Film Reviews
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... |
ElenaThursday, 25 October 2012
Elena is a story of two households, two families each unhappy in their own ways. Linking them is the title character (played by Nadezhda Markina, outstanding in a screen role that could have been written for her) who moves between two very different worlds that both speak truthfully about contemporary Russia. Read more... |
SisterWednesday, 24 October 2012
A tale of life at the foot of the slopes, French-Swiss director Ursula Meier’s follow-up to her likeably askew debut Home finds her once again zeroing in on an unusual domestic set-up. This time the focus is on a dysfunctional family, perilously pared down to just a 12-year-old boy and his irresponsible adult sister, who are scraping by on the money generated by the youngster’s gift for theft. Read more... |
Skyfall reviewTuesday, 23 October 2012
It's Bond number 23, and if you were to suggest to me that it was the best of the lot, I might very well agree with you. This is a terrific James Bond movie, thoughtfully written, shrewdly cast and taking stock of everything that the 50-year-old franchise has come to mean. But even if it wasn't a Bond film, it would still be darn good. Read more... |
Hello QuoMonday, 22 October 2012
We currently seem to be awash with rockumentaries. The Rolling Stones have yet another retrospective out, while Friday night on BBC Four would not be complete without dusting off the back catalogue of some mid-table band once adored by some nice middle-aged folk unable to find a babysitter. Read more... |
LFF 2012: The DelayMonday, 22 October 2012
As the London Film Festival finishes for another year, this study of the strain an ageing father’s decline puts on his daughter’s love will stay with me as much as anything. It’s Uruguayan director Rodrigo Pla’s third time at the LFF, but only The Zone (2007), his thriller about a young working-class robber trapped in a Mexican gated community after a murder, has found any sort of UK audience. The Delay confirms he’s a major talent whose films demand automatic release. Read more... |
LFF 2012: After LuciaSunday, 21 October 2012
It’s the suffocating inevitability of what is done to the girl that makes you keep grimly watching. Mexican director Michel Franco’s film is about people with nowhere to turn, expressed most brutally in the bullying of its teenage heroine Alejandra (Tessa Io). Read more... |
LFF 2012: Song for MarionSaturday, 20 October 2012
Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity unruffled. Song for Marion pairs him with one of his great Sixties peers, Vanessa Redgrave, as long-married Arthur and Marion. Read more... |
LFF 2012: In the FogFriday, 19 October 2012
In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet directors, most notably Elem Klimov in his visceral Come and See. Read more... |
LFF 2012: It Was the SonFriday, 19 October 2012
Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by passing contact with temptation. For Garrone’s far more sympathetic family, that’s the prospect of fame on Big Brother. Read more... |
Beasts of the Southern WildThursday, 18 October 2012
There’s more than a touch of the magic to come in Benh Zeitlin’s soaring 2008 short Glory at Sea, which sees a storm-ravaged community take to the sea to rescue their loved ones - who are anchored to the seabed in suspended animation. Zeitlin’s debut feature Beasts of the Southern Wild - which felled Sundance with its raggedy, semi-supernatural beauty – is certainly cut from the same generous-spirited cloth. Read more... |
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