Film
Jasper Rees
Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, in his symbolic walk to freedom as he emerged on foot from captivity in 1990, his astute performance at the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and then finally in death, announced just as an epic new film of his life was being premiered in London, the seat of the old colonial power.Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, which opens in early January, is by no means the first film to feature Mandela. Hollywood has co-opted him, as has television in South Africa, Britain, America and, first of all Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Unless Peter Jackson and his team decide to mine The Silmarillion for three more J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations, their films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will, by this time next year, comprise a complete hexalogy – or, at least, two consecutive triptychs. Setting aside for the moment the crass exploitation of the 317-page The Hobbit, which is being stretched thinner than Gollum's hair over eight hours, it would have been hoped that the entire gargantuan undertaking would be yielding a consistent vision that honours the author's conception of an alternative English myth.
This is not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney perhaps hoped their Lone Ranger reboot, replete with hamming Captain Jack Tonto at its heart, would be a draw in the league of director Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean series. They were gravely mistaken. The kids don’t like cowboys, something Hollywood should have gauged after the resounding flop that was Cowboys & Aliens. Grown-ups however, do still enjoy the Wild West, it seems, as the age bracket drawn to the cinema by The Lone Ranger was often higher than expected. Maybe these were parents and grandparents seeking innocent, old-fashioned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film too often comes over as a prettily decorated edition of a sick spinster’s diary” was how the Monthly Film Bulletin concluded their review of The Innocents in January 1962. After seeing Jack Clayton’s intense adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw more than 50 years on, the impression left now isn’t so much of an attractively presented chronicle of a breakdown, but a film which paints little of its substance in so clear-cut a fashion. As it is with the literary source, the audience is left to draw their own conclusions as to what is real, what is unreal, and what is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s usually documentary cinema that takes us inside societies of which we know little, revealing their structures and rituals. Occasionally feature films achieve something similar, and Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void is one such, telling its story from inside the world of Israel’s Orthodox Hasidic community, specifically the Haredim.So it might seem surprising that one of the first comparisons critics have been making has been with the fiction of Jane Austen (Burshtein herself has acknowledged such resemblances, too). On reflection, it's nothing of the sort: both the film and the novels show Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema Paradiso is having a third outing 25 years on. A commercial flop in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore’s homage to the big screen as an escape route into other worlds excited love on a global scale only after it was re-released as winner of the best foreign film Oscar the following year. After so many films from New York's Italian diaspora had glamourised the mob, here was a bitter-sweet picture postcard from Sicily that had nothing to do with the Cosa Nostra (or very little: one local don does get popped off, but blink and you miss it).Tornatore’s specialist subject is nostalgia - Italian lives Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Special Dialogue is a frothy, lunchtime news-and-chat programme on Indonesia's national television channel. One day – not a special day – its bubbly female anchor hosted three older men. One was called Anwar Congo. She smilingly introduces them by saying “Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating communists. It was more humane, less sadistic and avoided excessive violence.” It’s one chilling moment amongst many in a powerful film.Congo (pictured below right) was an executioner for the Suharto regime which took power in 1965. Before turning to contracted- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty was the deserved big winner at the European Film Awards, with Best Film, Director, Actor and Editor. The bigger question the European Film Academy needs to confront is how few of its winners seemed to really care. A crisis in European film is often declared from this ceremony’s stage. But the most virtuously idealistic of the major awards shows, intended to embody the dreams of the post-war European project, has a crisis of its own.The Awards were visibly strapped for cash this year, with fewer guests packed into an intimate theatre venue, the Haus der Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lest anyone think that the measured performances in Borgen, The Bridge and The Killing or the personal cinema of, say, Susanne Bier, Pernille Fischer Christensen, Lars von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg define Danish drama, along comes the British release of Klown, a film which – despite a few local touches – plays to the familiar: the uncomfortable comedy of The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the gross-out, road-trip fare of The Hangover.Like the first The Hangover film, Klown hinges on an arrested-development male presented with a scenario where he ought to commit to his girlfriend. He Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tarantino calls Big Bad Wolves “the best film of the year”. With its Reservoir Dogs-style scenes of mutilation that are never quite as awful as you fear, a thick streak of brutal black comedy, and a twisting plot in a confined setting, Israeli writer-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado could almost have designed their second feature to appeal to Quentin. There are elements of torture-porn horror, bad fairy tales and a satirical crime story from this film freak duo. But Big Bad Wolves’ strong Israeli context and character provide a flavour of its own.It’s good to see a genre film Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Mr Arkadin, wedged between two greats – Othello and Touch of Evil – is Welles’ most chaotic film, its production scarred by budget restraints and a terminal quarrel with the producer, who barred Welles from the final edit – yet again. What you see is often a mess of dismal dubbing, painfully abrupt (as well as daringly innovative) cuts, and swathes of voiceover to cram in the necessary plot explication.As a whole, it doesn’t hang together at all. Welles sails close over the border of the ludicrous with his face make-up as billionaire Arkadin – Harry Harryhausen’s models are more convincing – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Allen Ginsberg was once approached by two young acolytes eager to discuss literature. The bearded eminence of the Beats was the soul of generosity, giving up no small allowance of time to share his vast knowledge and experience. How they must have basked in the glow as a great poet treated them as equals. At a certain point, having put in sufficient effort, Ginsberg deemed it a good moment to change the subject. “So,” he said, “either of you guys suck cock?”It’s the making of this adventurer which is considered in Kill Your Darlings, and he’s played by the ever questing Daniel Radcliffe. Read more ...