Film Reviews

LFF 2012: Underground

Nick Hasted Friday, 12 October 2012

As Julian Assange continues to hold the world’s authorities at bay behind embassy doors, this new biopic offers Young Assange: a Melbourne teenager among the first generation of computer hackers, who cracked the Pentagon’s code on the Gulf War’s eve.

LFF 2012: Normal School

Demetrios Matheou Thursday, 11 October 2012

Argentine Celina Murga’s two feature films to date, Ana and the Others and A Week Alone, mark her out as one of the most original voices in a country chock full of talent. Those films are concerned with individuals – respectively, a young woman and a group of children – in search of an identity, in a society that is giving them little direction. Her first documentary, Escuela normal, investigates this question at source.

LFF 2012: End of Watch

Emma Simmonds Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Often portrayed as corrupt or, at best, on the front line of a war zone, the officers of the LAPD are regulars on the big and small screen. On TV, Southland and The Shield have examined the LAPD in microscopic detail and earlier this year Rampart intermittently impressed with its focus on one cop in freefall.

Hotel Transylvania

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Through a haunted forest and entered by a secret doorway is Dracula's castle - but this isn't where virgins are deflowered by the Transylvanian count; rather it's where he, a widower, dotes on his daughter and runs a hotel for his his monster mates. Hotel Transylvania is where Frankenstein's Monster and his wife Eunice, Wayne and Wanda Werewolf, the Invisible Man and all manner of ghouls and ghosties go for their holidays to take refuge from those nasty humans outside.

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On The Road

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 09 October 2012

This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze).

Love Tomorrow, Raindance Film Festival

Ismene Brown Monday, 08 October 2012

For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan.

Liberal Arts

Matt Wolf Friday, 05 October 2012

Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't.

Taken 2

Karen Krizanovich Friday, 05 October 2012

Like a Dirty Daddy Harry, Taken saw bad people get rough justice: if you kidnap a covert operator’s daughter, you'll be mercilessly tracked down and dispatched with giddy, impossible violence. In Taken 2, the whole family gets 'taken', making this sequel a study in scary togetherness. Conceived as a schlocky action vehicle for durable star Liam Neeson, Taken was a surprise hit.

Sinister

Nick Hasted Thursday, 04 October 2012

This year’s glut of haunted house films have been unusually, often painfully intimate. Elizabeth Olsen’s pure, panting terror in Silent House, like Gretchen Lodge’s depraved unravelling in Lovely Molly, added to the sub-genre’s essential horror: the thought that when you shut your front door you’re locking something awful inside, not out; that your home, every creaking floorboard and attic thud of it, isn’t a safe haven but an insidious foe.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Emma Dibdin Wednesday, 03 October 2012

Teenage angst is a tough thing to get right on screen. It's perenially popular territory for dramatic writers in part because of the heightened emotions it allows for – as Joss Whedon once phrased it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series which was in itself an extended metaphor for the horrors of high school, "everything feels like life or death when you're 16 years old."

The Campaign

Jasper Rees Thursday, 27 September 2012

Mostly thanks to Armando Iannucci, we are currently spoilt for political satire. Between the two of them Veep and The Thick of It have Westminster and Washington running for cover: to use that gratingly pious phrase, they speak truth to power. One behemoth that Iannucci has yet to bring down is the befuddling, clusterfucked idiocy of the American electoral machine.

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Holy Motors

Emma Simmonds Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric.

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Looper

Emma Simmonds Monday, 24 September 2012

Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright.

Barbara

james Woodall Monday, 24 September 2012

For a remarkable BBC Radio Four half-hour programme broadcast on 14 September, The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle, Chris Bowlby pieced together tales of treachery in the former German Democratic Republic. At one point a 1950s recording of a trial of a woman was played. Her cries above the rasping sound of the judge, if that’s what he was, sentencing her to death was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever heard.

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Killing Them Softly

Emma Simmonds Friday, 21 September 2012

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray.

Santa Sangre

Tom Birchenough Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Circus and church, and a whole lot of other extremes, come up against each other in bewildering opposition in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s re-released 1989 Santa Sangre, a cult film of which it could truly be said, “They don’t make them like this any more.” It’s practically a one-off, visually spectacular and musically vibrant; if you’re looking for equivalents, Buñuel, Ken Russell at his most hysterical, and the Italian horror-and-gore genre of the Seventies (think Berberian Sound...

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