America
Karen Krizanovich
The Frozen Ground, the debut feature of New Zealand director Scott Walker, takes place in Alaska in the 1980s. Based on a true story, it tells of cop Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage), who teams up with prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) to try and stop Jack Hansen (John Cusack) from killing again.Although mostly a standard issue police thriller, The Frozen Ground has some nicely balanced performances. Cage is allowed the weight and concern that his character, the dogged cop, requires. Hudgens tries a bit too hard in her role as the young mouthy prostitute, while Cusack is a little too Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At the risk of coming over a bit Daily Mail, my, hasn’t she grown up? I refer not to the career management decisions that have seen the former Disney Channel star turned head Belieber handed dubious photoshoots and sexed-up roles in Harmony Korine films, but rather to the fact that on Stars Dance the just-shy-of-21-year-old sounds about 35.It’s a well-established pattern, so it’s hard not to be cynical: child star reborn with raunchy new image; a first video (featured below) replete with writhing, heavy breathing and lyrics with a suitably subjugated message despite the appearance of sexual Read more ...
David Nice
How do you solve a problem like The Birth of a Nation? Do you admire the first part and turn away from the second (after all, the Germans screened The Sound of Music for years in a Nazi-free version ending with the marriage of Maria and Captain von Trapp)? Can you balance social, historical and aesthetic responses?My own were to admire every technique D W Griffith throws at the story-telling of the American Civil War as a fine, at times Tolstoyan interweaving of truth with the fiction of two families from north and south, only to throw in the towel at the flabbergasting rewritten history of Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“I hate these kids. Hate ‘em,” says Tanner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a handsome, mature commando who wants to help a bunch of high school football players save America from, yes, a North Korean invasion in the 2012 remake of John Milius’ and Kevin Reynolds’ 1984 right-wing fightfest Red Dawn. Competently directed by second unit/experienced stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, Red Dawn was shot then shelved before being recut by the studio marketers. This means Red Dawn never had a chance to shine. Hence, it has little to recommend it in any department – not music, direction, makeup, production design Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is something eminently smug and punchable about Robin Thicke. Born into a showbiz dynasty of US TV celebrities (media geek fact: his dad also composed the theme to Diff’rent Strokes), he appears to have lived a cossetted existence, writing slick, plastic sex songs for a multitude of stars from an early age while heavily involved in the epic artifice of TV talent shows. What’s not to loathe? Except that you don’t get signed to The Neptunes’ label or have Jay-Z work with you on the basis of dilettante dabbling. No, Thicke, punchable or no, can navigate his way around a pop song.His latest Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a summer awash with Russian ballet, at its best extravagant, limpid, spectacular - an experience of emotions processed through the eyes - a visit by an American company comes from a quite different sensory position: dance as intelligent motion, rhythmically schooled athleticism. While the American ballet was generated by a grandly classical Russian, George Balanchine, one of the things your eyes constantly search for in watching a US company is the way the Russian ballet genes, nurtured in Tsarist palaces, mutated when they met the bold, open-air, workaday grace over the Atlantic.Boston Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You've got a political scandal, so who ya gonna call? It had better be Olivia Pope, whose company Pope & Associates specialises in protecting the image and interest of the power-elite, frequently (though not exclusively) within the Washington DC Beltway.Olivia (a crisp, crunchy and aerodynamically power-dressed Kerry Washington) has serious crisis management credentials, having been Communications Director at the White House. Indeed, her connections reach right to the top, since she's also the ex-lover of President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). In fact not all that ex, since the Prez Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This movie has a couple of key advantages - it doesn't have any serial killers or zombies in it. It also pays the audience the compliment of assuming that it has a certain amount of intelligence, enough at least to appreciate being bamboozled by its relentless cleverness and convoluted trickery.It's a strange beast, though. I thoroughly enjoyed about 70 per cent of it as it took off on a whirling thrill-ride which seemed to defy the laws of physics and probability. But perhaps inevitably, all those spinning plates came crashing back to earth as director Louis Leterrier struggled to tie Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Mavis Staples keeps on comin': with a contralto voice soaked in gospel and soul, she delivers consistently heart-warming music.This is her second collaboration with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, a rocker with enough knowledge and taste to create a contemporary ambience in which Mavis can deliver classics such Washington Phillips’s spine-chilling religious classic “What are They Doing in Heaven Today” alongside Funkadelic’s secular lament “Can You Get to That”.Mavis grew up under her father’s musical and spiritual guidance: Pops was a Mississippi man, from the same plantations that gave us Charley Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Lucinda Williams’s current tour might be billed as “intimate”, but anyone who has seen her perform before will know that intimacy tends to come with the ticket. It is true, however, that this pared-down format, in which she performs drummerless and accompanied – splendidly – by Doug Pettibone and David Sutton on guitars, pedal steel, bass and harmonies, brings the audience even closer to her extraordinary voice and unflinching words. In Edinburgh last night, the effect wasn’t “intimate” so much as visceral: at times it felt like placing a microscope over an open wound.Two of the first three Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters. Brad Pitt's zombie flick - directed by Marc Quantum of Solace Forster - falls short all round, and makes the evolving characters and storylines of TV's The Walking Dead look positively Shakespearean by comparison.Spoilers are of course to be deplored, but the story here is so predictable that there's not a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lincoln was intended by Daniel Day-Lewis to reincarnate the face on Mount Rushmore: to give him sinew, sound and breath. This DVD’s extras show the film-makers’ efforts to help that process: real 19th-century clothing, accurate White House wallpaper and a jacket that hangs just right on Abe’s weary shoulders. “The words are the living part of him,” Day-Lewis explains, and the reedy voice he gives the folksy yet formal cadences in Tony Kushner’s screenplay sounds wryly resilient, and thin enough to snap in the buffeting winds of the Civil War’s climax. A yearning to relax, as he settles and Read more ...