violence
Tom Birchenough
Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.Tracking down, and ensuring the cooperation of the participants for Dogs… looked like it proved more challenging. No surprise when Read more ...
ellin.stein
In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. After an escalation of anxiety and machismo on both sides, one of the BART police shot the unarmed, handcuffed Grant in the back (he later claimed he thought he was firing his Taser) as the train waited in the station. The event Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ah, revenge. Why does something so bad sometimes feel so necessary? Particularly in its most bloodthirsty form, it's a concept well explored onscreen, from almost every western and martial arts film to the final act of so many horrors – and the entirety of the spectacularly absurd TV series currently showing on E4, which is so obsessed with the idea it couldn't be called anything other than Revenge. But what do those determined to get their own back truly hope to achieve, and where does an eye for an eye actually end?Jeremy Saulnier's follow-up to the little-seen Murder Party deals with the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After reinvigorating the actioner in 2011 with The Raid and its furious flurry of feet and fists, what next for the obscenely talented Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans? More of the same? Well, not quite. The sequel widens its net and extends its running-time, taking the action from a Jakarta tower block to the city's streets and dividing its time between the gangs competing for control of the city. Returning are Evans' martial arts muse Iko Uwais (with whom this marks his third collaboration) and the almost embarrassingly exciting ultra-violence.Just as computer games have evolved their Read more ...
emma.simmonds
300: Rise of an Empire is the follow-up to perhaps the most homoerotic film of all time, 300 - a film whose obsession with the well-lubricated muscularity of the male form was matched only by its unabashed exaltation of ultra-violence (rendered endlessly and often tediously in slow-mo). It was hardly high art or sound history, but it had aesthetic bravado and a certain logic, with the strangely sexy battles effectively evoking the Spartan idea of a glorious death. 300 was less swords and sandals, more pants and posturing and its sequel delivers (too) much of the same.The original's director Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At some point during Non-Stop - a mostly serviceable though increasingly nuts peril-on-a-plane movie - I began to doubt that Liam Neeson had ever had a credible career. Recently we've seen him starring in assorted nonsense such as Battleship and Wrath of the Titans and if you go back a few years you'll recall him looking bored in The Phantom Menace. But what we've gotten particularly used to is Neeson as the middle-aged action man, the skull cruncher from the pretty hideous Taken movies. There might have been a time when we thought he was elevating such films with his presence, but I think Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)Writer-director Quentin Tarantino proves once again he’s a master filmmaker with this double Oscar-winning revenge drama which reinvents the Western for a modern audience. The central cast are all Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
No definitive answers to what was "the best" of 2013 of course, and I daresay opinions will differ wildly. For instance, despite the plaudits showered on it elsewhere, I felt that Broadchurch stretched itself too thin after showing initial promise. An increasingly acute allergy to serial killer dramas meant I couldn't get too involved with Tony Grisoni's Southcliffe, let alone The Fall, with its extended, voyeuristic murder scenes. Being Netflix-free (he confesses sheepishly), I haven't caught up with House of Cards yet, or the conclusion of Breaking Bad, but obviously a profound shift in our Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Among the multiple achievements of American Psycho, any one of which might be enough to make Rupert Goold's long-awaited Almeida season-opener the banner musical of a notably busy year for the form, a particular paradox deserves mention up front. Here's a piece steeped in material (the Bret Easton Ellis novel from 1991 and its film version nine years later) that fetishises surfaces and wallows in emptiness and that - a grand hurrah! - turns out itself to have a lot to say.I had feared in advance that the show might devolve into a blank celebration of late-Eighties blankness as per the book Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reactions to Only God Forgives are going to be defined by expectations. Its star, Ryan Gosling, is an all-purpose arts polymath equally at home with music and film, who has directed and written as well as acted. Its director, the Danish-born Nicolas Winding Refn, has no problems with pushing genres beyond their limits despite working within America’s film industry. Gosling was in Refn’s 2011 film Drive, and their follow-up might have been expected to develop that film’s approach by once again hyper-stylising the familiar.To some extent, Only God Forgives does. But it also goes further – and Read more ...
David Nice
How many reviews of War Requiem do you want to read in Britten centenary year? This is theartsdesk’s fourth, and my second – simply because though I reckon one live performance every five years is enough, Rattle’s much-anticipated Berlin Philharmonic interpretation fell almost entirely flat, and I wanted to hear at least one good enough to move me to tears.Last night’s under the special circumstances of Remembrance Sunday wasn’t just good; it hit the heights and plumbed the depths, with no weak link in any of the soloists, choirs, orchestra or instrumental soloists. So much so that the tears Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
In a deranged world where Charlie Sheen is President of the United States, Hollywood gets a much-deserved and highly amusing roasting. Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to Machete goes straight for the jugular by mocking Hollywood's golden child, that "galaxy far, far away" film franchise - which doggedly refuses to sling its hook. Rodriguez not only flips his middle finger at reboots and outworn action clichés, he also takes jabs at US foreign policy and the controversy surrounding the Mexican border fence.In keeping with the absurd humour of the previous film, POTUS demands that Machete (played Read more ...