Film
Tom Birchenough
We see the harshness of everyday life in Danis Tanović’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker first in its snowy, subsistence landscapes, as hero Nazif goes out to the forest to bring in whatever wood he can find to keep the family home warm. But by the end of the film, which took the Jury Grand Prix at last year’s Berlinale, we have seen, much more chillingly, the harshness of human behaviour.Nazif and his wife Senada are from Bosnia’s Roma community, living with their two young daughters in a remote village. Home life is happy, even if sparse in comforts, and Senada is pregnant. Nazif Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even Emma Thompson's finely honed deadpan delivery can go only so far in The Love Punch, a caper movie (remember those?) that moves from the implausible to the preposterous before sputtering to a dead halt. A revenge comedy nominally steeped in a desire to right social injustice, writer-director Joel Hopkins's film soon abandons all loftier aspirations in favour of one jaw-droppingly daft sequence after another. If you've ever wanted to see four distinguished British thesps d'un certain age don body-hugging scuba gear while they attempt to crash a French wedding by any means necessary, here's Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sixty years a masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is being released by the BFI on DVD and in a Blu-ray Steelbook. Digitally restored by Toho from an original 35mm master positive, it ought to be a mandatory purchase for movie-struck kids raised on CGI, 3D, and hyperbolic action epics that bear no relation to reality. They and everyone else should, of course, see it in a cinema, too.Set in 1587, during Japan's late Warring States period, it tells the story, both stirring and elegiac, of five seasoned ronin, a boastful charlatan, and a starstruck rookie hired to spearhead a mountain Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
If Crystal Fairy is about "the birth of compassion in someone’s life”, as director Sebastián Silva explained when it premiered at Sundance last year, then Magic Magic (which he shot at the same time) can be seen as a companion piece of sorts. It’s not too far a reach to assume Silva is testing his audience with this disorientating and incredibly taut look at mental illness. He explores how deep sympathies really lie for a disorder that some have difficulty empathising with and how the decisions arrived at by a pack mentality can lead to devastating consequences.Silva cleverly sets this Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson first burst onto the scene in 1998 with the chaotically romantic Show Me Love (original title Fucking Åmål), a story of a love affair between two teenage girls which shocks a small Swedish town. He followed that with commune comedy Together (2000) before eventually segueing into darker territory with films such as Lilya 4-Ever (2002), A Hole in My Heart (2004) and Mammoth (2009) which focussed on sex trafficking, amateur porn and the ills of globalisation respectively.His latest We Are the Best! revisits Show Me Love's shy-girl-wild-girl dynamic but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spider-senses will be buzzing alarmingly before the end, as deadly danger approaches Peter Parker and his loved ones - just the sort of danger, in fact, that some viewers may remember from the distant days of 2004, and Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi’s superhero movie high-water mark. It’s the problem that won’t go away for the series reboot Sony’s budget and creative conflicts with Raimi required, when the series had only just begun. Everyone has done an excellent job on director Marc Webb’s exciting, well-crafted sequel to his first Spider-Man film. But it’s impossible to reboot audiences’ brains, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This April is proving the kindest month for cinephiles. Hot on the heels of Mark Cousins’ engrossing A Story of Children and Film comes another documentary about cinema of captivating, encyclopaedic interest, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Celluloid Man. The director’s immediate subject is PK Nair, the man who created India’s National Film Archive (NFA). It’s thanks to Nair that many early classics of that nation’s film heritage – India is as cinema-centred a country as any in the world, with many of its national languages giving rise to distinct branches of the industry – have been preserved at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.We Are the Best! is the story of Bobo, Klara and their unlikely soul mate Hedvig. It’s about their assertion of individuality and how Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bill Forsyth’s 1979 debut feature is so polished shouldn’t be a surprise; he’d been working on documentaries and short films since the 1960s. Several of these are included as generous bonuses on this disc. KH-4 and Mirror are offbeat mini-dramas, but more pertinent is Oscar Marzaroli's Glasgow 1980, an upbeat short edited by Forsyth in 1970, outlining in optimistic fashion how the city would soon be transformed for the better. The depressing gap between aspiration and reality is clear in That Sinking Feeling. Glasgow remains grubby and congested, its pasty-faced denizens negotiating a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The contradictions and iniquities of Panama City were very much in evidence last week. The city opened Central America’s first subway system, which many claim is a $2billion folie de grandeur for outgoing president Ricardo Martinelli, rather than a necessity; meanwhile, a fire destroyed one of the city's dilapidated old city buildings, killing a number of squatters who had refused to remove themselves from the path of gentrification, and whose lives would have benefited from an infinitesimal fraction of the money spent on the subway.Here was hubris and suffering, side by side in a city still Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first line of his Wikipedia entry says that Tom Hardy "is an English actor" (he was born in Hammersmith), but for the 84 minute duration of Locke I was fully prepared to accept that he came from Llangollen or Llareggub. The film's narrative floats on Hardy's warming Welsh brogue like a boat navigating heaving tides and contrary currents, as his character Ivan Locke tries to cope with his life disintegrating around his ears.It's not easy to devise an entirely fresh form of film-making, but writer/director Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Dirty Pretty Things) has had a pretty good go here. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bradenville is on the way up. The town might only have one bank, but it does have a copper mine and a newly opened pyjama factory. In Arizona, it’s sufficiently isolated to seem the right target for a trio of bad guys looking to help themselves to what’s in that bank. Their plans culminate on a Saturday.The 1955 film Violent Saturday is, potentially, standard film noir. A darkly drawn bank heist caper, it is also a Peyton Place-style melodrama examining the lives of townsfolk, their infelicities, insecurities and foibles. The two styles exist in parallel and meet head on the fateful Saturday Read more ...