Film
David Nice
Fans of this bewilderingly popular musical, and they are legion, will not be disappointed. Director Tom Hooper knows how to tell a fast-moving tale that makes light of the final running time (originally 158 minutes, slightly shorter in this DVD release, which offers no extras. Those who went to the film more than once will, I'm told, miss a couple of scenes). The lighting is appropriately lugubrious, most of the settings convincing – though occasionally there’s too much dependence on CGI – and famously the singing actors perform their numbers on set, often in long takes. Casting is strong, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just like Vietnam in 1970s, the so-called War on Terror has been a boon to filmmakers. It has allowed Hollywood to send another generation of buff leading males off to the front and, as the ordnance explodes, bravely question why it is that they are there. However, there’s not been a lot of mainstream filmmaking which puts the Muslim point of view. The Reluctant Fundamentalist – in which a Wall Street highflyer from Pakistan heads home after 9/11 to be among his own troubled people - redresses an imbalance.Indian director Mira Nair caught sight of the slender novel by Mohsin Hamid before it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If JJ Abrams's first shot at reinventing the Star Trek franchise in 2009 was a memorable coup de cinéma, blending a plausible back story with a fresh cast imbued with the spirit of the TV originals, this follow-up is more about consolidation. There's bags of vertiginous interstellar action, retina-scorching 3D effects and earth-in-peril terror, though by the time you totter from the multiplex 130 minutes older, you may be asking yourself where the big payoff went.Still, to Abrams's credit, his cast is terrific and he wrings more genuine actorly mileage out of them than you might reasonably Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A female hiker is naked. A village is close. Lying on the slope down to a river, she invites the taciturn man she’s followed to have sex. They do. She begins shrieking and foaming at the mouth. He fastens his face to hers. She could then be dead yet begins crawling into the water, looks heavenwards and spreads her arms.The images of baptism and rebirth are clear. But the motivation of the man, David Dewale’s Le gars (the man or guy), is less clear cut. Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan) is hard to read in terms of specifics, but overall it dwells on the arrival of a mystical outsider Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tales of pirate drama on the high seas have come a long, unpleasant way since Errol Flynn. Borgen and The Hunt co-writer Tobias Lindholm’s debut as solo writer-director explores the human factor behind Somali pirate headlines, with the cool grip Nordic drama fans now expect.Inspired by the real seizure of two Danish freighters, Lindstrom uses a parallel narrative split between Copenhagen and the terrifying emptiness of the Indian Ocean, where the crew of his fictional freighter are trapped below decks by Somali captors. At their shipping company’s HQ, CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Soren Malling – Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.Shakhnazarov's first venture into locally popular World War II territory, White Tiger is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s likely that how Our Children culminates is no secret. Director Joachim Lafosse is well aware of that, and the film’s opening moments take place in the aftermath of the shocking conclusion of what’s about to unfold. Nonetheless, Our Children is composed so carefully that its climax still whacks you in the stomach.Our Children (Á perde la raison) reunites Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, last seen together in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. Together with Émilie Dequenne, the trio comprise a family unit as unusual as it’s toxic. The film is based on real-life events that occurred in Belgium, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
There are few films of which you can say there's something for everyone - but there is something for everyone in Jeff Nichols's third film. Mud gives us Hollywood stars Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, plucky young unknowns, the great Michael Shannon being funny; it combines the feel of a classic yarn (think Great Expectations crossed with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) with a more modern kind of boys' own adventure (eg Stand By Be). It's gritty and dirty, climaxing in a genuinely thrilling shoot-out, and it's shamelessly romantic.Ellis (Tye Sheridan from The Tree of Life) Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Schlesinger’s 1963 film of Keith Waterhouse’s novel is 50 years old. It’s just been reissued in a pristine print by Studio Canal, and looks stunning in its new incarnation. What began as a claustrophobic three-act play was brilliantly opened out by the film’s director, and the widescreen format feels wholly appropriate.Watching the film again after several years, it’s the bleakness which hits home. There are laughs, but the overall tone is so sombre, so downbeat; this is a story about restricted ambition, narrowness of outlook and missed opportunities. Without Waterhouse’s wry humour, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Family dramas don't come much fruitier than The Eye of the Storm. Fred Schepisi's film adaptation of Nobel laureate Patrick White's 1973 novel will speak most potently to those for whom the (far superior) Amour was too po-faced by half. An Australian deathbed drama that is as loopy and overripe as Michael Haneke's French-language Oscar-winner was rigorous and austere, the movie is best thought of as the celluloid equivalent of those pulpy page-turners that go with us on holiday. You may feel guilty for devouring such material, but you'll stay with it to the very last and breathless moment.And Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Altman’s 1973 deconstruction of the private eye movie freely adapts and updates Raymond Chandler’s final completed novel from 1952. With Leigh Brackett (the remarkable female screenwriter who worked on Howard Hawks’s Chandler classic The Big Sleep in 1946 and The Empire Strikes Back in 1981) and his M*A*S*H star Elliott Gould, he offended purists, but caught some of Seventies LA's confusion.Gould’s Marlowe is a shambling anachronism, dawdling past his mostly half-naked, zonked hippie girl neighbours, callous police and psychotic criminals with the same laconic response: “It’s okay by Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2009 Niels Arden Oplev sent a lightning bolt through the multiplexes with his adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It was only a matter of time before a magpie in Hollywood noticed. They duly went about the business of re-adapting the film for people who can’t read pesky subtitles, and now the director has been summoned over the water to make his English-language debut. Across from Sweden he’s brought a lucky charm in the form of Noomi Rapace, who in turn has brought Lisbeth Salander’s motivation: vengeance.Not that we know this quite from the start. Lonesome Read more ...