Film
Karen Krizanovich
The last gasp of the Twilight franchise is really quite good, fugueing on the idea that if vampires live forever, wouldn’t it be great if a vampire fell in love with a human being - and didn’t drink her to death? As irresistible as that seems, there are times over its run when the Twilight franchise seemed to work against itself - what with huge idiotic CGI wolves that are neither scary nor realistic, etc. Nevertheless, the fifth and final (so far) film for the Twihards (Twlight hardcore fans) impresses: it knows exactly what it wants to achieve and sets out to do it - with one huge surprise. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Boris Barnet may not be as well known in film circles as his contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein or Alexander Dovzhenko, but his role in the first decade of Soviet cinema was no less important. What he lacks in the more pronounced experimentation of those two, he more than makes up in his depictions of the fabric of everyday life itself. His Outskirts of 1933 was one of the very first Soviet talkies, and followed on from Barnet's highly successful silent comedies. Its subject, however, was darker - this is the story how the beginning of World War I affects life in a small Russian Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s rare to get excited about a DVD release. It is even rarer to get excited about a director. Margin Call and its director JC Chandor are rare exceptions. Devised in 2005, the idea for the film came about when the director and his chums, testing the waters of the volatile yet lucrative New York property market, were offered $10m by a bank - few questions asked. By 2006, their plan of buying a building, renovating and flipping it became an undone deal as one of Chandor’s group pushed them to sell up - an act thatproved to be prudent in hindsight.Built upon those real-life tensions, Margin Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In the 1960s the Kiwi cartoonist Kim Casali started the comic strip Love is… which mawkishly defined love in a series of statements like, “Love is…being able to say you are sorry” - messages still printed on Valentine’s cards to this day. In Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winning latest, however, love is measured and told in pain: amour means longevity, dedication and the willingness to make difficult decisions. Try putting that on a greetings card.Haneke’s twelfth cinematic feature is a triumph of both simplicity and daring. Amour tells the poignant story of Georges (Jean-Louis Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Greece is in economic meltdown. Austerity is hitting most of the population very hard. Businesses are closing down. The amount of homeless has increased. There are strikes and huge anti-government demonstrations throughout the country. What better time to hold a huge film festival?I confess that I was a little surprised that the 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival was to take place this year. But then I underestimated the tenacity and pride of the Greeks. They were determined to show the world that it was business as usual. From the images I had seen on television, I imagined a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Sometimes the premise of a film is so intriguing that you wonder how any story could live up to it. Alps is such a film. The title refers to the name given by the leader of a small group whose members impersonate the dead to help the recently bereaved. It puts you in mind of Bart Layton’s The Imposter, released earlier this year, in which a Frenchman in his twenties impersonates a missing Texan teenager. He is accepted by the family, despite looking and sounding nothing like the boy. Part of Lanthimos’s intention is to confound us, and we spend much of the film’s first half in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There must be a way out of their Hackney council estate life for brothers Rashid (James Floyd, very sharp on screen here) and Mo (non-professional Fady Elsayed), whose claustrophic home life lived (more or less) to traditional parental rules, contrasts with the energy of the streets outside, where drug-dealing is the most lucrative occupation and there’s always a hint of violence in the air.One of the many achievements of Sally El Hosaini’s debut feature, winner of a clutch of festival prizes, most recently Best British Newcomer at the London Film Festival, is to nicely confound our Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, a young man is driven to murder women who excite him sexually. Sound familiar? Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) acknowledges his debt to Hitchcock by placing the mother in a rocking chair; there’s even a shower scene, yet Santa Sangre is far from being a remake of Psycho. First released in 1989, this ravishing visual feast is far weirder and more wonderful than that.Fenix (Jodorowsky’s handsome son Axel) is confined to a mental hospital. He thinks he’s a bird and, perched naked on a tree trunk, screeches mournfully. Then, in flashback, we Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Director David Cronenberg is his own enemy. His unforgettable remake of The Fly, Videodrome and many others, raised the bar so high that it is virtually impossible for him to satisfy his fans. With Cosmopolis, he comes very close.Robert Pattinson – more than a just telegenic face but an actor who will someday outlive Twilight – is Eric Paker, a handsome wealth-maker who decides to take his live-in limo to get a haircut, crosstown to his father’s old time barber – forget that there’s a meltdown riot outside. Like his performance in Bel Ami, Pattinson is perfectly cast as the ubermensch who has Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Three hours is a testing length for any film. Directors may stretch to that because they’re telling a huge story with plenty of plots and characters, but in Aurora, Romania's Cristi Puiu pares down plot, such as it is, to an absolute minimum. Elements of semi-documentary set in, as we watch his hero Viorel (played by Puiu himself in his first screen role) move disaffectedly through contemporary Bucharest. He takes the first half to bring himself to action, the alienated coldness of which, when it comes, leaves us stuck in his troubled soul – and, by extension, the soul of his city.The only Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
No one can resist a story based on declassified truth and in Argo’s case, no one should. The broad strokes of this so-ridiculous-it-must-be-true tale involve six American hostages who escape the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1979. They hole up at the Canadian ambassador’s house while the Iranian military are slowly discovering that some of their hostages are missing and the American government is trying all sorts of idiotic plans to get these hostages back. It’s a pincer movement heading straight for our hapless hostage heroes.The third of director Ben Affleck’s films is, so far, the best Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julien Temple’s directing career has been struck seemingly stone-dead twice. After working with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1979), then again after the flop big-budget British jazz musical Absolute Beginners (1986), he was made a notorious cinema untouchable in the UK. Exiled in Hollywood, he fell back on his parallel life as a landmark pop video auteur.But during the last decade Temple has bounced back to become the world’s most exhilarating and influential rock documentarian, with films using cut-up, rapid-fire film grammar to tell a story of post- Read more ...