Film
emma.simmonds
Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature debut is a perky French rom-com which brings together the talented, easy-on-the-eye trio of Déborah François, Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo. Set in the late 50s it contains oodles of delicious period detail along with shades of the much-loved Amelie and the adorable 60s TV series Bewitched. It should be likeable; it should be full of fun. So why doesn't it work? Two words seal its fate: speed typing.The year is 1958 in the small town of Saint-Fraimbault and - against the wishes of her conservative shopkeeper father - Rose Pamphyle (François) is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You gotta love Diane Keaton all the way from Annie Hall to Something's Gotta Give, but even her natural effervescence can't enliven The Big Wedding, a starry celluloid venture that is landing in cinemas briefly on its way presumably to an airplane near you. An in-flight video might in fact minimise the overriding coarseness of a venture whose brazen impulses don't hold up well to large-screen scrutiny. Whatever the context, Keaton's ageless charms are worth pondering, as is a film industry that increasingly seems not to know what to do with any of its senior crop of actresses, with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s something profoundly infantile about Quentin Tarantino’s quest to right the wrongs of history. Last time round he was retroactively bitchslapping the Nazis for the Holocaust. Here he’s punishing Americans who accrued obscene wealth out of slavery. In both films baddies galore get royally ketchupped. What’s next? Backdated justice for the Injuns? Oh shoot, Disney already pulled off that judicial backflip in Pocahontas.Django Unchained is a kind of spaghetti Blaxploitation epic. It’s immensely entertaining in bits – usually when Christoph Waltz is on screen reprising his casuistical Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Byzantium is a vampire flick which in look and tone seems fashioned to resemble Tomas Alfredson's magnificently humane (if that's the right expression when speaking of the undead) Let the Right One In. Wonderfully, unlike most pictures of its ilk, the focus is almost entirely on the fairer sex, with its bloodsucking protagonists, played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, out to prove the female of the species more deadly than the male. It's the latest film from Irish director Neil Jordan, best known for The Crying Game and - more appositely here - Interview with the Vampire, with a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There are many reasons to be thankful for the Dardennes brothers, the Belgians whose sibling genius is rivalled only by the Coens, not least the young actors they have introduced to cinema: Émilie Dequenne in Rosetta, Jérémie Renier in La promesse, Déborah François in The Child, Thomas Doret in The Kid with a Bike.With the exception of the young Doret, who is barely a teenager, those mentioned have since become part of a Belgian brigade who add a covert quality to French cinema: while becoming a Dardennes regular, Renier has acted for Ozon and Assayas; Dequenne has recently been seen to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You don't have to be a fan of The Hangover franchise to get most of the jokes in Part III, although it certainly helps. How else would you understand why the line “It all ends tonight” is so funny, or why the arrival of Mr Chow causes such hilarity in the audience?For those just tuning in, The Hangover (2009) followed the Wolfpack, a bunch of friends - high-school teacher Phil (Bradley Cooper), dimwitted rich boy Alan, pompous dentist Stu (Ed Helms) and boring stiff-shirt Doug (Justin Bartha) as they went to Las Vegas on a stag weekend before Doug's marriage to Alan's sister. Mayhem, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The latest film from acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Still Walking) tells the story of two young brothers who are separated when their parents divorce and who attempt to bring their family together again. While its prosaic subject matter might sound far from must-view material, I Wish is absolutely a film to savour, one whose considerable folksy charm, humour and authentic spirit will take you hurtling back to your own childhood adventures.12-year-old Koichi (Koki Maeda) lives in Kagoshima with his mother (Nene Ohtsuka) and grandparents, under the threat of an active volcano. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema sometimes seems to have left the Age of Aquarius behind. The filmmakers who came of age in the Sixties have long since said what they needed to, and nowadays the decade’s evanescent aura feels confined to 50th anniversaries of the likes of Billy Liar and The Leopard. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air plunges us right back in as it which harks longingly back to the heady days of the soixante-huitards when apparently, for those who were there, it seemed possible the world could be fashioned anew.Assayas wasn’t quite there hurling bricks at the police at the Battle of the Sorbonne, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens takes its title from the Atlantic City Monopoly property, connoting the New Jersey resort’s then imminent future as a board game for real-estate developers. The conman Jason Staebler (Bruce Dern) acknowledges its status thus when his younger brother David (Jack Nicholson) arrives in town to bail him out of jail.Jason also imports David to persuade him to join in his fantastical scheme of acquiring and running a casino on an island north of Hawaii. David isn’t expected to invest in the deal, only to enjoy its fruits: the corrupt, cynical world of Read more ...
mark.kidel
“Chronicle of a Summer” (“Chronique d’un été”) is one of the great documentaries of all time – and a work that could only have been made in France, home of the immensely influential Cahiers du cinéma and the constant ferment of speculation on the nature of film. The BFI’s release of the 1960 classic by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin couldn't be more timely: documentary flourishes today as at no other time in the history of cinema and attracts some of the world's best film-makers.The realm of non-fiction cinema, first explored by the Russian avant-garde pioneer Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, is free Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title says it all. Whatever John Wrathall’s script for The Liability might have promised is resoundingly undelivered in Craig Viveiros’s direction, and that’s despite the presence of Tim Roth in a lead role, and Peter Mullan giving a supporting turn that proves at least that he can parody himself. Possibly its comedy may work slightly better in front of a full cinema audience, but frankly I doubt it, and DVD is where this one is heading with a speed faster than the crime caper-cum-road movie itself ever manages.The eponymous role here goes to Jack O’Connell (a bright face best known to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first of the Dresden-born Robert Siodmak’s eight film noirs, Phantom Lady (1944) was adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel that typically endows its heroine with traditional masculine energy and guile while rendering its hero impotent and passive.Her dynamic investigator-avenger is eventually compromised by her becoming prey to the killer who framed the man she loves. However, Siodmak’s focus on her drive and her brief donning of a femme fatale guise during the second act powerfully reflects the male anxieties about women’s perceived threat to the patriarchal order during the war years.In Read more ...