violence
emma.simmonds
Based on a novel by Kanae Minato, Tetsuya Nakashima’s provocative, serenely sinister thriller is fuelled by the murderous desire of its teens and the righteous anger of their teacher. Best known for the inebriated mania of Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, in Confessions Nakashima trades his outrageous rainbow hues for a distinctly funereal aesthetic. It’s as if a dark veil has been drawn across his signature style, with the film bowed in sombre recognition of its troubling subject matter.Confessions opens on familiar scenes of unruly schoolchildren, in this case Class B, who are all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters), as “personal but not autobiographical”, although it undoubtedly draws heavily on his working-class upbringing in 1970s Glasgow. He was, like his lead character John McGill, the academically gifted younger brother of a local hard man, determined to do well at school and escape the violent life he saw around him. Their father, as in the film, was a “raping, bullying alcoholic”.Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time, and a scruffy beard, can't dim the unshowy magnificence that is Robert Duvall, the actor's actor among American film stars who turned 80 earlier this month. That milestone might represent a cue in some quarters to hang up your cleats or, at least, to coast into old age via a kindly supporting role or two, of the sort Duvall essayed in Crazy Heart. But resting on such comparatively untaxing laurels is no more Duvall's style than it would be that of his latest assignment, Felix Bush, an avowed loner who says little but keeps a shotgun close at hand. Mess with him at your peril, and don't Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The multiplatform franchise might sound like a modern concept - the film that leads parallel lives as video game, TV spin-off, T-shirt and toy. But no, ‘twas ever thus. Entertainment moguls have always known how to squeeze every last dime out of a popular hit, none more than The Green Hornet. Created in Detroit as a radio drama in 1936, it has buzzed across the decades and the genres, from film to comics to television to fiction and back to comics again. It’s now returned to the big screen with a bang. And a nod and a wink.The Green Hornet was conceived as a different kind of superhero. By Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Two members of Thet Sambath’s immediate family were murdered during the Khmer Rouge’s time in power in Cambodia. His father was killed when he objected to the organisation's seizure of his property, while his mother was then forced into marriage with a Khmer Rouge militia. She died soon after following complications in childbirth. His older brother, who had witnessed the brutal murder of his father, was also later executed. Enemies of the People, a documentary made with Rob Lemkin, is Sambath's illuminating, admirably restrained insight into a brutal regime.Sambath has spent the past decade Read more ...
carole.woddis
It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been sent to prison twice now in the past four days. Last Friday it was Clean Break’s day-long six-play epic in Soho. Last night it was an 80-minute all-male affair at the Roundhouse. Needless to say the encounters were planets apart. Men, after all, come from Mars, already primed for battle, women from Venus. Philip Osment’s Inside, however, once again provides living proof of the absurdity of such simplistic, reductive analysis. People are people. Each individual has their own story to tell and is shaped by conditions and environment and what they have Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grime music, following its emergence from (mostly) East London clubs and pirate radio stations in the very early 2000s, was archetypical music of urban disaffection. Although it produced characters like the rambunctious Jammer and the oddly melancholic Trim among its legions of young rappers, its fundamental mode is of straight-up combat and threat – of gunplay and postcode rivalries, of “slewing” (killing), “murking” (killing) and “duppying” (go on, have a guess) rivals, of fury at unspecified “haters” – and the jagged rhythms and harsh tones of the music tended to back this up.So as the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If any play of the past two decades deserves the label legendary it must be Sarah Kane’s debut, which was condemned as “this disgusting feast of filth” on its arrival in 1995, but is now firmly ensconced in the canon of contemporary playwriting. Although the shock of its original production, which in retrospect simply heralded the appearance of a distinctive new voice, has led audiences to expect a similarly frightful experience every time it is revived, subsequent productions have emphasised the play’s poetry and its relevance.But, it must be admitted, the story does sound grim when you Read more ...
howard.male
”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green light) that it’s hard not to contemplate the notion that there’s some kind of grim finishing school that all blossoming sadistic bastards are obliged to attend before getting their licence to kill.But while Morse would have snorted dismissively at the machete-inflicted carnage and suggested to Lewis that it was time for a pint, DCI Banks - taking Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When cultural talk drifts toward Mr Big, thoughts tend to turn to Sex and the City's Chris Noth, whose New York is world enough and time away from the doomed metropolis populated by the "big fellah" played by Finbar Lynch in Richard Bean's play of the same name. This big guy is, in fact, slight but menacing: the type of man not unacquainted with the very methods of violence which Harold Pinter, among others, dramatised so well. And when Lynch's Costello remarks, "Unlike you, I am not mentally ill," one sits up and takes notice. The issue here has less to do with what Costello is not and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The constant strobing lights us white like we’re watching an Atom bomb test. From its garish credit sequence to the somehow inevitable vagina’s view of a penetrating penis, Enter the Void attempts assaultive cinema. You’d expect no less from Gaspar Noé, whose previous film Irreversible (2002) menaced audiences with the prospect of Monica Bellucci’s character’s real-time rape half-way through. The director is an idealist as much as a provocateur, as this long trip through the post-death visions of a murdered young American in Tokyo proves.We only see casual drug dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a difference the Atlantic makes. An abused, underprivileged boy tries to escape his neglectful mother and through the kindness of an unrelated adult discovers he has a rare talent that - a few ups and downs notwithstanding - eventually brings him a happy and fulfilling life. I could be describing The Blind Side, which deservedly delivered a best acting Oscar for Sandra Bullock, or even Precious, about an abused girl.In fact it’s Brit flick The Kid, the second film by Nick Moran, who came to fame as a cockney geezer in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but is now a writer Read more ...