Film
DVD: The Colour of PomegranatesThursday, 01 September 2011
A master of visual cinema, primus inter pares, Sergei Paradjanov was a law unto himself in Soviet cinema of the 1960-1980s; his body of work from the Caucasus in that period is as visually innovative and brightly colourful as anything in cinema. A “... Read more... |
Fright NightWednesday, 31 August 2011
After 10 minutes in the company of Fright Night’s vacuous US teens I was thinking, like Colonel Kurtz, “Kill them all!” One of the several virtues of this remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy is that its writer, Marti Noxon, feels the same way.... Read more... |
DVD: HannaTuesday, 30 August 2011
It’s pretty damn cold inside the Arctic Circle, but Eric Bana’s former CIA agent Erik Heller doesn’t notice. Striding out of his wilderness cabin into metres-deep snow, he’s fine in a business suit. Demanding a catering-sized suspension of disbelief... Read more... |
Kill ListMonday, 29 August 2011
Ben Wheatley’s debut Down Terrace, about a Brighton crime family whose bickering resembles Abigail’s Party, then Macbeth, had almost no budget and was literally home-made. Many critics still realised that it was one of the best and most original... Read more... |
AttenbergSunday, 28 August 2011
In Attenberg Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari illustrates that there is no species on earth more peculiar than man. A hit at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, where its lead Ariane Labed rightfully claimed Best Actress, it is on... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director István SzabóSaturday, 27 August 2011
When I interviewed the great Hungarian film-maker István Szabó (b 1938) in his native Budapest, he took me on a tour of the city centre on the Pest side of the Danube. On the way we were distracted by a flashy café designed to lure tourists. It... Read more... |
Children of the RevolutionFriday, 26 August 2011
As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary... Read more... |
The Skin I Live InThursday, 25 August 2011
Cinematic virtuoso Pedro Almodóvar’s contribution to the body horror subgenre is a sumptuous nightmare with the precision and looming malevolence of its psychotic surgeon’s blade. His 19th feature is a film for our age – an age which has seen... Read more... |
DVD: IncendiesThursday, 25 August 2011
Watching Incendies leaves you winded. Although it can be read as a thriller, Incendies is a drama that offers no hints of where it’s going. When it gets there, it hits hard. It’s about more than Middle East conflict, more than a search for identity... Read more... |
R: Hit First, Hit HardestWednesday, 24 August 2011
You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing... Read more... |
One DayWednesday, 24 August 2011
Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than... Read more... |
Wuthering HeightsTuesday, 23 August 2011Emily B gets the Andrea Arnold treatment. Read more... |
