Film
Tom Birchenough
At the risk of endorsing national stereotypes, I’ll still describe Yann Gonzalez’ feature debut You and the Night as a very French film. Its appearance in Critics’ Week at Cannes last year brought comparisons with Francois Ozon and Pedro Almodovar for a combination of style and sex, arguably at the expense of substance. And you can’t help feeling that the ghosts – it’s a work very much concerned with ghosts and fantasies – of Cocteau and Genet are lurking somewhere too.Gonzalez’ opening scene, as a woman is driven by a mysterious motorcyclist (pictured, below right) away from a figure she's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Are you going to be to Canada what Ingmar Bergman is to Sweden?” “Oh, I think so.” David Cronenberg’s response to a TV interviewer at the time of Shivers’ release must have seemed like unwarranted boastfulness in 1975, but he did indeed become one of cinema’s most significant filmmakers and remains such. After his first full-length feature had hit screens, Cronenberg’s chutzpah was enviable.Originally conceived as the schlokily-titled Orgy of the Blood Parasites to attract as much attention as possible, Shivers became a box-office (but not instant critical) success. It was followed by Rabid Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mesmerising in her sustained emotional rawness, Emmanuelle Devos is at her empathetic best in Violette, a psychological study of a woman damned by her loveless childhood and what she perceived as her ugliness.Devos gave an impression of homeliness and dowdiness as the near-deaf secretary ridiculed by her colleagues in Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips, but in that 2001 film, as in Martin Provost's Violette Leduc biopic, she obliterated conventional value judgments about women's appearances. She has a habit, too, of rendering almost appealing negative qualities like neediness, self-consciousness Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some feared that turning Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel into a movie couldn't be done, but with Flynn herself in the screenwriter's chair and the clinically precise David Fincher wearing the director's hat, it's turned out a treat. It's long at 145 minutes, but it needed space to accommodate its titillating mix of police procedural, whodunnit, social satire and psychological drama.Gone Girl is the story of the marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, a pair of high-profile journalists whose blissfully gilded Manhattan existence has been brought to a shuddering halt by an economic recession which Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zombies have feelings too. That's the message at the heart of writer-director Jeff Baena's debut Life After Beth, which begins its life as a sensitive indie comedy with a winning deadpan shtick and ends up salivating and snarling after developing an appetite for riotous, blood-splattered slapstick. Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza bags the bizarro role of a lifetime and this quite brilliant comedienne attacks it like a man-eater tearing flesh from bones with only its teeth. She also quite literally does that.Dane DeHaan gives us a modern day Harold Chasen (from the excellent Harold and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You expect the tears, anger and pride, as NUM veterans relive Britain’s defining industrial dispute, 30 years later. The bafflement of a South Welsh ex-miner is more telling; the way his voice slows in disbelief at the level of violence the British state unleashed in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, and incomprehension as he still struggles to grasp how and why what he saw could have happened. Two miners died during the strike, as did a cabbie taking one to cross a picket line, and three children sifting the coalfields for scraps to survive on. Light casualties, really, for a strike Margaret Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In his director’s interview for Goltzius and the Pelican Company Peter Greenaway describes the public profiles that his films have achieved over the years, dividing them into an effective A and B list. He counts his 1982 The Draughtsman's Contract as his most approachable work, while acknowledging that its follow-up A Zed & Two Noughts was greeted by a really savage critical and popular reaction (though the director himself thinks it’s his best film).With Goltzius Greenaway is back on form, coming at least close to the four-star mark, and the film achieved acclaim on its release around Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Draft Day should have been a contenda. As it stands, it's a football film for people who like football but who hate film. Sure, you may like “movies”, but you sure as hell don’t like film. It’s also the kind of film a rookie film reviewer will gleefully shred.In his fourth go at the sports genre, Kevin Costner looks better in the actual film than in the horribly photoshopped movie poster. This is fortunate as he plays Sonny Weaver, the manager of – gee, what team was it again? If you don’t follow football it doesn’t matter. If you do, it’s the Cleveland Browns – anyway, it’s the team we’re Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
I Origins is a high-concept sci-fi thriller and romantic drama from American indie director Mike Cahill, who investigates big philosophical and scientific issues by looking for meaning in coincidence. Part produced by Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Pitt, who also stars, this well-intentioned thesis intrigues but falls short due to a laboured script and an inelegant handling of a burgeoning relationship.Molecular biologist, Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), is intent on disproving the existence of God through science. When he teams up with bright spark Karen (Brit Marling) the two make an exciting Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Hollywood's veneer has been cracked so many times it's possible to see right through to its cynical core; in an age of irreverence and intrusion the stars simply don't glitter as brightly. David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars is a film that forgets all this and sets out its satirical stall anyway. A measure of malice to floor an elephant and a pair of striking performances - from Mia Wasikowska as a deliciously strange fruit and from Julianne Moore, giving us every shade of a star - nearly salvage it.Moore plays fading actress Havana Segrand. Part Baby Jane, part Norma Desmond, part porn star Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Denzel Washington steps into the shoes of avenger Edward Woodward (TV series 1985-89) as a quiet, private man wrestling with his demons as he tries to stifle his natural gifts for violent justice. He’s reluctant to hurt people but, you know, he has skillz. Washington's easy grace and intelligence give this predictable policier manqué almost edible allure.It was Antoine Fuqua who directed Washington to an Oscar in 2001’s Training Day. In the tough world of Hollywood, Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen won a match race between two White-House-in-jeopardy films. So, this vigilante story that’s been Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The name of Czech director Karel Zeman is far less-known in the English-speaking world than it deserves to be. He began working during World War Two, establishing a name for himself in the rich Czech animation school (and proving a later influence on that movement’s master, Jan Švankmajer), and thus is a decade or two earlier than that country’s celebrated New Wave cinema movement of the 1960s. His later work often combined animation with the feature format in distinctive, and different way: among his fans is Terry Gilliam, who has acknowledged Zeman’s influence, especially in his treatment Read more ...