Film
Tom Birchenough
It’s fascinating to catch the moment when an already great film director moves onwards and upwards, to another level. Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev has been collecting major festival prizes for more than a decade, since his debut feature The Return won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003. After that he became a regular at Cannes, with his follow-ups The Banishment and Elena; his latest film, Leviathan, came away from the Croisette this year with the best script award. Many critics there felt that it merited something more.Because Leviathan marks a change of direction for Zvyagintsev, a move Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It is an extraordinary scene. John Maloof stands over box after box after box of the belongings of Vivian Maier. They contain photographic negatives, undeveloped film, address labels, receipts, tickets and even teeth. In all, there are around 100,000 negatives and 700 undeveloped rolls of film. Soon after acquiring this material, Maloof scanned some of the photos, put them on the internet and it took off. The formerly unknown Chicago-based nanny and housekeeper became a buzz photographer, compared with greats like Diane Arbus and Weegee.Subsequently, she has been exhibited, prints of her Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Pretty in Pink featured an interesting example of female friendship between a teenager and a grown woman. A record shop owner imparts motherly advice to her employee while also getting to grips with her own identity. In a similar manner, Lynn Shelton’s indie comedy (which was written by YA author Andrea Siegel) pairs up Keira Knightley and Chloë Grace Moretz, but shifts the focus away from teen angst to tackle the quarter-life crisis from the point of view of a woman who decides she needs to find herself 10 years after graduating from high schoolWhen Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to Megan ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm, adapted from George Orwell's 1945 allegorical novel about the emergence of Stalinism, was Britain’s first animated feature film. Clearly influenced by Walt Disney's early 1940s classics, the husband and wife team (he was from Budapest, she from Watford) necessarily avoided sentimentalism but were unafraid to milk pathos in depicting the plight of Orwell’s oppressed proletarian beasts.The ultimate victim of the tyrannical porker Napoleon (pictured below) is the workhorse Boxer, who slaves devotedly to build a windmill for the agrarian collective Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan opens in Russia early next year it won’t be in the director’s cut. Given new legislation effective from this past July, it will be against the law to include the very distinctive Russian expletives, known locally as mat, that are plentiful in the director’s film, and add a very distinctive quality to his depiction of contemporary Russia.It’s a difference that may be lost on non-Russian speaking viewers who won’t be surprised by the usual procession of f-words and the like. But for Zvyagintsev himself, it’s a matter of considerable concern. “Film-makers, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Space, the final frontier. Except that on the slowly dying earth where Christopher Nolan's often awesome sci-fi epic begins, the instinct to reach for the heavens has been crushed by the struggle for survival as crops die and life-choking dust storms sweep across the American midwest.In this eco-doom dystopia, technology has been deemed useless because food production is the sole imperative, and schools teach that the NASA moon landings were a fiction designed to bankrupt the competing Russians. Virgin Galactic is evidently not operational. It's only when former test pilot Cooper (Matthew Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.And just as Topsy-Turvy was as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Never mind Alien vs Predator. Gareth Edwards's rumbustious earth-in-peril spectacular restores Godzilla to the top of the über-monster food chain. He's an indestructible force called from his sub-oceanic lair to combat hideous opponents fuelled by mankind's reckless abuse of Mother Nature.Edwards makes token efforts to give his story some human-scaled interest, though frankly it's futile. Bryan Cranston emotes doggedly as a scientist at a Tokyo nuclear plant, where the first signs of impending planetary catastrophe are felt, but Juliette Binoche as his wife lasts about five minutes before she Read more ...
stephen.walsh
At least three composers have set about turning The Fall of the House of Usher into operas, including most famously Debussy, whose abortive attempt, completed by Robert Orledge, was brilliantly staged by Welsh National Opera in June. But there is a good argument that Poe’s story – short on incident and character, long on visual image and atmosphere – lends itself better to film than to the stage. So I was intrigued by the chance of seeing Jean Epstein’s 1928 silent film, complete with a new accompanying score by Charlie Barber, at Malvern’s Forum Theatre, halfway through a tour set up by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted from the cult novel by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) and directed by Alexandre Aja, Horns can't keep itself on an even tonal keel for more than a few minutes. Part policier, part doomed romance and part gothic nightmare, I suppose it might even have created its own nano-genre.Nonetheless I enjoyed it quite a lot, even with its over-optimistic two hour running time. But this probably isn't the film which will carry Daniel Radcliffe across the great divide from boy wizard to mature screen actor. Partly it's the nature of the piece, which frequently finds itself trying to straddle the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
“If it bleeds it leads”, proclaims crime news reporter Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) as he investigates the bloody remains of a car crash with his invasive camera lens in a bid to make the biggest bucks out of the exploitation of human tragedy. It’s a mantra which curious onlooker Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal, who has shed a massive 30 pounds for the role) takes to grim and vicious extremes when he sets up his own TV news business. First-time director Dan Gilroy sets his grisly and blackly funny satire of modern media practices and the American dream on a seedy night-time LA canvas which oozes style Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The key lines are “you’re reborn into an untroubled world” – a world “where everyone’s the same.” The 1956 Don Siegel science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often taken as a response to America’s fear of Communism and the associated suppression of self, or as a commentary on the encroaching conformity brought by the spread of consumerism and a regimented suburbia. In both cases, homogenisation and standardised behaviour were the potential result.Seeing the film anew does nothing to alter these interpretations. In cinemas again as part of the BFI’s Days of Fear and Wonder Read more ...