Film
Jasper Rees
In the last 25 years anything and everything has become possible in cinema. The budgets got bigger, the SFX more spectacular (and the audience ever more infantilised). By rights Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the first film that cost $100 million to shoot, should now look dated. This release proves otherwise. Everything about the Terminator sequel, arriving seven long years after the original, stands the test of the time.A bit like Garbo laughing, the concept of Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the good guy was a quantum leap in star branding. As he explains in the extras, he wasn’t that keen on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Doing work” is the phrase that inmates of California’s New Folsom Prison have adopted to describe the group psychotherapy sessions that have been run there for more than 15 years now. Given that Folsom is a Level-4 penitentiary, in which murder is the least of the convictions for those imprisoned, most of whom will remain locked up there for the rest of their lives, issues of access and trust must have been as challenging as any documentary-maker could expect to encounter.How The Work co-director Jairus McLeary came to resolve them is a story in itself (of which more later), but the fact Read more ...
Matt Wolf
No movie that folds Toby Jones of all people into a Gallic entourage headed by Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the two as formidable as one might wish, is going to be without interest. Nor is it likely that the ever-severe Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke would title something Happy End without irony coursing from every pore.But the bizarre fact of the matter is that for all its grimly compelling goings-on, the latest from the auteur creator of Amour, Funny Games and others risks sending itself up. You can't look away as the motley assemblage on view do devious or difficult Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s shameful to admit it, but it’s perhaps rather surprising that a film about a fashion photographer and designer should end up being so profoundly moving and inspiring. Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s deft biopic about Cecil Beaton starts off dancing across the surface of his achievements – his iconic fashion images; his striking photographs of the royal family; his sumptuous designs for My Fair Lady, Gigi and other movies. But by the end, the director achieves a really rather remarkable portrait of a complex, cussed and equally remarkable man, one whose work continues to exert a profound Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Genuine emotion does battle with gerrymandered feeling in Wonder, which at least proves that the young star of Room, Jacob Tremblay, is no one-film wonder himself. Playing a pre-teen Brooklynite who yearns to be seen as more than the facial disfigurement that announces him to the world, Tremblay is astonishing once more in a movie that feels as if it wants to break free of the formulaic but can't quite bring itself to do so. When the director Stephen Chbosky keeps the focus on 10-year-old Auggie's domestic life – that's to say the scenes involving his interactions with his mum and dad Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jabberwocky is all the more enjoyable once you get past what it isn’t; Terry Gilliam’s 1977 directorial debut is a medieval romp starring Michael Palin and a short-lived Terry Jones, but audiences shouldn’t expect a Monty Python film. Gilliam and Palin’s bonus commentary is a joy, Gilliam describing his relief at “not having to be funny all the time,” free to let this baggy, rambling tale unfold at a more stately pace. There are many mirthsome moments, but Gilliam admits that Jabberwocky “is more quirky than funny.”The inspiration for Gilliam and screenwriter Charles Aveson was the nonsense Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The myth of Modigliani, the archetypal tortured artist, was set in train while he was still alive and remains potent almost a century after his death. Every so often a few game academics try to put things straight, and now Tate Modern’s exhibition reappraises his considerable output not through the broken lens of his addiction, but in the sober daylight of his influences and milieu. The tragic glamour of Modigliani’s life proves endlessly hard to resist though, and critics and scholars alike continue to conflate his life with his work, his paintings treated as fatally biographical, to be Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you’re hoping for an incisive look at Fifties American suburbia in this unappealing film, directed and co-written by George Clooney, you’ll be disappointed. It’s hardly worthy of the director of Good Night, and Good Luck, also set in the Fifties and co-written by Grant Heslov. It could have been much more satisfying if Clooney and Heslov had stuck with the original plan and explored the timely real-life story Suburbicon is partly based on – the racist riots sparked off by an African-American family moving into Levittown, an all-white suburb in Pennsylvania, in 1957. But instead, Clooney Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Breaking up is hard to do, sang Neil Sedaka, and Mercedes Grower plays out that sentiment in a quirky, original and often funny film, which neatly subverts Hollywood romcom tropes.It's an episodic piece (with a stellar cast) that cuts between nine couples breaking up with resignation or despair, angrily or comically. There's some unbearably honest writing, but also some rather less accomplished scenes that have the feel of improvised material.And some stories work better than others, but there are a couple that stand out. Julia Davis is wonderful as Livy, a self-obsessed, talent-free actress Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to experience of its two 14-year-old protagonists, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), in which the film’s twin themes, coming of age and coming out, become uneasily intertwined.Gudmundsson opens his story at a leisurely pace – and, at a few minutes over the two-hour mark, there’s no calling its rhythm hurried – as we discover the Read more ...