Film Reviews

RIPD

Jasper Rees Friday, 20 September 2013

Sometimes, a little bit of everything amounts to a whole lot of nothing. RIPD features a standard buddy cop caper bolted on to a heaven-can-wait drama channelling a body swap comedy also starring a CGI cartoon element. There’s even a heavy dollop of the old Wild West and a splodge of Armageddon alarmism. You get a grab-bag of half a dozen film styles jostling for attention. It must be like this teaching a classful of needy reception kids with ADD.

Cold Comes the Night

Nick Hasted Thursday, 19 September 2013

Build My Gallows High, Farewell, My Lovely: Cold Comes the Night. The cod-profound, slightly tortured syntax of its title is in the lineage of downbeat pulp fiction Tze Chun’s film aspires to.

Diana

Matt Wolf Wednesday, 18 September 2013

A film once touted as surefire Oscar bait instead looks set to clean up at the Golden Raspberry awards (or Razzies) if this preposterously inept biopic of the world's best-known woman finds the fate it deserves.

Kelly + Victor

Tom Birchenough Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Kieran Evans’s debut feature, adapted from the novel by Niall Griffiths, achieves a rare and accomplished sense of place in its depiction of Liverpool. It’s a place of chilly but not actually threatening cityscapes, with an air of space and windy sunshine, from which the film’s eponymous protagonists retreat into a private bedroom world.

DVD: Les Invisibles

Tom Birchenough Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age.

Comment

Metro Manila

Kieron Tyler Monday, 16 September 2013

The malign influence of the big city on countryside folk has fuelled filmmakers since cinema had the means to produce feature-length productions. In 1927, with the America-made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F. W. Murnau brought the disruptive forces of the urban to a farmer in the form of a woman. Following her back to city, he suffered the consequences.

In A World ...

Matt Wolf Friday, 13 September 2013

If you're going to make a film whose title mocks a particular tone of voice, it helps to have a voice of your own. And that turns out to be one of the many hugely beguiling aspects of In A World ... , the actress Lake Bell's first film trebling as writer-director after years playing goofball also-rans in films starring the likes of Meryl Streep.

Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, BBC Four

David Benedict Friday, 13 September 2013

BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.

The Artist and the Model

Demetrios Matheou Wednesday, 11 September 2013

One of the most mystifying of working relationships is that between an artist and model. For any sitter the experience must be tiring, if not tiresome, but for the artist their compliance is as integral as paint or clay; one may become famous, while the other remains anonymous, the silent partner in a work of art; there’s also the fact that, in the most common permutation, the arrangement involves a man staring for hours at a naked woman, without reproach – and where else can you find that...

Rush

Adam Sweeting Monday, 09 September 2013

In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.

Comment

Pieta

Tom Birchenough Saturday, 07 September 2013

We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...

Museum Hours

Graham Fuller Friday, 06 September 2013

How we look at and value art, the stuff we accumulate around us, and our daily surroundings; how we look at and communicate with each other (or avoid doing so in the digital age); and if we do or don't see: these are some of the themes explored in Museum Hours, an immersive docufiction made in Vienna by the experimental, socially progressive Brooklyn filmmaker Jem Cohen.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

Emma Dibdin Thursday, 05 September 2013

The question of what makes a romance click on screen – what combination of elements goes into creating that indefinable spark between two projected faces – is one of the most eternal for filmmakers. David Lowery’s wistful, lyrical neo-Western has just over 10 minutes to make you invest in doomed lovers Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) before fate and justice do them part, and succeeds with breathtaking ease.

About Time

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 04 September 2013

The news that Richard Curtis will not direct any more films after About Time (which he also wrote) was met with sadness in some quarters and undisguised glee in others. Curtis co-wrote Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Mr Bean, created Comic Relief and is an all-round good egg, but none the less stirs up real venom in those who find his other creation, the modern British romcom, sickeningly sweet.

No One Lives

Nick Hasted Tuesday, 03 September 2013

“Hannibal Lecter meets Jason Bourne”: that’s how director Ryuhei Kitamura unbeatably sells No One Lives’ indestructible serial killer hero. But his film is at its most interesting before it’s clear who Driver (Luke Evans, pictured below) is, or where we stand with anything that’s happening.

The Great Beauty

Emma Simmonds Monday, 02 September 2013

Paolo Sorrentino's latest opens with a Japanese tourist keeling over at the mere sight of an ancient Roman vista: he takes a snap and wipes the sweat from his brow before his fatal fall to the floor. As the Small Faces sang in "Itchycoo Park", for this gentleman at least, "It's all too beautiful." The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a love letter to Rome, in the vein of and as grandly ambitious as a Fellini, but don't be fooled by the title.