Film
emma.simmonds
Once again bringing to screen the seemingly unfilmable (see also Naked Lunch and Crash), the audacious David Cronenberg takes on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel - a novel which in the last decade has become frighteningly pertinent. Respectfully retaining much of DeLillo’s original dialogue, Cosmopolis is a paranoid, loquacious nightmare, a sly, searing study of the alienated super rich, a meditation on greed, emptiness and jealousy. It’s set almost entirely within the comfortable cocoon of a stretch limousine which, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost science fiction-style space. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The press release for The Woman in the Fifth says it’s “a twisted and intense love story” that's about a “passionate and intense relationship”. It is, to a degree. But that undersells the film. As an oblique examination of mental breakdown, director Pawel Pawlikowski's film shares a lineage with Polanski’s Repulsion.The Woman in the Fifth adapts Douglas Kennedy’s novel. American author Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke, sporting an excellent haircut) arrives in Paris to seek out his estranged wife and their daughter. Whatever barriers there are between them are insurmountable – she has a restraining Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's nothing wrong with the film adaptation of the stage show Rock of Ages that more raunch and noise - oops, I meant noize - might not put right, assuming that an amiably dopy immersion in Eighties rock pop is your thing. One of those star-a-minute movies ("Look, there's Mary J Blige!"; "Wait, isn't that Catherine Zeta-Jones?") that may well have been more fun to make than it is to see, the director Adam Shankman enters into the flat-out silliness of the enterprise without fully embracing the correspondingly anarchic spirit. After all, how can you hope to deliver "Nothin' but a Good Time Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
From playing a blood-weeping Bond villain in 2006’s Casino Royale to his repeated collaborations with directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) and Susanne Bier (After The Wedding), Danish-born actor Mads Mikkelsen has carved out a respected niche on both sides of the pond. He can come out of questionable blockbuster material unscathed – as his recent turns in Clash of the Titans and The Three Musketeers demonstrate – and elevate good material with his relentlessly compelling, peculiarly intense screen presence.He’s recently been confirmed to play a villain in the follow-up to Kenneth Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hailed in some quarters for its gruelling realism in the depiction of the work of the Paris-based Child Protection Unit (the French call it La Brigade de Protection des Mineurs), Polisse is another French cop drama but with tiresome pretensions of social concern plastered on top. Actor/writer/co-director Maïwenn spent time embedded with the real-life mineurs-protecting cops and was able to observe ongoing cases, but though these have given her plenty of horrific or hair-raising raw material, the finished film fails to achieve convincing documentary weight, and doesn't feel plausible as drama Read more ...