Film
Tom Birchenough
The sheer joy of making theatre provides the central attraction of Cycling with Moliere (Alceste à bicyclette), but Philippe Le Guay’s film is also rich in the comedy of fractious interaction between old friends whose worlds have moved apart. It’s the story of two actors: Gauthier (Lambert Wilson) has become famous for his television roles (the different circumstances in which he’s recognised become memorable vignettes in the film); Serge (Fabrice Luchini) has left the profession after a breakdown, retreating to a run-down house on the windblown Ile de Ré and a life of virtual solitude. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One isn't long into the latest weather-related doomsday movie before a nagging question occurs: did the script for this late-summer image of elemental Armageddon at some point blow away? We all know that you don't go to these kissing cousins of Twister and the like expecting Chekhov or Mike Leigh. But Into the Storm is so peremptorily written that it's borderline hilarious. I would imagine it's not easy to effect ceaseless variations on "we gotta get outta here" and "is everybody okay?" - to cite just two of screenwriter John Swetnam's defining lines - but rarely does one get the sense that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For an actor whose post-Potter CV has been so wide-ranging - an Irish cripple on stage one minute, a young widowed lawyer in a period horror film or the poet Allen Ginsberg the next - Daniel Radcliffe has developed a highly distinct acting style: self-effacing, somewhat shy, his head often downturned as if to deflect attention away from someone who, after all, was catapulted into stardom before he had even reached puberty. And then there's the stubble, itself an apt visual reminder that the onetime boy wizard is now a man.Such modesty has its charms, to be sure, but also its limitations, as Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The positioning of Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (one of the few actresses to have confidently made that tricky transition from French darling to Hollywood leading lady) at the centre of the Dardennes' latest says less about the artistic integrity of the filmmakers - which remains beautifully intact - and more about the approach of the actress, who continues to do remarkable work in challenging fare despite her starry status.The premise is strikingly simple: Sandra (Cotillard) has returned to her job at a solar panel factory after a spell of depression. Soon after, she's told that they can Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calcutta director Satyajit Ray was a colossus of cinema whose work often bridged the gap between his native Indian – specifically, Bengali – culture and that of Europe. He wrote that his 1964 film Charulata (alternatively titled in English “The Lonely Wife”) was his favourite, saying “it was the one film I would make the same way if I had to do it again”. Ray’s script is based on a novella, “The Broken Nest”, by one of the most profound cultural influences on the director, Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore.Charulata is a film of intimate concentration, as well as an immaculate recreation of Read more ...
David Nice
Lukas Moodysson caught the miseries and splendours of kids on the cusp of teendom in an early gem, Together (Tillsammans), but there they made up only one strand in the general trajectory of trouble to triumph. That difficult theme of very early adolescence, so easy to parody, so hard to keep truly affectionate, is the entire domain of We Are the Best!Maybe it partly rings true because the tale of first two, then three spirited girls embracing punk at the end of its natural life in 1982 is also the true story of Moodyson’s wife Coco, who novelized her early angsts and exuberance. But it Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
August bank holiday weekend is like Christmas day for horror fans thanks to Frightfest who deliver a sackful of disturbing delights in their 15th year. An inspiring line-up sees Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens reinvent himself as a charming psychopath in opening night film The Guest. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (You're Next) amaze once again with a blend of Eighties-style action and horror.Meanwhile, horror classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street play alongside up-and-coming British fare such as Oliver Frampton’s bleak take on past trauma The Forgotten and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mad Max script-doctored by Dostoyevsky: that’s how David Michod sees Australia after it all goes to hell. His first film, Animal Kingdom, rewired the gangster film as a suburban family horror story, sweaty with the threat and reality of violence. Michod’s debut as writer-director heads into the Outback, to make a post-apocalyptic road movie notable for steely reserve as much as swift, frequent mayhem."10 years after the collapse” is our dateline. As Eric (Guy Pearce) walks into a karaoke bar in the first minute (pictured right), clues to the catastrophe are already piling up. Bottles of water Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lauren Bacall, who has died at the age of 89, was an iconic figure on screen. She spoke one of the immortal lines in film history when all but exhaling the remark, “You just put your lips together and blow” in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not. But away from the screen and from such husbands as Humphrey Bogart and Jason Robards, Bacall shone just as brightly on stage, a medium that made plain a quality hinted at by her work in movies. She may not have been the greatest actress ever – far from it: you wouldn’t peruse her CV for reappraisals of Shakespeare and Chekhov. But in her element, she Read more ...
ellin.stein
Director Ari Folman burst onto the scene with his brilliantly realised, quasi-autobiographical Waltz With Bashir, an animated feature that navigated between dreamscapes and reality to explore the personal trauma arising from witnessing the massacres at Lebanon’s Shabra and Shatila refugee camps as an Israeli soldier. His follow-up feature, The Congress, is highly original and fizzing with ideas. But without a similarly gripping central narrative to keep it anchored, it remains somewhat emotionally uninvolving, instead provoking the head-scratching conceptual interest of Inception or The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robin Williams, who has died at the age of 63, was a very American comedian. The flow of invention that erupted from inside him had an unstoppable, domineering, emetic brilliance. In chat shows, performing stand-up, and in his greatest role as a DJ entertaining the troops in Vietnam, he was a not quite human force of nature.Williams had his first starring role in the sitcom Mork and Mindy, as an alien learning the ways of earth. The role lingered over his career as a kind of definition. He never played regular guys: instead he was a shoo-in for shrinks, outcasts, weirdos, penguins and, most Read more ...
graham.rickson
Director David Mackenzie tells us in this disc’s extras that Starred Up is his first genre film, and Fox’s low-rent sleeve art suggests that this could be another dreary, thuggish Britflick. The prison drama clichés come thick and fast, from the hard-nosed governor to the attack in the shower block. There’s a well-meaning outsider helping prisoners deal with anger issues, copious, bloody violence and a sweaty gym scene.So it's good to report that Starred Up is a remarkable film, superbly acted and cannily scripted by Jonathan Asser, basing the screenplay on his own stint teaching prisoners. Read more ...