Film
Demetrios Matheou
Turin, December 2013. Berlusconi has finally been kicked out of the Italian parliament. The country is disaffected, fed up with its politicians, broke. Youngsters, including university students, have no hope for the future. It’s a perfect time for them to become acquainted with New Hollywood cinema.One of the most appealing aspects of the Turin Film Festival is the quality of its retrospectives, which are astutely chosen, intelligently curated and extensive. A Nicholas Ray retrospective in 2009 was revelatory, and helped point the way to the rediscovery (and full restoration) of his long-lost Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Alexander Payne is at home with the road movie. From mid-life crisis in Californian wine country in Sideways to dealing with life after the death of a loved one in About Schmidt, he has a knack of tapping into the human spirit and an affinity with the American landscape. Taking great lengths to elicit the whirs and hums of vehicles and the many bumps along the open road, his exploration of the USA is always an eye-opening experience. Nebraska is no different and is the setting for a Midwestern adventure which captures the essence of an agricultural town, the antics of an elderly community and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reactions to Only God Forgives are going to be defined by expectations. Its star, Ryan Gosling, is an all-purpose arts polymath equally at home with music and film, who has directed and written as well as acted. Its director, the Danish-born Nicolas Winding Refn, has no problems with pushing genres beyond their limits despite working within America’s film industry. Gosling was in Refn’s 2011 film Drive, and their follow-up might have been expected to develop that film’s approach by once again hyper-stylising the familiar.To some extent, Only God Forgives does. But it also goes further – and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Although it begins, somewhat startlingly, with a 3D hacksaw to our collective mush - as it penetrates the ice on a frosted lake - the latest computer-generated offering from Walt Disney Animation Studios is far from an aggressive overhaul of Disney tradition. For the most part, Frozen marks a return to the studio's roots after the subversive, divisive Wreck-It Ralph (which I loved); it's a spirit-stirring musical crafted with finesse whose more schmaltzy moments are deftly (and thankfully) undercut by self-deprecating humour. In its tale of two sisters, Frozen is Christmassy fare to thaw even Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
A fascinating and heart-breaking relationship is charted through cross-cutting flashbacks (a technique recently used in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, which this film has a lot in common with), which hint at future happiness and sorrow. In this Flemish film from Felix Van Groeningen, tattooist Elise falls madly in love with cowboy and bluegrass musician Didier who’s more than a little obsessed with America. We then witness their highs and lows as their young daughter, Maybelle, is treated for a life-threatening disease.At odds with each other from the beginning, Elise seeks spiritual Read more ...
emma.simmonds
You wait ages for a French film about a teenage girl's sexual awakening and then two come along at once. Actually who am I kidding? As any filmic Francophile will tell you it's not exactly a rarity. Still, red-hot on the heels of the astonishing Blue is the Warmest Colour comes François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie. As sleek and enigmatic as its protagonist, whereas Blue gave us a messy relationship and bodily fluids (including snot), Jeune et Jolie is an altogether cooler, stranger and unfortunately not nearly as credible affair - although it is a lot shorter.Jeune et Jolie is the mercurial Ozon's Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Classic children’s stories often have a darker side; a shadowy area that lends an eternal quality to an otherwise merely durable yarn. Such is Mary Poppins. How and why it came to the big screen is one of Hollywood’s best tales, previously untold until now with Saving Mr Banks, a controlled yet poignant story hinging on the persistence and pain essential to bringing even the cheeriest film to fruition.Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s high-profile effort focuses on the psychological backstory of one of the most famous children’s stories of all. It is a big mission – even if few will know Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. The HBO-Storyville documentary by double directors-producers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin tells the brave story of the Russian conceptual art, feminist punk collective. Two of the group's members are still imprisoned in Russian penal colonies for their participation in the "punk prayer" they staged at Moscow’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Vivien Leigh deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the mercurial Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, so producer David O. Selznick's legendary Civil War epic has been re-released to coincide with her centenary. It is a tactless choice to have been made, however, at a time when movies are conscientiously addressing the horrors of slavery and the movement to overthrow it.Django Unchained and Lincoln have been followed by 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen's landmark depiction of the degradation and brutality relentlessly inflicted on slaves working Louisiana sugar and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
That Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) directed only nine features can be attributed to the British film industry's mistrust of the intellectual left-wing cineaste and union activist – and his own distaste for making pablum. That he didn't make 30 pictures, including his planned The Mayor of Casterbridge, was a major loss. He was not only a master manipulator of light, space, movement, sound, and actors, but a shrewd judge of psychological and sociological dynamics.Gaslight (1940), adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play, is as European in flavor as Dickinson's sublime Pushkin adaptation The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's great to see Robert De Niro front and centre in a full-sized role again, even if we might wish it hadn't been this one. Likewise Michelle Pfeiffer, stepping up to play the hard-boiled wife of De Niro's mobster-in-hiding Giovanno Manzoni. Twenty-five years later, she's remarried to the Mob and giving it serious bada-bing.With its twin (and legendary) leads in fine fettle, The Family might have been a shoo-in for the industry's various gong-circuses, but the fact is that it's only some hard peddling from Bobby and Michelle that keeps the thing airborne. It's directed and co-written by Luc Read more ...
Angie Errigo
The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.This second instalment — in what will be four films from the phenomenally popular Suzanne Collins book trilogy — finds Katniss, haunted by the ordeal of her inspirational victory in the 74th Hunger Games, back in dystopian, post-Apocalyptic Panem’s miserable mining community District 12 with her Read more ...