biopic
emma.simmonds
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. She pitches her film perfectly, presenting an intimate portrait of a man struggling to live up to his own legend and maintain the momentum of a movement, filtered through the powerful story of a series of initially small, eventually seminal protests in the town of Selma, Alabama.Beginning in 1964, it follows King's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize with a crime of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s Turing versus Hawking, Cumberbatch v Redmayne, computer science v astrophysics, tragedy v the triumph of love. Ever since The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything appeared at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the head to head has been inevitable, leading all the way to the Oscars.The foremost battle is between the actors. As Cumberbatch fuelled his already sizeable reputation with his portrayal of the difficult, tortured and finally persecuted genius Alan Turing, so Redmayne has effectively sealed a place at the top table by expressing a man whose terrible affliction Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nothing proves a theory better than practice, and this is exactly what Norwegian adventurer-archaeologist-ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl did in 1947 when he and five companions sailed a raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove his hypothesis of how the Pacific islands were originally settled. He thought people first arrived there from the east, not the west, contravening the then-prevailing scientific orthodoxy. But Polynesians didn’t have boats, cried the establishment. Ah, but they had rafts, countered Heyerdahl. So he built one and launched it into an ocean whose currents it followed to Polynesia Read more ...
ellin.stein
James Brown has always been on my Desert Island Discs list, because, should despair threaten, his brand of propulsive funk could be guaranteed to make the castaway "Get Up Offa That Thing". But despite a compelling performance from Chadwick Boseman that vividly captures Brown’s blend of charisma, drive, self-absorption and business savvy, the film is short on Brown’s most defining characteristic – vitality. The result is a missed opportunity that ends up being good enough when it should be galvanizing.All the hallmarks of a modern musical master’s biopic – a booming genre – are there: the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game. This highly anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, who was not only a gifted mathematician but also an ultra-marathon runner, is made even more alluring by an exquisite cast of Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley and Alan Leech (Tom in Downton Abbey), with Charles Dance and Mark Strong muscling up pivotal supporting roles.This beautifully designed Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.And just as Topsy-Turvy was as Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Jimi Hendrix redux directed by John Ridley, Oscar-winning scriptwriter of 12 Years A Slave (and the underrated Undercover Brother, among others), was highly anticipated - especially as this take on the great guitarist’s life would not, apparently, feature any hits.Although this sounded like a deliberate plan, one suspects Ridley was hampered by a perennial film budgeting problem: soundtracks cost a lot. So, no greatest hits but snippets of covers work perfectly well to tell the story of Jimi’s breakthrough year 1966-67 – with Jimi well portrayed by the telegenic, talented and relaxed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mesmerising in her sustained emotional rawness, Emmanuelle Devos is at her empathetic best in Violette, a psychological study of a woman damned by her loveless childhood and what she perceived as her ugliness.Devos gave an impression of homeliness and dowdiness as the near-deaf secretary ridiculed by her colleagues in Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips, but in that 2001 film, as in Martin Provost's Violette Leduc biopic, she obliterated conventional value judgments about women's appearances. She has a habit, too, of rendering almost appealing negative qualities like neediness, self-consciousness Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite. But the film stints on precisely that aspect of the show that sends theatre audiences to their feet every night - namely, the music, which largely gets sacrificed on the altar of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Camille Claudel was not only Rodin’s student, mistress and muse, but a talented sculptor in her own right. Some years after the two parted, her mental health started to decline. In 1913 her family committed her first to a psychiatric hospital, then an asylum; but their actions appear to have been needless and cruel, the family persistently ignoring doctors’ recommendations that Camille be released. She would remain locked up until her death, some 30 years later. Bruno Dumont’s outstanding film charts three days near the start of Claudel’s incarceration in the asylum, during which time Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sometimes a film captures the imagination of the critical establishment for all the wrong reasons, and there's a scramble to see who can file the most entertainingly bitchy copy. And so it is with Grace of Monaco, which emerges from the vipers' nest that is the Cannes Film Festival (and from a very public spat between director Olivier Dahan and the co-chairman of the film's US distributor, Harvey Weinstein) covered in vicious puncture wounds, ridiculously ruffled and resigned to take it all over again on general release. But can it really be that awful?As expected - and as anyone looking Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It took the last 16 years of Nelson Mandela’s life, almost to the day, to bring his autobiography to the screen. South African producer Anant Singh eventually handed Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to British director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson to make a film for international audiences. The iconic weight of a violent rebel who became a living saint can’t wholly be thrown off in this authorised (though freely made) biopic. It does, though, remind you that Nelson Mandela was very far from Mother Teresa. Rough and earthy struggle preceded his Robben Island refinement into Read more ...