of the Earth", an apt one for a silent film which depicts a community and way of life largely untouched by the industrial revolution. Director Jean Epstein had recently completed an acclaimed but troubled 1928 adaptation of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Feeling exhausted and burnt-out, he Read more ...