Film Reviews

The Deep Blue Sea

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 24 November 2011

The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.

Moneyball

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 23 November 2011

It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the...

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Dream House

Nick Hasted Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Dream House’s crude selling point is the chance to see newly married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz co-star as Will and wife Libby, in the film they made just before their first date. In bed and around the home their characters have moved to with their two young daughters, they’re appropriately, easily affectionate.

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We Were Here

Ellin Stein Tuesday, 22 November 2011

The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward.

An African Election

ASH Smyth Tuesday, 22 November 2011

How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.

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Resistance

Dylan Moore Monday, 21 November 2011

What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough.

Snowtown

Nick Hasted Friday, 18 November 2011

Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals.

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Welcome to the Rileys

Graham Fuller Wednesday, 16 November 2011

As supremely silly as they are, the Twilight movies are made watchable by Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, whose combination of fidgetiness and aloofness puts me in mind of James Dean’s Cal Trask and Jim Stark.

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

Adam Sweeting Monday, 14 November 2011

Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making.

The Awakening

Matt Wolf Friday, 11 November 2011

Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot.

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The Rum Diary

Nick Hasted Thursday, 10 November 2011

In later years, when callow reporters would be sent to interview the wrecked legend Hunter S Thompson in his Colorado compound, at some point in the weekend, in between the drugs, booze and random gunfire that punctuated his days, the Gonzo journalist would betray unaccustomed nerves, and point his guest to a pile of typewritten pages. This was The Rum Diary, an attempted novel from the early Sixties he picked at for four decades.

The British Guide to Showing Off

Sarah Kent Tuesday, 08 November 2011

A glittering egg cracks open and, waving a magic wand, Andrew Logan emerges riding his sculpture of Pegasus, the winged horse. He flies across London to waiting friends and relatives and, with one touch of his miraculous wand, transforms them into sparkling glamour queens.

Wuthering Heights

alexandra Coghlan Monday, 07 November 2011

You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

william Ward Saturday, 05 November 2011

World cinema – like its cousin world music – is an awkward generic term that we generally apply to the output of those far-off countries or cultures about which we know (and perhaps if we are really honest, care) little.

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Oslo, August 31st/ The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)

Kieron Tyler Friday, 04 November 2011

Oslo, August 31st and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) share more than a release date. One is a melancholic existential meditation and the other ostensibly a horror film, but both openly draw from earlier films, focus on an outsider unable to connect with society and use capital cities as background noise rather than window dressing. One is wilfully unpleasant.

Junkhearts

Jasper Rees Thursday, 03 November 2011

British film-makers tend towards bipolarity. Where French cinema is broadly speaking about the middle classes, we tend to get films about one thing or the other. The national fixation with the past supplies stories about how the nabobs of yore lived (and, as importantly, dressed).