Film
Kieron Tyler
Arriving in Paris from New York after graduating from university and splitting with his girlfriend, Simon has no idea what he’s going to do there beyond trying to find the focus lost during the break-up. What he actually does is the subject of Simon Killer, an unsettling, atmospheric yet not wholly satisfying second film as director from Antonio Campos, the producer of the more-recent Martha Marcy May Marlene, which also featured Brady Corbet. Simon Killer was devised while that was being completed.As the repellent and unfathomable Simon, Corbet is on screen the whole time. He may or may not Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Shane Carruth directs films in the same way as Aaron Sorkin writes scripts: seemingly oblivious to the fact that we are trailing in his wake. Sorkin can sometimes leave you floundering with his spitfire recitations of information and dazzling repartee, Carruth with the opaqueness of his ideas. Does either expect, or wish us to keep up? I suspect not. Buying into their work is a tacit agreement to be stretched.But while Sorkin’s material (the new series of The Newsroom is currently airing in the US) is as deliciously entertaining as it can be exasperating, Carruth has less of a care even to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-age films have frequently featured inebriated antics and ill-advised hook-ups, but it's usually the teenagers behaving badly. The Way Way Back sees a family decamp to an East Coast beach house for a summer vacation described witheringly by one teen as "Spring Break for adults". The film is the directorial debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (two of the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants), who also pen the excellent screenplay and take supporting roles.Duncan (Liam James) is a painfully shy 14-year-old from Albany who hangs uncomfortably in his own skin and can't seem to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You’re Next has chutzpah. It’s a home invasion horror made with the vigorous energy and imaginative violence of a Warner Bros cartoon. Feeling like a record that starts at a stately 33 rpm and finishes at 45, it becomes progressively more crazed and comic, even as the screen swims in gore.Simon Barrett’s screenplay has the nerve to pause at length to note the smug, feuding unpleasantness of the upper-middle-class Davisons at their family reunion, before a crossbow bolt crashing through a window into a neck begins their bloody, mysterious elimination. Petty sibling bullying, parental Read more ...
emma.simmonds
John Lennon once said, "You have to be a bastard to make it. That's a fact. And the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth." As that statement would suggest, to be a bastard is not to be a villain - nothing quite so obvious. The reality is that bastards are often apparent gents, with the veneer of respectability concealing a character who's ruthlessly ambitious, insufferably smug, a button-pusher, schemer or cheater.Cinema has seen its share of scintillating scoundrels. Indeed, some actors have made entire careers out of playing such men - Michael Douglas to name but one. So why do they Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The notion of childhood as any sort of state of grace gets exploded big-time in What Maisie Knew, a largely blistering celluloid updating of the 1897 Henry James novel from The Deep End team of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. True (for the most part) to the spirit of its literary source if by no means to the letter, the movie on its own terms captures the terror that adults can inflict on children, a bequest that a brilliant cast makes painfully plain. Suffice it to say that by the time Julianne Moore, playing the toxic mother of the eponymous Maisie (Onata Aprile), tells her six Read more ...
emma.simmonds
We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.Jason Sudeikis plays David Clark, a small-time weed dealer who's never really grown up. When he's robbed of his drug stash and money after playing the good Samaritan he finds himself in debt to mwa-ha-ha Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s always irritating being told “you had to be there”. Even more irksome is when some author, film director or nostalgic creative decides to record – naturally, they “fictionalise” it – their contribution to some golden era or significant event for posterity. Whether they’re being truthful, bigging themselves up or playing fast and loose with history is beside the point. They’re saying they were there. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air is the French director and writer’s entry in the canon and, shockingly, it’s great.It’s great because Assayas has thoughtfully crafted a rich, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Neil Blomkamp’s got a thing for crafts. Spacecrafts, that is. With his first feature, District 9, alien ships hovered over Johannesburg in 1982. Now it’s 2154 and Elysium, a nirvana-like space station for the elite, floats in Earth’s orbit, using all the global resources and leaving the planet ravaged, polluted, riddled with crime and simply dreadful.Max (Matt Damon) is an ex-con gone straight. As a boy, he promised his childhood girlfriend Frey (Alice Braga) they too would live in Elysium. Of course, in the grown-up world, that’s impossible: they're only ordinary citizens. Making matters Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final words we see in subtitles in Ibrahim El Batout’s Winter of Discontent, a film centred on the events that began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January 2011 and would go on to change Egypt’s future, could not read more ominously today: “And counting…” They refer to the death toll in the popular uprising that would depose Hosni Mubarak, bringing a degree of freedom that Egypt had not known for 30 years. They assume new poignancy in the light of the recent events we have been watching on news reports from the country, 30 months on from those first protestations.But Winter… isn’t a film Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shot in Seventies throwback grainy-cam, Amanda Seyfried is superb as Linda Lovelace in the surprisingly entertaining biopic Lovelace. Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Bobby Cannavle, Hank Azaria, Chris Noth, Juno Temple and James Franco round out a dream cast.Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Howl) and written by Andy Bellin, it charts the harrowing rise of 1970s porn phenomenon Linda Lovelace from her Floridian girlhood as Linda Boreman through to her starring role in 1972’s big grossing adult film Deep Throat - said to have earned up to $600m on a production cost Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Cinema's unrivalled silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was influenced by Arthur Rackham's illustrations and by Chinese and Indonesian puppet theatre. Like her fellow German filmmaker Fritz Lang, she must have appreciated the intricacy and spite in Rackham's pictures. Those qualities abound in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surving animated feature and, at 65 minutes, the longest film Reininger made.It's a near-avant garde pastiche of Arabian Nights stories, primarily The Ebony Horse and the 18th-century addition Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp. Handsome Achmed is Read more ...