violence
emma.simmonds
A mean, muscular and unflinching display of concentrated brutality and shaved-down storytelling, the Spanish thriller Cell 211 is armed with the furious intensity of its caged environment and a chain of events which cascades like dominos over and beyond its prison walls. It’s an unlikely candidate for award-season acclaim, but Daniel Monzόn's film cheeringly arrives laden with Goyas - as if Spain’s strongest man had triumphed at a beauty pageant.Relative newcomer Alberto Ammann (pictured below right and left) is Juan Oliver, an eager-beaver trainee prison guard being shown the ropes ahead of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near suffocating intensity.Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) is our emotionally impotent, blank-slate narrator, blunted by a life that relentlessly deals him a losing hand. After his mother overdoses he is taken in by his Grandma “Smurf” (a stunning, Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), a “Mommie Dearest” mafioso who has raised a gang of armed robbers. A lumbering Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If you had a quid for every time a nerdy character in a contemporary comedy made reference to Star Wars, in particular to the gnomic wisdomous utterances of Yoda, you’d be richer. Maybe not as rich as George Lucas. But it happens. It happens a lot. A country short on mythology sources its gods and heroes in kiddie lit and stores them in the toy box. Over here we’ve got Homer. Over there they’ve got Marvel Comics. And this is how misguided films such as Super, films which have no idea how infantile they are, come to exist.There’s nothing intrinsically unsound about a postmodern ironic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the many strengths of new writing for the stage is that it’s not afraid to go into the darkest and most upsetting places of the human psyche. Whether at the Royal Court or at the Bush or Soho theatres, young playwrights have dived in to explore the grimmest reaches of our imaginations. Hundreds and Thousands, which opened last night, is Lou Ramsden’s powerful and compelling account of one family’s descent into a nightmare.Lorna is not unusual. She’s a frumpy thirtysomething who wants a baby. Unable to meet a suitable man, she tries speed dating. After thus hooking up with Allan, an ice Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Verbatim theatre has been the flavour of political theatre for the past two decades, and no theatre has done more to promote this style of public witnessing than the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London. Its artistic director, Nicolas Kent, has created a special style of verbatim drama called tribunal theatre, where the results of long-running public inquiries or trials are edited into an evening’s viewing. His latest venture, Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, which opened last night, illustrates the pros and cons of this type of infotainment.First the facts: at the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Peter Mullan’s incendiary and long-overdue third feature is an unflinching, often hilarious look at a teenager’s inexorable descent into delinquency. NEDS (or Non-Educated Delinquents) begins in Glasgow in 1972, immersed in a rosy haze of promise as the chubby-cheeked, saucer-eyed John McGill graduates from primary school. Moments later he’s being threatened with a beating to end all beatings by a malevolent peer.It’s a story told in academic milestones, violent street clashes and graffiti. When the talented scholar John starts secondary school his older brother Benny’s name adorns the walls Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Hanna begins with a bang, and there will be those for whom the excitement never lets up – especially if you like your action movies all but bereft of chat. The young assassin of the title scarcely needs words when her days are given over to taking careful aim. Sure, her father makes a case for the need for language, but determination and a good eye take the feral Hanna infinitely further than pleasantries such as “Hello”.Admirers of Joe Wright’s work on Atonement and Pride and Prejudice may ponder whether the English film-maker is atoning for those movies’ period pleasures this time out. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mark O’Rowe is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights, and Terminus was first produced in 2007 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It transferred to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and is now being revived by the Abbey in an international tour. His play charts another ordinary night in Dublin city, but as this captivating triptych unfolds the events his characters - simply named A, B and C - describe are anything but. A man and two women deliver a series of overlapping monologues about love, sex, loss, regret and acts of shocking violence, but also of angels transporting souls to the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Route Irish isn’t the St Patrick's Day parade along Fifth Avenue in New York, but the “most dangerous road in the world”, from Baghdad airport to the relative safety of the heavily fortified Green Zone. With impressively opportunistic timing, Route Irish’s makers release it the day after the Irish saint’s celebrations but anyone expecting shamrockery will be disappointed - Ken Loach’s latest is a smile-free affair set among the lawless private security firms that “supported” the allies after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Route Irish isn’t the St Patrick's Day parade along Fifth Avenue in New York Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This debut feature by writer/director Thomas Ikimi was shot in 22 days on an infinitesimal budget, and while it's easy to point out some obvious flaws, it's far more constructive to look at what Ikimi has achieved. Chiefly, he wrote a script intriguing enough to lure Idris Elba on board, and he not only agreed to play the central role of Malcolm Gray, but additionally gave the project a hefty professional shove.Consequently Ikimi also found himself directing another Wire alumnus, Clarke Peters, as well as Julian Wadham as the enigmatic arms dealer Gregor Salenko and Monique Gabriela Curnen, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Recently, some British playwrights have gone back to school, and found that it feels very much like a war zone. All the old tensions between teachers and pupils have escalated into open conflict: knives are drawn, punches thrown and arguments are settled by fights. Likewise, the language is disrespectful at best, and always expletive-heavy. Vivienne Franzmann’s new play, which visits London after opening in Manchester last month, frankly refers to a war zone in its title, and its action is scarcely less antagonistic.Like John Donnelly’s The Knowledge and Steve Waters’s Little Platoons, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The animals 17-year-old Josh Cody has to survive are his own criminal family. The Codys are hardly the Corleones. Led by sweetly smiling, grandmotherly matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver) as they fume and feud in Melbourne’s suburbs, this motley gang of five’s only outstanding quality is their ruthlessness. Deposited with them when his mum overdoses on drugs, the shy teenager navigates between armed robber Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) and wired drug dealer Uncle Craig (Sullivan Stapleton). Senior detective Leckie (a moustached, understated Guy Pearce) would also like a word, as Josh tries to Read more ...