Film
Matt Wolf
What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? The answer is on often grievous yet ultimately heartening view in How To Survive A Plague, David France's immensely stirring chronicle of the activism - spawned in New York and then spun out elsewhere - that accompanied the first decade or more of the AIDS crisis. Nominated this year for an Oscar, journalist France's thoroughgoing record of events at first stirs Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
As a director, Alfonso Cuarón is a stickler. In his renowned Children of Men, he sought to dismantle cinema, to break down the glass wall between audience and content by making the film more like a live event. To a great extent, he succeeded, opening with a 17 minute continuous take and, later, using the expertise of Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski (known as Chivo), he would fashion takes of stunning length and complexity. No wonder that his next film, Gravity, took over four years to make: he needed to top his last one.So he has. Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Read more ...
David Nice
We’re in a Tokyo bar. As the first of two fixed cameras dominating the opening quarter of an hour gives a selective picture, a girl’s voice is heard offscreen remonstrating on her mobile with a pathologically jealous fiancé. The situation comes slowly into focus: the girl, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), is being compelled as a top-end call-girl to visit a client. Though some of the trajectory is what we think, or fear, it might be, many of the outcomes are far from expected.The symmetry is as carefully observed as everything else in this piece of genius filmmaking. There are only three main indoor Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Feature films about ballet are rarities - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the red eyes and OTT fantasies? Black Swan became an instant world hit on the strength of its purple take on showbiz (never mind it was packaged in a ballet scenario, this was more a riproaring horror story). Love Tomorrow is altogether something else. Like Black Swan it isn't really about ballet as such - that's simply the setting for a delicate, elusive romance-cum-friendship between two dancers, both facing a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One might think that of all the national cinemas, the one that least needs its own festival in the UK is the French; after all, Gallic fare has a better showing here than most foreign language films.That said, distribution-wise it’s a large slice of a tiny pie. And with 30 new films, the 21st edition of the French Film Festival offers a glimpse of the breadth of French cinema that isn’t always apparent from general releases. For Francophiles in London, Warwick and a handful of Scottish cities, the next month promises quite a boon.The festival opens with the first live action film by Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The 65th Cannes film festival acts as the backdrop for this compelling, if somewhat misguided documentary from James Toback. Accompanied by Alec Baldwin, Toback sets out to shame Hollywood for its decision to continually churn out megabuck franchises and mediocrity rather than investing in risky, original cinema as the pair try to get funding for their own film project.From the outset their plan to reinterpret Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (set in Iraq starring Alec Baldwin and Neve Campbell) is questionable; is this a real project, or are they simply trying to provoke a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Within moments of World War Z beginning Piers Morgan is onscreen. Zombies, schmombies - this is surely the face of true horror. Where that smug mug blossoms, the apocalypse cannot be far behind. Morgan pops up among intercut US news-streams and media that open the film. This collage hints at eco-disaster before we settle into the everyday Philadelphia home life of Gerry and Karin Lane (Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos, who was the lead in the US remake of The Killing) and their two daughters. Gerry is a house-husband but, as we slowly find out, he used to be a superhero UN investigator. Before too Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Orgasms aside, it was When Harry Met Sally’s edict that sex always gets in the way of male-female friendships that hit home. Drinking Buddies comes to more nuanced conclusions, as we watch Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) steadily drink and comfortably banter during and after work at a Chicago micro-brewery, and wonder just when they’re going to leave their straitlaced partners, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick), pictured below. When a double-date weekend in the woods sees Kate strip off in front of Luke, and Jill dig into her rucksack’s wilderness gear for a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cornelia is 60 and increasingly frustrated with her 34-year-old son, Barbu. He doesn’t communicate with her, she doesn’t approve of his girlfriend and the way he leads his life. Convinced she has to take command of her immature son, she’s suddenly presented with an opportunity to exert control. The release of the Romanian film Child’s Pose in the same week as Gloria – the Chilean story of a 58-year-old woman making the most of life – is uncanny, as each offers a wildly different take on similar raw materials.Luminița Gheorghiu’s Cornelia has exacting standards which hardly anyone can match up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A film of contrasts, Short Term 12 manages to be simultaneously dark and humorous, casual yet intense. The relationships between staff and patients in the group home for troubled teenagers where it’s set – the facility is meant to be a place of refuge for up to a year, hence the title, though many stay longer – are both thick and thin, and as in the wedding vow must endure through difficult times. They’re thick because the bonds created when exploring the reservoirs of sadness that these kids bring along with them run so deep; thin, because the slightest alteration in mood risks disrupting Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Directed by a Frenchmen, Foxfire adapts an American book to create a film with an archetypical stance and setting which could rank it alongside The Outsiders, Stand by Me or even Rebel Without a Cause. The problem is that despite depicting a passionate, wayward and issue-fuelled gang, Foxfire is not animated enough. It unfolds in deliberate steps, like a stage play. The young women may be on fire, but the measured approach of the overlong film tempers their spirit.Foxfire - Confessions of a Girl Gang is Laurent Cantet’s rendering of the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name. It’s been Read more ...