Film
emma.simmonds
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near suffocating intensity.Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) is our emotionally impotent, blank-slate narrator, blunted by a life that relentlessly deals him a losing hand. After his mother overdoses he is taken in by his Grandma “Smurf” (a stunning, Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), a “Mommie Dearest” mafioso who has raised a gang of armed robbers. A lumbering Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling. Instead they’ve been boarding at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Read more ...
james.woodall
It is resonantly famous, picking up plaudits from the off, with one Sight & Sound commentator claiming in 1962 that it was the "greatest film ever made", for which he'd been waiting "during the last 30 years". That now seems slightly hysterical, as it evidently isn't the greatest film ever made, and wasn't then. In it, nothing happens, many times, as opposed to Beckett's Godot - first seen eight years before - often vilified for tedium and in which at least, as critic Vivian Mercier pointed out, "nothing happens, twice". Beckett was a funny Irish poet-playwright. Robbe-Grillet (the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jean-Luc Godard has lived in self-exile for most of his film-making life, a now 80-year-old enfant terrible. After the seismic ruptures to film grammar in his self-aware, playful Sixties work, he largely abandoned narrative and popularity at the start of the Seventies. But his enduring idealism came through in a rare recent interview when, dismissing his more conventional and beloved nouvelle vague peers Truffaut and Chabrol, he sighed: “This was not the cinema we had dreamt of.” I haven’t seen much by him since 1967’s Weekend, for which I now suspect I should hang my head. Film Socialisme Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea. Geeky Hasidic kid from Brooklyn's claustrophobic Jewish community finds his attention wandering during his rabbinical studies, and falls under the raffish spell of the older and wilder Yosef Zimmerman. He finds the slope is slippery indeed, and with head-spinning speed he's enmeshed in a transatlantic drug-mule racket. He's making big piles of wedge, but losing his immortal soul in the process.Kevin Asch's directorial debut, which is based on the true story of a team of Hasidic smugglers who imported a million Ecstasy tablets from Amsterdam to the USA in 1998-99, has potential in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky. Above all, it’s a film which is buoyed – and which sometimes threatens to be sunk - by its own formidable ambition.The Tree of Life is only Malick’s fifth feature in a career spanning 38 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If you had a quid for every time a nerdy character in a contemporary comedy made reference to Star Wars, in particular to the gnomic wisdomous utterances of Yoda, you’d be richer. Maybe not as rich as George Lucas. But it happens. It happens a lot. A country short on mythology sources its gods and heroes in kiddie lit and stores them in the toy box. Over here we’ve got Homer. Over there they’ve got Marvel Comics. And this is how misguided films such as Super, films which have no idea how infantile they are, come to exist.There’s nothing intrinsically unsound about a postmodern ironic Read more ...