Film
Katie Colombus
For a long time, Kathleen Hanna was ensconced in a world where she cared more about the noise she made onstage than off. Despite being in a band that couldn't really play their instruments, her political message was what mattered.
The Bikini Kill front-woman and outspoken feminist punk idol’s life is explored in this biographical documentary, hinged on the mystery of why she suddenly stopped performing in 2005.
Directed by Sini Anderson in a fanzine style, the film pays homage to a singer that rocked the riot grrrl movement, sparking a sub-culture of female empowerment and launching third Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Director Jim Mickle and writing partner Nick Damici made a big splash on the horror scene back in 2007 with fierce debut Mulberry St. Since then they have impressed with low-key apocalyptic vampire flick, Stake Land, and a reimagining of the well-regarded Mexican cannibal horror, We Are What We Are, which they turned into a story of female empowerment and a slight on organised religion. Cold in July may not be what their ever increasing fan base expected them to do next but that’s exactly what makes it so satisfying. Mickle and Damici’s daring attitude, passion and knowledge of genre, and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
A pervading sense of melancholia runs through this film, and yet it is neither chilling, nor disaffecting. Akin to one of the key characters, watching it is a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The Past hovers somewhere between fight and flight, with characters in myriad sliding door moments. They dissect the past and analyse the future, but are stuck in an impossible limbo between the two. It is a labyrinthine tangle of what might have been - accidentally leaving your child on the metro as you head out of the station; a complete and happy marriage; an extra-marital affair; a Read more ...
Ian Knight
I can remember the exact moment that Zulu grabbed me. I was seven at the time and watched the film at some now-defunct widescreen cinema in Brighton early in 1964, probably just a few weeks after it was released.I had been intrigued by the posters spread on hoardings around my nearby hometown. They depicted small figures locked in battle at the foot of the gigantic letters making up the title, which stood, Ozymandias-like, in the African veldt. The movie promised to be right up my street, a classic Boys’ Own adventure – although I can’t remember now if I badgered my parents to take me to see Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite. But the film stints on precisely that aspect of the show that sends theatre audiences to their feet every night - namely, the music, which largely gets sacrificed on the altar of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Camille Claudel was not only Rodin’s student, mistress and muse, but a talented sculptor in her own right. Some years after the two parted, her mental health started to decline. In 1913 her family committed her first to a psychiatric hospital, then an asylum; but their actions appear to have been needless and cruel, the family persistently ignoring doctors’ recommendations that Camille be released. She would remain locked up until her death, some 30 years later. Bruno Dumont’s outstanding film charts three days near the start of Claudel’s incarceration in the asylum, during which time Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For a film that begins with the remark "this is the truth, sorry", The Fault in Our Stars could up its honesty quotient. Slickly made and very nicely acted within the confines allowed by the script, Josh Boone's adaptation of John Green's young-adult blockbuster novel nonetheless can't help but sell candour (not to mention plausibility) down a tear-laden river in its tale of young love cut short by cancer. I was more or less going along with a narrative that sells its lack of sentimentality like a badge of honour - until a scene set at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam of such startling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alarm bells jangle when the first thing you see on the screen is a caption saying "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia". It's the sum of all cliches, and therefore the perfect way to tee off this incoherent pseudo-thriller from director McG which can't decide whether it wants to laugh or cry. The viewer may not share its indecision.In a nutshell: veteran CIA hitman Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) vows to give up his old job of committing international mass murder and try to re-establish relationships with his estranged wife and teenage daughter. However, before he can achieve this, his new CIA Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Transylvania in Northern Romania remains yoked to the memory of Vlad the Impaler, the ruthless individual immortalised as Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, but, on a sunny midsummer week in early June, the mood was anything but stygian in Cluj, the region's capital and the country's second-largest city.Cold War brutalism sits alongside elaborate Austro-Hungarian wedding cake fancies in this elegant, eclectic, battered melting pot, where a constant chain of arts festivals is to be found pretty much throughout the year (Cluj is currently contending for the crown of European City of Culture in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010), the filmmaker Joanna Hogg staked out unfashionable territory: the anxieties and frustrations that stem from communication failures and deep-seated resentments among the insular English bourgeoisie. Exhibition, her latest, is as coolly observed and as exquisitely acted, visualized, and sound-designed as its predecessors, but it's more opaque.A series of mostly low-key vignettes, it depicts the secure but uneasy marriage of the contemporary artists D (Viv Albertine, the musician) and H (Liam Gillick, the conceptual artist) at a moment of crisis. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Miss Violence opens with an 11th birthday party whose brightly coloured balloons, pointed party hats and forced family jollity might seem unremarkable if a little girl hadn't chosen to stick Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the stereo - not only Cohen at his most sinisterly sensual but a song inspired by the Holocaust. He wrote it after learning orchestras were a feature of some concentration camps, and that they were sometimes pressed into playing through brutality, so that their music became horribly anomalous accompaniments to punishments or violent death. Given the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Shanghai director Fei Mu’s final film Spring in a Small Town appeared at the end of an era, coming out in 1948, a year before revolution engulfed China. The subsequent upheaval saw the director branded a “rightist”, or reactionary (he fled to Hong Kong. where he died three years later, aged only 45), and Spring… was shelved for almost three decades, only returned to audiences when a new print was made at the beginning of the Eighties. You can understand why the director’s emphasis on the intimacy of private worlds, and sense of a society looking backwards rather than forwards, didn’t exactly Read more ...