Film
howard.male
Rather unjustly, this underrated 1976 thriller is best remembered for the dental torture scenes in which Laurence Olivier’s shiny-headed, shiny-spectacled Nazi, Dr Christian Szell, repeatedly asks Dustin Hoffman’s petrified and pain-crazed Levy if it’s safe or not, and Levy has no idea if the answer required is yes or no. But the rest of this movie is a much subtler, more involving affair than is suggested by a scene that is truly painful to watch . As an Olympic event, the marathon is about endurance as much as speed. For poor Levy the whole of John Schlesinger’s film is a test of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No matter how many war films come out about unbelievable suffering or astonishing heroism (and there are several around just now), there will always be more stories untold, hidden unlikely saints, overshadowed because some bigger movie did the job already. Schindler’s List did sterling work to lionise a “good” German; Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness compellingly brings to light a Polish sewer-worker who concealed 10 Jews from the Germans for 14 months underground.Holland doesn’t put a halo around Leopold “Poldek” Socha - when we first see him he is burgling a house, his potato face hard and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Reason dictates that Britain should win the four archery competitions at the Olympics, although we have accrued only two gold medals (both in 1908), two silvers, and five bronzes in the 14 Olympiads in which the sport has hitherto been included. So why the confidence? It is dictated by the aura of Robin Hood. One only has to turn to the opening verse of the poem Arthur Conan Doyle (himself a Scottish footballer, first-class cricketer, and golfer) included in The White Company, his 1891 novel of the Hundred Years War:What of the bow?The bow was made in England:Of true wood, of yew wood,The Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even in this year of years, it has to be accepted that not everyone has a soft spot for sport. Anyone answering to that description may well attempt to sprint, jump or pedal away from the coming onslaught, but if you are anywhere near a television, radio or computer, the five-ring circus is going to be hard to avoid for the next few weeks. Though an arts site devoted to noting, admiring and every so often deploring fresh developments on the cultural map, we felt we couldn’t entirely allow the biggest sporting event ever to visit the shores to pass entirely unnoted. So as of tomorrow, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In romantic comedy, the task of the leads is to overcome whatever obstacles are thrown in their way to find true love before the closing credits. In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, that imperative takes on a particular urgency. A larger obstacle awaits than the mutual antipathy that usually keeps the hero and heroine apart: namely, the eponymously predicted End of Days. An asteroid is heading Earthwards. Humanity has three weeks to put its affairs in order, get its insurance claims in and prepare to meet such Makers as exist.For certain parties that means ducking out of dead-end Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It’s hardly incredible for a film to focus on teenagers running wild, not least because teens are such reliably enthusiastic cinema-goers. US cinema in particular is riddled with youthful misbehaviour, with suburban kids coming of age whilst living large in films as variable in quality and tone as Thirteen, Youth in Revolt and Project X. In The Giants, from Belgian director Bouli Lanners (Eldorado), three teens go wild but in a very different way: they’re forced to return to nature as a consequence of parental neglect.The Giants presents its bleeding heart in the glossy wrapping of a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Massive commercial success usually buys an actor the right to bring a pet project to fruition. The Artist had not yet conquered the planet when The Players was cooked up. But its release in the UK – simultaneously in cinemas and on DVD, which says it all – is of note mainly because it features Jean Dujardin. Teamed with Gilles Lellouche, the two stubbly middle-aged roués explore the corridors and back passages of playing away, French style.The film’s original title is less euphemistic: Les infidèles is an adultery palimpsest whose original French poster (pictured right) caused a storm in a PC Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The lugubrious soulfulness of Adrien Brody is not to all tastes, and in many cases is wholly inappropriate, but his casting in Tony Kaye's downbeat meditation on education, or the lack of it, is masterly. Brody plays Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher drafted in to plug a temporary gap in a failing school in some unspecified American city. He has a natural gift for teaching, but by never taking up a permanent post he's able to avoid painful emotional attachments. He lingers just long enough to gives some of his pupils a glimpse of what learning actually means before snatching it away again. Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Having spent the last few years alternating deftly between high-profile, star-studded blockbusters (the Ocean’s trilogy, last year’s Contagion) and smaller, more niche projects starring largely unknowns (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience), Steven Soderbergh may have found his perfect middle ground. Male stripping dramedy Magic Mike pairs big names (Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey) with near-unknowns; it combines trashy visual pleasures with shrewd, straightforward character writing; it was made on a $7 million shoestring, and has already become a box office hit in the US. It is something Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apparently it’s the taking part that counts, which would explain why recent weeks have brought unseemly howls of protest and threats of litigation from British athletes who have failed to make it into the Olympic squad. You’d like to sit these people with their adamantine sense of entitlement in front of a couple of this week’s releases. One we know all about. Chariots of Fire has jogged back along the beach and onto cinema screens in time to remind us about all our amateur yesteryears. The ageless story of two British sprinters who defied the Establishment, it finds a remarkably good Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The great Spanish surrealist film-maker Luis Buñuel was 72 when he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but it is as madcap a piece of weirdness as ever he came up with. It also won him the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. One of the great things about Buñuel is that, while his films are unhinged, dipped deep in artsy satire and opaque avant-garde concepts, they remain supremely watchable entertainment, often very funny.Discreet Charm stars Fernando Rey as ambassador of the fictional Republic of Miranda and involves the foiled attempts by he and five friends to dine together. As the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If not as ensnaring as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, or Out of the Past, Otto Preminger’s urbane police procedural Laura is one of the best film noirs because it transcends the genre. It is an inverted women’s picture – about the hubris of a successful career girl cum Galatea – a savage critique of the decadence of Manhattan high society, and a commentary on the neurotic idealisation of beautiful women.It begins like Rebecca: the Wildean newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) musing, with the words “I shall never forget the weekend Laura Read more ...