Film
David Nice
Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There aren’t many understated films about cannibal clans. Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, the Mexican original on which this American remake is based, reeked of despair and depravity, in a tainted Mexico City where a family fed on the homeless. Director Jim Mickle has almost inevitably made a sleaker, less disturbing film. More surprising is just how slow a burn it is. We know something is wrong with the Parkers: mother Emma (Kassie De Paiva), who falls down and dies hawking up black blood in the first scene, stern, grieving patriarch Frank (Bill Sage), teenage daughters Rose (Julia Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Is it just me or are the Oscars getting better? I don't necessarily mean the show itself, rather the films selected for nomination and the eventual winners. In recent years we've seen films as brilliant and diverse as The Artist, The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men take the top prize. And whilst The King's Speech, Slumdog Millionaire and Argo might have been crowd pleasers, they were also finely crafted and help banish memories of seeing Chicago, A Beautiful Mind and Crash crowned, or Forrest Gump trumping Pulp Fiction and Titanic sinking everything in sight.This year's nominees Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Basil Barrow (John Mills) is a proud, repressed, upper-class lieutenant colonel who was traumatized by his experiences in a Japanese POW camp. Shortly after the war, he fulfils his ambition by taking command of the Scottish battalion once led by his grandfather. When his by-the-book methods are ignored, his stiff upper lip doesn't quiver, but one of his eyes twitches dementedly and his head looks as if it it might burst, like a plum. Mills was able to twitch that eye at will.The cause of Barrow's apoplexy is the acting colonel he has replaced, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness), a coarse, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from Markus Zusak's bestseller, director Brian Percival's movie is well cast and brimming with good intentions, but it's too long, too safe and too uneventful to do justice to its subject matter. The story charts the rise of Nazi Germany through the eyes of Liesel Meminger and her adoptive parents the Hubermanns, but the horrors are sanitised and the anticipated emotional punch is never delivered.The Hubermanns are struggling to make ends meet, and have adopted Liesel (luminously played by adolescent Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse) because state funding is available to foster parents Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What's happening here?" Jennifer Connelly asks somewhere near the not-a-moment-too-soon ending of A New York Winter's Tale, a question filmgoers will have been muttering from pretty much the first frame. Not long after, Connelly lets rip with "this is crazy", a sentiment similarly likely to strike home with that hapless few who find themselves at this magical-realist foray into psychobabble and soap suds. Writer-director-producer Akiva Goldsman may have won an Oscar for scripting A Beautiful Mind (Connelly got her own trophy for that one), but his directorial debut has eventual triumph at Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Over many months, the release of stills and teaser trailers from Nymphomania, as well as the poster showing the faces of its stars (presumably) faking orgasms, have maximized press speculation on the nature of Lars von Trier's hardcore-laced saga about the life of a female sex addict.Would it be a garden of delights, earthly and unearthly? Would it be to 21st century global culture what the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover was to British society in 1960? Would it be yet another film made by the provoking Dane, in the misogynistic spirit of Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville Read more ...
mark.kidel
Claude Sautet’s gripping noir thriller “Classe Tous Risques”, originally released in 1960, was an inspiration for Jean-Pierre Melville’s collection of peerless films set in the French underworld. Not surprising, as the script was written by the novelist and ex-cop José Giovanni, who also supplied the story for Melville’s classic “Le Deuxième Souffle”. As the excellent TV series "Braquo", written by another ex-policeman, Olivier Marchal, has shown, experience of a profession in which the boundaries between good and evil are blurred makes for convincing and emotionally engaging stories. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The lakeside beach that is the only scene of action in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a concentrated crucible of desires. The sense of languid summer and the limpid beauty of the lake itself, beautifully and compellingly caught throughout in Claire Mathon’s widescreen cinematography, are deceptive: this gay cruising area is a place of urgent, largely silent action, and deadly undercurrents, where sexual fascination can become potentially fatal.The film opens with the arrival of the goodlooking Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who parks his car, strips down, and goes into the water. Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Unique, dreamy, super cool and splendidly silly, just like its maker Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire flick packed full of romanticism, wit and enchanting, fuzzy music. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast as a pair of vampires named Adam and Eve entangled for eternity by the bonds of love. They don't prowl around town searching for victims, instead they live peaceful existences surrounded by the “human zombies” who are slowly ruining their beloved planet.LA is “zombie central” according to Adam (Hiddleston), an ex-rock star who now hides away from the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Hopelessly devoted women queuing up for hugs and to cut a rug with a playful John Travolta all dressed in black were just two of the highlights of an often pensive and surprisingly serious discussion, hosted by film critic Barry Norman, but one that still came littered with moments of real fun. “I want to make love to you all!”, Travolta exclaimed as he came out on stage to rapturous applause and screams of adoration.Preceding Travolta’s lively "Stayin' Alive"-flanked entrance to the Drury Lane stage where the dimple-cheeked actor gamely struck his famous pose from Saturday Night Fever, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The primary DVD extra with Captain Phillips is an hour-long behind-the-scenes featurette. Most heavyweight Hollywood films have these but they’re often backslap-fests with little true revelation. The Captain Phillips featurette bucks the trend with genuine insight into the film-making methods of Paul Greengrass.Captain Phillips is classic Greengrass, close in flavour to his shockingly powerful United 93. He combines earnest attention-to-detail coverage of the minutiae of extreme situations with a fat-free forward-driving narrative and enough glimpses of real humanity to keep the emotions Read more ...