Film Reviews

Silence

Kieron Tyler Tuesday, 06 August 2013

A taciturn, bearded Irishman leaves Berlin to return to his homeland. He’s travelling there to record silence. Arriving in Donegal, he wanders the countryside with a microphone trying to capture an environment where sounds made by humans do not intrude. In the rain and on moors, he stands or crouches with his equipment. Occasionally, someone encounters him.

The Conjuring

Emma Simmonds Friday, 02 August 2013

Things go bump in the night in James Wan's chilling latest, based on a supposedly true story. The Conjuring is an event horror movie, benefitting from a sizeable marketing budget and the distribution of a major studio (Warner Bros); appropriately enough it simply screams to be seen. And those looking for a touch of class to elevate their frights will find it heartening to hear that there's a leading role for Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga.

Heaven's Gate

Graham Fuller Thursday, 01 August 2013

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, waged a vigilante campaign against the region’s small farmers, settlers, and rustlers.

The Heat

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 31 July 2013

The basic set-up for The Heat is familiar – two mismatched cops are thrown together on a case and have to find a way of working together despite their differences in social background and methods – only in this case the officers are female.

Paradise: Hope

Nick Hasted Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Ulrich Seidl claims there’s a simple reason he goes easier on young teenager Melanie’s stumble through 21^st-century sexual desire and disaster than he did with her mum and aunt in Paradise: Love and Paradise: Faith. Going further with her requited crush on an adult would have involved exploiting his young star Melanie Lenz. So a director known for his provocations dutifully pulls up short.

Only God Forgives

Emma Simmonds Monday, 29 July 2013

Introducing his latest film at a preview screening, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn commented, "If Drive was like taking really good cocaine, Only God Forgives is like taking really good acid." It's an appropriate (and characteristically provocative) comparison - and if Only God Forgives is not quite the trip one might hope for, it's certainly hypnotising and alarming.

The Wolverine

Nick Hasted Friday, 26 July 2013

Wolverine is a second-division, third-generation Marvel superhero, and for all the care devoted to his sixth cinema outing, he remains the problem here. First introduced in 1974, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – comics’ Lennon and McCartney – were no longer on hand to conceive this metal-clawed lunk with the adolescently resonant weaknesses they gave Spider-man and the rest. Instead, Wolverine had over-wrought, tin-eared Chris Claremont to chronicle his key years as the star turn in the X-Men, a...

Dial M for Murder 3D

Kieron Tyler Thursday, 25 July 2013

Newly restored versions of old films in cinemas are commonplace. This revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is set apart due to it being in 3D, as it was originally intended to be seen. But unless you were able to catch it in the few American cinemas where it screened after its May 1954 New York premiere, the original has proved elusive, although 3D versions have surfaced intermittently.

Imagine... Woody Allen: A Documentary, BBC One

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 24 July 2013

You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.

Blackfish

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Oddly, there is quite a cinematic sub-genre starring killer whales. The killer’s first (and worst) lead role was opposite a hammy Richard Harris in Orca, a shameless attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to ape the success of Jaws. Then came Free Willy, which in three icky instalments repositioned killers as essentially cuddly.

Frances Ha

Emma Simmonds Monday, 22 July 2013

"I'm so embarrassed, I'm not a real person yet," Frances apologetically tells her date after she's forced to make a calamitous cashpoint dash when they're asked to settle their restaurant bill. This is the seventh film from writer-director - and sometime Wes Anderson collaborator - Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale).

The World's End

Jasper Rees Friday, 19 July 2013

Just three Cornettos: the trilogy accidentally named after an ice cream concludes here. Previously in the imaginations of actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, London has been invaded by zombies and a quiet English village by organised crime. In The World’s End, it’s the turn of a faceless Home Counties feeder town to fall under the influence of yet another B movie sub-genre.

The Frozen Ground

Karen Krizanovich Thursday, 18 July 2013

The Frozen Ground, the debut feature of New Zealand director Scott Walker, takes place in Alaska in the 1980s. Based on a true story, it tells of cop Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage), who teams up with prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) to try and stop Jack Hansen (John Cusack) from killing again.

Wadjda

Tom Birchenough Wednesday, 17 July 2013

In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both locally and beyond its native land? It was always going to be a tricky issue for Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first full-length feature to come out of Saudi Arabia, where cinemas simply do not exist – they are banned.

Easy Money

Adam Sweeting Monday, 15 July 2013

Based on Jens Lapidus's novel Snabba Cash (great title, even if it is meaningless to English-speakers), Easy Money is yet further evidence of the allure of the Scandi way of looking at the world. It's ostensibly a crime thriller, featuring healthy doses of violence and drug-dealing, but equally it's an examination of class warfare, divided loyalties and racial tension.

Pacific Rim

Adam Sweeting Friday, 12 July 2013

As a capsule description of Pacific Rim, "giant monsters versus giant robots" will do nicely. It tells the fantastical story of mankind's battle for survival against a bunch of enormous killer reptiles from outer space, known manga-ishly as "Kaiju", which now live in a "dimensional rift" at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.