Film Reviews

LFF 2014: Foxcatcher

Karen Krizanovich Friday, 17 October 2014

There is loud Oscar talk surrounding the stellar performance by Steve Carell in director Bennett Miller’s genuinely unsettling Foxcatcher. Miller (Capote) tackles yet another true crime drama, this time following the steps leading to the murder of David Schultz, an Olympic wrestling champion. Top athletes need patrons and Schultz’s brother Mark (a truly exquisite performance by Channing Tatum) thought he’d found his in John E.

LFF 2014: Mommy

Katherine McLaughlin Friday, 17 October 2014

Motherly love is stretched to its very limits in Xavier Dolan’s deeply affecting melodrama. It's pitched to perfection and shot in a claustrophobic 1:1 aspect ratio, which is occasionally opened up to evoke a rush of liberating joy. This stylish and emotionally charged cinematic experience marks out the maturing of one of the most exciting filmmakers working today.

The Judge

Karen Krizanovich Thursday, 16 October 2014

The Judge is the Chaka Khan of movies: it’s every movie, it’s all in here. Directed by comedy specialist David Dobkin, there were high hopes for this first outing from Team Downey, Robert Jr & Susan Downey's production company. To ensure excitement, Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque’s script has enough plot for five films: The Judge is a crime drama, court thriller, family melodrama, bromance, romance and comedy.

LFF 2014: Phoenix

Nick Hasted Thursday, 16 October 2014

Director Christian Petzold avoided Germany’s grim version of heritage cinema – the war, the Wall – until last year’s Cold War hit Barbara.

Björk: Biophilia Live

Russ Coffey Wednesday, 15 October 2014

From David Attenborough’s spoken introduction to the blonde, robed backing singers, Biophilia Live sees Björk in full experimental flow. Sometimes the film seems almost as if documenting the ceremonial workings of a science-based cult rather than covering an avant-garde pop show. Musically it is reverent, the atmosphere is cerebral, and, above all, Björk’s persona is shamanistic.

LFF 2014: The Keeping Room

Katherine McLaughlin Wednesday, 15 October 2014

Indie actress Brit Marling takes aim at a rigid power structure in this tense and pared down female-led revisionist Western from British director Daniel Barber. Set towards the end of the American Civil war three women are grappling to survive and make sense of it all whilst the men battle it out and the world around them is burning to the ground.

LFF 2014: It Follows

Nick Hasted Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Few films this frightening are also so kind. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature starts with a pretty teenage girl suffering inexplicable, bone-snapping terror. He makes us wait to find out why, lingering in the lives of 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends in their deliberately timeless, golden, Spielbergian suburbs.

LFF 2014: Goodbye to Language

Nick Hasted Monday, 13 October 2014

Jean-Luc Godard is still masterfully riding new waves, more than 50 years after Breathless. Following Film Socialisme’s epic engagement with digital cinema, here 3D becomes a dazzling illusionist’s trick. Goodbye to Language drew laughs when I saw it for sheer chutzpah, but also in the way Georges Melies elicited gasps at cinema’s birth.

Cathedrals of Culture

Tom Birchenough Monday, 13 October 2014

Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.

LFF 2014: Wild Tales

Demetrios Matheou Monday, 13 October 2014

Argentine cinema is best known for its serious side – finely-honed arthouse fare from the likes of Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero and Lisandro Alonso. But the Argentines can do mainstream very well. And this is a big, bold, glossily-produced, highly entertaining black comedy – a collection of stand-alone stories connected by the theme of revenge, the practice of which is lent one spectacular expression after another.

LFF 2014: The Cut

Nick Hasted Saturday, 11 October 2014

There have been pitifully few films about the Ottoman Turks’ genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in World War One, surely thanks to the strategic usefulness of a modern Turkey which denies the genocide’s existence. Fatih Akin, the fierce German-Turkish director of Head On, doesn’t limit The Cut to its direct horrors either, preferring to sweep away his hero Nazaret (Tahir Rahim) on wider historical currents.

Comment

LFF 2014: Listen Up Philip

Emma Simmonds Saturday, 11 October 2014

Listen Up Philip is so successful in its retro stylings that it comes across like a lost New Hollywood gem.

LFF 2014: The Duke of Burgundy

Katherine McLaughlin Friday, 10 October 2014

Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M.

LFF 2014: Thou Wast Mild and Lovely

Emma Simmonds Friday, 10 October 2014

Ushering in the mucky-minded art-house crowd like the Pied Piper lining up kids for the snatching, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely describes itself as an erotic thriller set amidst the Kentucky wilds, while its fluid, meadow-fresh depiction of forbidden romance recalls Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. However, it's a film that turns surprisingly savage with 'hillbilly horror flick' a more apt description of where things end up.

LFF 2014: The Imitation Game

Karen Krizanovich Thursday, 09 October 2014

Benedict Cumberbatch leads a superb cast in The Imitation Game, the highly-anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, gifted mathematician and father of modern computing.

LFF 2014: Camp X-Ray

Demetrios Matheou Thursday, 09 October 2014

What can another film about American malfeasance in its War on Terror add to our knowledge and disapproval? Camp X-Ray has too narrow a scope to offer much; yet it’s impossible not to be affected by its depiction of utter hopelessness for those illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.