Film
ash.smyth
Attention! Required viewing: Jon Shenk’s Maldivian climate-change documentary, The Island President, starring one Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed in the title role.What might be called a natural sequel - or codicil, anyway - to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, The Island President tells the story of Nasheed’s long struggle against the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, his imprisonment, his exile, and his eventual jubilant ascension to the presidency in 2008 - only to discover that his country was sinking into the sea.To lose one island may be considered a misfortune; to lose 2,000… So it’s the run Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It sounded like a good idea at the time - go and see colossal special-effects epic at an IMAX cinema in 3D. There was even a fleeting pre-show visit from the stars, Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington, who play Zeus and his son Perseus respectively. However, having just about managed to say "Hello, enjoy the film," the pair of them couldn't get out of there fast enough.Perhaps they felt that nothing they could say would help, because Wrath of the Titans is a baffling mash-up of Greek mythology which seeks to batter the viewer into stupefaction with an almost continuous barrage of monsters, Read more ...
william.ward
Now here is something genuinely original and genuinely innovative coming out of Italian cinema, a very welcome surprise. Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature film has a freshness of outlook and a sharpness of overview that could put many of her more venerable rivals in Italy to shame. Corpo Celeste – Heavenly Body – based on the novel by acclaimed Anna Maria Ortese - recounts the story of 13-year-old Marta (Yle Vianello) and her somewhat traumatic return to the city of her birth in Southern Italy after spending the last 10 years in Switzerland as the daughter of poor immigrants. The most Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not hugely to the advantage of Hugo that its release on disc opens with a trailer for The Artist. The two homages to cinema’s silent age slugged it out for supremacy at this year’s Academy Awards. Where Martin Scorsese’s first foray into both 3D and children’s narrative justly cleaned up in all the technical categories, on the small screen there is less disguising the frailties of a redemptive story adapted from Brian Selznick’s breezeblock novel.Hugo Cabret’s clockwork lair remains a sumptuous visual treat, as is the bustling world of the Parisian station whose timepieces he Read more ...
fisun.guner
With only a modest, handheld camera and an iPhone at his disposal, the internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi shot this film in secret whilst under house arrest. His close friend, and co-director of this film, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, then smuggled it into France hidden in a cake as a last-minute submission to Cannes last year. Made whilst awaiting his appeal for a six-year prison sentence and a film-making ban of 20 years for publicly supporting the opposition party in Iran’s 2009 election, the film bravely and eloquently attempts to circumvent these restrictions: he is not " Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home. In Tiny Furniture the colourfully calamitous, low-key adventures of Dunham’s alter Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the most refreshing aspects of current Latin American cinema, most evident in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, is a particular brand of off-beat romantic comedy – one with echoes of the literate and quirky US independents of the Eighties and Nineties, of Hartley, Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, but laced with melancholy and shards of realism that are specifically Latin.Bonsai, from Chile, is a delightful example of this. Adapted from Alejandro Zambra’s novella by writer/director Cristián Jiménez, it is an individual and wonderfully playful film, teasing us with intimations of rom-com, before Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Theo Angelopoulos (pictured below) was hit and killed by a motorcyclist on 24 January, as this now final collection of his work was readied. The films of this 76-year-old Palme d’Or-winner (for 1998’s Eternity and a Day, included) wrestled with the tragic recent history of his native Greece and Balkans at sometimes notorious, slowly unfolding length. An old-time maestro aspiring to novelistic depth, he lured Willem Dafoe, Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz and Irene Jacob to his unintended swansong, 2008’s The Dust of Time (unreleased in the UK in any form till now). These DVDs are an elegy to the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Into the Abyss sees celebrated German filmmaker Werner Herzog take a sharp turn away from those marvels of early man he so magnificently captured in the stereoscopic Cave of Forgotten Dreams to the shocking violence of which humanity is also capable, here both greed-fuelled and state-sanctioned. It’s a documentary which takes as its focus a multiple homicide and is both an anatomy of a (triple) murder and a passionate, if frequently askew, petition against the death penalty.Wearing his anti-capital punishment stance proudly from the outset, Herzog delves into the 2001 murder of Sandra Stotler Read more ...
ash.smyth
A couple of nights ago I went to a book launch at Waterstone’s, Notting Hill, for a collection of un-illustrated short stories (Household Worms) by a visual artist (Stanley Donwood) perhaps best known for his work in the music industry (producing iconic record covers for Radiohead).This invitation-only party was a circus of extroverted introverts: women in bow ties, men sporting double-breasted Van Gogh jackets, and almost everyone with “interesting” hair. Think the geekier end of the Radiohead fanbase crossed with, well, the west-London literary scene. Eyes closed, though, it was pretty good Read more ...