Film
Tom Birchenough
Where there’s a stoker there must be a furnace, and this being Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s latest story from St Petersburg’s gangster 1990s, as well as heating some snow-bound Soviet industrial hulks, its flames also conveniently consume whatever corpses the local criminal gang brings in.That they have such immediate, unceremonial access is less the result of The Stoker inhabiting a world of absolute lawlessness, both literal and moral – that’s practically a given with Balabanov – than because the furnace is presided over by the vulture-thin stoker of the title, Ivan (Mikhail Skryabin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The mothership has landed. After a year or so of countless stage adaptations ranging from a recitation of the novel in its entirety to a themed party and (just this week) a dance piece, Baz Luhrmann's celluloid version of The Great Gatsby has finally arrived in all its superhero-style 3D scale and scope. So, is this Gatsby great? Not by some measure, and for every moment of inspiration and ingenuity comes another that fails both its literary source and Luhrmann's own instincts. Only in terms of the title character does the film deliver on the adjective that gets written out before us in Read more ...
David Nice
It took Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, melancholy last scion of a never very reproductive family, a lifetime to get round to writing one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. Publication of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), based on the life of the author's great grandfather and the changes of the risorgimento, only took place over a year after Lampedusa’s death in July 1957. Events then moved very fast. By March 1959 the book had gone through 52 editions. French and British translations won a warmer critical press than in Italy, but it was there that Luchino Visconti made his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
For those familiar with Ginger Baker’s virtuosic musicianship, but not with his life, the biggest revelation of the warts-and-all documentary Beware of Mr Baker may be that next to drumming, playing polo was the great time-keeper’s obsession. One might expect a jet-setting country gent like Bryan Ferry to mount up for a chukka or two before teatime, but the wild man of Cream and Blind Faith, late of Lewisham? Does Topper Headon play bowls?If, as an addiction, polo didn’t match Baker’s 19-year affair with heroin, it has been almost as ruinous a pastime. Toward the end of Jay Bulger’s film, Read more ...
David Nice
Fans of this bewilderingly popular musical, and they are legion, will not be disappointed. Director Tom Hooper knows how to tell a fast-moving tale that makes light of the final running time (originally 158 minutes, slightly shorter in this DVD release, which offers no extras. Those who went to the film more than once will, I'm told, miss a couple of scenes). The lighting is appropriately lugubrious, most of the settings convincing – though occasionally there’s too much dependence on CGI – and famously the singing actors perform their numbers on set, often in long takes. Casting is strong, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just like Vietnam in 1970s, the so-called War on Terror has been a boon to filmmakers. It has allowed Hollywood to send another generation of buff leading males off to the front and, as the ordnance explodes, bravely question why it is that they are there. However, there’s not been a lot of mainstream filmmaking which puts the Muslim point of view. The Reluctant Fundamentalist – in which a Wall Street highflyer from Pakistan heads home after 9/11 to be among his own troubled people - redresses an imbalance.Indian director Mira Nair caught sight of the slender novel by Mohsin Hamid before it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If JJ Abrams's first shot at reinventing the Star Trek franchise in 2009 was a memorable coup de cinéma, blending a plausible back story with a fresh cast imbued with the spirit of the TV originals, this follow-up is more about consolidation. There's bags of vertiginous interstellar action, retina-scorching 3D effects and earth-in-peril terror, though by the time you totter from the multiplex 130 minutes older, you may be asking yourself where the big payoff went.Still, to Abrams's credit, his cast is terrific and he wrings more genuine actorly mileage out of them than you might reasonably Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A female hiker is naked. A village is close. Lying on the slope down to a river, she invites the taciturn man she’s followed to have sex. They do. She begins shrieking and foaming at the mouth. He fastens his face to hers. She could then be dead yet begins crawling into the water, looks heavenwards and spreads her arms.The images of baptism and rebirth are clear. But the motivation of the man, David Dewale’s Le gars (the man or guy), is less clear cut. Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan) is hard to read in terms of specifics, but overall it dwells on the arrival of a mystical outsider Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tales of pirate drama on the high seas have come a long, unpleasant way since Errol Flynn. Borgen and The Hunt co-writer Tobias Lindholm’s debut as solo writer-director explores the human factor behind Somali pirate headlines, with the cool grip Nordic drama fans now expect.Inspired by the real seizure of two Danish freighters, Lindstrom uses a parallel narrative split between Copenhagen and the terrifying emptiness of the Indian Ocean, where the crew of his fictional freighter are trapped below decks by Somali captors. At their shipping company’s HQ, CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Soren Malling – Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.Shakhnazarov's first venture into locally popular World War II territory, White Tiger is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s likely that how Our Children culminates is no secret. Director Joachim Lafosse is well aware of that, and the film’s opening moments take place in the aftermath of the shocking conclusion of what’s about to unfold. Nonetheless, Our Children is composed so carefully that its climax still whacks you in the stomach.Our Children (Á perde la raison) reunites Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, last seen together in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. Together with Émilie Dequenne, the trio comprise a family unit as unusual as it’s toxic. The film is based on real-life events that occurred in Belgium, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
There are few films of which you can say there's something for everyone - but there is something for everyone in Jeff Nichols's third film. Mud gives us Hollywood stars Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, plucky young unknowns, the great Michael Shannon being funny; it combines the feel of a classic yarn (think Great Expectations crossed with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) with a more modern kind of boys' own adventure (eg Stand By Be). It's gritty and dirty, climaxing in a genuinely thrilling shoot-out, and it's shamelessly romantic.Ellis (Tye Sheridan from The Tree of Life) Read more ...