Film
Adam Sweeting
There was a brief moment back in the day when Sylvester Stallone thought he ought to be a serious actor (remember Cop Land?), but posterity will surely recall him as the King of the Franchise. As if Rocky and Rambo weren't enough, the 68-year-old Stallone is now enjoying a major string of paydays with The Expendables, and this third instalment will merely whet the global appetite for more.The plot (cooked up by Stallone) is the usual clunkily serviceable farrago of action clichés, designed to travel to its destination via a string of ever-more-catastrophic set pieces. Barney Ross (Sly) and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"There are 32 ways to write a story...but there is only one plot - things are not as they seem" - wisdom, courtesy of author Jim Thompson and ominously quoted in We Gotta Get Out of This Place by Sue (Mackenzie Davis) before she's swept into a nightmarish story of her own, one that takes the shape of a Thompson-esque crime thriller where things, and more specifically people, are most certainly contrary to how they appear. The film is the confident directorial debut of brothers Simon and Zeke Hawkins, working from a knowing, double-cross-laden script by first-time screenwriter Dutch Southern. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Early in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s first, Oscar-winning documentary about a former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara admits that, if the USA had lost World War Two, he would have been convicted as a war criminal for his part in the fire-bombing of Japan. “Some things work out, and some things don’t,” Donald Rumsfeld observes with contrasting breeziness in Morris’s new film. This is as near to a critical perspective as the Iraq catastrophe’s principal architect cares to get.The cunning and humane Morris, who spent 33 hours interviewing Rumsfeld, only presses his subject once, on Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine an industrial disaster that manages to kill, maim or make homeless a significant percentage of the population of a densely populated city. Then imagine the effects of that disaster for years to come: the catastrophic physical and psychological effects on the city’s surviving inhabitants; the complete destruction of the region’s infrastructure; and the utterly devastating impact on its already struggling local economy. (If it helps, imagine this city is Bhopal, 1984, and the company is United Carbide.)Now imagine that this powerful multinational company – culpable through Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
It comes as no surprise that this sequel, based on the Channel 4 TV series of the same name, which saw four awkward male teenagers bond over their insecurities, offers little more than a shitstorm of juvenile humour and one-note female characters who are presented as objects to lust over. Lowbrow comedy doesn’t get any lower, and writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris (who also take on directorial duties) predictably push the limits of acceptability which makes for occasionally funny viewing.The Inbetweeners 2 offers its most laddish character and pathological liar, Jay (James Buckley), the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love. The connection is stretched by cultural differences, and only exaggerated by differences (and therefore misunderstandings) of language.Lilting moves between a loose, if undefined realism, and a certain kind of hallucination. That tone is set in its Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
I sit down with Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou to talk about his experience making his first feature film, Lilting, which showed at Sundance film festival in competition, took home the award for best cinematography in the world cinema category, and opened the 28th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival to great acclaim. A cheery mood fills the room, his softly-spoken, intelligent musings inflected with an excitability which is utterly endearing. After working in film distribution for years, Khaou finally decided to take the leap over to full-time filmmaker last Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Now that the shock and dismay over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death has subsided, we have the chance to see his final performances and recall an actor like few others. I can’t think of many who managed to emit so much power and convey so much human complexity without an iota of visible “acting”.His spy thriller A Most Wanted Man is released later this year, followed by what he’d managed to get in the can for the final instalments of The Hunger Games. And that will be that. First, there’s God’s Pocket, whose other notable credit is that of John Slattery, the actor best known for his suave and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Depardieu as an imaginary version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was always likely to be a study in grossness. Add director and co-writer Abel Ferrara, the hardcore extremist behind Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, and a white-knuckle night out is guaranteed. Depardieu’s powerful French banker Devereaux is a creature of grotesque and relentless appetites, alright, a bloated sex addict and rapist. But actor and director also insist he is human and shamelessly so, even as he sacrifices others to his desires.There is a sense, too, that Welcome to New York is autobiography even more than biography. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We were making a film about the ideal summer holiday,” says actor Sophie Neville in one of the extras on this "40th Anniversary Special Edition" of the 1974 adaptation of Arthur Ransome's book Swallows & Amazons. As Titty Walker, she played a girl camping out with her three siblings on a Lake District island while engaging in wholesome outdoor fun and mounting a play war against the Blackett sisters, the Amazons of the title.Swallows & Amazons is the evergreen and totemic book from 1929 in which Ransome celebrated the Lake District and its power to delight. The 1970s cinema version Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Against the background of the spectacular scenery of Patagonia, Argentinian director Lucia Puenzo creates a tight, subtly unnerving thriller in her third film Wakolda. Its American release title “The German Doctor” reveals its subject more immediately, which is the time spent by Nazi physician Josef Mengele (Alex Brendemuhl) in Latin America after his flight from Europe.But Wakolda is a very long way indeed from the other film that springs to mind on that subject, The Boys from Brazil. Instead it tells a chamber story of how Brendemuhl’s character, travelling under the name Helmut Gregor, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The long march of history pales next to the clamped-down passions and pulpy theatrics of A Promise, the first English-language film from that often most sinuous and witty of French directors, Patrice Leconte. Wit, alas, is nowhere to be seen on this occasion, which may just mark the worst foray into non-native celluloid territory since The Lives of Others' Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck gave us The Tourist four years ago.Leading lady Rebecca Hall gets to wear an array of nice hats, and classical music devotees will thrill to the overuse of Beethoven to amplify the mood; everyone else will Read more ...