Film
Marina Vaizey
I don’t think any of us will look at a museum in quite the same way after this dazzling documentary. For several years the Austrian film-maker Johannes Holzhausen and his team followed what seems to be scores of the working staff inhabiting Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (KMH), as they physically cared for the remarkable objects in their care, worried about how best to put them on view for the public, and met continually to discuss museum matters.KMH is one of the world’s most important museums, repository of centuries of Habsburg imperial heritage, as well as myriad other Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Given Hercules stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and is directed by Brett Ratner, the man behind the Rush Hour films, currently signed on to helm Beverley Hills Cop IV, few would expect anything but a mindless multiplex romp. And that’s exactly what they get although it’s a shame brains must be so completely switched off since much more fun could have been had with this, especially given a strong supporting cast that includes John Hurt, Peter Mullan and Joseph Fiennes. Marvel films such as Avengers Assemble and Guardians of the Galaxy have ably demonstrated that it’s possible to entertain 14- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Finding a clear narrative among the deadly uncertainties of the long-lasting stand-off between Israel and Palestine is a challenge. Israeli documentarist Nadav Schirman, drawing on a real-life story, has honed The Green Prince down into a bare story of the ongoing contact between Gonen Ben Yitzhak, an officer of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service, and Mosab Hassan Yousef, a young man from the very centre of the Palestinian leadership who becomes his agent.It’s a remarkably unadorned film, concentrating on the direct testimonies of the two players. They tell their stories direct to camera Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai has ventured into new territory with The Grandmaster. Many years in the making, his new film is a remarkable portrayal of martial-arts traditions, specifically the story of kung fu master Ip Man from his early life in mainland China on the eve of World War II, through to post-war exile in Hong Kong. It was there that he set up his own Wing Chun school, which would with time achieve huge international popularity; Ip went on to train future kung fu stars, most notably Bruce Lee.Fans of the heightened aesthetics of Wong’s early arthouse masterpieces like 2000’s In Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The subject of The Possibilities are Endless does not appear until 24 minutes into the film. When Edwyn Collins is manifested, it is as a silhouette, as spectral as he is tangible. Collins is bifurcated: corporeal but also removed. The massive stroke he had suffered meant he could not summon the words he needs, has mobility issues and did not recall the connections between the episodes from his life in his memory. Who Collins is has been rewritten yet he remains the person he was, as attested by his partner Grace Maxwell.The Possibilities are Endless charts the iron-willed Collins’ difficult Read more ...
Matt Wolf
God love Bill Murray. Just when you think you can't take yet another film about the cross-generational divide that finds crotchety older person transformed by the company of youth (and vice-versa), along comes Murray's latest star vehicle, St Vincent, to inject new life into a more than time-honored conceit in a movie that feels quietly revelatory in all sorts of small ways, as well. (Example: Melissa McCarthy for once isn't reduced to a screaming banshee and visual sight gag.) In synopsis, writer-director Ted Melfi's narrative might seem like one where you can foretell every turn when the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite the presence of Jude Law as a disillusioned old underseadog, the real star of Black Sea is the 50-year-old Russian submarine on which most of the action takes place. Now called Black Widow, the vessel lives on the river Medway near Rochester (pictured below right), whither director Andrew MacDonald and his crew hastened with cameras at the ready .Black Sea is the story of a group of battered, embittered North Sea workers spat out by various companies and corporations. Law plays Captain Robinson, an ex-Navy man and veteran submarine commander who has just been sacked by salvage Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The original Planet of the Apes series was Hollywood’s most ingeniously extended franchise, surviving the obliteration of Earth in its first sequel to loop back on itself and spin out a further three. This second film of the successful reboot and its already planned follow-up are both basically remakes of the clapped-out 1973 finale Battle for the Planet of the Apes, a conceptual handicap evident when it climaxes with two chimps in a punch-up.The care put into the world of Matt Reeves’ film still mostly carries the day. Set 10 years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar (Andy Serkis, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary.Despite chronicling a year of a group of immigrant children in the French school system, School of Babel (La Cour de Babel) is not about the politics of France’s attitude to immigrants or Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode. It won the director the Best Film award in the Horizons Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past. We see a lot of septuagenarians and octogenarians, as well as film clips and photographs Read more ...
Graham Fuller
No Gravity or Interstellar has challenged the might and influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey: its re-release this week is one of the movie events of the year. Those who haven’t previously seen it – but who take CGI for granted – should be prepared to be awestruck, if not necessarily moved, by the classical music-enhanced images of planets, spacecraft, and astronauts created with animation, matting, models, back projection, and Douglas Trumbull’s special photographic effects. If that sounds prosaic, it’s because Stanley Kubrick’s film is more about surface than substance.Culturally as well as Read more ...