Film
theartsdesk
Film fans will not need reminding that next weekend knees all over Tinseltown start quivering at the prospect of the Academy Awards. To get you in shape for the big night, theartsdesk is running a week's worth of Oscar-related features starting on Monday.On Monday Nick Hasted considers the film career of Daniel Day-Lewis, the star of Lincoln considered a dead cert to win his third Best Actor statuette having already snaffled the BAFTA last weekend. On Tuesday, Demetrios Matheou considers the political films in the light of Argo’s spectacular marriage of Hollywood and grim events in Read more ...
james.woodall
Big hitters have graced Berlin, with the festival now reaching its close - Damon, Huppert and Binoche have been and gone, Deneuve is yet to come - but one of the more anticipated visits this week was Steven Soderbergh’s. He has said that Side Effects will be his last feature as he “retires” at 50.If he’s really putting himself out to grass, this slick thriller is an impressive last testament. Jude Law plays psychiatrist Jonathan Banks, who's drawn into murky money and labyrinthine deception as he tries to deal with a patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), who seems to “forget” Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skyfall is the rarest of Bond films, dividing critics and wowing doubters with extraordinary cinematography and memorable theme tune. Nominated for five Oscars and eight BAFTAS (and winning two), it is the first Bond film to earn more than £1 billion at the global box office.People who may not see another film at the cinema for years will make an effort to see Bond, and the challenge to Mendes and Eon Productions was how to refresh a spy story for the 23rd time. Effectively a Bond reboot without rebooting the lead actor, director Sam Mendes took an intricate script by Bond regulars Neal Read more ...
theartsdesk
“I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” This weekend is the 30th anniversary of one of the best-loved films in British cinematic history. There are louder movies than Local Hero, comedies with bigger laughs and more telegraphic intentions. But one of the reasons Bill Forsyth’s pocket masterpiece has earned a place in so many hearts is the gentleness of wry wit, the modesty of its wisdom, and underpinning it all a profound humanity.This weekend we celebrate the birthday of Local Hero in the company of its writer-director Bill Forsyth and its two stars, Denis Lawson and Peter Riegert Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet another drubbing. But that was then. And this is 25 years on from Die Hard's first outing: the day A Good Day to Die Hard makes it five.The joke of the Die Hard/Harder/Hardest franchise is that a comic-book cop takes a battering as he goes about the important business of deleting scumbags at the point of a machine gun. The villains, as villains will Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The shock of no longer being young and carefree – that’s the message in director Judd Apatow’s funny and poignant fourth feature, a ‘sort of’ sequel to Knocked Up. In the long tradition of Fellini and Woody Allen - where a lead actor is the director's alter ego - Judd Apatow's onscreen self is Paul Rudd. As Pete married to Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real life wife), he plays a father and husband confronting the scariest mundane thing in life: the idea that he's no longer young. In fact, the couple experience a collective fear that they’re losing their grooviness - and so soon!?The symptoms Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet. Side by Side is partly a manual in how films are made, the way in which light pours through camera apertures to create images, Read more ...
james.woodall
They’re in trouble. They had to be. Otherwise there’d be no drama. And if you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) skip the next two paragraphs to avoid knowing where, physically, temporally, Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have arrived since the poetic ending of the 2004 film.Location: Greece. They’re together: unsurprising fact. They have twin girls. They’re on holiday in the Peloponnese, guests of an elderly writer called Patrick, played by Walter Lassally (a cinematographer who lives in Crete and, as it happens, won an Oscar for Zorba Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sally Potter has forged an admirable career as an independent British filmmaker. She has avoided formulas, made daring visual experiments, and been committed to a highly personal art cinema. Among her movies, there have been two dazzling achievements, The Gold Diggers and Orlando, and an audacious vanity project, The Tango Lesson.It’s arguable, however, whether Potter has developed as a muscular storyteller. Set in 1962 against the background of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Cuba missile crisis, her depiction of the collapsing friendship of 17-year-olds Ginger (Elle Fanning) Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Presented a clear fortnight ahead of the Oscars, while the BAFTAs might have little, if any, bearing on the decision making there, they at least provide an opportunity for the Brits to have a go at the glitz and glamour before award fatigue sets in. With treacherous weather an inauspicious portent, how the night would go was anyone's guess - for, as the ceremony began, only Daniel Day-Lewis and Anne Hathaway were clear favourites in their respective categories.Taking place at the Royal Opera House, this year's ceremony was presented by Stephen Fry who's had the gig on and off since 2001 (this Read more ...
james.woodall
Great fun on day three in Berlin: Scarlett Johansson co-stars in a porn movie. Well, a movie about a young man’s love of porn sites, in which she flashes her famous curves - and starts sleeping with Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But Jon, a swanky, body-building Roman Catholic, is soon dumped; Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman sees no future in being jilted by a laptop and tissues.Don John’s Addiction might on the surface seem a deeply tasteless excuse to cash in on raw sex and Johansson’s nakedness (kept, in fact, to a suggestive minimum), yet it’s much cleverer and wittier than it sounds. Read more ...
David Nice
Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.Yet you can’t fault Prokofiev’s spirited response to every war situation in this propagandist masterpiece about the stalwart 13th century prince who sees off an invasion of Teutonic knights in a battle on a frozen lake. It was made at a time when the German threat Read more ...