violence
Adam Sweeting
You have to wonder if there any alternative themes permitted in TV drama apart from murder (preferably multiple, committed by a serial killer) or paedophilia. New five-parter The Fall plonks itself down squarely in category A, with its story of DS Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) from the Metropolitan Police arriving in Belfast to shake up a stalled murder inquiry.This one won't be a whodunnit but rather a howtheycatchim, since we were introduced to the perp only moments after we'd caught our first glimpse of Anderson, who was cleaning a murky-looking skin care product off her face in the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Whilst Zac Efron is getting urinated on in The Paperboy, his High School Musical co-star Vanessa Hudgens is taking the piss in an entirely different sense. In Spring Breakers Hudgens and Disney princess Selena Gomez bin their clean-cut images to hook up with James Franco's metal-mouthed miscreant during the US rites-of-passage party season. Harmony Korine's fifth feature gives us girls in bikinis packing heat. It revels in the fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me of it all and it's hard not to be seduced by its glamorously anarchic brand of entertainment.Spring Breakers follows four college Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its exuberant blood-spray, rambunctious dialogue and generous running time, Django Unchained is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s first full foray into Westerns. Although it’s not a remake, it pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, not only in name but in its use of the title song - which opens this movie as it opened that one - and in the fleeting appearance of the original's game star, Franco Nero (pictured below right).The year is 1858, two years before the American Civil War, and the setting "somewhere in Texas". We watch as a pair of slave trading brutes Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A dark night of the soul gets mined for maximum effect in Irish director Lenny Abrahamson's third film, a subdued yet infinitely disturbing portrait of a teenager, and by extension his community, undone by a sudden act of violence. Set among Dublin's comfortable Sandymount middle-class, the film couples an improvisatory vibe with a gathering sense of grief that brings Greek tragedy to mind. And when the movie's deliberately clamped-down feel cracks open, watch out: the howl it unleashes is terrifying to behold.Newcomer Jack Reynor (pictured below right with Roisin Murphy) gives a star-making Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
How could we have expected the London 2011 riots to be brought back for the big screen? The least likely answer must be as a black comedy about a bicycle cop who after a bad concussion has woken up as a one-man vigilante who’s taking out the villains on his beat, but asking their permission first. That last detail explains the title of Stuart Urban’s May I Kill U?, which brings this particular wayward member of her majesty’s constabulary rather into Carry On territory, with a twist of Ealing comedy on the side.The odds are already stacked towards absurdity when your hero’s called Baz Vartis, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As anyone who saw The Next Three Days, A Good Year, or Proof of Life will know, Russell Crowe has frequently been one to squander his talent in mediocre or plain terrible fare. His latest, The Man with the Iron Fists, is a 1970s-inspired martial arts menagerie which makes LA Confidential feel like a very long time ago. It’s an almost literal assault on the eyes and ears – entertainingly mad and fitfully bad. But at least this time Crowe looks like he’s having a ball, and to be fair you might too.The Man with the Iron Fists is the passion project of Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA (aka Robert Fitzgerald Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's only one Martin McDonagh as is proven anew by Seven Psychopaths, the latest from the London-born Irish playwright and erstwhile wunderkind who in recent years has transferred his brand of casual and often comic cruelty to the screen. Featuring a predominantly male ensemble that amounts to McDonagh's ad hoc repertory troupe, the film is cheerfully violent on all manner of topics including the nature of movie-making itself, and its "meta" quality is sure to divide audiences, who will either be entranced or irked by what's on view. McDonagh devotees can groove on a script that pokes Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright. If Brick was conceptually ambitious yet small-scale, Looper gives us filmic chutzpah with the budget (and stars) to match.It’s set predominantly in a dystopian 2044, in and around Kansas City, with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you saw previous Nick Love efforts like The Football Factory or Outlaw, you'll know he likes nothing better than a lairy swagger down Geezer Street while slaughtering innocent bystanders. He's at it again here, with this glaringly unnecessary remake of Seventies cop show The Sweeney, a TV institution that very nearly justifies the use of the crassly abused-to-death term "iconic".Love rightly decided that merely mimicking the original was neither possible nor desirable. Love wrongly decided to cast Ray Winstone as DI Jack Regan and Ben "Plan B" Drew as his stalwart sidekick, George Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores. In Berberian Sound Studio writer-director Peter Strickland takes this phenomenon as a mere starting point, following his self-financed debut Katalin Varga with Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Like most things about the suited, bespectacled image of Chris Brown that stares intensely at something to his right from his new album’s cool blue artwork (currently: the remains of the delicious spicy chicken pizza I had for dinner), the title Fortune is not an accident. For Brown has, as anybody who hasn’t been living under some pop culture rock these past three years, been a very fortunate lad. Although technically still on probation for the brutal assault of his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009, such is the esteem with which this man is held by his contemporaries in American pop that he Read more ...