Film
Matt Wolf
A New York blizzard so intense that people can't get out the front door traps a random couple who have hooked up online into a rather longer mating dance than they had anticipated. That's the essence of Two Night Stand, the debut film from director Max Nichols (son of the late, great Mike, who died in November) that prolongs a wearyingly cute premise well past breaking-point.That one sticks with the goings-on at all pays credit to the cast of what is essentially a two-hander: the large-eyed Analeigh Tipton and the ever-remarkable Miles Teller, the Whiplash star here cast as a horndog Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jake Gyllenhaal and Canadian director Denis Villeneuve shot Enemy before their collaboration on Prisoners (released in 2013), but already the combination was working stunningly well. In outline, Enemy doesn't sound hugely original – university lecturer Adam (Gyllenhaal) becomes fixated with his own double, an actor called Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal), who he happens to spot while watching a movie on DVD, and their lives become progressively entangled after Adam feels compelled to track down his doppelganger. But thanks to the star's subtle and fastidious playing of the two characters, and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Cynical writer Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and pragmatic photographer Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) are the tabloid team charged with getting the undercover scoop on the society wedding of the year, between old-moneyed Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and a self-made industrialist. Their way into the party: Tracy’s ex-husband, CK Dexter Haven (Cary Grant). Will Tracy actually marry a social-climbing stiff, or fall for the angry young reporter with an unnatural capacity for champagne? Will Dexter be able to turn the tables on Spy magazine’s diabolical editor? And why can’t we all dress like Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This almost-no-budget feature by writer/director James Ward Byrkit was created by gathering eight of his actor-friends in his Santa Monica living room, and giving each of them a daily page of notes about their character on which to base their improvised performance. Five nights of shooting gave Byrkit enough material for the finished product, but questions must be asked about whether the process justified the flick's 88 minute running time.Coherence resembles a postgrad science project masquerading as drama. Byrkit's aim was to explore the theoretical notion of parallel universes and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Wachowskis' sci-fi blockbuster has been getting a kicking from the Stateside critics, but perhaps that's because it's a bit of a shape-shifter with multiple personalities. Part dystopian fantasy, part fairy tale, part cosmic epic, all rolled up in a whole lot of astonishingly vivid special effects, Jupiter Ascending is like spending a day at Alton Towers with your brain marinating in mescaline.Admittedly I was fortunate enough to see this on an IMAX screen in 3D, but I tottered from the exit afterwards with my senses authentically jangled. Two hours of intergalactic travel aboard space Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was made by Sidney Bernstein as World War II drew to a close. It was a gathering of massed concentration camp footage and detailed explanations that he hoped would be shown worldwide but, especially, to the German people, so that they might consider their complicity. André Singer, previously best known as a producer, notably of The Act of Killing and Into Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bringing a real-life story with a well-known and shocking outcome to the screen has an inherent major difficulty. When the end does come, it won’t shock. Amour Fou dramatises the suicide pact of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, a woman at the heart of high society who had been diagnosed as terminally ill. They both died on 21 November 1811.Amour Fou solves the problem of being burdened with an in-built spoiler by assembling a cast whose engrossing performances are enacted as if under hypnosis and by devising a mise-en-scène so striking that it becomes as important to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. She pitches her film perfectly, presenting an intimate portrait of a man struggling to live up to his own legend and maintain the momentum of a movement, filtered through the powerful story of a series of initially small, eventually seminal protests in the town of Selma, Alabama.Beginning in 1964, it follows King's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize with a crime of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The images have a painterly precision in Uberto Pasolini's Still Life, as one might expect from a writing-directing effort from the onetime producer of The Full Monty that co-opts a style of painting as its title. Lead actor Eddie Marsan is often positioned at the centre of the shot, the meticulous visuals of a piece with a movie about a 44-year-old man who is himself fastidious to a fault as he goes about his job. That said employment has involved 22 years at Kennington Council tracing the relatives of people who have passed away means that John May (Marsan) spends a lot of time thinking Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When a film is all about unreliable narrators, it’s difficult to talk about it without ruining things for others. But it’s also a problem for filmmakers. When Gillian Flynn’s bestselling Gone Girl (1.2 million in UK paperback) was recalibrated by the author for the cinema, it was possible for the marketing material to refer to no more than the first 54 minutes of the movie. So explains director David Fincher in the commentary which is this release’s only extra. If they gave the game away, he adds, it wouldn’t be worth making the film.For Gone Girl first timers, there’s plenty to feast on in a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of the tacit jokes in John and Roy Boulting’s I’m All Right, Jack concerns the parentage of Liz Fraser’s Cynthia. How could the lugubrious communist shop steward Fred Kite (Peter Sellers) and his pocket battleship missis (Irene Handl) have produced a daughter so resplendently lovely – and so aflame with desire for a dithering toff like their lodger Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael)? The answer is: even they were young once.Learning that her dad has evicted Stanley for breaking a strike Fred called at his sweet factory, Cynthia starts bawling. “W-what am I to do with his suspenders?” she Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The director Stephen Daldry has always worked beautifully with young actors, whether on film or stage, so it's not difficult to see what might have drawn him to Trash, the Richard Curtis-scribed adaptation of the Andy Mulligan novel about life on the Rio de Janeiro scrapheaps. An opportunity for three Brazilian unknowns to take centre-screen in a film spoken almost entirely in Portuguese, the movie gives an instant career to its three male newcomers while otherwise remaining mired in the feel-good Hollywood muck that even the most elaborate change in locale can't shift.Equal parts adventure Read more ...