Film
Nick Hasted
Artists can be selfish bastards. Yoko Ono didn’t pay her babysitters; Bob Dylan has frozen out nearly all his friends; Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and William Burroughs shot his. Philp (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist who sociopathically meanders through Alex Ross Perry’s new film, causes no fatalities. Which is where his positive qualities peter out. Whether contemplating his navel to Ph.D level, or harbouring petty grudges and explosive rages which would shame a two-year-old, Philip may be cinema’s most rampantly temperamental artist.Perry had Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Any parent, or anyone who's ever stood in front of a class needs to watch Whiplash. In a film brimming over with ideas, the recurring question is whether or not your pupils will ever achieve greatness if you overpraise them. As JK Simmons's Terence Fletcher explains, the most harmful words in the English language are “good job”. He refers to an inexperienced Charlie Parker having a cymbal thrown at him by an angry bandmate, and the first major shock in Whiplash comes when an enraged Fletcher hurls a chair at student drummer Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) during a rehearsal. Fletcher's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time gets called on California in San Andreas, a bone-headed disaster movie that sends huge swathes of the West Coast toppling to its doom even as one particular family not only makes it through intact but is even enriched in the process. Who'd have thought that the demise of several cities full of unnamed people would act as a perverse sort of marriage counselling for a couple in nuptial distress? The real fault here isn't the tectonic one that gives Brad Peyton's putative summer blockbuster its title but the perverse logic of a creative team clearly indifferent to mass suffering but willing Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wild is solid, but Reese Witherspoon wasn’t necessarily the best choice to play a woman who took a 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail – from the Mojave Desert to the Bridge of Gods, which links Oregon to Washington State – to banish her demons. Considering Witherspoon's chipper personality, can-do spirit, fabulous smile, and natural aura of resilience, her casting loaded the dice. Were we expected to believe her character would sobbingly abandon her trek a third of the way through, or, for that matter, not find transcendence and a handsome, laid-back guy (Michiel Huisman) to Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
American actress Lake Bell turns in a rather charming performance in a romcom written by newcomer Tess Morris, who handles the insecurities of a thirty-something woman looking for love in a funny and energetic way.There's a manic screwball edge to the comedy and some witty one-liners but also present are some of the worst pitfalls of this genre. The Inbetweeners director, Ben Palmer, takes the reins in a film which dashes across famous London landmarks and the back roads of suburban England with verve. When Nancy (Lake Bell) is gifted a romantic self-help book by a woman on a train who’s due Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The imposition of a brutal jihadist regime is relayed with formidable articulacy and a surprising lightness of touch in this gut-wrenching drama from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako. Although its narrative events are as horrifying as those of any thriller Timbuktu avoids the manipulative tricks of genre cinema. Sofian El Fani's sun-kissed cinematography mirrors the defiant beauty of the landscape and its people, while the screenplay - from Sissako and Kessen Tall - gently draws out the hypocrisy and absurdity of the situation, alongside the exasperating injustice.Inspired by the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Al Pacino gives it his barnstorming all as Danny Collins, an ageing, coke-rattled rocker who calls it quits in order to reconnect with his family and recharge his life. Sentimental (but not brazenly so) and buttressed by an ace supporting cast, the film finds Pacino hurtling through his 70s in irresistibly energiser bunny mode. Whereas such contemporaries as Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson have pretty well faded from view, there's plenty of life in this celluloid mainstay yet. Indeed, there's something delicious in watching Pacino gobble whole the part of a rock god living off his Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“No other city has in its centre such an opportunity for profitable progress.” Anyone depressed and outraged by London’s gentrification plague will find this the most chilling statement by visionary gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), as his criminal guests sip champagne and his boat eases down the Thames, where Docklands cranes stand in stilled salute, and he sketches his plans for East London’s redevelopment around a 1988 Olympic stadium.The apparently prophetic nature of this 1979 gangster film is merely symptomatic of its greatness. John Mackenzie’s direction and Barrie Keeffe’s script Read more ...
Nick Hasted
François Ozon’s sly fascination with radical family units takes another, surprisingly gentle twist here. Based on a Ruth Rendell story but equally inspired by French protests against gay marriage, this is an affecting romcom starring a secret male transvestite and a woman, brought together by their love for the same dead person.A nine-minute prologue sketches in Claire’s deep friendship with Laura, from childhood till the latter’s death from cancer. The only person to mourn Laura as much is her widower David (Romain Duris). Surprising him in his home one day, Claire is shocked to her core to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the restored director’s cut’s DVD debut.Writer-director Helma Sanders-Brahms’s view certainly is subjective, and feminine. Germany Pale Mother is a fictionalised version of her early childhood with her parents: here young lovers Hans (Ernst Jacobi) and Lene (Eva Mattes), separated and destroyed by war. Lene’s home front heroism and bond with daughter Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Keaton – like Cary Grant, Bill Murray, and George Clooney – is one of those stars who frequently convey their awareness that the situations they’re in are preposterous. He tautens his jaw muscles; his eyes express a mix of incredulity and suffering. That look is one of the many pleasures of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 2014’s Best Picture Oscar-winner and Keaton’s crowning achievement as a mature actor.Alejandro González Iñárritu's heavy dramas (Amoros Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful) tend to the portentous. Turning to blackish comedy has rejuvented him. He didn’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.The setting is Bad City, somewhere in Iran. Arash ( Read more ...