Film
Karen Krizanovich
Skipping across time and place – South Pacific 1849 to Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 to San Francisco 1973 to UK (looks like England) 2012 to Neo Seoul 2144 to Earth’s post-apocalyptic Hawaii 2321 – Cloud Atlas is like a scary old punk who's actually quite nice. A simple and satisfying moral centre stops you from feeling its 172 minutes are a waste of time and its six stories don’t intertwine as much as play tag with each other. But look past extraordinary makeup, special effects, distracting painted horses and Hugo Weaving as Old Georgie, an irritating amalgam of Tom Waits and Johnny Depp, and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Walter Salles was an obvious choice to direct the movie of Jack Kerouac’s roman à clef about his peripatetic life in 1947-50 and his worship of the dynamically dissolute Neal Cassady (Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty). Not only did the Brazilian filmmaker have the advantage of being able to bring an outsider's perspective to the rusty Beat canon, but his handling of Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries had revealed his knack for harnessing topographic images to the emotional experiences of traveling companions. Atmospherically photographed by Éric Gaultier, the vistas don Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Frank Capra called the Oscars “the most valuable, but least expensive, item of world-wide public relations ever invented by any industry”. They are, like it or not, the film awards against which all others are judged - even to the point that other countries’ film awards are scheduled in relation to the ceremony. Despite being the accepted mark of excellence, the Oscars are not a meritocracy. The choice of one art work/film product over another is, necessarily, irrational and Oscars' critics often say AMPAS members are too old and out of touch to cast such important votes.Whatever its flaws, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain in Joan Jett-like form as an imperilled hipster, the movie goes heavy on portentous sound effects and creepy-crawlies. What it lacks pretty much entirely is common sense. On the other hand, who submits to such genre pictures for logic? The whole point of director Andy Muschietti's movie is to trot out a time-honoured arsenal of horror film Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether Lincoln can pip frontrunner Argo to this year's Best Picture gong is in the hands of the Academy, but its 12 nominations are a notable achievement in director Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career. It's sometimes been easy to dismiss Spielberg as a sentimentalist, an entertainer first and an artist second but his films are pure cinema, and for every work of groundbreaking spectacle he's delivered something equally as thought-provoking.Over the years Spielberg's films have secured a not-to-be-balked-at nine Best Picture nominations, and his sterling stewardship has been rewarded with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An intriguing aspect of this year’s battle for Oscar was the early assurance with which pundits placed Lincoln as their favourite for best film. Steven Spielberg's frontrunner merits recognition; what surprises is that no one has noted the significance if it were actually to win. For despite Hollywood’s long history of fine political films, in over 80 years only one has ever won the prize.That exception was All The King’s Men, in 1950. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Robert Rossen’s drama chronicled the rise and fall of Willie Stark, a once idealistic Southern lawyer turned Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brilliantly played by Saskia Rosendahl, the eponymous teenage heroine of Lore (full name, Hannelore) faces a demanding double journey: both the physical slog through end-of-war Germany, a country fallen into chaos, and the more complicated process of acknowledging, like the nation itself, past Nazi complicity. On the cusp of adolescence, she's forced into adult responsibility for her younger siblings, just as her inner world of sexual feeling is awakening - everything pushes her towards maturity, and she must cope or perish.Australian director Cate Shortland’s second feature combines a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jacques Audiard's follow-up to A Prophet (2009) is an off-centre but haunting piece derived from short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson. Marion Cotillard is Stéphanie, whom we first meet outside a nightclub on the Côte d'Azur where she has been involved in a drunken fracas. She's rescued by Ali (Belgium's Matthias Schoenaerts, from Bullhead), a bouncer, ex-kickboxer and petty criminal who's come to the coast with his young son Sam in search of some sort of existential last chance. He tells her she looks like a whore. She thinks he's a lunkheaded schmuck.It's unexpected Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A week from now he could be the all-time Oscar king. If Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Lincoln wins him a third Best Actor award, it will send him clear of a thoroughbred field of nine past double-winners, Jack Nicholson, Spencer Tracy and Dustin Hoffman among them. Those other nine were all American. Uniquely for an Englishman, Day-Lewis isn’t politely respected in Hollywood for his theatrical technique, but matches the screen intensity and exhaustive Method of Brando and De Niro. Ever since his first Oscar as the cerebral palsy-afflicted Irish writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Are films for the senior demographic the new rock’n’roll? As the population ages and people keep their marbles for longer, entertainments for the grey pound, as it’s charmingly called, must be laid on. The job of films like The Last Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and now Song for Marion is to tend towards the cheerful and the redemptive. Age is a bugger, they all accept, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings – or in the case of Song for Marion, till Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp have given their leathery larynxes a public work-out.In this case old age really is flirting with age- Read more ...
james.woodall
The 2013 Golden Bear in Berlin has gone to Poziţia Copilului (Child's Pose), by Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer. Starring Luminita Gheorghiu as a mother, Cornelia, drumming up support for her son Barbu, arraigned for killing a little boy in a speeding offence, the Berlinale winner is a much-favoured mix of - in this festival - a film combining steely contemporaneity and political fearlessness. Its documentary-like texture and compelling theme, along with Gheorghiu's hugely imposing performance, make it a popular winner.A Silver Bear goes (as happily predicted by theartsdesk) to Paulina Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The great German-born director Max Ophüls admired Goethe, Stendhal, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and the four films he made in France, following his unfulfilling post-war sojourn in Hollywood, are characterised by supreme literary elegance and wit. Their prime subject is the transient nature of love and the particular sorrow of women. His elaborate tracking shots and bravura pans are brilliantly harnessed to mirror the inexorability with which emotions alter over time.Changing critical tastes haven’t been especially kind to La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de… (1953), and Read more ...