Film
Karen Krizanovich
Take some hot Fyodor Dostoyevsky, top it with two scoops of Jesse Eisenberg and stir with writer-director Richard Ayoade – and you'll have The Double, Ayoade’s second feature after his successful Submarine. You know to expect freshness, quirkiness and quality from that far southwestern pool of the UK creative arts. Stylish and sharp, this is a quirky black comedy that clicks with serious undertones, aided by terrific sound design and Eisenberg acting himself off the screen. It feels like Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich meeting Kafka, with a bit of Five Easy Pieces thrown in.It's the Read more ...
David Nice
Hands Over the City is to Naples at a crucial point in its 20th-century history what Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta is to the Italian capital and Visconti’s La terra trema to the Sicilian coast. Francesco Rosi’s decision to capture the only boom that Italy has ever really known in the early 1960s is an uncompromising film about the energy that directs itself to bad ends.Its embodiment is Rod Steiger’s Eduardo Nottola, a councillor who embroils city housing plans in his own profiteering property development. "So what’s new, or rather old?" you might ask. And indeed the film remains pertinent Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Always the bridesmaid but never the bride: that adage, and its many equivalents, courses through 20 Feet From Stardom, the hugely entertaining but also gently poignant documentary that was a popular winner at this year's Oscars. A look at the life of backup singers over time - who they were and are and where they have got to - Morgan Neville's short (90-minute) and bittersweet film casts a necessary spotlight on those show biz folk who aren't necessarily given centre-stage.It deepens our response that the given milieu also works as a metaphor for so many lives across all vocations that exist Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first outing of the re-tooled Captain America in 2011's The First Avenger was a bit of a hoot, thanks to its carefully-wrought 1940s setting and Stanley Tucci and Hugo Weaving portraying contrasting varieties of Teutonic craziness. Bringing the Cap into the present day after a 70-year slumber poses a few different problems, since he is quite literally a man out of time. It's really not that easy to take seriously a bloke who goes everywhere with a large tin shield clamped on his back, while everybody else has upgraded to hover-jets and laser-guided weapons.Still, while The Winter Soldier Read more ...
Madeleine Sackler
For the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, there are many risks to doing something that we might all take for granted: telling stories about our lives. These risks include censorship, blacklisting, imprisonment, and worse. But when the authorities forbid critical examinations of such topics as sexual orientation, alcoholism, suicide and politics, the Free Theatre responds by injecting these taboos into underground performances. Unfortunately, their activities eventually become too dangerous for even these individuals, and after a rigged election and a violent crackdown by the KGB, they are Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's not often we're told to strap ourselves in for a drama - it takes quite some skill to make the everyday excite and to make ordinary lives seem extraordinary, but these are gifts that the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has in abundance. His talent for meticulously structured, thriller-tense narratives, for coming at stories from an interesting angle (conducive to creating and capturing emotional charge) couldn't even be ignored by the Academy, who recognised 2011's A Separation outside the (niche) world cinema category, with an Oscar nomination for its screenplay alongside the gong Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Donald Cammell made two films that were close to his intentions: Performance and this. There were only four films altogether, in almost 30 years of trying. Wild Side, studio-savaged as Demon Seed had been, was restored to something like his wishes after he shot himself in 1996, defeated.White of the Eye is, then, the only untarnished testament to Cammell’s talent away from his Performance co-director Nic Roeg. It’s a 1986 film about a possible serial killer, Paul White (David Keith), and his wife Joan (Cathy Moriarty, pictured below). Each anonymous murder is highly stylised: a meat cleaver Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s sleazy being green. In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit The Frog stars as both himself and evil Constantine, a frog that would annex the Ukraine if he could, in a star-studded follow-up to the enjoyable hit The Muppets. Like the feature of 2011, Muppets Most Wanted has some terrific songs, even if it lacks the momentum and funny logic of its predecessor. Nevertheless, given a little time, the frog and his buddies warm up, brush off the dust and get down to the kind of Muppetry we crave. It’s one of those films you’re not sure about, but as you leave the cinema you'll be singing the songs as Read more ...
ellin.stein
If Errol Morris lived in Middle Earth he’d make a documentary about Sauron. If he taught at Hogwarts, he’d be turning his cameras on Voldemort. You get the idea. Morris is drawn to Dark Overlords, powerful men of steely ambition and ego, convinced of their own rightness even after events have proven that their wrong-headed ideas have demonstrably contributed to the sum of human misery.He can also claim to be the only person to have made documentaries about not one but two former U.S. Defense Secretaries (Ministers), the pinnacle of the Pentagon. The first was 2003’s Oscar-winning The Fog of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The big screen is no country for old women. The exception who proves the rule over and over again is of course Judi Dench. Of no actress is it more frequently said that you’d happily listen to her reading out the phone book. Her most recent masterclass in the tiny brushstrokes of screen acting is in Philomena, adapted from Martin Sixsmith’s book about helping an Irish woman to find the son she bore out of wedlock in 1952. Dench is very largely the reason it’s worth making an appointment to view.She plays Philomena Lee, a devout old woman with love and sadness in her heart leavened by a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You'd have to go a long way to find a film as truly, mind-bogglingly bad as A Long Way Down, which trumps A New York Winter's Tale as the worst celluloid entry in this still-young film year and may likely set the bar for some while to come. Adapted from the darkly comic 2005 novel from Nick Hornby, the movie about four suicidal malcontents who find solace in one another's company manages to trivialise and cheapen every aspect of human behaviour that it touches. Amidst the pervasive ineptitude, the astonishing Toni Collette wrings a tonal grace note or two out of the dross around her, which is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone who secretly liked High School Musical or is a fan of Mean Girls or Glee will find something to like in Darren Stein's candy-coloured high-school satire, which detonates some teenage culture bombs (albeit some of them years behind the curve) while giving some hearty laughs.When quiet and unassuming Tanner (Michael J Willett) is outed, suddenly he becomes hot property for the school's clique queens – Mormon princess 'Shley (Andrea Bowen), sassy drama diva Caprice (Xosha Roquemore) and bitchy blonde Fawcett (Sasha Piertse). If they all sound like stereotypes, you're absolutely right Read more ...