Film Reviews
London Film Festival 2015: Who Dares Wins?Tuesday, 13 October 2015
How do you corral 250 films in a way which makes sense to potential viewers? Major releases – so far at this year’s LFF we've had Suffragette, Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van – pretty much take care of themselves. For the mostly unknown rest, festival director Clare Stewart introduced themed strands in 2012 with the stated aim of making the festival “much easier to navigate”. Read more... |
SicarioThursday, 08 October 2015
"I just wanna know what I'm getting into," states FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), not unreasonably, as she heads blindly down the rabbit hole. She emerges into a lawless land where bad guys rule, police fearfully follow and her own side's principles have become unrecognisably warped, with their tactics questionable and objectives increasingly hard to grasp. Read more... |
Red ArmyWednesday, 07 October 2015
There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades. Read more... |
MacbethFriday, 02 October 2015
The question of the Macbeths’ dead child is one of those Shakespearean quandaries, like Hamlet’s age, Iago’s cuckolding and Beatrice and Benedick’s earlier dalliance. How much do they really matter? In this new film version of the Scottish play, it’s all about the back story. Everything – Macbeth’s disdain for death in battle, Lady Macbeth’s descent into somnambulant madness – hinges on the loss of a child. Read more... |
Fidelio: Alice’s JourneyThursday, 01 October 2015
The title of French director Lucie Borleteau’s first feature conceals a range of meanings. Fidelio is both the name of the enormous maritime freight vessel on which most of the action takes places, and a clear hint at “fidelity”, a concept with which its independent heroine Alice (Ariane Labed) negotiates throughout. Read more... |
The MartianWednesday, 30 September 2015
How kind of the boffins at NASA to announce their spectacular discovery of water on Mars this week – giving a timely, real-science boost to the release of Ridley Scott’s The Martian. In truth, the film needs no such assistance. Despite following fast in the warp drive of Gravity, Interstellar and Scott’s own Prometheus, this fabulously entertaining film doesn’t suffer either through space fatigue or by comparison. Read more... |
Just JimSaturday, 26 September 2015
Craig Roberts first made his mark in Richard Ayoade’s 2010 debut feature Submarine, playing a socially inept Welsh teenager. For his own debut feature, as writer, director and lead, Roberts plays – well, a socially inept Welsh teenager. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable – and possibly even intentional, too. Read more... |
LifeFriday, 25 September 2015
In an age when film stars take selfies at the Oscars and photobomb other celebrities, and when the bashful have little control of their image saturating the internet, it may be hard to imagine a time when an actor could be on the verge of stardom without anyone having any idea who he was – or a moment when a photographer could have the inclination or intimate access that could actually touch on something truthful. Read more... |
Mia MadreFriday, 25 September 2015
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce. Read more... |
EverestFriday, 18 September 2015
I don't usually suffer from chattering teeth and attacks of vertigo while watching a movie, but as this panorama of Himalayan disaster reached its climax I began to fear that I might need paramedics and an emergency evacuation. Everest might not top the all-time charts in terms of plot development or character psychology, but as an immersive account of a horrific chain of real-life events, it reaches – I nearly said "summits" – its objectives with distressing potency. Read more... |
TangerinesThursday, 17 September 2015
Tangerines has a simple premise which is executed straightforwardly. Yet it proves affecting to a degree seemingly out of proportion to the proposition behind the film. A man living in a war zone finds that the conflict has, literally, come to his door. He takes in an injured survivor from each of the opposing sides and, as they come back to health, steers them to confront and accept each other’s humanity. Where there was neither, tolerance and respect are cultivated. Read more... |
A Girl at My DoorWednesday, 16 September 2015
When a lead character is warned that “it’s easier to be scrutinised in a small town”, it’s instantly clear they are not going to take the advice, keep their head down and make sure they don’t attract attention. In South Korean director July Jung’s first full-length feature, police chief Young-nam inevitably makes her presence felt soon after her arrival from Seoul in the southern coastal region of Yeosu. Read more... |
Horse MoneyTuesday, 15 September 2015
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a barrel; beside him stands a white woman with a filthy face. The former looks like he had enough wits to survive the squalour for a while, the latter looks doomed. Read more... |
Irrational ManFriday, 11 September 2015
When Immanuel Kant, the existentialists, and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point all get referenced right from the start, there can be no doubt that Irrational Man is on its way toward achieving the "total heaviosity" that its writer-director Woody Allen famously lampooned in Annie Hall. Read more... |
Misery Loves ComedyThursday, 10 September 2015
It’s a strong word, misery. It makes you think of unremitting sorrow, a darkness it’s difficult to see a way out of, unforgiving conditions that make life well-nigh unbearable. A fertile backdrop for a career in stand-up comedy, you might assume. But despite the promise of his film’s title, it’s a subject that veteran US actor and comedian Kevin Pollak hardly dares to touch in his bright, breezy but frustratingly lightweight debut feature. Read more... |
PasoliniWednesday, 09 September 2015
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense. Read more... |
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