Film
Graham Fuller
It’s easier to admire than enjoy 2013's Hard to Be a God. The 177-minute final film directed by Leningrad-born Alexei German depicts medieval squalor and butchery so intensely that the viewer is forced to shrink from its portrait of life without culture, humanism, and soap. Like another protracted masterpiece, Béla Tarr’s 2011 The Turin Horse, German’s miasmic swansong imparts its riches mostly after being endured and reflected upon.Adapted from the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, whose Roadside Picnic begat Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Hard to Be a God was filmed between 2000 and Read more ...
james.woodall
With eyes trained on sporty Rio de Janeiro once more for next year’s Olympic Games, cultural portals on to the city are bound to be offered in all sorts of places around the world. One such is Rio+Film, a new film festival at the Barbican Centre focusing exclusively on the great Brazilian city by the sea. Rio+Film is likely to have further editions elsewhere.Curator Adriana Rouanet says the “+” in the festival’s name underlines that the chosen films burrow beneath the usual image of beach, football and carnival. In the Saturday-night hot spot was Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s 2002 Read more ...
David Kettle
Craig Roberts first made his mark in Richard Ayoade’s 2010 debut feature Submarine, playing a socially inept Welsh teenager. For his own debut feature, as writer, director and lead, Roberts plays – well, a socially inept Welsh teenager. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable – and possibly even intentional, too. But they’re also a bit unfair, partly because Ayoade’s film is by far the more assured of the two, but also because in Just Jim, Roberts seems to be attempting something a bit darker, and far more dream-like. He might not always succeed, but he certainly has a lot a fun Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In an age when film stars take selfies at the Oscars and photobomb other celebrities, and when the bashful have little control of their image saturating the internet, it may be hard to imagine a time when an actor could be on the verge of stardom without anyone having any idea who he was – or a moment when a photographer could have the inclination or intimate access that could actually touch on something truthful.But by all accounts this was the case in 1955, for the actor James Dean and for Dennis Stock, the Magnum photographer who took the pictures that have become most associated with the Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's that time of year again, with autumn casting a shroud over London and the LFF offering the perfect tonic. The only problem is that with 238 fiction and documentary features over 10 days, even diehard cinephiles with no desire for human contact or fresh air would be hard pressed to sift and select. The festival programmers attempt their customary guidance, with films tucked (sometimes too neatly) into themes such as Love, Thrill, Debate and Dare. For our part, theartsdesk's film writers offer some very personal tips – films we've seen and would highly recommend, others that we ourselves Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce.The Son's Room dealt with the raw anguish of the sudden, violent demise of a child that rips through a happy family like a tornado. Mia Madre, on the other hand, is a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antonioni’s celebrated trio of films, L’Aventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, established the Italian director as a major and influential force in world cinema. All three of the works deal with the failure that resides at the heart of human relationship, offering a Mediterranean mirror to the Nordic angst associated with Bergman’s films of the same era.The women in Antonioni’s films – often played by Monica Vitti, his wife and muse – invariably upstage the men. Vittoria, in L’Eclisse, leaves her rather limp boyfriend Riccardo (Francesco Rabal) and drifts away from the wreckage of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
It has never been easier for cinema to capture the terror and splendour of the mountains. Cameras can do what they never could before, which is why Everest, released this week, gets audiences as close to the roof of the world as any multiplex experience ever will. But mountains are about more than altitude. In this edition of Listed, we clamber about the history of cinema looking for the movies which tell us about the men and women - though it seems to be mostly men - who have brought summit fever to the big screen. The Epic of Everest (1924)“This isn’t Hollywood,” said Mallory. “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I don't usually suffer from chattering teeth and attacks of vertigo while watching a movie, but as this panorama of Himalayan disaster reached its climax I began to fear that I might need paramedics and an emergency evacuation. Everest might not top the all-time charts in terms of plot development or character psychology, but as an immersive account of a horrific chain of real-life events, it reaches – I nearly said "summits" – its objectives with distressing potency.A shelf-load of books has been written by survivors about what happened on the world's most imperious mountain in May 1996, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The repercussions of the revelations about intelligence gathering by American and other surveillance services made by US whistleblower Edward Snowden have proved huge. Laura Poitras’s documentary CitizenFour is no less revelatory about the process of their appearance, about just how Snowden came to be in that Hong Kong hotel room with reporter Glenn Greenwald, and what happened there.To call their encounter, the centrepiece of the film “eight days that shook the world” might be an overstatement, but not by much, so acute did the revelations make the question of the relation between Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tangerines has a simple premise which is executed straightforwardly. Yet it proves affecting to a degree seemingly out of proportion to the proposition behind the film. A man living in a war zone finds that the conflict has, literally, come to his door. He takes in an injured survivor from each of the opposing sides and, as they come back to health, steers them to confront and accept each other’s humanity. Where there was neither, tolerance and respect are cultivated.And that's it, the plot of Georgian director Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines. The film’s impact stems from the subtlety of the Read more ...