Film
Nick Hasted
Exposed is a film suffering from blunt force trauma to the head. Director Gee Malik Linton’s name only remains as screenwriter after his largely Spanish-language film – more meaningfully called Daughter of God and centring on Dominican-New Yorkers – had a helpful supporting role from producer Keanu Reeves greatly expanded by its US distributor, hoping to transform it into a Keanu cop movie. What’s left is a film of two halves, one with Ana de Armas starring and one with Reeves, intercut with a meat cleaver and stumbling with unsteady gait, barely recognisable to each other. Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
Secret in Their Eyes is not a mystery-thriller that leaves us pondering for long “whodunit”. The focus is on how two investigators and a Deputy District Attorney can relinquish obsessions that have glued them to a murder case for 13 years. This is a story of longings, obsession, and the inability to move on from events unaccounted for by justice. Written and directed by Billy Ray (who was Oscar-nominated for his Captain Phillips script), Secret in Their Eyes is based on Juan Jose Campanella’s 2009 El Secreto De Sus Ojos, which won the 2010 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Ray’s Read more ...
David Kettle
The set-up behind Spanish film-maker Álvaro Longoria’s intelligent documentary on North Korea is almost as bizarre and unlikely as the regime he’s attempting to probe.Having felt compelled for several years to make a film about the country, he’s finally allowed to travel there thanks to intermediary and fellow Spaniard Alejandro Cao de Benós (pictured below), the North Korean government’s sole foreign employee (we’re told), and a passionate, unquestioning supporter of the regime. Permitted to film whatever he wants to (as long he’s accompanied by government guides, and as long as it’s what Read more ...
graham.rickson
Taxi Tehran fits neatly into a recent tradition of films set entirely in cars; Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth comes to mind, as well as Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten. Initially we’re led to believe that we’re watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary, assembled from dashboard footage shot on a cheap digital camera by director Jafar Panahi as he drives a taxi through the streets of Tehran. There’s inevitably more to it; that the various passengers’ conversations are scripted becomes quickly apparent, despite the winningly natural performances which Panahi draws from his uncredited cast.Already banned Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s always a slight sinking feeling when the first words to appear onscreen are "Based on a True Story". The first worry is that it’s a story you already know, and the movie will lack any narrative surprises, the second that it will be a Good Cause. Sadly, Freeheld doesn’t dodge these pitfalls, despite a quality cast. This has to be blamed on the predictable script by Ron Nyswaner (of Philadelphia fame) and Peter Sollet’s by-the-numbers directing. Set in the mid-Noughties, it’s the tale of a dedicated New Jersey police detective, Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), who falls in love with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Colm Tóibín’s work has always eluded the attention of filmmakers. It took Nick Hornby, a writer who knows his way along the obstacle-strewn pathway between page and screen, to effect a beautifully smooth transition of his 2009 novel Brooklyn. The DVD arrives on the back of a BAFTA for best British film. In truth, Hornby is the most British thing about it. Like Tóibín, director John Crowley and Saoirse Ronan are Irish, while the story is set in the author’s native Enniscorthy and the eponymous Brooklyn, the Ireland in exile to which his young protagonist Eilis travels in search of work in the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a film which, if you want to see it in a cinema, needs to be caught fast. It’s unlikely to please big crowds. Chronic won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2015 and its elliptical narrative will certainly stay with you, but it’s not a joyous experience.Tim Roth plays David, a nurse who specialises in the care of dying patients in their homes. When we first see him, he’s sitting in his car, watching a young woman walk to her vehicle and drive away. The previously static camera pans to his face as he follows her. Cut to him going through Facebook photos of a woman, her updates back and forth Read more ...
Graham Fuller
From The Steel Helmet (1951) through The Big Red One (1980), Samuel Fuller has shown more empathy for US Army infantrymen in combat than any other filmmaker, including Oliver Stone. During the making of Fixed Bayonets!, Fuller’s second gripping Korean War film of ’51, he had Lucien Ballard’s camera pore so closely over the grimy, unshaven “dog faces", it’s clear he was memorialising the real soldiers they represent and those he fought alongside in World War II. The film is set in the winter of 1950 shortly after Mao had mobilised the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army to protect North Korea Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The flip side of the apocalyptic evolution-and-destiny concerns of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's previous foray across the Last Frontier, The Martian is a feelgood take on the theme of space travel. Having landed the first astronauts on Mars in 2029, NASA is pursuing its Ares programme to establish a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet. However, a calamitous storm forces the NASA crew to evacuate, leaving behind botanist Mark Watney, seemingly killed by flying debris.But Watney is Matt Damon and he's the star of the show, and has better luck this time than he did as the stranded astronaut Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A "guests-from-hell" saga on a panoramic scale, Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash is a reworking of Jacques Deray's 1969 sex-and-jealousy movie La Piscine. The action has been transported from the south of France to the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily, where rock icon Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating after a throat operation with her filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts).The couple sprawl luxuriously and nakedly around the pool at their idyllic island eyrie, where the view offers both craggy hillsides and sun-baked plains stretching away to the sparkling Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fidelio: Alice's Journey can literally be described as relating a journey of self-discovery. A mechanic on the Marseille-registered freighter Fidelio, the equally titular Alice navigates the seas with an all-male crew and explores who they are while investigating her own sexuality.She’s left her cartoonist boyfriend Felix (Anders Danielsen Lie) on dry land and tells him to use “C” for cock and “P” for pussy in their e-mails to disguise what they’re discussing. Soon, things become more complicated. The ship’s captain Gaël (Melvil Poupaud), turns out to be her first great love. Alice (Ariane Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” Miss Bennet has been a busy Lizzy. In recent years she's popped up in a British Bollywood setting (Bride and Prejudice) and in the present day (Lost in Austen), and solved a murder mystery (Death Comes to Pemberley). Her latest outing – as played by literary pin-up of the moment Lily James – is as a sword-wielding, pistol-toting scourge of the zombie hordes. Naturally, she’s very good at what she does.The title tells it exactly like it is. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Read more ...