Film
Demetrios Matheou
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of Amélie fame, makes so few films that whenever he pulls one out of that magic hat of his it feels like an event. At least it used to. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, which has just had its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, is a lovingly made and sweet film; but the novelty of the director’s style – that minutely observed production design and full-blown whimsy – has now completely worn off, leaving one wishing for a new dimension.The 10-year-old protagonist, who might also be described as gifted, precocious and brimming with initiative, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The careers of writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell are indelibly linked, with a collaboration that has now lasted 20 years. In 1993 Michell, then an accomplished theatre director who was relatively new to the camera, directed Kureishi’s adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia for the BBC, with great success. After a nine-year gap – and Michell’s phenomenal hit with Notting Hill – they rekindled their relationship for the big screen, with Michell directing Kureishi’s original screenplays for The Mother (2003), Venus (2006) and now, their third film together, Le Week- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Created in a time when we could be shocked, The Wicker Man shows its power by being shocking still. Conceived by its director Robin Hardy, writer Anthony Shaffer and star Christopher Lee as a reaction to New Age-ism, The Wicker Man delights, thrills and horrifies in this latest version, restored to the American theatrical cut.Bad luck struck The Wicker Man back in 1973, when director Hardy’s debut was caught up, like many films continue to be, in a corporate wrangle. Its release temporarily delayed, the original cut of 102 minutes was edited down to 88, along with a reduction of its marketing Read more ...
graham.rickson
Czech director Jindřich Polák’s 1963 science fiction epic Ikarie XB 1 was known in the West for many years only in a recut dubbed version. Happily, Second Run’s restored print looks and sounds marvellous. There is a slowly unfolding narrative, though Ikarie grips more as an acutely realised study of what life could actually be like on a 15-year space voyage.Polák’s source material was a novella by Stanisław Lem, better-known for Solaris, and a team of scientific advisors was assembled by Polák to give the adaptation greater credibility. One character describes the Ikarie spaceship as “a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An immensely likeable cast gets pushed to breaking point and beyond in Girl Most Likely, a Kristen Wiig quasi-romcom that is preposterous and obnoxious in turn. The tale of a playwright called Imogene (Wiig) who starts over by returning to her New Jersey home and to Zelda, her former go-go dancer of a mum (an unplayable role here foisted upon the great Annette Bening, if you please), the film wants to be distinctively quirky and merely ends by shutting the audience out.Nor would detail seem to be its strong suit if the dénouement is to be believed. By film's end, Imogene is shown savouring Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a life-size cardboard cut-out of Colin Firth in Austenland. He blends in very nicely. The only way you can tell him apart from the other actors in this cloth-eared, cack-handed romantic comedy of paramount awfulness is you can't see the despair and self-loathing in the whites of his eyes.Whether the script was in quite such dreadful nick when the cast first saw it and signed up is a matter for speculation. Perhaps the finer inanities and more sclerotic non-sequiturs were carefelly woven in during the shoot. The result is a rare collector’s item which should be prescribed to all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of his people to get some more work out of that Jane Austen. She seemed like a good source of romantic comedies. Regrettably for all, there were only ever six titles from this promising scriptwriter, and those have been done and done again by film and particularly television. Only Northanger Abbey has not provoked producers into serial adaptation, and that’s presumably because the story of poor Catherine Morland’s hyperactive imagination turns out to be not as Gothic as a horror filmmaker would wish Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A mine haunted by spriguns, an orphan menaced by a stranger who vanishes at will and the shadow cast over a village by the Black Death. Each is the backbone for the three films gathered on Scary Stories, the BFI’s fourth collection drawn from the archives of the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF). Although aimed at children, around an hour long and made with limited budgets, these subtle, well-crafted films sold no one short. All three are packed with shocks – and still pack punches for children of all ages.The Man From Nowhere (1976) is Victorian-set gothic of the highest order. On arriving to Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
An update on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcare Named Desire, it isn’t essential to have seen that work on stage to enjoy this pithy homage from Woody Allen. However, revisiting the iconic 1951 film version starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter could very well make Blue Jasmine even funnier. This is because Allen treats the audience as equals to the tragic in-joke of familial impact and the damage left in its wake.The pivot is a beautiful woman’s perpetually occurring emotional meltdown. Former wealthy Manhattan socialite Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is the Blanche character, a tall, Read more ...
Giles Terera and Dan Poole
The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties and help others to remove theirs. This was the goal. How we would achieve all this was the ordeal. It has been a five-year adventure but now the film is complete and ready for its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival, we can say that every moment of an incredible journey was worth it.Before we became filmmakers we were already Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sometimes, a little bit of everything amounts to a whole lot of nothing. RIPD features a standard buddy cop caper bolted on to a heaven-can-wait drama channelling a body swap comedy also starring a CGI cartoon element. There’s even a heavy dollop of the old Wild West and a splodge of Armageddon alarmism. You get a grab-bag of half a dozen film styles jostling for attention. It must be like this teaching a classful of needy reception kids with ADD.Hey, that’s the referential world of comics for you. RIPD is the latest graphic novel to move from the two dimensions of the page to the, er, two Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first venture into fiction. Both form part of a prodigious body of work otherwise dedicated to non-fiction. The release of the documentaries Blockade, Landscape and Revue in one package gives non-Russians a first chance to sample what dominates his output.Blockade (2006) takes archive footage of the Leningrad Blockade of 1941 to 1944, when the city was Read more ...