Film Reviews

Sundance London 2013: In A World...

Demetrios Matheou Friday, 26 April 2013

“In a world…” How many times have we heard this portentous introduction to a movie trailer, in a reverberating baritone whose seriousness is in stark contrast to the epic fluff it seeks to promote. Director/writer/star Lake Bell’s oddball and hugely likeable comedy makes up for some of the pain we’ve had to endure through such promos, by taking a peep into the world of the voice-over artists, whose finely-honed vocals are responsible.

The Look of Love

Demetrios Matheou Thursday, 25 April 2013

It may not be Scorsese and De Niro, but the partnership between Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan has been extremely fruitful.

Comment

Iron Man 3

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 24 April 2013

The only faintly cracked note in this zinging early-season blockbuster is that, just as spring belatedly puts in an appearance, the action is set around Christmas time, with snow, Christmas trees and even some Yuletide hip-hop beats. Still, think of it as just a further example of the smart counter-intuitiveness that director Shane Black (stepping in for Jon Favreau) has brought to the party, helping to make it the fizziest and funniest of the series so far.

Sundance London 2013: Touchy Feely

Demetrios Matheou Wednesday, 24 April 2013

I’ve always thought of Lynn Shelton as Sundance royalty. Her breakthrough film Humpday – the über-buddy movie with the amateur porn twist – screened at the festival, as did her follow-up, Your Sister’s Sister, which demonstrated that Shelton could handle more mainstream comedy-drama without losing her indie spontaneity.

Sundance London 2013: Upstream Color

Emma Simmonds Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Unburdened by conventional narrative sense, Upstream Color is a true curiosity. Seductively strange, woozily kinetic and above all romantic, Shane Carruth's second feature is a little film with big, bizarre ideas. Incorporating pig farming, scientific experimentation and sound recording, it proves that you don't need a sizeable production budget to swoop and soar on the big screen, and that you don't always need to know precisely what's going on to be immersed in a story.

Bernie

Emma Simmonds Monday, 22 April 2013

"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie Nugent. The format of the film is recognisable from countless documentaries: talking heads giving us the lowdown on a crime.

Promised Land

Karen Krizanovich Friday, 19 April 2013

Promised Land is much better than its poster suggests.

Love Is All You Need

Veronica Lee Thursday, 18 April 2013

Following in the footsteps of hugely popular television dramas and film adaptations of various Scandi noir novels comes this overwhelmingly sympathetic piece, a romcom that hasn't an ounce of gloopiness and, unusually, is about middle-aged people getting it together.

Olympus Has Fallen

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 17 April 2013

South Korea begging Washington for protection as the dread threat of nuclear apocalypse looms? As Graham Norton recently twitquipped, the news headlines are no more than the publicity campaign for Olympus Has Fallen. Most amusing etc, but that was before a bomb on an American street killed three and injured many others.

Evil Dead

Nick Hasted Tuesday, 16 April 2013

Down in the cellar where the monsters were in Sam Raimi’s 1982 debut The Evil Dead, you glimpsed a poster for Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, ripped symbolically in half. The bar for gruelling low-budget horror, Raimi was saying, had just been raised.

Rebellion

Adam Sweeting Monday, 15 April 2013

The 1988 uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia, in the Western Pacific, is apparently unknown to most French people, let alone we rosbifs, but director Mathieu Kassovitz has used the episode as a scalpel with which to probe issues of colonialism, race and political cynicism. It's something of a return to issues Kassovitz explored in La Haine (1995), following his excursions into the supernatural and sci-fi with Gothika and Babylon AD.

Oblivion

Emma Simmonds Friday, 12 April 2013

Director Joseph Kosinski's second film feels dispiritingly like his first, the bastion of excitement and originality that is TRON: Legacy. That film was an empty shell which at least managed not to be catastrophically irritating. Oblivion stars Tom Cruise, proving yet again that his ego is in inverse proportion to his physical stature.

Theorem

Demetrios Matheou Thursday, 11 April 2013

Terence Stamp has drolly recalled being over the moon when the Catholic church attacked Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, in which he starred, on its release in 1968. “It was a very obscure movie – it was going to be seen by four drag queens and Einstein. And when the Pope came out against it, everybody wanted to see it.”

Simon Killer

Emma Dibdin Wednesday, 10 April 2013

Blunted affect is one of the more troubling symptoms associated with certain kinds of mental illness – the face becomes a mask, the voice becomes a monotone and the eyes, far from windows into the soul, turn shuttered and dark. It’s this uneasy sense of vacancy, in both the lead character and the film’s attitude to his behaviour, which gives stranger-in-a-strange-land thriller Simon Killer its queasy power.

The Gatekeepers

Nick Hasted Wednesday, 10 April 2013

Retired spymasters, like retired diplomats, break their career reticence with particular relish, what they've known for so long in inverse proportion to what they can say. Dror Moreh’s remarkable interviews with the last six heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, shed light on strategies and tactics they were required to keep in the shadows in professional life.

The Place Beyond the Pines

Emma Simmonds Monday, 08 April 2013

"If you ride like lightning you're going to crash like thunder" Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendlesohn) tells his reckless partner-in-crime Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who will later be dubbed the "Moto Bandit". Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that threatens to do likewise, never quite keeping up with its own soaring ambition.