love
Tom Birchenough
Among contemporary British documentarists Kim Longinotto has surely travelled the furthest afield internationally – Iran, Japan, Africa – to find her subjects. Love Is All brings her resoundingly back home to Britain, across a timeline that stretches from the very end of the 19th century when the moving image was born, right up to the present day. It’s a fluid anthology about human relations in every form you can imagine, drawn from both more formal feature and documentary films and informal footage from the archives of the British Film Institute and Yorkshire Film. Black and white material Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are two lucky people. They work in New York City where Ben paints and George teaches music. After they marry, the church school where George works fires him for being openly gay. Their life has come apart with the loss of one income. The couple must sell their co-operative flat and live apart - Ben with Elliot, his nephew (a convincing Darren E Burrows) and George with a couple of groovy gay cops (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez) one floor below their old flat. From there on, grumpus Ben looks on the dark side where George finds miracles in the Read more ...
David Nice
Eternal love is in the air, not seasonal fluff, at the Royal Opera this December. Later in the month Verdi’s most ecstatic duet, in Un ballo in maschera, will find his Riccardo and Amelia briefly playing Tristan and Isolde, very much in the shadow of not so much the greatest as the strangest love story ever told. Director Christof Loy underlines that strangeness and Wagner’s open questions at every point, never more heart-flippingly than when a big, middle-aged man lies full out on the floor singing “Let Tristan die” and his lover, on her knees behind him, leans over and declares tenderly but Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M.Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn’s (Chiara D’Anna) relationship is presented in a slyly funny manner with tinges of sadness delivering harsh truths about the dark side of devotion. Evelyn likes it rough and Cynthia Read more ...
Naima Khan
Performed by a cast of ten actor-musicians, Derek Bond's take on Shakespeare's comedy of gender-reversal and the constancy (or not) of love is melodic, quirky and at its absolute best when it loses all sense of seriousness. It takes a while to get there given the Bard's finicky set-up, but Bond delights throughout in the characters' foibles and sense of rebellion and he fearlessly works the audience into the show - which, presumably, is as they like it.Brothers Orlando and Oliver fight over their inheritance while cousins Rosalind and Celia look on. Rosalind and Orlando before long fall for Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Karen O’s first solo outing is an intimate confessional full of short, lo-fi, angst filled songs which mark a period in her life when she “wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again.” Recorded in private over 2006-2007 after a break-up with Spike Jonze the year previously, the album leaves the listener to ponder not only her mind-set at that time but the reasoning for making this heartfelt debut available now. Released under Julian Casablanca’s label Cult, and accompanied by a tour of small gigs, the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs' extraordinary front woman is currently showing no signs of despair. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Disney's latest is a film which must have itself represented a hell of a pitch. Based on a true story, it's basically Slumdog Millionaire meets Jerry Maguire - two films that attracted ample awards-interest and that prompted cascades of cash, like crunchy autumn leaves to be raked up by the sackful. Million Dollar Arm finds a hard-nosed sports agent travelling to India in search of the next baseball sensation, his method of selection - the titular talent contest.Jon Hamm makes the transition to the big screen lead look easy, usefully channelling his televisual alter-ego Don Draper to play JB Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The magically off-kilter Mood Indigo is based on Boris Vian's posthumously celebrated Surrealist novel L'écume des jours (1947), one translated title of which is "Froth on the Daydream" and another "Foam on the Daze". Literally, it means "The foam of the days" or, more ominously, "The scum of the days". As it transpires, director Michel Gondry gradually skims away the froth from the movie's surface to find a layer of poisonous scum underneath.What starts out as a pleasurably light boy-meets-girl fairytale gives way to a Gothic tragedy thick with decay and despair. Although its cause is a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For a film that begins with the remark "this is the truth, sorry", The Fault in Our Stars could up its honesty quotient. Slickly made and very nicely acted within the confines allowed by the script, Josh Boone's adaptation of John Green's young-adult blockbuster novel nonetheless can't help but sell candour (not to mention plausibility) down a tear-laden river in its tale of young love cut short by cancer. I was more or less going along with a narrative that sells its lack of sentimentality like a badge of honour - until a scene set at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam of such startling Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sadly the battle to shape stories from a female perspective, or even to tell stories about women is far from over. The Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University recently found that women represented only 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2013. If we look closer to home the most recent BFI statistics put the percentage of female directors working in the UK at just 8 percent (that's based on films released in the UK in 2012) - meaning this is even rarer than you'd think. So for a film to be directed by one woman and to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first line of his Wikipedia entry says that Tom Hardy "is an English actor" (he was born in Hammersmith), but for the 84 minute duration of Locke I was fully prepared to accept that he came from Llangollen or Llareggub. The film's narrative floats on Hardy's warming Welsh brogue like a boat navigating heaving tides and contrary currents, as his character Ivan Locke tries to cope with his life disintegrating around his ears.It's not easy to devise an entirely fresh form of film-making, but writer/director Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Dirty Pretty Things) has had a pretty good go here. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking. With his fifth feature - staring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin - Reitman Junior tries something different, something initially more dramatic, but ends up back in comic territory anyway, albeit unintentionally.Set in 1987 during the titular US holiday weekend and narrated by Tobey Maguire (who seems to do this a lot - see also The Ice Storm, Read more ...