Film
Nick Hasted
The literal miracle in this earthily comic 1956 romance happens at the end. The deeper magic for producer-screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was the “small daily miracles” he found in its “extraordinary” Soho setting. He wrote the script in 1934, at the start of life in England as a Hungarian Jewish refugee, via France, from Germany’s newly Nazi film industry. In the two decades it took to make it, Pressburger wrote, produced and edited one of the greatest sequences in British cinema with director Michael Powell - A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Discussing what appealed to him in Patricia Highsmith’s simmering thriller The Two Faces of January, first-time director Hossein Amini landed on the deliberate lack of character motivation: “She doesn’t really explain why people do things.” This very obfuscation drew attention at the time of the novel’s 1964 publication, when the reader at Highsmith’s publisher identified “a frightening sense of the neurotic” in her approach to drawing characters.A lack of motivation is far from ideal in the mind of most actors, and there is a sense that Two Faces’ script is at times working against its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble may well be the film that foretold the end of Communism in Poland. Its script gestation period lasted almost 14 years, starting from 1962, and though its official release in 1977 was kept to a minimal level by the authorities, even in that form it’s believed that almost a fifth of the nation’s population saw the work.Aleksander Scibor-Rylski’s script plays loosely with the Citizen Kane narrative device of hunting down the personal truth behind a past legend. In this case it’s a socialist hero bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, centre, main Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Born in an era when the Japanese were censored out of making a straightforward post-Hiroshima film, King of the Monsters Godzilla – or aka his infinitely cooler Japanese name Gojira – is a hero, cultural phenomenon and metaphor: he represents nature that can both kill and save. As a film star, however, he’s moved from ultra low-budget to high in over 28 films of various quality. The original 1954 Japanese film produced by Toho is often considered the best with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version almost killing the monster and the franchise off entirely.To paraphrase Jennifer Lawrence’s character Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Speaking at the BFI's recent preview Jia Zhang-ke revealed that his surprisingly bloodthirsty latest is in fact, contrary to the shift it seems, the next logical step in his journey as a filmmaker: an amalgamation of his interest in personal crisis and his great love for the work of John Woo. Jia described A Touch of Sin as the film where he finally puts a "gun in the hands" of his beleaguered protagonists. It comprises four stories from the economic giant and human rights black hole that is modern China, each of which culminate in cataclysmic violence. With visuals inspired by traditional Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The classic Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu named a number of his films after the seasons, but he restricted himself to spring, summer and autumn. I don’t believe he ever titled one after winter - not that his work doesn’t touch on the closing of the year, and its associations with death. Re-released in a wonderfully restored print, An Autumn Afternoon turned out to be the director’s last film, made in 1962; the previous year had seen the death of Ozu’s mother (the director never married, and lived with her all his life), and Ozu himself would die a year later. But while there is sadness here Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Many films fuse humour with horror and many of those fail to be accomplished in either genre. Bringing fun to the scary often results in a clunkiness which neither raises laughs or goosebumps. The worst example might be the utterly awful Bloodbath at the House of Death, a 1984 film which teamed all-round showbiz eccentric Kenny Everett with veteran actor Vincent Price. What Price thought as he navigated his way through this stinker is not a matter of record, but he may have ruefully cast his mind back a decade to the contrastingly wonderful Theatre of Blood. Released in 1973, it is one of the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Some of the most famous movie duds - Showgirls, Body of Evidence, Boxing Helena, Colour of Night - which are beloved of course by a certain type of film enthusiast, this reviewer included, strive for smouldering and deliver mainly laughs. Which brings us to the latest example of inept eroticism: In Secret, debut writer-director Charlie Stratton's adaptation of Zola's 19th Read more ...
Jasper Rees
French cinema is full of long-term marriages hit by a meteor in the form of an attractive younger female. So there is a heavy sense of déjà vu to Before the Winter Chill. It also features another increasingly common trope of modern French film, which is Kristin Scott Thomas playing a perfect French speaker with an English heritage, and accent. So is there a twist? Sort of.Scott Thomas is Lucie (pictured below), the wife of a successful neurosurgeon Paul (Daniel Auteuil) who prefers to operate on brains rather than suffer the fate of his shrink friend Gérard (Richard Berry), who has to listen Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Films in which poetry is almost a character can often become bombastic, but there’s no danger of that in Bruno Barreto’s Reaching for the Moon, whose heroine is the repressed, rather quiet American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto): speaking loudly, we feel, was little in her character, even when she was in her cups (which she quite often is in this deluxe Brazilian English-language biopic).Barreto’s film is about Bishop’s complicated 15-year relationship with the affluent Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires), who is the exact opposite of her partner – she’s forthright Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“At the time, I was bored, and I needed something to do,” Tara (Lindsay Lohan) says, trying to explain her participation in a film. “And now…I’m looking for something else to do.” And she gives a small, bottomless sigh. The notorious, bedevilled Lohan is the hot spot in Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis’s chilly nightmare about love in Hollywood. Her Marilyn-style on-set unreliability led every pre-release story about their experiment in micro-budget, Kickstarter-funded cinema.Lohan’s recent homage to Marilyn’s last, nude photo-shoot aged 36 is here followed by a film in which the 27-year- Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises is grand, sweeping and bursting with the kind of beautiful animation we've become accustomed to from Studio Ghibli (which celebrates its 30th birthday next year). Miyazaki delves into Japanese history with a soaring autobiography of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi, which also acts as a tribute to the writer Tatsuo Hori - who penned the original short story "The Wind Has Risen".The freedom and highs of creative expression and following your dreams are stylishly rendered through breathtaking flight sequences - first in Jirô’s fantasies Read more ...