Film
Tom Birchenough
With its combination of a Tom Waits lament and visuals tracking over art works by Viennese modernists like Klimt and Schiele, the opening of Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 Bad Timing stays in the memory – its mood remains just there. The territory is defined gradually: variations on obsession, sexual but not exclusively. One line in the script suggests “lineaments of gratified desire”, though the elements of gratification here remain dubious for all concerned.Bad Timing came at the end of Roeg’s glorious 1970s, after Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now. He came on a variation of the script through Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes – and Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cracking part-homage, part-pastiche of the James Bond franchise (and other British spy movies) done with knowing comedy, élan and obvious affection. It's based on The Secret Service comic book created by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar, and is directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class), and here he reunites with Jane Goldman, who also provided scripts for his previous works.It's about a British spy organisation staffed mostly by Savile Row-suited toffs, including the impeccably Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Thomas Pynchon and PT Anderson: too good to be true? News that the director of There Will Be Blood and The Master was adapting America’s greatest and most hiply profound living novelist certainly sounded like a heavenly equation. Better yet, Anderson had chosen Pynchon’s most consistently funny and approachable novel, Inherent Vice, in which the author had effectively passed around a convivial and especially mind-blowing joint to his fans, as a reward for braving the heaving banquet of his preceding, testing masterpiece, Against the Day. With Anderson also coming off his own furthest-out film Read more ...
graham.rickson
Boyhood is an intimate film on an epic scale. Twelve years zoom past in 189 minutes, as we follow Mason Evans Jr.'s journey from primary school pupil to university student. That the film exists at all seems miraculous; you admire the producers’ nerve in funding such an open-ended project, and director Richard Linklater’s luck in securing a loyal cast willing to commit for 12 years. Especially the two young leads; Linklater’s daughter Lorelei as Mason’s sister Samantha must have been a known quantity, but watching six-year-old Ellar Coltrane mature into such an engaging, confident screen Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Following the critical and commercial hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney's latest is a film which will win you over with its charming WALL-E-esque antics, oddball coupling and simple slapstick before it – somewhat annoyingly – reveals itself as a kids' first comic book movie, entering the superhero movie stratosphere by transforming into an origin story for the titular crime-fighting team.Based on a little known Marvel comic series and directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, Big Hero 6 is set in the fictional mash-up city San Fransokyo – a pleasing blend of ornate Eastern- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. We hear phrases like “world of nightmare”, “utter shock”, “beyond describing” repeatedly, uttered by the first Allied soldiers to enter the German concentration camps at the end of World War Two.We, the general viewer, have had seven decades to Read more ...
ellin.stein
Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, a Kickstarter-funded film essay about the deeper meaning of post-1990 coming-of-age movies, aspires to be one of those Arena programs that takes a fresh look at a seemingly trivial or minor pop form to reveal deeper truths about the culture at large. Don’t get me wrong – I love teen movies and I think there’s a rich seam here to be mined. Unfortunately, because his analysis lacks rigour and is almost as superficial as the movies themselves, there are few insights here the perceptive viewer won’t have already gleaned for him/herself.Lyne draws on clips from some Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of artificial, attractive intelligence rings subtle changes on familiar s.f. ideas, while keeping within the clean lines of a mostly three-hand drama. When callow internet search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a competition to visit his company’s legendary founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac, pictured below right with Gleeson) in his isolated Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A Bolivian upper-crust family comes to gradual pieces in Juan Carlos Valdivia’s 2009 Southern District (Zona Sur), which won best director and script prize in the World Cinema section at Sundance the following year. Delayed in its UK DVD release, this thought-through film proves worth waiting for.Its title refers to the name of one of the better districts of the country’s capital La Paz, and Valdivia tells a slow-burn story of the break-up of a traditional world, with convincing portrayals of somewhat superficial lead characters, their existence thrown into uneasy counterpoint through their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
JC Chandor is rapidly turning into one of the most fascinating (and gifted) filmmakers out there, as A Most Violent Year proves in almost every way. Shamefully overlooked in this year's Oscar line-up, which neglected the film altogether, this portrait of crime and punishment during New York City's own lawless nadir some 30-odd years ago feels both like the finest film that the late Sidney Lumet never made and also entirely fresh in its portrait of morality trying to keep its head above the murk. And Chandor's cast match him every step of the way, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain giving Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Still best-known in Britain for scripting Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s films as sole auteur develop that landmark work’s slippery reality. Like the novels with which he first made his name, Trans-Europ-Express (1966) draws attention to and fractures its own construction, as Robbe-Grillet, his producer, his wife Catherine as a canny continuity assistant and the film’s star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, all board the titular train. Robbe-Grillet cooks up a potboiler plot with his collaborators about a trench-coated cocaine smuggler’s tense trips between Paris Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beyond being a portrait of a day in the life of French national broadcaster Radio France, it is hard to work out what La Maison de la Radio might be about. There is nothing about what the institution is meant to be for, little hinting at the attitudes defining the content aired and a lack of context for the people seen on screen. No one is specifically identified by name or role, and the nature of what is in production or being broadcast is hard to determine. Language and local concerns like the Tour de France aside, La Maison de la Radio could be a compilation of footage of any public Read more ...