Film
Adam Sweeting
Ever since the first Planet of the Apes film in 1968, in which astronaut Charlton Heston landed on a futuristic Earth being run by super-evolved apes, the idea has become a sci-fi staple, breeding a string of sequels, spin-offs and TV series. Tim Burton remade the original flick in 2001, but despite enjoying commercial success, it was viewed with contempt by Apes cognoscenti.Better luck this time? Director Rupert Wyatt's new foray into simian mythology takes its cue from 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, in which monkey mastermind Caesar led an ape rebellion against humankind, but Read more ...
joe.muggs
This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Every shonky visual effect, every discordant stab of strings as the camera's point of view creeps up behind a character, every window that blows open extinguishing a candle: these are meat and potatoes to sketch writers, and this makes it hard to watch these episodes with a straight face... at first.Sit down and watch the episodes in full, Read more ...
alex.kotlowitz
Twenty-four years ago, I found myself hanging out virtually every day in the Henry Horner Homes, a Chicago housing project on the city's hardscrabble West Side. I had begun to immerse myself in the lives of two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, in an effort to understand what it means to be growing up poor in the world's wealthiest nation. Mother Teresa had visited this neighbourhood just a few years earlier, and what so struck her was not the poverty of the pocketbook - she had certainly seen worse in India - but rather what she called “the poverty of the spirit”. Indeed, it was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Spare, slow and beautiful, Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist Western is an effective allegory about bad leadership in America, but it’s as a minimalist tribute to women pioneers that it excels.Inspired by the worst disaster to take place on the Oregon Trail, it hardly shows the extent of that tragedy. In reality, 150-300 wagons set out from Boise City in August 1845 and were led astray by the scout Stephen Meek (1807-86), whose cluelessness caused 24 deaths; maybe another 20 perished after the journey. Reichardt had three wagons at her disposal - each contains a pioneer couple, and one a young Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mid-August Lunch (2009) was the most purely enjoyable of the welcome new wave of Italian films. Watching its writer-director Gianni Di Gregorio, then 59, star as a failed Roman rogue with a lived-in face, swigging wine while failing to corral his irascible mother (movie debutante Valeria de Franciscis Bandoni, 93) and her ancient cronies, this was la dolce vita lived amiably on the bottom rung. In a summer of lazy remakes and sequels, this odd couple’s swift return in Salt of Life is a delight.This isn’t strictly a sequel but, as when Chaplin would bring back the Tramp, another variation on Read more ...
james.woodall
Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Elbowings, buttings, anklings, maimings, studdings, anarcho-thespian handbaggings – the figure formerly known as the man in black is the thin line between the beautiful game and the collapse of civilised society as we know it. And what is his reward? Players abuse him. Crowds bay for his blood. Presidents call for his execution (Polish ones do anyway). To misquote Liverpool fans quoting Oscar Hammerstein II, he’ll ever walk alone. Who’d be one?Football nowadays brings out the right-winger in one (and I’m not referring to the old-fashioned five-three-two formation). As a lapsed and, of course Read more ...
David Nice
“I wanna blow you all… a kiss” are our hapless heroine’s first and last words in this opera dealing with Anna Nicole Smith's real-life rise and fall in strip-cartoon, morality-ballad style. But it’s not by any means the shallow, voyeuristic tack-fest you might have expected from, among others, the creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera.That’s Richard Thomas, whose words have their fair share of cheap thrills. But here he’s in harness with a composer, Mark-Anthony Turnage, as well as a director (the ever-amazing Richard Jones) and a conductor (Royal Opera helmsman Antonio Pappano) who know how Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having masterminded the existential fantasy of Lost, reinvented Star Trek and served up the monster-on-the-loose rampage of Cloverfield, JJ Abrams now comes trampling all over Steven Spielberg's favourite turf of homely, nostalgic American suburbia. He can feel Spielberg's benign hand resting on his shoulder though, since the Big 'berg co-produced and brought aboard several of his favourite sound and visual effects specialists.Plot-wise, it's the summer of 1979 - we know this from an introductory blast of ELO's "Don't Bring me Down" - and we're in the small town of Killian, Ohio, where many Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having masterminded the existential fantasy of Lost, reinvented Star Trek and served up the monster-on-the-loose rampage of Cloverfield, JJ Abrams now comes trampling all over Steven Spielberg's favourite turf of a homely, nostalgic America. He can feel Spielberg's benign hand resting on his shoulder though, since the Big 'Berg co-produced and brought aboard several of his favourite sound and visual effects specialists.Plot-wise, it's the summer of 1979 - we know this from an introductory blast of ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" - and we're in the small town of Killian, Ohio, where many of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive preserve, the film chronicles both the eponymous Sarah, a young girl who survives the French internment camps, and Julia, a Paris-based American journalist in the modern day whose life is taken over by Sarah's story. Are the film's two parts of equal value? Let's just say that fiction yet again is trumped by fact.That the contemporary sequences achieve Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There is an interesting tension at the Sarajevo Film Festival which, though this was my first time, I suspect exists as a matter of course. And this is a tension between the spirit of the people I meet here – ebullient, good-humoured and indefatigable (they really know how to party) – and the films themselves, which suggest a country and a region still reeling from the turmoil of its recent past. It’s a strange experience, then, poised between light and gloom.The origins of the festival embody this tension. It began in 1995, in the midst of the Siege of Sarajevo, one of the many cultural Read more ...