Film
Kieron Tyler
The likelihood of leaving a screening of PARADISE: Love without feeling either queasy or at least a little off balance is low. This realist-styled portrayal of middle-aged Teresa’s excursion to Kenya to seek intimacy and, inevitably, sex is awkward viewing. Some scenes are so uncomfortable to watch that their imprint will be permanent. PARADISE: Love is made all the more an assault on perceptions of acceptability by being entirely unjudgemental. Reactions are entirely up to the viewer. Director Ulrich Seidl offers no helping hand.Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is Austrian. She’s 50, a single Read more ...
Matt Wolf
People genuinely care about words in Josh Boone's directing debut, Stuck in Love, and that's as might be expected from a film that went by the name of Writers when it premiered in Toronto last autumn. So the first thing to be said is that this likable American indie is nicely written (a rarity in itself these days), notwithstanding an ending that trades heavily on the inevitable uplift that is the Hollywood norm even in such low-budget climes.And it's even better acted across the generations by an attractive cast, all of whom fully inhabit the cautious, often anxiety-laden byways of love and Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Few heroes of cult genre television ever manage the transition into mainstream financial success – although JJ Abrams hasn't been doing too badly for himself – and for many years Joss Whedon's deified status among fans of his various lovingly crafted, emotionally rich series was not reflected by broader recognition. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its spin-off series Angel, and space-western Firefly have all maintained a passionately devoted core of fans, despite all having been off the air for almost a decade, and it was largely thanks to fan campaigning that Whedon made his feature Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite its five Oscar nominations, in the end Zero Dark Thirty only won for Best Sound Editing, with the Academy showing a distinct preference for the more "thrillerised" version of US foreign affairs displayed in Ben Affleck's hugely entertaining Argo. Impressive in many respects, not least its unflashy - even, frankly, tedious - depiction of the nitpicking drudgery of intelligence work and the near-impossibility of achieving definitive answers, Zero Dark... eventually fails to be one thing or the other.Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have made claims for its partly- Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first image in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) shows clusters of mist hovering over the darkened Andes. Mirroring the implacability of the terrain, Popol Vuh’s synth score evokes a celestial choir hymning the mountains' numinous might, worried though the music is by faint high-pitched vibrations. In a short series of downward tilt shots, the camera – unseen, but a “felt” presence throughout, as drops of moisture on the lens later testify – picks out insect-like figures tentatively making their way in single file down a narrow path hundreds of feet above the Amazon.Much nearer, the men that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Losing your pet mouse would be distressing enough. But misplacing the white rodent on a school trip to the Tower of London is beyond careless. It’s downright irresponsible. But that’s routine compared with turning yellow and then encountering a man who travels via the electric current he feeds from. Obviously, the errant school kid ends up set for a beheading in the Tower. All of which happens to John in The Boy Who Turned Yellow, a 1972 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) production that’s bizarre, even by their eccentric standards.The captivating Boy Who Turned Yellow is one of the three CFF Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The party's over in more senses than one in Behind the Candelabra, the Steven Soderbergh film dedicated to the proposition that all that glitters is most definitely not gold. It charts the downward spiral of the relationship between the American king of piano-playing glitz, Liberace, and his onetime "chauffeur" and companion, Scott Thorson. The movie finds two major Hollywood names, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, in head-turning form, only to wed them to a drearily predictable and none-too-illuminating script that is itself as pro forma as the personalities it deals with are singular to a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Titling their long-delayed second album The Second Coming meant The Stone Roses had run out of religious metaphors for their 2012 reunion. They already had a song called “I Am the Resurrection”. Still, with super-fan director Shane Meadows on hand to capture their return, actions spoke louder than words. At their homecoming concert in Manchester’s Heaton Park, he caught their singer Ian Brown touching the outstretched hands of the faithful, anointing them with his mystic power.To some, the return of The Stone Roses after their messy demise in 1996 was tantamount to a spiritual rebirth. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I wouldn't describe this movie as an air crash, but the fact that it isn't is largely down to its flabbergasting near-disaster sequence, in which veteran pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) manages to crash-land his crippled airliner after it suffers a catastrophic mechanical failure. Six people die but 96 are saved, in a heroic feat of airmanship which brings gasps of admiration from press and public. The shot of the aircraft flying upside down at treetop height is probably worth its own techie Oscar.However, Whip has a dirty secret. He's an alcoholic whose pre-flight routine stipulates Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ariel Vromen's third film, and his first to command a major cast, is the story of mob contract killer Richard Kuklinski who, from his incarceration in 1986 (charged with just a fraction of the murders he supposedly committed) until his death in 2006, was the subject of media fascination based on the proflicacy of his criminal career and his willingness to tell his story. The Iceman features an eclectic ensemble fronted by Michael Shannon at his most formidable, and is worth watching for his performance alone.Just ahead of his turn as General Zod in Man of Steel, Shannon plays Kuklinski - he's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The life of the stand-up is a balance, often precarious, between those stage moments when things seem to be going just right, and the ones which look like they're about to go very wrong. The hero of Tom Shkolnik's debut feature The Comedian, Ed (Edward Hogg), seems to be making decent progress with his club appearances, but when the chance of a new relationship comes along it puts the previously settled balance of his life right out of kilter.There's something immediately attractive, almost provocatively downbeat about Shkolnik's film that announces a director who knows what he Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, into a secular Muslim family with Orthodox Slavic roots, the filmmaker Emir Kusturica has long been a polarizing figure in the Balkans. A patriot of the former Yugoslovia, he is regarded by his enemies, who condemned him as an apologist for Slobodan Milošević during the Bosnian War, as a Serbian nationalist; as recently as April, the Bosnian stage director Selma Spahić withdrew the play she was bringing to the current Sterijino Pozorje Theatre Festival in Novi Sad because Kusturica was invited to open it.Time was – before his second Palme d Read more ...