Film
Demetrios Matheou
We can’t seem to move these days without stumbling into the path of a zombie movie, making one wonder why walking dead with a penchant for fast food are suddenly so alluring.When George A Romero effectively created the genre in the late Sixties and Seventies, zombies were a device for satire; today they seem to reflect a communal sense of societal breakdown. While comedies such as Warm Bodies and Zombieland make broad fun of post-apocalyptic decay, and the horror of World War Z is mitigated by its global scale, the zombie stories that truly strike home – such as The Walking Dead on television Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. With Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden the light is on Paul Vallée, a club DJ trying to make his way in the fertile early Nineties French electro-dance music scene from which Daft Punk became the global breakout phenomenon. And it’s the helmet-wearing duo which loom large over Eden.Eden takes the factual and merges it with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
All the charm in the world provided by two seasoned pros can't make a satisfying whole out of Ruth & Alex, a glutinous portrait of a longtime marriage that is gently tested when the eponymous couple decide to move house. Burdened with a bewilderingly wrong-headed pair of subplots, British director Richard Loncraine's film makes only partial use of the off-the-charts amiability and ease of leading players Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman: so much so, in fact, that one wishes the two Oscar-winners had thrown away Charlie Peters's script altogether and started from scratch.Intermittent voice- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It wasn’t quite Ali vs Frazier. But the 1968 debates between William F Buckley, Jr and Gore Vidal were as bruising (nearly literally) as TV had seen, and haunted the protagonists for the rest of their lives. Morgan Neville and Robert Gordan’s documentary claims its aftershocks also damaged TV and America in ways we’re still suffering through.In 1968, Vidal’s ribald, transsexual comic novel Myra Breckinridge, waspish essays puncturing the follies of what he termed the American Empire, and a conviction that “there are two things you don’t turn down: sex and TV,” made him a notorious liberal. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The best that can be said of The Face of an Angel is that it’s based around an interesting idea. Instead of dramatising the story of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia and what surrounded the case, director Michael Winterbottom has instead fashioned a film in which serial director of flop films Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) has arrived in Siena to scope out how to adapt a book on the case, then in its court appeal phase, by American journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale). For the purposes of The Face of an Angel, Kercher has been renamed Elizabeth Pryce, the accused and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Had Wim Wenders not used the title Until the End of the World for his most ambitious road movie, it would have suited his biographical portrait of Sebastião Salgado. Since 1973, the Brazilian photographer has traversed the planet to document its natural beauty and diversity on one hand, and the greed, destructiveness, and murderous ferocity of man on the other.Thus, another alternative title for The Salt of the Earth, which Wenders was invited to co-direct with Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, could have been Heaven and Hell, words the photographer uses frequently when being interviewed Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its teeny tiny protagonist Ant-Man joins a movie tradition that includes The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace. And yet the 12th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels like a fresh perspective on the modern blockbuster, where bigger certainly hasn't always meant better. A miniature superhero might not seem hugely useful in the fight against contemporary cinema's monolithic threats but, in its surveillance and espionage themes and heist plot, Ant-Man does a sterling job of selling its premise.Based on the comic book creation of Stan Lee, Larry Lieber Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This must be one of the year’s most remarkable archive exhumations: it may well become the re-release of 2015. A French take on the western released in 1969, Cemetery Without Crosses was explicitly made in the style of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Leone even directed one scene – a set piece in which the cast gather around a table for dinner. Its director and lead actor Robert Hossein says it was France’s first western.Hossein was meant to be in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but his contract with French company Gaumont prevented him taking the job so he set to creating his own Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Truth isn't so much stranger than fiction as it is duller. That, at least, is the abiding impression left by True Story, the debut film from the adventuresome theatre director Rupert Goold that by rights ought to be considerably more exciting than it is. Bringing together Jonah Hill and James Franco in a cat-and-mouse game that begins when one appropriates the identity of the other, the result pounds away at its thesis about how similar these apparent adversaries are without extracting much meat from their encounters. The rewards come largely from watching Hill further his expanding Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson’s ecstasy started to fade when he was resurrected. The ex-Dr Feelgood guitarist seemed to be living out a surreal final chapter with an unavoidable end when his January 2013 diagnosis with inoperable cancer flooded him with the wonder of life, leaving him content for perhaps the first time. This reaction ironically raised his career to a new peak, as radio and TV queued to hear the dead man talking, and an album with Roger Daltrey hit the Top 10. Then, in a dizzying turn, he didn’t die. It’s a strange, thought-provoking tale.Johnson, like his old band, was largely forgotten when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. The Wonders is told from her point of view: the perspective of a child with three younger sisters forced to grow up and take on responsibilities for which she has no training. Gelsomina has to deal with what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The plot to assassinate Hitler that everyone knows about was on 20 July 1944. It had its Hollywood moment in 2008 with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Von Stauffenberg. That film unfortunately arrived on the coattails of Downfall, which has since made all Anglophone portrayals of the Third Reich look dismally bogus. So it’s of note that Downfall’s director Oliver Hirschbiegel, having taken leave of his senses to make Diana, has turned his attention to the lesser-known attempt on the Führer’s life.Georg Elser’s attempt to kill Hitler took place on 8 November 1939 in Read more ...