Film
Graham Fuller
Suffragette is exemplary in its attempt to depict the harrowing experiences of the British women who risked their lives to win the vote. It depicts the awakening of a reluctant recruit who becomes a militant, and graphically depicts the violence meted out to the protestors and hunger strikers in the critical years of 1912-13, potently drawing parallels with the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strikes. Yet it’s also a history lesson so worthy and dutiful that viewers might miss how unusual it is for a mainstream movie to endorse acts of anti-state terrorism, even Read more ...
Nick Hasted
How do you corral 250 films in a way which makes sense to potential viewers? Major releases – so far at this year’s LFF we've had Suffragette, Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van – pretty much take care of themselves. For the mostly unknown rest, festival director Clare Stewart introduced themed strands in 2012 with the stated aim of making the festival “much easier to navigate”. Where the LFF had previously been divided by nation – New British Cinema, French Revolutions, then Europe, then everyone else – we now essentially have a choice of emotions: Dare, Thrill Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ousmane Sembene is one of the pioneers of African cinema. Black Girl, the film that brought him international renown, has been beautifully restored for this DVD release, so that it looks as sparkling as when it was released in 1966.The strength of this film is derived in large part from the potent creative forces that were unleashed when Senegal became independent, and was ruled by the visionary politican and poet Léopold Senghor.The simple but powerful story of a Senegalese woman who takes a job as a nanny in the South of France, in the hope of enjoying the promises of the former colonial Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"I just wanna know what I'm getting into," states FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), not unreasonably, as she heads blindly down the rabbit hole. She emerges into a lawless land where bad guys rule, police fearfully follow and her own side's principles have become unrecognisably warped, with their tactics questionable and objectives increasingly hard to grasp. Sicario is a nail-bitingly tense, precision-crafted and ferociously critical look at the US war on drugs from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, Prisoners).After a disastrous raid on a cartel horror house in Chandler, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sparrows Can’t Sing can be seen in many ways. The film, completed in 1962 and released to British cinemas in March 1963, features an extraordinary cast which now seems an uncanny roll call of British character and comic actors: James Booth, Avis Bunnage, Yootha Joyce, Roy Kinnear, Stephen Lewis, Murray Melvin, Arthur Mullard, Victor Spinetti, Barbara Windsor and more. For this alone, Sparrows Can't Sing would be a landmark.It is also a classic comedy and funny - frequently, extremely so. It was the only film directed by Joan Littlewood, then almost single-handedly effecting a sea change in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2007) about two Bangladeshi sisters, one confined to an arranged marriage that takes her to London, the other eloping in a "love marriage" in Bangladesh. She followed that with a documentary, Village at the End of the World (2012), a year in the life of a remote Inuit fishing village in Greenland, whose 60 residents fear the closure of their Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades.Red Army makes clear how, in a world in which sport was an extension of the superpower struggle, Fetisov and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a verbatim musical with the addition of Adam Cork’s deftly knitted score. The stage version travelled to the big screen with Rufus Norris directing, and now makes it to the small screen.Television, in the shape of BBC drama Five Daughters (2010), is where the story of the murder victims was first told. London Road has widescreen moments, particularly at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The question of the Macbeths’ dead child is one of those Shakespearean quandaries, like Hamlet’s age, Iago’s cuckolding and Beatrice and Benedick’s earlier dalliance. How much do they really matter? In this new film version of the Scottish play, it’s all about the back story. Everything – Macbeth’s disdain for death in battle, Lady Macbeth’s descent into somnambulant madness – hinges on the loss of a child.The solemn, wordless opening locates the Macbeths’ motivation in bereavement for a little child onto whose dead eyelids Macbeth places pebbles before the body is paganistically cremated on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though packaged as a tale of an ageing rock star, Danny Collins is really an autumnal comedy-drama about regret, redemption and trying to seize life's second chances. As the title character, a cheesy AOR veteran pitched somewhere between Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, Al Pacino demonstrates why he and rock'n'roll have never been intimately linked – he can't sing, he can't dance, and he hasn't a clue what to do with a baying live audience.Nonetheless this is Pacino at his warmest and most soulful, and, abetted by such wily old veterans as Christopher Plummer (as his manager Frank Grubman) and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of French director Lucie Borleteau’s first feature conceals a range of meanings. Fidelio is both the name of the enormous maritime freight vessel on which most of the action takes places, and a clear hint at “fidelity”, a concept with which its independent heroine Alice (Ariane Labed) negotiates throughout. If its French original, Fidelio: l’odyssée d’Alice, also suggests something else, the “Odyssey” of Alice’s journey meaning a return to the starting-point of home, then our expectations are challenged.The balance between home and away, with the different codes of behaviour Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
How kind of the boffins at NASA to announce their spectacular discovery of water on Mars this week – giving a timely, real-science boost to the release of Ridley Scott’s The Martian. In truth, the film needs no such assistance. Despite following fast in the warp drive of Gravity, Interstellar and Scott’s own Prometheus, this fabulously entertaining film doesn’t suffer either through space fatigue or by comparison.It’s day 18 of a manned mission to Mars. Scientists are collecting their samples from a very red desert plain, when a severe storm hits the planet. Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Read more ...