Film
emma.simmonds
Proving that laughter is the only sure-fire cure for the January blues, this year's London Comedy Film Festival took place over four days from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th January. Known commonly and affectionately as LOCO, it once again showcased the best of comedy filmmaking from around the world, lined-up alongside a range of imaginative events - a programme seemingly designed to give the most depressing month of the year a well deserved kick up the arse.Giving the intriguing but daunting sounding "Laughter Yoga" a wide berth on Thursday morning, I opted instead for Thursday evening's BFI Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another presidential movie. Another year, another lead role for a stuttering English monarch. Hyde Park on Hudson feels like the product of one of those irony-free meetings in Burbank. You know, the ones in which executives crank up a cinematic concept on the basis that if the audience liked X, they’ll suck up Y. And hey, why not hit them with some Z too? Thus a few days on from Lincoln and with memories of The King’s Speech still warm, we have a film in which an iconic leader of the free world, in this case Franklin D Roosevelt, receives a visit from stiff, diffident George VI Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Body-horror proves a viable family business with Brandon Cronenberg’s writing-directing debut, a chilly, queasy successor to dad David’s best work. Cronenberg Sr.’s Videodrome (1983) – which caught its era’s potential for bootleg, endemic visual sex and violence and the interdependence of people and screens – is a decent comparison to Brandon’s Antiviral, which pushes our obsession with celebrity to satiric extremes.We follow Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) in his work at the Lucas Clinic, where celebrity’s diseases are stored and fans pay to be infected, sometimes serious sickness a small Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Poetic restraint dominates Ligy J. Pullapally’s 2004 Kerala-set lesbian drama The Journey (Sancharram). Based on a true story of a relationship between two young women that ended in one's suicide (a conclusion that’s left open in the film), its opening symbol is a butterfly, and flight would indeed be the only escape for its schoolgirl heroines.It would be away to a city from the small town - which looks rural and idyllic, centred around the school from which both girls are due to graduate - where social pressures dictate that conventional family life must be adhered to. When the slow- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
"You're a hero, man! You will never pay for a drink for as long as you live." Sounds easy enough, but after the sensational crash sequence in the opening scenes of Flight, heroism will never be the same. The Oscar-nominated script by John Gatins is a morally skilful examination of one terrifying what-if: what if Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who sensationally landed US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, had been a closet drunk?Also Oscar-nominated is Denzel Washington for his portrayal of Whip Whitaker, heroic pilot with a problem. Striding down a hotel hallway on Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A rum aspect of the Oscar nominations has been the inclusion of two films that concern American slavery, and which could not be more different: in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino gives the American slave exactly the sort of empowerment he offered the Jews in Inglourious Basterds – blood-splatter violent and fantastical; in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg is happy to lean on the history books, for a respectful biopic. Lincoln might not be as inventive, or as much fun as Django, but its seriousness and maturity are a welcome alternative to Tarantino’s excess.Spielberg is no stranger to the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Director Ira Sach's autobiographical tale of Erick and Paul's 10-year relationship shows the passion and destruction that can occur in any relationship. Here, we follow the decade of ups and downs that happen between documentary filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and his attorney boyfriend Paul (Zachary Booth) as drug addiction takes its toll.Shot in crowded city spaces and cafes, the drama closely follows Sachs' own relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg (whose memoir was published last year). What may shock is how lives can be changed by a chance meeting on the way to the subway. Sachs, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zero Dark Thirty could have easily gone by the name of the Danish thriller from last year, The Hunt, it’s so furiously single-minded. As it is, the film's striking title is a military term for half-past midnight - the timing of the Navy SEAL raid which shot dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The shadowy, nail-biting recreation of that infamous operation forms the film’s finale and is its pièce de résistance. But Zero Dark Thirty also gives us the undisclosed story of the 10-year search for bin Laden: the moments of discovery and revelation, as well as the frustrations and deadly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's not an easy trick for an outsized action hero to grow older gracefully or credibly, but Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a shrewd choice of vehicle with which to launch his post-political film career. The way he tells it, being Governor of California was only ever intended to be a temporary time-out from Hollywood. Back in his first leading role since 2003's Terminator 3, he has little difficulty in seizing control of the screen.However, he has carefully scaled down his ambitions. Playing Ray Owens, sheriff of the small town of Sommerton, Arizona, Arnie has adopted a laboured senior Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As promised, he's back. Arnold Schwarzenegger's last major movie appearance was in 2003's Teminator 3: Rise of the Machines, probably the worst of the Terminators but a lucrative one nonetheless. Since then he has popped up in a few cameo roles including an appearance as Prince Hapi in the Jackie Chan/Steve Coogan remake of Around the World in 80 Days, but from 2003-2011, he was mostly preoccupied with being governor of California. And handling a few personal issues of course, which led to him separating from his wife Maria Shriver in 2011.Anyway, this week the 65-year-old Arnold gets top Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As proof that the American cinema for the most part exists to waste its actresses, along comes Won't Back Down. A peculiarly reactionary piece of tosh, it masquerades as a crusading film in the spirit of Norma Rae, the Sally Field Oscar-winner from decades ago that in fact is snarkily referenced in passing. The story of two determined mums who take on the Pittsburgh school system and (guess what?) win, Daniel Barnz's film exudes the breathless if misplaced confidence of a pre-schooler who hasn't yet learned anything of the realities of life and thinks that all experience can be reduced to a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Michael Winner was always proud to call himself a film director but his filmography is notably short of quality moments. The likes of I'll Never Forget What's'isname and Hannibal Brooks in the 1960s, pointless remakes of The Big Sleep and The Wicked Lady, a questionable foray into theatrical adaptation with A Chorus of Disapproval, Lia Williams' reluctant turn as a vengeful killer in Dirty Weekend or his last film Parting Shots - these will not be remembered fondly (or even at all). Death Wish (starring Charles Bronson, pictured below) and its several offshoots, at least in the cinema, is Read more ...