Film
Jasper Rees
South Korea begging Washington for protection as the dread threat of nuclear apocalypse looms? As Graham Norton recently twitquipped, the news headlines are no more than the publicity campaign for Olympus Has Fallen. Most amusing etc, but that was before a bomb on an American street killed three and injured many others.The latest excrescent live action video game from Anthony Fuqua has a fortuitous kind of oafish currency, what with those freaky North Koreans brandishing fists at the neighbours over the fence. But without wishing to rain on anyone's parade of braindead jingoistic fervour, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Down in the cellar where the monsters were in Sam Raimi’s 1982 debut The Evil Dead, you glimpsed a poster for Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, ripped symbolically in half. The bar for gruelling low-budget horror, Raimi was saying, had just been raised.In employing another debutante, Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, to remake The Evil Dead, Raimi, these days the unlikely Hollywood insider behind the Spiderman trilogy and Oz the Great and Powerful, invites him to raise the stakes again.The original’s fireproof premise is kept: five friends spend the weekend in an isolated cabin in the woods ( Read more ...
graham.rickson
The author B S Johnson would have been 80 this year. An accessible "experimental" writer, cheekily described by the author Jonathan Coe as “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s”, he’s best remembered for The Unfortunates, a book in which the chapters can be shuffled and read in random order. Johnson also took film making very seriously and a peek into his British Library archive shows the level of care and detail with which his film projects were planned – every camera angle and frame painstakingly prepared.Which is surprising when one watches the most entertaining item here: Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1988 uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia, in the Western Pacific, is apparently unknown to most French people, let alone we rosbifs, but director Mathieu Kassovitz has used the episode as a scalpel with which to probe issues of colonialism, race and political cynicism. It's something of a return to issues Kassovitz explored in La Haine (1995), following his excursions into the supernatural and sci-fi with Gothika and Babylon AD.The setup is pretty simple. A group of Kanak separatists launches a surprise attack on a gendarmerie on the island of Ouvéa, killing four French Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Director Joseph Kosinski's second film feels dispiritingly like his first, the bastion of excitement and originality that is TRON: Legacy. That film was an empty shell which at least managed not to be catastrophically irritating. Oblivion stars Tom Cruise, proving yet again that his ego is in inverse proportion to his physical stature. He plays "one of our best" in a soulless film which has the gall to place tangible cultural pursuits on a pedestal whilst clonking you round the head with sterile CGI.The year is 2077 and, yes, Tom Cruise is still an action-man. His Jack Harper bounds about Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While it’s impossible to know the effect of Captured on the few who originally saw it, you can be damn sure it packed a punch. It still does. This unforgettable film was made in 1959 for the Army Kinema Corporation to train personnel in resisting interrogation. Classified as “restricted”, it was seen only by a relevant and limited forces audience. Instead of making a dry, instructional film, director John Krish fashioned a drama with clearly defined characters and a slow-burn intensity which climaxes disturbingly.Its first-time release on DVD comes in the wake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Terence Stamp has drolly recalled being over the moon when the Catholic church attacked Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, in which he starred, on its release in 1968. “It was a very obscure movie – it was going to be seen by four drag queens and Einstein. And when the Pope came out against it, everybody wanted to see it.”Theorem, as it’s known in English, was indeed hugely successful. And it has since become one of the Italian’s best-known, most assiduously analysed and arguably most influential films. One can feel its shadow over so many films featuring families driven to distraction by a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’” The words belong to Jason Taylor, the stammering 13-year-old poet protagonist of David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green. But they will do for any artist presenting fresh work. Mitchell is going through an extracurricular phase of presenting fresh work to a different kind of audience. The most widely read of his four novels – Cloud Atlas – was released as a star-spangled film earlier this year. And this week brings the world premiere of his libretto for the Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Blunted affect is one of the more troubling symptoms associated with certain kinds of mental illness – the face becomes a mask, the voice becomes a monotone and the eyes, far from windows into the soul, turn shuttered and dark. It’s this uneasy sense of vacancy, in both the lead character and the film’s attitude to his behaviour, which gives stranger-in-a-strange-land thriller Simon Killer its queasy power. Simon (Brady Corbet) is a recent college grad taking a "gap summer" in Paris, where he roams the street solo with only his iPhone earbuds for company, nursing the wounds of a recent Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Retired spymasters, like retired diplomats, break their career reticence with particular relish, what they've known for so long in inverse proportion to what they can say. Dror Moreh’s remarkable interviews with the last six heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, shed light on strategies and tactics they were required to keep in the shadows in professional life. He focuses on actions among the colonised people of the Occupied Territories since Israel’s victory in 1967’s Six Day War, which made Shin Bet arguably more important than Mossad’s more famed, external spies. But Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"If you ride like lightning you're going to crash like thunder" Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendlesohn) tells his reckless partner-in-crime Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who will later be dubbed the "Moto Bandit". Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that threatens to do likewise, never quite keeping up with its own soaring ambition. Nevertheless it's a compelling, occasionally exciting saga with an invigorating aesthetic and a gently melancholic tone - akin to that of the director's previous picture Blue Valentine.With a narrative stretched over 15 years and a cast who zoom in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sigh: here's not much of anything for anyone, actually, to indulge a self-evident riff on the title of yet another in a seemingly ceaseless parade of subpar Brit-gangster films, this one from first-time writer/director George Isaac, who produced the Kidulthood/Adulthood celluloid duo. Notable largely for casting some rather rarefied actors deliberately violently against type, the film is best seen as the pay cheque that has helped allow at least two of its three leads to take on less lucrative theatre work of late. For that largesse, after a fashion: one star. Otherwise, well, you stand Read more ...