Film
emma.simmonds
Pulsating and cinematically proud with an opulent urban palette, Trance positively storms onto the screen. Fast becoming a national treasure (if he hasn't broken through that particular ceiling yet) Danny Boyle is also one of the few directors with the visual chutzpah to make a film this bombastically exciting set in the UK. A heist thriller located in a so-chic-it's-barely-recognisable London, Trance features the handsome trio of James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel. Whilst not quite the mind-fuck it purports to be, it nevertheless challenges you to keep apace with its surging Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
François Ozon is one of France’s most mercurial directors, his country’s equivalent, in some respects, to our own Michael Winterbottom – prolific, and constantly on the move between genres. He’s made a musical (8 Women), a marital drama (5x2), a murder mystery (Swimming Pool), a period melodrama (Angel), political satire (Potiche) and a poignant drama about a young man coping with his imminent death (Time to Leave), among others. The common denominators are the director’s intelligence, daring, élan and, when called for, a delicious sense of humour.All these traits are on display in his latest Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
When Craig Zobel’s true-life thriller Compliance played at Sundance, it was met equally with critical praise and audience outrage. There were walk-outs, complaints, shouting matches. At the London Film Festival last year, reaction was similarly polarized – one indignant viewer attempted to lead a mass walkout, rising from his seat during a particularly troubling scene with the rallying call of “Okay everybody, I think it’s time to go now!”It’s not impossible to understand the response – to say that Compliance is a tough watch is to vastly understate the skin-crawling, clammy-handed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When Tess was released in 1979 much was made of the fact that Hardy’s western England had become Polanski’s northern France. Also, that he had cast a German actress in the title role with a wobbly Wessex burr. All these years on, Nastassja Kinksi’s performance looks as ravishing as ever, and doesn’t sound too bad either. An extra layer of otherness is added to her portrayal of a beautiful young country girl passively buffeted by fate – and seduced, possibly raped by a powerful male - with the recent revelation that her father Klaus Kinski abused her half-sister and tried it on with her too. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a fairy tale which may send children to sleep before the good bits, then wake them up screaming at the first glimpse of loping, bestial giants. Splicing Jack the Giant-Killer (subject of a 1962 kids’ monster movie which gave me nightmares) and the more familiar Jack and the Beanstalk, it has farmboy Jack (Nicholas Hoult) spilling the magic beans, and following mildly rebellious princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) up the resultant beanstalk to a stone kingdom of giants above the clouds.Along for the ride are king’s men Elmont (Ewan McGregor, unfeasibly youthful and dashing) and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the customarily narrow perspective that informs much film distribution in the UK, we might be forgiven for assuming there is just one subject in Brazilian cinema: crime; in particular, the drug-related gang wars in the favelas. We certainly haven’t seen much to suggest otherwise, since City of God.Of course, with 100-odd movies released each year, there is a far greater breadth at play. Like their counterparts throughout Latin America, Brazilian filmmakers are adept at depicting their fluid, culturally and socially diverse societies on screen, often in films that defy genre or any such Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When Matteo Garrone’s sixth film Gomorrah won the 2008 Grand Prix at Cannes, it announced Italian cinema’s resurrection to the world. When his follow-up, Reality, won the 2012 Grand Prix, opinion was more divided. Where Gomorrah rigorously exposed the inescapable impact of the Camorra gangs on Naples and the surrounding region, giving a grimly compelling tour of a hidden world, Reality is the more slippery tale of Luciano (Aniello Arena), an amiable, amusing Naples fishmonger pushed by his family to enter a heat for Italy’s Big Brother, Grande Fratello. The possibility of appearing on TV Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Future writer-directors who cast their mothers in their first features should be as blessed as Barnaby Southcombe, who was able to cast his mum, Charlotte Rampling, in the title role of I, Anna. An actress on a formidable run, whose sphinx-like reticence usually shields her characters psychological complexities, she is typically riveting here.Southcombe adapted the script from the 1990 debut novel of psychoanalyst Elsa Lewin, transposing the story from New York to London. A soignée department store bed saleswoman, Anna exudes quiet confidence, but her desperate loneliness has led Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling work of visual poetry, buoyed by the innocence of children and mired in the contrasting anxieties of their parents. Whether it's sexual neurosis, the natural world, or kids at play it's all too beautiful. Confounding, intoxicating and hugely rewarding, Post Tenebras Lux won Reygadas Best Director at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This is cinema as Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone who has ever sat through a Las Vegas show – whether in the Nevada desert city or on tour – will instantly recognise the cheesy, overblown nonsense being lampooned throughout this movie. Whether they'll find it as funny is another matter. For while The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its moments, two thoughts interrupted my viewing enjoyment: one, the big-blown magic shows on the Strip are surely beyond parody; and two, if they are going to send them up, the makers of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have done it so much better.But hey, it's funny enough to be getting on with. We Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For anyone who missed Sightseers in the cinema, purchasing it on DVD is a must. Its blend of the shocking and what initially seems a quirky, Mike Leigh-style British road movie is audacious. Mischievously subverting the familiar, it’s funny, pathos-filled and openly questions the nature of morality. It’s hugely entertaining too.By now, the adventures of Steve Oram’s ginger-faced Chris and Alice Lowe’s angry-woman Tina have been recounted endlessly. Both their performances are sure to fuel cult fandom, with Sightseers assured an afterlife akin to that of Withnail and I. Director Ben Wheatley Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a socialist family between the Great War and the General Strike. Hope in 1945 resided not in the kind of militancy that emerged in Britain following the Russian Revolution, however, but in the idea that the people who had won World War II together could build the peace together.Constructed from archival footage and on-camera oral reminiscences of socialist Read more ...