Film
Karen Krizanovich
Blue Ruin, the American thriller which won the coveted FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes last year, will amaze. It stars actors you don’t know, made by a director you don’t know yet Blue Ruin is proof of life beyond Hollywood: this is a tremendous independent film. We’re not talking something shot through an iPhone with one location. We’re talking an entertaining, incredibly smart and deftly-made story with heart, a message and memorable characters and scenes. Clue: when the cinematography, script, acting and direction are mesmerizing, you’ve got a winner.Macon Blair is Dwight, a long-haired vagrant Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Everyone loves a homegrown hero – and they don’t get more homegrown than Before I Go to Sleep, the thriller written and directed by Rowan Joffe, son of Roland Joffe, director of The Killing Fields and The Mission. Before I Go To Sleep is, arguably, one of the most anticipated British films of 2014. The script is based on the Faber Academy sensation of 2011, ex-audiologist S.J. Watson’s novel of the same name. Taken on by Ridley Scott’s production company, the high-end cast stars Nicole Kidman as Christine Lucas, Mark Strong as her physician Dr Nash and Colin Firth as Ben, her husband. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Like its title, this film is surprisingly open in its capacity for possibility. It's ironic that this blossoming branch – When I Saw You – is set in the stilted habitat of a refugee camp in Jordan. It’s a sweet film that gets to the heart of the Palestinian conflict, cinematically as well as through its characters.The year is 1967, the Six-day war has just happened and 11-year-old Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa, pictured below) is fast realising his stay in Harir with his mother Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal), as they wait for his father, could be much longer than he initially anticipated. In what should be a Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Opening as it does on a frank, witty and somewhat extended discussion of female discharge, Obvious Child lets you know from the outset that it is every bit as uninterested in making nice as its blunt lead character. Jenny Slate is Donna, a late-twenties comedienne who drily mines her less-than-aspirational life and stagnant relationship for laughs during standup sets, only to be unceremoniously dumped one night when the boyfriend in question tires of being used as material. Immediately, then, writer-director Gillian Robespierre is doing something compelling with the question of what Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Disney's latest is a film which must have itself represented a hell of a pitch. Based on a true story, it's basically Slumdog Millionaire meets Jerry Maguire - two films that attracted ample awards-interest and that prompted cascades of cash, like crunchy autumn leaves to be raked up by the sackful. Million Dollar Arm finds a hard-nosed sports agent travelling to India in search of the next baseball sensation, his method of selection - the titular talent contest.Jon Hamm makes the transition to the big screen lead look easy, usefully channelling his televisual alter-ego Don Draper to play JB Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Taylor Kitsch’s doomed film career continues with this trite but good natured Canadian mash-up of Doc Hollywood and Waking Ned. Just like in major box office failure John Carter, Kitsch finds himself dumped in a foreign, mysterious land but the strange inhabitants are far more welcoming in the small harbour village of Tickle Head, where he could prove to be their saviour.It’s dark days in this fishing village, where the men line-up to collect their welfare cheques instead of heading off to sea. They are in need of jobs, which are offered in the form of a petrochemical reprocessing plant Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Returning to the small town you grew up in after a spell in the big city can often be problematic. Old friends now think you’re a big shot. The familiar is seen in a new light, and not necessarily a good one. There’s a sense that the ties which have been slackened might be irrevocably sheared. In Mystery Road, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan is a cop back in outback Queensland, in north-east Australia, after training. Now a detective, he quickly finds it’s sink or swim.But that’s not his only problem. As an Aboriginal, he’s subjected to racism. He’s one of what’s called “this dark breed.” And as a Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
There’s no rest for the wicked and corrupt in Frank Miller’s sequel to Sin City which sees him team up once again with Robert Rodriguez. A series of uninspired but visually alluring vignettes play out demanding you to question what came before and why such a foul follow-up has taken over nine years to come to fruition.Three stories based on the hard-boiled graphic novels of Frank Miller that date back to the 1990s (with a little new material thrown in) are told via the monochrome, highly stylised images that we first saw back in 2005. Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a death wish and a Read more ...
graham.rickson
So much of Fritz Lang's 1929 silent film Frau im Mond rings true that you're inclined to forgive its shortcomings – notably a protracted, slow first act which takes far too long to set the plot in motion. Which involves brooding engineer Helius (an intense Willy Fritsch) whose space programme is hijacked by a sinister, cigar-smoking cabal intent on plundering gold reserves located on the moon's dark side. Lang's slow opening does have some choice moments – there's an entertaining robbery in the back of a car, and the film's oleaginous baddie (Fritz Rasp) reveals his colours in style. There's Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Richard Attenborough made himself known to the British public as a shark-eyed, snivelling psychopath. Pinkie, the teen gangster he portrayed in the Boulting Brothers’ 1947 film of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, chilled with his lack of empathy, even to the angelic girlfriend he means to betray in the most vicious way (watch a clip below). He is a predator of Brighton’s seedy, damp backstreets, a manipulator and coward. As the world came to know over the next 65 years, these qualities were the opposite of the man playing him.Attenborough played a broad range of characters in the Fifties and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beethoven went deaf at 26, we're helpfully informed near the start of If I Stay in a bit of information that pales next to the tin ear on display in this late-summer romantic tragedy, which aims to position Chloë Grace Moretz as the next Shailene Woodley. (The actresses are all of five years apart, which constitutes a veritable lifetime in Hollywood). Even more than The Fault in Our Stars, the popular book-turned-film that places tragedy directly in the path of teenage love, this latest young adult novel to become a doomladen tearjerker displays a pretty strange set of priorities. I doubt I'm Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Luc Besson has always venerated the ladies, preferably trousered types with lashings of spunk. You can tick them all off: Isabelle Adjani in Subway, the felon-assassin Nikita, precocious little Natalie Portman in Léon, bande-dessinée adventuress Adèle Blanc-Sec. Why, in The Lady he even offered a po-faced serenade to Aung San Suu Kyi. Not a lot of submissive mannikins in floaty floral-print cotton skirts in that lot. Just when you think he’s run out of ballsy goddesses to plant on a pedestal, up pops Lucy, his most completely idealised heroine yet, glacially incarnated by – who else? - Read more ...