Film Reviews
Hide Your Smiling FacesMonday, 28 July 2014
Daniel Patrick Carbone is a director who makes his viewers work. That's not meant to sound intimidating at all, because the rewards of his first feature Hide Your Smiling Faces are considerable. But part of its achievement is that by the end we feel that we have assembled the truth, or rather a part of a truth, behind its spare, elliptical story rather in the way the director did in making it. Read more... |
Who Is Dayani Cristal?Friday, 25 July 2014
The struggle of the migrant journey from Mexico and Central America to el Norte has been much in the news recently, and, coincidentally, it’s a theme that cinema has been following too. After Diego Quemada-Diez's recent The Golden Dream, about teenagers who set out on that difficult route, Marc Silver’s drama-documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal? shows us a similar experience, though through a somewhat different lens. Read more... |
The Lady from ShanghaiThursday, 24 July 2014
There’s so much high drama and scandal surrounding the production of Orson Welles’ feverish cruise through the dark side of human nature it’s no surprise the resulting film is a bizarre labyrinthine of twists and tightly strung lunacy. Welles’s exorcism of personal and professional demons in this impassioned and witty tale of moral bankruptcy remains as compelling and confounding today as it was back in 1948. Read more... |
HerculesWednesday, 23 July 2014
A Grecian palace on a studio lot. Gods wander about among the plywood and polystyrene looking deific. As a child is raised to the heavens a voice(over) is heard to intone the following legend. Oracle: You don’t want to believe those myths you’ve read in boys’ own books about the heroes of ancient times. That Roger Lancelyn Green is so tediously on-message. Take the dozen labours of the demi-god Hercules… Read more... |
The Purge: AnarchyWednesday, 23 July 2014
The Purge is the night each year when the US government turns off the law and lets mayhem rule, allowing crimes including murder and rape. Just let it all out of your system, citizens, goes the official logic, and crime on the other 364 days will plummet. Read more... |
JoeMonday, 21 July 2014
David Gordon Green is a director who's certainly not afraid to confound. His CV includes indie gems George Washington, All the Real Girls, comedy smash Pineapple Express and medieval misfire Your Highness. His previous feature Prince Avalanche was made in secret and starred Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as mismatched highway workers; it was sensitively shot, unpredictable and determinedly oddball. Read more... |
I Am DivineFriday, 18 July 2014
Divine is a lot more than dog poop. The minute you mention Divine – born Glenn Milstead in Baltimore, star of John Waters’ cult classics such as Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble – mention of the famous scene in Pink Flamingos where the performer actually does consume canine faeces is almost obliterated. Read more... |
Grand CentralFriday, 18 July 2014
Finding a new angle for a forbidden romance film must be tough. Telling the story of a couple where one is married, in a relationship or in some other situation impeding the path of true love or lust is not enough. New settings are needed. In the French drama Grand Central, the problem is solved when love blossoms inside a nuclear power station and the surrounding encampment. Read more... |
Dawn of the Planet of the ApesThursday, 17 July 2014
Humankind's desperate struggle for survival is exquisitely rendered in this post-apocalyptic set sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves, the director of another end of the world type scenario in found footage film Cloverfield, takes the reins of this smart and attractive franchise and runs confidently with visceral wanton destruction and a blunt message about gun control. Read more... |
Norte, the End of HistoryTuesday, 15 July 2014
In the opening scene of Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History, the cash-strapped Fabian (Sid Lucero), a law school’s star student until he dropped out, sits in a trendy café pontificating to his friends about the absence of truth and meaning in the Philippines of the 21st century. Read more... |
Finding Vivian MaierMonday, 14 July 2014
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate the merely good from the truly great – and who would have expected that there are truly great photographers yet undiscovered, or even some that didn’t want to be discovered? Read more... |
Mr Morgan's Last LoveFriday, 11 July 2014
A May-September relationship is given a winter chill here. When Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), an American widower in Paris, meets pretty young dance instructor Pauline (Clemence Poesy) on a bus, the ageing male fantasy suggested by the title seems on the cards. A feel-good scene of grumpy, grieving Matthew joining in at Pauline’s dance class also prepares you for a lazy, age-gap romcom. Read more... |
BoyhoodWednesday, 09 July 2014
Coming-of-agers, of which we’ve seen an awful lot recently, focus on a turning point in a child’s life: not so much the moment they transition from child to adult as the moment a child is first drawn into the adult world - retreat might be possible but they emerge from the experience changed. Boyhood, from the ever ingenious Richard Linklater, offers a genuinely fresh and truly ambitious twist on this cinematic staple. Read more... |
Goltzius and the Pelican CompanyTuesday, 08 July 2014
Perhaps the most surprising - and certainly the most moving moment - of the 2014 British Academy Film Awards was the awarding of Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema to Peter Greenaway. Read more... |
Begin AgainMonday, 07 July 2014
Movies about the music industry often end up being bombastic or twee or merely idiotic. This one, written and directed by John Carney (who made 2006's not entirely dissimilar Once), picks its way carefully around the pitfalls to tell a story of love, loss and pop songs with sweetness and wit. You wouldn't automatically visualise Keira Knightley as Indie Pop Girl, but she... Read more... |
Digital Revolution, The Curve, BarbicanFriday, 04 July 2014
Digital Revolution begins with an archive section taking you back to the 1970s when Ralph Baer developed a video game allowing punters to play ping pong on TV (below right: poster for the original Pong arcade game) and Steve Jobs worked on Break Out, in which a virtual ball bounces off a bank of horizontal lines. Read more... |
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