Film
james.woodall
Feuchtgebiete has been the talk of Locarno. The word combines “damp” or “moist” with “areas” – yes, you might guess what’s coming. English-born, German-bred Charlotte Roche published in 2008 a novel of the same title, which became Wetlands in English. And as my mother’s reprimand of me and my brothers sniggering at what boys always snigger at went, “Will you please get your heads out of your pants…”The pants here are Helen’s (Carla Juri). She’s a hyper-imaginative teenager who can’t keep her mind off her fanny. She has bad haemorrhoids – don’t we just know that at the film’s start as she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wilfully perverse avant-hipster darling Harmony Korine has always teetered on the paper-thin border between vanguard edginess and trendy, emperor’s-new-clothes vapidity. His previous work, from the opening salvo of Kids, with Larry Clark, through various warped cinematic visions of a freakish American underclass, have set out to repel a wider audience. Spring Breakers, while equally determined to shock, is a change of pace. It has a cast that includes High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens and Bieber/Disney pop princess Selena Gomez, as well as Hollywood heavyweight James Franco, and revels in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s the women who keep things together in Umut Dağ’s debut feature Kuma, and you can see the weight of the burden that matriarch Fatma (Nihal G Koldas) has been carrying etched on her face. Fatma’s latest endeavour to preserve balance in her Vienna-based Turkish family goes further than before, and provides the first surprise in Dağ’s film.Opening with the colourful atmosphere of a village wedding in Turkey, we assume that Fatma and her husband Mustafa (Vedat Erincin, below right, with Koldas) have married off their good-looking son Hasan (Muruthan Muslu) to the innocently youthful country Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
With this sequel to director Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John S Romtia Jr, writer/director Jeff Wadlow has done his best to make Kick-Ass 2 into a two-part franchise. It certainly doesn’t help that its release date puts it into a piranha tank of action films with bigger budgets and ideas.Following on from the original, Mindy Macready (Chloe Grace Moretz - soon to be the new Carrie) is living with responsible surrogate father Marcus (Morris Chestnut), the best friend of her late crime-fighting father. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is no Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Sporting dreams and the Second World War are both bottomless narrative mines. German-Jewish high-jumper Gretel Bergmann’s attempt to compete in the German team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics unites these genres, but it’s no Hitler-era Chariots of Fire.Black American Jesse Owen’s Fuhrer-baiting victories are the ones we remember, but the injustice Bergmann suffered is equally symptomatic of the Reich’s early days, before its propaganda could be decisively driven home by dive-bombers and panzers. As Kaspar Heidelbach’s film begins, we find Bergmann (Karoline Herfurth) celebrating in a pub after Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"What do you call a bachelorette party without a bride?" asks maid-of-honour Regan (Kirsten Dunst). "Friday," comes her fellow hen’s deadpan response. In Bachelorette the bridesmaids lose the bride, tear up her dress and get trashed; these are high-school mean girls all grown up and, hey, they're just as mean as ever. Bachelorette is the spunky, spiky, sweary debut of writer-director Leslye Headland and appropriately it feels like a woman's work, albeit a woman proudly in touch with her inner bi-atch.The film begins with Becky (Rebel Wilson, pictured below) announcing that she's getting Read more ...
James Williams
This week sees the release of the eagerly anticipated Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa. And while there are those of us who simply cannot wait to cringe along with Norwich’s favourite talk radio host, there is a rather vocal minority that are indignant at having their favourite sitcom sullied by the limitations of the movie format. While it would be churlish to judge a film on the basis of an innate distrust of the movie-making business, a precedent has been set when it comes to much-loved comedies making that considerable leap to the big screen. We cherrypick a selection of films that have Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Kemosabe, The Lone Ranger is fun. Despite its star and producer blaming American critics for poor box office stateside, this film is Pirates of the Caribbean on horseback - and that's the Pirates franchise before it bloated in 2007.There is a lot of good in The Lone Ranger, starting with Armie Hammer. Perfectly cast as John Reid, he’s the long, tall and handsome lawyer whose rough-hewn brother Dan (James Badge Dale) is the town’s ranger and husband to the gal John loves (Ruth Wilson). Coming upon a strange Native American called Tonto, John puts him in jail, only to meet him again in a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s black-and-white style aplenty in Štefan Uher’s The Sun in a Net, an elliptical look at a youthful boy-girl relationship that intermingles with a whole range of themes left open for the viewer’s interpretation. Heralding the better-known Czech New Wave and rather ignored in the aftermath of that movement, it earned opposition from the authorities in its time, but impresses today for its filmic rather than social edginess.It’s a story of young lovers and their families: Fayolo (Marián Bielik) and Bela (Jana Beláková) meet on the roof of their Bratislava apartment block, both to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't spend too much time looking for Kristin Scott Thomas in writer-director Pascal Bonitzer's Looking For Hortense (aka Cherchez Hortense). In keeping with the fleeting presence afforded the Hortense of the title, the divine Scott Thomas gets her customary star billing only to pretty much vanish from a largely somnolent Gallic exercise that sorely needs this actress's effortless command and wit. Cast as a theatre director called Iva who strays into the arms of her leading man - quelle surprise! - Scott Thomas is pretty much jettisoned from a plot that could use more of her and Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Snow White in silent Seville is glib shorthand for director Polbo Berger’s tasteful Blancanieves, a beautiful, quirky take on the recognisable fable. Nicely shot and well cast, this silent melodrama, shot in black and white, is not sweetness and light. It’s more gleaming Spanish gothic that will charm and shock, dismay and delight in equal measure.Daniel Giménez Cacho – the narrator for Alfonso Cuaron’s breakout Y Tu Mama Tambien - is wealthy, handsome bullfighter Antonio Villlalta. He’s the father of Snow White, whose story begins after a careless Kodak moment leaves the bullfighter Read more ...