Film
Demetrios Matheou
Christopher Lee died this week, aged 93. It’s strange that an actor best known for horror films, for characters that were fiendish and diabolical, should be so cherished a part of the British cultural landscape. That fact speaks volumes for the charisma and charm, as well as craft of Lee’s performances, and for the intelligence, grace and wit of the man in person.He made his name in horror films – first as a terrifying monster to Peter Cushing’s Dr Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein, then more elegantly as one of cinema’s definitive Draculas in 1957’s Horror of Dracula, returning to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page.So arise, then, Sir Van, Sir Lenny and, even if it’s only an honorary knighthood, Sir Kevin. There’s no arguing with any of these gongs. The great Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Heimat was already one of cinema’s most extraordinary, majestic achievements. Edgar Reitz’s three series of films for German TV spent 53 hours exploring the humanity of the inhabitants of Schabbach, a Rhineland village much like Reitz's own roots, throughout Germany’s cataclysmic 20th century. It was a chronicle built from often fond, sometimes horrifying memories, mesmerically deep, leisurely detail, and a gorgeous cinematic eye. Reitz was 79 when he added nearly four further hours, revisiting Schabbach in 2012. This could have been hubris. Instead it’s a wonderful (presumably) last visit to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-home numbers but scored to the jagged, often discordant music of the composer Adam Cork, London Road seemed to want to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic Park franchise to hatch. The last film was 14 years ago and this fourth instalment seems to have been on the development slate almost ever since. Now that it's here at last, what’s new?For starters, this is a film which will give you tinnitus. The latest generation of dinosaurs are louder, scarier, toothier. Arguably, also sillier. Twenty-two years Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What Wes Orshoski’s new documentary points out, above everything, is how much pop success relies on an ordered narrative and an easily understood package. First-wave British punk band The Damned, on the other hand, wrote as many great songs as their peers, but their career has been a mess of random creativity, changing line-ups and dreadful business decisions. There is a telling moment where Rat Scabies, the original drummer, weeps as he recalls the one occasion the band had all their ducks in a line. With a major label deal, solid American management, and 1985’s chart-friendly Phantasmagoria Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any suggestion that the companion piece to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, his disturbing documentary on the state-supported mass killings undertaken for Indonesia’s Suharto regime, could actually be a more troubling film might seem surprising. The Act of Killing was extremely unnerving. The Look of Silence is even more distressing, even more frightening. Inong, a death-squad leader interviewed in the new film, chillingly says, “if we didn’t drink human blood, we would go crazy.”This was the still-pumping blood of a dying person whose throat he had just cut. In the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title might suggest, Christian Schwochow’s West (Westen) takes us back to the time of Germany divided. It's almost a chamber piece, catching the very particular experiences of a woman and her young son who leave East Berlin and end up in a refugee centre in the city’s American sector, where they’re forced to reappraise their expectations of what their new life in the West will be.We first encounter heroine Nelly (Jordis Triebel, really strong throughout) and her young son Alexei (Tristan Gobel) on a snowy East Berlin street in 1975. They’re seeing off Nelly’s partner, the boy’s father Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Dancing Years and The Rat are seemingly very different films. The Dancing Years (***, 1950) is a British musical which defines frou-frou. With a springing-off point in the dizzy world of the waltz-obsessed Vienna of 1910, its lingering shots of spectacular scenery, meringue-light music, pastel-shaded costumes and unrequited love, it’s the sort of film a fan of Barbara Cartland romances would love. The Rat (***, 1937) is black and white and also set in a continental European capital city, this time Paris. The story of a master criminal who sticks to the promise he made to look after a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Winston Churchill’s famous words on Russia serve as a very apt verdict on Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo), the third film from Chinese director Diao Yinan. Its noir detective style pays homage to classic Hollywood tropes, but this is an unapologetically arthouse piece that impresses most for its gloriously dark visuals: it certainly captivated last year’s Berlinale jury, winning the Golden Bear there over Richard Linklater's Boyhood and other more approachable fare.Viewers may well need more than one watch to even attempt to explicate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world.Not that Boorman brings us to any gore-sodden battlefields or strategic command bunkers. His focus is strictly personal and intimate, as he takes his protagonist Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) – nine years old in the first film, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite its 19th-century setting, John Schlesinger’s film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd – released to cinemas in 1968 – is a very Sixties film. Amongst the themes of the novel which resonated then are class differences, female self-determination, the guises adopted to steer perceptions of the self and repression: all very relevant in 1960’s Britain as society sought to re-invent itself. Casting the then-hot Julie Christie and Terence Stamp further stressed the film was of the moment. As Frank Troy, Stamp could have been a poster boy for the voguish nostalgia embodied Read more ...