Film
Karen Krizanovich
Divine is a lot more than dog poop. The minute you mention Divine – born Glenn Milstead in Baltimore, star of John Waters’ cult classics such as Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble – mention of the famous scene in Pink Flamingos where the performer actually does consume canine faeces is almost obliterated.That almost is the door through which director Jeffrey Schwarz
takes us, using archive stills, footage as well as new interviews with Waters, Mink Stole, Ricki Lake, Tab Hunter and many more. More effective than a DeLorean, we are right back in the day, when Divine was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finding a new angle for a forbidden romance film must be tough. Telling the story of a couple where one is married, in a relationship or in some other situation impeding the path of true love or lust is not enough. New settings are needed. In the French drama Grand Central, the problem is solved when love blossoms inside a nuclear power station and the surrounding encampment.Grand Central tells of Gary (Tahar Rahim) and Karole (Léa Seydoux). From near Lyon, he has pitched up in the Rhone Valley and finds a job as a decontamination worker at a nuclear power plant. Karole works there and is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That 1971’s Harold and Maude still confounds and delights in equal measure is a tribute to its timelessness. Despite evocative, period-specific music from Cat Stevens, and settings and trappings which place it as a film conceived and completed as the Sixties still cast a shadow, it still hinges on finely honed characterisations and a story which was, and remains, unique. Although mainstream, it played with the nature of romance and what is or isn’t acceptable in the day-to-day to such an extent that it continues to be both uncomfortable viewing and engender warm-hearted feelings. Reactions Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Humankind's desperate struggle for survival is exquisitely rendered in this post-apocalyptic set sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves, the director of another end of the world type scenario in found footage film Cloverfield, takes the reins of this smart and attractive franchise and runs confidently with visceral wanton destruction and a blunt message about gun control.Living a peaceful existence in the wilderness of a San Francisco forest, the apes have carved out a life without humans who they presume have long died out due to the simian flu virus (seen taking hold Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the opening scene of Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History, the cash-strapped Fabian (Sid Lucero), a law school’s star student until he dropped out, sits in a trendy café pontificating to his friends about the absence of truth and meaning in the Philippines of the 21st century. A nascent absolutist vigilante who extols such 1890s liberationist revolutionaries as José Rizal and Andrés Bonifacio – “they did what they needed to do, and then they died" – Fabian also regrets that Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship of 1965-1986 failed because he softened, culminating in today’s corrupt Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The sign of a good film is one that lingers, one that you return to after days, months or even years – a snapshot of an image, a feeling that struck a chord within you, a memorable character that inspired or excited, or a line that you just can’t shake. But what of one that does the total opposite, that makes you appalled and apathetic in equal measure so that you to want to forget it immediately and never return to it?An 11-year-old girl jumps to her death from the balcony of her family’s apartment on the day of her birthday. To begin with, every line of Miss Violence could be misconstrued Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate the merely good from the truly great – and who would have expected that there are truly great photographers yet undiscovered, or even some that didn’t want to be discovered? This is the backstory of Finding Vivian Maier, an exceptional and exceptionally compelling documentary co-directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.It was Maloof’s own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When is an adaptation no such thing? Novelist Michael Faber has been more or less faithfully televised by the BBC in The Crimson Petal and the White starring Romola Garai as an autodidactic Victorian prostitute, while at the other polarity stands Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, featuring an almost wordless Scarlett Johansson as a man-slaying alien loose on the streets of Glasgow. From under the skin of the film the guts of the novel have been ripped out, leaving the viewer free to read what they will into a chilling parable about (when all's said and done) alienation.The film has already Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A May-September relationship is given a winter chill here. When Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), an American widower in Paris, meets pretty young dance instructor Pauline (Clemence Poesy) on a bus, the ageing male fantasy suggested by the title seems on the cards. A feel-good scene of grumpy, grieving Matthew joining in at Pauline’s dance class also prepares you for a lazy, age-gap romcom. But his puppyish looks towards Pauline as he dances are childishly needy as much as comic, and German writer-director Sandra Nettlebeck has more interesting, unpredictable ideas on old age, youth and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-agers, of which we’ve seen an awful lot recently, focus on a turning point in a child’s life: not so much the moment they transition from child to adult as the moment a child is first drawn into the adult world - retreat might be possible but they emerge from the experience changed. Boyhood, from the ever ingenious Richard Linklater, offers a genuinely fresh and truly ambitious twist on this cinematic staple.Like the growth chart we see inked on a door-frame, the film provides yearly updates on a child’s development. It’s a labour of love, shot in 39 days over the course of 12 years Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perhaps the most surprising - and certainly the most moving moment - of the 2014 British Academy Film Awards was the awarding of Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema to Peter Greenaway. Surprising, not because this wasn't colossally deserved (and in keeping with tradition it was of course announced ahead of the event), but because our most idiosyncratic and subversive auteur has fallen out of fashion in recent years: a 2011 Time Out poll listing the "100 Best British Films" as chosen by industry experts, sadly saw not a single one of his works placed.Furthermore, Greenaway hasn't made a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Movies about the music industry often end up being bombastic or twee or merely idiotic. This one, written and directed by John Carney (who made 2006's not entirely dissimilar Once), picks its way carefully around the pitfalls to tell a story of love, loss and pop songs with sweetness and wit.You wouldn't automatically visualise Keira Knightley as Indie Pop Girl, but she steps up winningly as Greta, a budding songwriter who prizes her music and doesn't want it prostituted on TV talent shows or bastardised to fit marketing strategies. She's in a seemingly idyllic (uh-oh) relationship with Dave Read more ...