America
Tom Birchenough
Did they get the president? That’s the benchmark question viewers will ask of any new film from documentary house par excellence Brook Lapping and producer Norma Percy ever since they secured an interview with Slobodan Milosevic for their landmark The Death of Yugoslavia. Their strike rate has rather dropped off lately. Even though – or because? – he was the subject of the outfit’s recent Putin, Russia and the West, that wasn't enough to convince the current master of the Kremlin to participate.Brook Lapping's new three-parter, The Iraq War, has a similar dearth of the number-one men: George Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You gotta love Diane Keaton all the way from Annie Hall to Something's Gotta Give, but even her natural effervescence can't enliven The Big Wedding, a starry celluloid venture that is landing in cinemas briefly on its way presumably to an airplane near you. An in-flight video might in fact minimise the overriding coarseness of a venture whose brazen impulses don't hold up well to large-screen scrutiny. Whatever the context, Keaton's ageless charms are worth pondering, as is a film industry that increasingly seems not to know what to do with any of its senior crop of actresses, with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s something profoundly infantile about Quentin Tarantino’s quest to right the wrongs of history. Last time round he was retroactively bitchslapping the Nazis for the Holocaust. Here he’s punishing Americans who accrued obscene wealth out of slavery. In both films baddies galore get royally ketchupped. What’s next? Backdated justice for the Injuns? Oh shoot, Disney already pulled off that judicial backflip in Pocahontas.Django Unchained is a kind of spaghetti Blaxploitation epic. It’s immensely entertaining in bits – usually when Christoph Waltz is on screen reprising his casuistical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour?But the film is what it is rather than what it isn't, and most of what we got was fascinating, and often terrific. In an opening collage of quotes from Bowie, Whately banged home the point that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You don't have to be a fan of The Hangover franchise to get most of the jokes in Part III, although it certainly helps. How else would you understand why the line “It all ends tonight” is so funny, or why the arrival of Mr Chow causes such hilarity in the audience?For those just tuning in, The Hangover (2009) followed the Wolfpack, a bunch of friends - high-school teacher Phil (Bradley Cooper), dimwitted rich boy Alan, pompous dentist Stu (Ed Helms) and boring stiff-shirt Doug (Justin Bartha) as they went to Las Vegas on a stag weekend before Doug's marriage to Alan's sister. Mayhem, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Every May the townspeople of Monroeville, Alabama, the home of Harper Lee, perform Christopher Sergel’s theatrical adaptation of Lee’s acclaimed, much beloved novel, on the grounds of the county courthouse. It’s a potent, somehow ironic demonstration of the enduring regard for the novel, in the very part of America whose racial intolerance Lee exposed.It’s one thing performing, and seeing this story of the Deep South in its steamy locale, where even the shade is “sweltering” and “men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning”, another outdoors in a still painfully chilly London May. But Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens takes its title from the Atlantic City Monopoly property, connoting the New Jersey resort’s then imminent future as a board game for real-estate developers. The conman Jason Staebler (Bruce Dern) acknowledges its status thus when his younger brother David (Jack Nicholson) arrives in town to bail him out of jail.Jason also imports David to persuade him to join in his fantastical scheme of acquiring and running a casino on an island north of Hawaii. David isn’t expected to invest in the deal, only to enjoy its fruits: the corrupt, cynical world of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The mothership has landed. After a year or so of countless stage adaptations ranging from a recitation of the novel in its entirety to a themed party and (just this week) a dance piece, Baz Luhrmann's celluloid version of The Great Gatsby has finally arrived in all its superhero-style 3D scale and scope. So, is this Gatsby great? Not by some measure, and for every moment of inspiration and ingenuity comes another that fails both its literary source and Luhrmann's own instincts. Only in terms of the title character does the film deliver on the adjective that gets written out before us in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
US drama is a funny thing. Given the obsession certain parts of the press have with the stuff, there are some shows whose names you will be familiar with regardless of whether you’ve ever seen an episode. But while your social media feed has been working itself up into a frenzy over Game of Thrones, and counting down the days until Breaking Bad is back on, there is one show that has been quietly brilliant throughout that you probably haven’t heard of.As its fourth season gets underway on this side of the Atlantic, Justified has only gotten better since the last time theartsdesk checked 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 ...
garth.cartwright
Jazzfest has managed to succeed as a mainstream rock festival. The first weekend’s headliners on the main Acura Stage included John Mayer, Billy Joel and Dave Matthews, while this weekend promises Fleetwood Mac, Maroon 5 and The Black Keys. If the aforementioned suggest a festival devoted to AOR chart-topping US rock, then understand that the festival’s organisers allow the superstars to drag in suburban rock fans, thus underwriting the rich regional music flavours that dominate most of the other 11 stages.Admittedly, the Acura Stage did also host local legends Dr John and Allen Toussaint , Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Occasionally an ensemble cast comes along that makes you want to get down on your knees and give praise to the movie gods; A.C.O.D. (Adult Children of Divorce) has such a cast. The directorial debut of Stu Zicherman brings together Parks and Recreation stars Adam Scott and Amy Poehler and expertly tosses into the mix Oscar-nominee Richard Jenkins, along with bona-fide comic geniuses Jane Lynch and Catherine O'Hara. And that's just for starters.Scott plays the neurotic, cynical Carter, ever-the-peacemaker for his acrimoniously divorced parents (Jenkins and O'Hara): "You have turned a nine-year Read more ...