Film
Kieron Tyler
When a lead character is warned that “it’s easier to be scrutinised in a small town”, it’s instantly clear they are not going to take the advice, keep their head down and make sure they don’t attract attention. In South Korean director July Jung’s first full-length feature, police chief Young-nam inevitably makes her presence felt soon after her arrival from Seoul in the southern coastal region of Yeosu.Although A Girl at My Door explores small-town hierarchies and tensions, and the rifts and violence barely below the surface, it has to be taken as a commentary on South Korea overall as well Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a barrel; beside him stands a white woman with a filthy face. The former looks like he had enough wits to survive the squalour for a while, the latter looks doomed. As ghosts immobilized in time by the Danish journalist and reformer Riis’s camera, they open the door to the ghosts, alive and dead, who populate the post-colonial misery of Costa’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although The Tribe is disquieting, seeing it at home rather than experiencing the full immersion of a cinema screening raises questions of what gives it its impact. theartsdesk’s review coinciding with the theatrical release pinpointed what makes director Miroslav Slaboshpitskiy’s strange Ukrainian film tick: from its use of sign language to its commentary on Ukraine. But are there individual stylistic elements which leap out as signifiers of its singularity?Time will tell whether or not Slaboshpitskiy can follow his first full-length feature with another film as striking, and whether working Read more ...
theartsdesk
This week Legend opened in cinemas starring Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy. The actor’s double turn as the Kray twins is only the latest in a surprisingly long tradition of actors taking more than one role in a film. To show off their range, and give the audience a bit of fun, actors have doubled (or trebled, or more) up as twins, siblings, parents and children, doppelgängers and often characters who are entirely unrelated. For this edition of Listed, theartsdesk revisits some of the stellar turns by those actors taking more than one credit in the cast list. Deborah Kerr, The Life and Death of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When Immanuel Kant, the existentialists, and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point all get referenced right from the start, there can be no doubt that Irrational Man is on its way toward achieving the "total heaviosity" that its writer-director Woody Allen famously lampooned in Annie Hall. That the latest in Allen's record-breaking annual output of films manages not to send itself up but to engage pretty much throughout owes a lot to a terrific leading man in Joaquin Phoenix, who on this occasion makes you wonder what sort of partnership he and Hitchcock might have made had their careers aligned. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When filming Vivre sa vie in 1962, Jean-Luc Godard made his wife and star Anna Karina wear a wig resembling Louise Brooks’s black-lacquered art-deco bob. Karina’s Nana was less immaculately coiffed than Brooks’s Lulu in G.W. Pabst's Pandora’s Box (1929), however, and her hair didn’t taper into pincers, like those that lay against Lulu’s cheeks. Nana is more vulnerable than her iconic antecedent – her glum stares at the camera replacing the devastating smiles Lulu bestows promiscuously.Godard’s fourth feature (and third with Karina) ostensibly traces Nana’s downward spiral as an aspiring 22- Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s a strong word, misery. It makes you think of unremitting sorrow, a darkness it’s difficult to see a way out of, unforgiving conditions that make life well-nigh unbearable. A fertile backdrop for a career in stand-up comedy, you might assume. But despite the promise of his film’s title, it’s a subject that veteran US actor and comedian Kevin Pollak hardly dares to touch in his bright, breezy but frustratingly lightweight debut feature.Instead, he goes for quantity over quality, and assembles interviews with what’s admittedly an astonishing roll-call of more than 50 comedians and comedy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead? Writer-director Brian Helgeland knows his way around screen violence - he scripted LA Confidential – and he has been a tourist in England before: he paid a knockabout visit to the Middle Ages with A Knight’s Tale. The traditional thing to say about foreign directors on such Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The off-the-wall premise of The New Girlfriend could have been one adapted by Pedro Almodóvar. After married woman Claire’s close childhood friend dies, she gives an undertaking to look after the widowed father David and the couple’s daughter, to whom she is godmother. While keeping her promise, she accidentally discovers he is a secret transvestite – David says his wife knew of this. Claire helps him into the outside world in his female persona (which she names Virginia), learns the reasons for the cross-dressing, falls for him in his female guise and, in the process, discovers she isn’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Randolph Scott had ridden long in the saddle before Budd Boetticher directed him as a driven loner with a painful past in the six harsh “Ranown Cycle” Westerns (1956-60). His apprenticeship began with ten 1930s Zane Grey oaters, mostly made by Henry Hathaway, and concluded with the B-Westerns he starred in for Edwin L. Marin and André de Toth after World War II. Marin’s rousing Abilene Town (1946), newly released on Blu-ray, augured Scott’s becoming a genre icon.Though it lacks the melancholy poetry of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (also 1946), Marin’s Western similarly evokes postwar Read more ...