Film
Adam Sweeting
The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.But, as Nick Broomfield’s new documentary reveals, none of this could protect her from a grasping family, parasitic hangers-on, and an unfaithful husband who aided and abetted her Read more ...
Alison Cole
As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just! – it closes on 25 June) duly attempts to rise to the challenge, with the publicity promising a “dramatic retelling of the life and creative journey of the original celebrity artist” and a film Read more ...
mark.kidel
One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon Brando ever directed, is a masterpiece by any reckoning, a classic western about love and treachery, as well as a startling and boundary-breaking re-invention of the genre.The tragedy unfolds, through many twists and turns, from a moment of betrayal that subsequently haunts two bank-robbers, Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden). The story focuses on Rio’s quest for revenge: after five years in a horrific Mexican prison, he comes upon Longworth, who has now re-invented himself as the sheriff of Monterey, California. The two actors, both originally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The best bit is in the trailer. It's the scene where Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) are inside a stricken Hercules transport aircraft as it suddenly plunges vertically out of the sky, leaving its occupants in weightless limbo as they struggle frantically to find parachutes so they can bale out. But it's too late – the ground comes screaming up to meet them, and poor Tom can't get out.It's a classic teeth-clenching Cruise set-piece of the kind he painstakingly builds into his Mission: Impossible movies, and it's a shame he didn't concoct a few more of them here. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For those of us still mourning John Hurt, this lovely HD restoration of the actor’s favourite film is a real joy. Made in 1975 for Thames Television, it’s stood the test of time remarkably well. Funny, moving and often cited as a turning point in British acceptance of homosexuality, The Naked Civil Servant is based on the aphoristic autobiography of Quentin Crisp, who famously described himself as “one of the stately homos of England”. Born Denis Pratt in 1908 into a respectable suburban family, he reinvented himself as the flamboyantly camp Quentin Crisp, rent-boy, artists’ model, Read more ...
graham.rickson
“People think babies are sweet. But this one’s bitter.” So squeaks Alice Lowe’s malevolent unborn daughter in the horror comedy Prevenge, prompting her heavily pregnant host Ruth to embark on a killing spree. Think of it as an unholy blend of Rosemary’s Baby, Sweeney Todd and Kind Hearts and Coronets, as Ruth seeks to murder those who she blames for the death of her lover in a climbing accident.Childbirth should be a celebration of love; here, it’s a very grim business indeed, Ruth’s body being subject to what she describes as a hostile takeover. Prevenge makes a virtue of its limited budget Read more ...
Matt Wolf
From the breathless questions posed at the beginning onwards, My Cousin Rachel charges forward like one of leading man Sam Claflin's fast-galloping steeds. Presumably eager not to let this period potboiler become staid, director Roger Michell swoops in on the characters for close-ups and lets his surging camera duck and dive where it may. The result certainly eclipses whatever memory people may have of the 1952 film of the same Daphne du Maurier novel, which heralded a young Richard Burton in the role Claflin takes here. But after a while, one wants to urge everyone to calm down. It's only a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You’re like a drowning man trying to wave at an ocean liner,” says lawyer Philip (Michael Sheen) to his uncle Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere as you’ve never seen him before – a revelation). “But I’m a good swimmer,” replies Norman, feverishly making notes on a napkin. Swimming, for Norman, means trying to network his way around New York City’s biggest Jewish names and make a deal. He’s a wannabe macher, a connector, always on the periphery, always on the verge of catastrophe. The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer is the film’s subtitle – a bit of a give-away.From the first Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s 1989 debut feature My 20th Century (Az én XX. Századom) opens on a grandiose scene depicting the first public demonstration of Thomas Edison’s electric light-bulb. We see the wonder of onlookers as they witness the new phenomenon, the brightness of light contrasting with surrounding darkness. The discovery would, in due course, give rise to cinema itself.Enyedi’s film is shot in glorious black and white (by master cinematographer Tibor Máthé, who with the director supervised this luminous HD restoration), and in the course of its complex, non-linear Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If one were to stop at the title, My Life as a Courgette – from the French Ma vie de Courgette and unsurprisingly renamed for those insular Americans as My Life As a Zucchini – could be too easily dismissed as a juvenile or childlike frivolity. And that would be to under-estimate this French-Swiss, Oscar-nominated, stop-motion animation, which is one of the more profound, touching and daring family films of recent years.Based on the French novel Autobiography of a Courgette by Gilles Paris, it follows the fortunes of a nine-year-old boy, Icare, nicknamed Courgette by his alcoholic mother, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Shepherd – original title El pastor – is a Spanish film which carried all before it at the Raindance Festival. It’s a very Raindance kind of movie. Shot on a low budget with a small cast, a single handheld camera shaking like a leaf, it sticks up for the little guy against a big bad corporate world. And it’s very much the vision of one sensibility: Jonathan Cenzual Burley wrote, shot, directed and produced it. It’s his third film - not bad for someone who only six years ago was a junior research on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.The shepherd of the title is Anselmo (Miguel Martín), a solitary Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is a master of family drama, carrying on the traditions of his illustrious predecessors Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. But these are not films of raised voices or open conflict, rather highly nuanced studies of the emotional dynamics between parents and children – differences across the generations – or partners whose relationships have cooled. There’s always a gently melancholic tinge, and Kore-eda has a particular gift for working with his child actors, movingly presenting their point of view on the issues that divide the adults who surround them.In Read more ...