Film Reviews
End of WatchFriday, 23 November 2012
There's a temptation to roll your eyeballs upwards when you hear Jake Gyllenhaal's introductory voice-over, which sounds like a corny photocopied mission statement they dish out to all new recruits to the LAPD. "I am Fate with a badge and a gun," he tells us, in his role as Officer Brian Taylor. He didn't make the laws, but he will uphold them with as much force as it takes. The police are the thin blue line. Read more... |
Silver Linings PlaybookThursday, 22 November 2012
If Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games had somehow left you in any doubt about the magnetic screen presence of Jennifer Lawrence, prepare to surrender your remaining misgivings. Playing outspoken, emotionally damaged young widow Tiffany, Lawrence is a firecracker, a powder keg, a force of nature. Read more... |
GambitWednesday, 21 November 2012
It’s Gambit in name only. Producer Mike Lobell struggled for 14 years to bring the remake of this beloved caper to the big screen. In so doing, he has broken the new rule of Hollywood: Thou Shalt Not Remake Something Good, especially if you’ve gutted and purged the original story from its redolently good title. Read more... |
Crossfire HurricaneSaturday, 17 November 2012
What a year for great British institutions. Sixty years of Elizabeth II, 50 years of James Bond, and a half-century of the Rolling Stones. To recycle an even older cliche, we will never see the like of any of them again. Read more... |
Hit So HardFriday, 16 November 2012
If the subtitle - The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel - didn't make it clear enough, Hit So Hard was never going to be your average "rockumentary". Read more... |
The MasterThursday, 15 November 2012
In The Master, it is the hand that matters. Lancaster Dodd is the charismatic leader of a cult-like therapy/religion similar to Scientology, its lengthy, non-sensical "processes" aiming at metaphysical time travel. But that isn't important. In fact, nothing is important about the plot of The Master. It works, in tailor’s terms, on “the hand” - the way it feels. Read more... |
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2Wednesday, 14 November 2012
The last gasp of the Twilight franchise is really quite good, fugueing on the idea that if vampires live forever, wouldn’t it be great if a vampire fell in love with a human being - and didn’t drink her to death? As irresistible as that seems, there are times over its run when the Twilight franchise seemed to work against itself - what with huge idiotic CGI wolves that are neither scary nor realistic, etc. Read more... |
AmourMonday, 12 November 2012
In the 1960s the Kiwi cartoonist Kim Casali started the comic strip Love is… which mawkishly defined love in a series of statements like, “Love is…being able to say you are sorry” - messages still printed on Valentine’s cards to this day. In Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winning latest, however, love is measured and told in pain: amour means longevity, dedication and the willingness to make difficult decisions. Read more... |
AlpsSaturday, 10 November 2012
Sometimes the premise of a film is so intriguing that you wonder how any story could live up to it. Alps is such a film. The title refers to the name given by the leader of a small group whose members impersonate the dead to help the recently bereaved. It puts you in mind of Bart Layton’s The Imposter, released earlier this year, in which a Frenchman in his twenties impersonates a missing Texan teenager. Read more... |
My Brother the DevilFriday, 09 November 2012
There must be a way out of their Hackney council estate life for brothers Rashid (James Floyd, very sharp on screen here) and Mo (non-professional Fady Elsayed), whose claustrophic home life lived (more or less) to traditional parental rules, contrasts with the energy of the streets outside, where drug-dealing is the most lucrative occupation and there’s always a hint of violence in the air. Read more... |
AuroraWednesday, 07 November 2012
Three hours is a testing length for any film. Directors may stretch to that because they’re telling a huge story with plenty of plots and characters, but in Aurora, Romania's Cristi Puiu pares down plot, such as it is, to an absolute minimum. Elements of semi-documentary set in, as we watch his hero Viorel (played by Puiu himself in his first screen role) move disaffectedly through contemporary Bucharest. Read more... |
ArgoMonday, 05 November 2012
No one can resist a story based on declassified truth and in Argo’s case, no one should. The broad strokes of this so-ridiculous-it-must-be-true tale involve six American hostages who escape the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1979. They hole up at the Canadian ambassador’s house while the Iranian military are slowly discovering that some of their hostages are missing and the American government is trying all sorts of idiotic plans to get these hostages back. Read more... |
Rust and BoneThursday, 01 November 2012
Considering that his last film was set in a prison, it’s perhaps appropriate to say that Jacques Audiard has an arresting track record. The French director has made a handful of very impressive features (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) but it was when he donned a knuckle-duster for his unflinching tale of prison life, A Prophet, that Audiard really knocked many of us sideways. Expectations are then high for the film that follows. Read more... |
Halloween Special: The Shining/ExcisionWednesday, 31 October 2012
The Shining isn’t the worst horror film ever made. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about blocked, alcoholic writer Jack Torrance’s deadly winter as caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel is certainly as extraordinary as anything he directed. Read more... |
Keep the Lights OnSunday, 28 October 2012
American indie director Ira Sachs’s last film was Married Life, and he returns to similar territory in Keep the Lights On, which could just as easily be titled Scenes from a Relationship. Episodes over the decade from 1998 onwards tell the story of the coming together - and falling apart - of a New York gay relationship, one that Sachs has said draws on his own life. Read more... |
It Always Rains on SundayFriday, 26 October 2012
As the title suggests, It Always Rains on Sunday wasn’t one of Ealing Studios' famous comedies, but a film suffused with resignation and realism. That’s not to say the 1947 classic is monotonous: how could it be when it’s a bickering domestic drama, a panoramic portrait of Bethnal Green street culture, and a thriller that draws on French poetic realism and American film noir? And given its provenance, it does at least include a wryly comic story about petty criminals. Read more... |
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