Film
LFF 2012: After LuciaSunday, 21 October 2012
It’s the suffocating inevitability of what is done to the girl that makes you keep grimly watching. Mexican director Michel Franco’s film is about people with nowhere to turn, expressed most brutally in the bullying of its teenage heroine Alejandra... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Film Critic David ThomsonSaturday, 20 October 2012
Film critic and historian David Thomson has been writing on cinema for more than 40 years, and in that time has penned books both sprawling (1975’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film) and specific (2009’s The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock... Read more... |
LFF 2012: Song for MarionSaturday, 20 October 2012
Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity... Read more... |
LFF 2012: In the FogFriday, 19 October 2012
In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet... Read more... |
LFF 2012: It Was the SonFriday, 19 October 2012
Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by... Read more... |
DVD: The Big ComboFriday, 19 October 2012
Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955) isn’t as celebrated as Gun Crazy (1950), his other great film noir, but it’s as perverse and violent as anything in the canon. A vehicle for the husband-and-wife team of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace, it’s... Read more... |
Beasts of the Southern WildThursday, 18 October 2012
There’s more than a touch of the magic to come in Benh Zeitlin’s soaring 2008 short Glory at Sea, which sees a storm-ravaged community take to the sea to rescue their loved ones - who are anchored to the seabed in suspended animation. Zeitlin’s... Read more... |
LFF 2012: The SessionsWednesday, 17 October 2012
A sex comedy with a disabled hero involving frank sex scenes, a poignant drama about a man struggling to live a full life against the odds, and a love story prompted by the assertion “my penis speaks to me, Father Brendan.” The Sessions is all of... Read more... |
FrankenweenieWednesday, 17 October 2012
Who knew that Tim Burton remaking himself would, in effect, bring him back to creative life? Of three highly anticipated horror-based "family films" released this Halloween season, Burton’s Frankenweenie would seem like the rank outsider. A stop-... Read more... |
LFF 2012: EverydayWednesday, 17 October 2012
Michael Winterbottom’s Channel 4 commission for a film on prison life resulted in this five-year experiment in the passage of time for jailed Ian (John Simm) and his young family left on the outside. The oldest of the four child actors was almost... Read more... |
LFF 2012: The HuntTuesday, 16 October 2012
Featuring a towering, Cannes-award-winning performance from Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt (Jagten) is a humane and horrifying story of the power of accusation from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen).Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a kindergarten teacher... Read more... |
Ginger & RosaTuesday, 16 October 2012
The latest film from innovative firebrand Sally Potter is something of a surprise given her back catalogue. Her last feature, Rage (2009) premiered on mobile phones and the internet and comprised a series of to-the-camera monologues; the one before... Read more... |
