Film
howard.male
These two 1960s movies have more than just their director, Joseph Losey, and their writer, Harold Pinter, in common. They also both star Dirk Bogarde, escaping his matinee idol mould to startling effect, and feature soundtrack composer John Dankworth, whose jazzy scores cleverly veer between generic sexy swagger and disorientating dissonance, as and when appropriate.Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the most self-consciously avant-garde of the two films that has dated the most. Accident (1967) is at times stilted and painfully slow. And although it might be argued that the pace is a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two’s company, three’s a crowd, four’s a string quartet. Classical music movies tend to focus on the cost of individual brilliance. See David Helfgott in Shine, Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, not forgetting the talented little man who features in Amadeus. A Late Quartet homes in on that subtle and complex quadratic equation, a string ensemble which thrives on the interplay of four barely subordinated egos.The Fugue String Quartet is all set to celebrate its 25th anniversary in New York when its cellist and senior member Peter (Christopher Walken) announces that after one last Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Whilst Zac Efron is getting urinated on in The Paperboy, his High School Musical co-star Vanessa Hudgens is taking the piss in an entirely different sense. In Spring Breakers Hudgens and Disney princess Selena Gomez bin their clean-cut images to hook up with James Franco's metal-mouthed miscreant during the US rites-of-passage party season. Harmony Korine's fifth feature gives us girls in bikinis packing heat. It revels in the fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me of it all and it's hard not to be seduced by its glamorously anarchic brand of entertainment.Spring Breakers follows four college Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In a just world, Papadopoulos & Sons should join Bend it Like Beckham, East is East and The Full Monty in the micro-genre of thoughtfully entertaining, low-budget British feel-good hits. But the UK cinema industry is not that world, as the makers of last year’s raw and hilarious East End entertainment Wild Bill, given up on before it got near an audience, would be only the latest to tell you. Greek-British writer-director-financier-distributor Marcus Markou’s debut has the odds stacked against it.His plot follows a well-worn path, as widowed, ruthless entrepreneur Harry Papadopoulos ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David O Russell's multi-Oscar-nominated film is a romcom with a difference, dealing as it does with mental-health issues. Bradley Cooper, more usually found parlaying characters with arrested adolescence, here plays Pat Solitano, a man with a condition for which he hates taking his meds because they make him both physically bloated and mentally foggyPat returns home after a spell in an institution, having lost his marriage, his home and his job, and he hopes to win back his adulterous wife. But Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), herself troubled after the death of her husband and who has been self- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.Both films are road movies, not in the "wham bam", eventful sense of a Hollywood road movie, but modest, small-scale, quiet journeys, involving Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail & I (1987), he embodied in Uncle Monty a predatory homosexual who, according to the film’s director Bruce Robinson, was based on Franco Zeffirelli. Many years later Griffiths found himself playing a character parked on the same spectrum in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2005). As Hector, the teacher with a roving mind and wandering hands, he bagged a notable brace of awards in the form of an Olivier and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an arresting moment towards the start of In the House when a character looks the camera – and by extension, the audience - directly in the eye. A warm trusting face and a slight squint hint at vulnerability (see clip below). His name is Rafa, and he is the best friend of Claude, who regularly visits Rafa's house after school to help him with his maths. But we soon learn that Claude’s furtive intention is to infiltrate an ideal suburban home as part of an observational writing assignment.Among the piles of vacuous contributions from his classmates, Claude’s account of what he did on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If you go down to the woods today, it’s possible a Huldra might be encountered. A Norwegian wood, that is. She goes by other names across Scandinavia, but this be-tailed woman is to be avoided. Men lured into her lair are never seen again. Thale turns the legend on its head and tells the tale of Thale, a Huldra who’s been captured by a man and imprisoned in his basement. The story of the Siren-like Huldra is one that’s ripe for a film treatment, especially after Norway’s Troll Hunter became an international hit. Unfortunately, Thale is somewhat undercooked.Thale’s just-over-70 minutes opens Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In his 1970 television documentary for Granada, I Was a Soldier, British filmmaker Michael Grigsby was one of the first to look into the experience of US soldiers returning home from Vietnam. “Vietnam syndrome” may have been a few years away from any formal diagnosis, but Grigsby caught the mood of three young Texans – David, Dennis and Lamar – back from the conflict and struggling to re-engage with a society that has become alien to them.Grigsby returned to the town of Brady and its Texas environs 40 years later, and the result is his new film We Went to War (co-directed with Rebeka Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It begins with two gunshots. Lee Marvin is a guy who just wants his $93,000. "I want my money" is the mission statement for Point Blank, a film that is as timelessly entertaining as it is influential. But putting it that way doesn’t grab the sensation of watching a film that is so exciting you may forget to breathe for all 92 minutes of it.Beginning as a film editor and then moving up through TV, Boorman, who also made Deliverance, Excalibur and Hope and Glory, wrote in his 2003 memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy about the “essential mysteriousness of movies” - and Point Blank is an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Thomas Vinterberg made his name with Festen’s queasy social discomfort, but has struggled to match his Danish compatriot and Dogme 95 co-founder Lars von Trier’s iconoclastic career. The Hunt’s stomach-knotting intensity as an innocent man is accused of paedophilia restores him to the front rank.Mads Mikkelsen is Lucas, a small-town nursery worker coming back to life after a bruising divorce, and loved by the kids in his charge. Klara (Anikka Wedderkopp, pictured right), the daughter of his childhood friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen), is an imaginative, sad-eyed child. Hurt by Lucas’s chiding of Read more ...