Film
Graham Fuller
Ron Mann’s laid-back documentary about the career vicissitudes and family life of Robert Altman (1925-2006) takes its cue from the tone of the director’s films. It was Altman’s habit to observe his character’s crises, collapses, and deaths with the same evenness and lack of melodrama with which he observed their humdrum moments.Although there’s a powerful current of liberal anger in Altman’s work, at the core of it there’s an acceptance of the reality of Social Darwinism, manifested particularly in the American Way. Optimism goes hand in hand with opportunism, as demonstrated by a scene that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s no shame in being a jobbing actor, but you can’t help missing the Anthony Hopkins who dissected repression with definitive, painful finesse, back when he was great. The Human Stain (2003) is the last I’ve seen of that, amongst the last decade’s Norse gods, Greek generals and judges. His turn as kidnapped lager tycoon Freddy Heineken resembles one of Larry Olivier’s later, international pay-cheques – as a project if not role, Wild Geese 2 comes unwelcomely to mind.The story of Heineken’s 1983 kidnapping, 21 days of captivity, the paying of a then-record ransom and its strange aftermath Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rude Boy is a rotten film. Nonetheless it exerts an inexorable draw as it includes live footage of The Clash which is amongst the best of any rock group on stage. The performance of “Safe European Home”, caught on camera in July 1978, is white hot. That is, the performance as seen. The audio track was subsequently modified in a recording studio.Rude Boy is not a documentary. It is a confabulation which didn’t represent The Clash as they saw themselves – which was a crafted persona anyway. The band did not want it released, and even had badges emblazoned "I don’t want Rude Boy Clash film" made Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, nothing can prevent love blossoming. Sebastian’s second encounter with Andreas is punctuated by the latter vomiting after too much booze. It doesn’t put the brakes on the former’s growing passion for the leather-jacketed object of his affections. Soon, the pair are lovers despite Andreas declaring that he is not gay. He cannot resist Sebastian.The path of love often takes strange turns. In the Swedish film Something Must Break, the roadmap is ripped up. Sebastian (Saga Becker, pictured below right) is androgynous and gay: he is transgender. Although accepting of who he is, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lushly produced to within an inch of its pictorially ripe life, the new Disney/Kenneth Branagh live-action Cinderella couples swoony imagery with a cloying message about compassion. But all its pro forma qualities fall away as and when Cate Blanchett takes to the screen, the actress as beady-eyed as she is bristling – and Branagh's film that much the better for it.Playing the stepmother from hell who makes poor Cinderella's life a nightmare, the actress is all but heaven-sent within the context of a movie that desperately needs her bite. That the two-time Oscar winner also looks magnificent Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film of Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann was the Archers duo’s crazily ambitious attempt to create a synaesthetic magical realm abstracted from realism through an immersion in “total art” – music, dance, colour, design – in the austerity Britain of 1951. They triumphed with the magic, though only the individual viewer can say if he or she can “hear” Moira Shearer’s dragonfly dance or “see” soprano Ann Ayars’s aria.The Archers slightly altered and rearranged Jules Barbier’s libretto. Between acts in a Nuremberg performance by the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Six apocalyptic Argentine stories of revenge combine in this hugely enjoyable and extreme anthology. Producer Pedro Almodóvar must have been impressed by the perverse humour, and the lack of a handbrake as actions rocket out of control. Writer-director Damián Szifron is, though, the sole author of his characters’ nightmarish misfortunes.An aperitif involving the mysterious link between the passengers on a plane sets up a sequence of satisfying main courses, connected by characters who utterly lose it against their enemies. There’s the thuggish loan shark who stops by a roadside diner, and is Read more ...
ellin.stein
If anyone thinks high fashion is an airy-fairy world populated by flibbertigibbets preoccupied with frills and furbelows, Frédéric Tcheng’s feature-length documentary Dior and I, a behind-the-scenes account of the race to prepare the 2012 Christian Dior couture collection in record time, should set the record straight. This is a serious business, with investors’ money and employees’ jobs riding on the quality and execution of one person’s artistic vision. In fact, in this aspect, and in the number of dedicated and highly skilled craftspeople it employs, launching a collection resembles Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Nominated for Best Foreign Language film at this year’s Oscars, Wild Tales is that rarity, a portmanteau film; even rarer, it’s a good one. Though unconnected by plot or character, the six darkly comic stories are bonded by themes of revenge and fighting back – against cheating lovers, bad drivers, rank bureaucracy, the crook who ruined your life. It’s about people who cross a line most of us only fantasise about.A big hit on the festival circuit prior to its Oscar nomination, the film has launched its 39-year-old writer/director into the spotlight. Not that Argentina's Damián Szifron Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 19 films directed by Anthony Mann between 1950 and 1960 included all 11 of his Westerns – five of them psychologically nuanced vehicles for James Stewart as an irascible loner scourged or mutilated for his obsessive pursuit of some goal. The zenith of Mann’s unflinching study of violence and compromised masculinity was 1953’s Naked Spur, though 1958’s Man of the West, starring Gary Cooper, runs it close. Jean-Luc Godard, for one, has raved about it.A family man travelling to Fort Worth to hire his rural town’s first schoolmarm, Cooper’s middle-aged Link Jones is disconcertingly meek at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How would a sighted adult react to becoming blind? What would their anxieties be? How would they construct their new world? Could they construct one? All these questions are central to the Norwegian film Blind. Ingrid can no longer see and is attempting to find her way anew without sight.Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen, who last cropped up on theartsdesk in King of Devil’s Island) is in her '30s and lives in Oslo with her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen, pictured below right with Petersen). Recently blind, she has chosen to stay within the womb of their apartment. While Morten is out at work, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Horror, fantasy, bleak humour and appalling taste combine to make The Voices that rare thing, a movie that defies packaging by soundbite. Iranian director Marjane Satrapi (of Persepolis fame), abetted by screenwriter Michael J Parry, has conjured a looking-glass world of simple, colourful surfaces and childlike charm, only to rip it away to reveal the gibbering psychosis beneath. The story is set in the flat, blank middle of America, where Jerry Hickfang (Ryan Reynolds) is a willing but none-too-sharp employee of bathroom company Milton Faucet and Fitting. The fact that Milton's Read more ...