Film
Kieron Tyler
Few real-life subjects of a film would allow themselves to be seen in the way Ginger Baker is in Beware of Mr. Baker. He’s violent, bullying, self obsessed, a control freak, irresponsible, sexist, foul-mouthed and harbours decades-long grudges. Since he doesn't appear to be ill, it's difficult to ascribe his behaviour to forces beyond his control. He does, though, love animals and is a legendary drummer. So that’s all right then. Not only is Beware of Mr. Baker a testament to director Jay Bulger’s tenacity, it’s a portrait of a human so grotesque that even William Hogarth couldn’t have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Newly restored versions of old films in cinemas are commonplace. This revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is set apart due to it being in 3D, as it was originally intended to be seen. But unless you were able to catch it in the few American cinemas where it screened after its May 1954 New York premiere, the original has proved elusive, although 3D versions have surfaced intermittently.It was seen by audiences in red-and-green specs in 1980, in a form which did the rounds for a couple of years afterwards. There was another attempt to bring it back to life in 2004. Then, last summer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.But it isn't just comedy, or perhaps it's comedy as the visible tip of a fully-rounded philosophical iceberg. Even Allen's shortest one-liners may Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oddly, there is quite a cinematic sub-genre starring killer whales. The killer’s first (and worst) lead role was opposite a hammy Richard Harris in Orca, a shameless attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to ape the success of Jaws. Then came Free Willy, which in three icky instalments repositioned killers as essentially cuddly. That image took a dent in Rust & Bone after Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer spent much of the film without any legs courtesy of a captive orca. And now there’s Blackfish, a documentary which lifts the lid on the theme parks where killer whales work as aquatic circus Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Post Tenebras Lux is a hard film to love, but it is one which engrosses. Although riveting, its appeal is akin to the fascination exerted by catastrophes and car pile-ups. Fittingly, the taste it leaves is bitter. It’s also hard to digest. Contrary to the title – light after darkness – there’s little to suggest either salvation or a path towards redemption.Director Carlos Reygadas doesn’t make it easy for viewers: there was animal cruelty in Japón (2002) and explicit sexual situtations in Battle in Heaven (2005), but he seemed to have mellowed with the Dreyer influenced Silent Light (2007). Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He is now 77 and the inevitable is a lot nearer than it was when he first realised, aged five, that this doesn’t go on forever. Fear of death has powered the furious productivity that in the early days yielded jokes by the yard, then the films appearing year upon year. In the interim the public image has calcified: the master comedian who would prefer to be a tragedian, the world-class worrier, the clarinet-tooting workaholic. But is that the real Woody Allen? This week a two-part Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"I'm so embarrassed, I'm not a real person yet," Frances apologetically tells her date after she's forced to make a calamitous cashpoint dash when they're asked to settle their restaurant bill. This is the seventh film from writer-director - and sometime Wes Anderson collaborator - Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale). This time he co-writes with luminous star and indie-darling Greta Gerwig and it's a terrifically fruitful collaboration. Frances Ha is a film about female friendship, artistic expression and getting your shit together in your twenties, whose monochrome elegance Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mel Smith, who has died at the age of 60, will be principally remembered as one quarter of the satirical sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News and one half of its blokier spin-off Alas Smith and Jones. A natural and inclusive comedian, it’s less widely recalled that Smith also directed one of the most successful films in British movie history: Bean. As co-founder with Griff Rhys Jones of Talkback, he was also a pioneer in independent television production. When they sold the company, Smith became a millionaire many times over.He was always destined for a life in entertainment. The son of a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just three Cornettos: the trilogy accidentally named after an ice cream concludes here. Previously in the imaginations of actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, London has been invaded by zombies and a quiet English village by organised crime. In The World’s End, it’s the turn of a faceless Home Counties feeder town to fall under the influence of yet another B movie sub-genre. In this case the local population is replaced by robots (although what precisely constitutes a robot is one of the film’s fun running gags).Is there just a hint of weariness as Pegg, Wright and faithful lumpen co- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The default word for these films, made by the band Saint Etienne with their collaborator and former guitarist Paul Kelly, is "poignant". As elegiac visual poems which capture the always-evolving environment of London, they certainly are expressive. They are also often described as nostalgic, as they cast a lens across businesses and buildings, proprietors and townscapes that are now gone. The mood they evoke is one of longueur: a figurative sigh. Fine as far as it goes, but that’s passive wallowing. What they generate from my viewpoint in north London is a tremendous anger, one born from a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Frozen Ground, the debut feature of New Zealand director Scott Walker, takes place in Alaska in the 1980s. Based on a true story, it tells of cop Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage), who teams up with prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) to try and stop Jack Hansen (John Cusack) from killing again.Although mostly a standard issue police thriller, The Frozen Ground has some nicely balanced performances. Cage is allowed the weight and concern that his character, the dogged cop, requires. Hudgens tries a bit too hard in her role as the young mouthy prostitute, while Cusack is a little too Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both locally and beyond its native land? It was always going to be a tricky issue for Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first full-length feature to come out of Saudi Arabia, where cinemas simply do not exist – they are banned. And the fact that it's a woman director who has set the Saudi film industry in motion challenges further our expectations of Read more ...