Film
emma.simmonds
Comedic curio Casa de mi Padre features Will Ferrell in his most surprising role yet – that of a Mexican rancher who “no habla inglés”. This Spanish-language film is a tongue-in-cheek thriller featuring Ferrell alongside Mexican stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. It’s Acorn Antiques meets El Topo: frequently batty, wilfully inept and performed with aplomb by a sporting cast. Directed by Saturday Night Live scribe Matt Piedmont and written by the aforementioned’s Andrew Steele, its knowing nostalgia and elegiac violence means this retro rib-tickler would play well alongside the 2007 Read more ...
David Nice
Only one of the five films in Artificial Eye’s selection is palpably a classic, a turning point in Ingmar Bergman’s early career. It’s flanked by curiosities spanning 11 of the master’s 59 years as a film-maker – two of them flaunting the beginner’s uneasy mixture of melodrama and realism, two later specimens making good use of the actresses who came to dominate his world. All have characteristic moments of intensity and will be welcomed by Bergman buffs keen to add to the substantial roster already available on DVD.The masterpiece is Sawdust and Tinsel, Bergman’s fantastical 1953 take on how Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There was a strange sense of ghosts, or rather absent presences, in the screening room where I saw Ben Drew’s iLL Manors (that orthography reflects the chosen spelling of the film’s title, and Drew is also as well known as Plan B, from his rapper music career).The late Alan Clarke turned up first, with a vhs of his Scum. Peter Mullan was down from Glasgow with NEDS, not the only Glaswegian visitor, along with Ken Loach, of the early vintage films. Gary Oldman was in from the East End, and of course Ray Winstone was already there in the company. Shane Meadows, certainly. Tim Roth, too. Some Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
BOAC, BEA, and Britannia: the recent past is so near and yet so far. All have now disappeared from the national consciousness but, in these two DVDs, the flagship planes of the British Overseas Airways Corporation and British European Airways appear – in improbable colourways – bookending royal tours in stirring shots by British Pathé News or British Movietone as commissioned by the Central Office of Information, to be shown mostly abroad.So, too, the royal yacht sailing serenely into ports world wide, a safe haven and elegant entertainment venue for heads of state. The COI Collection Volume Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The world is awash with rock docs, most of them not very good, but it's best to think of Under African Skies as merely a superb piece of film-making. Marking the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon's Graceland, and included on DVD with the album's special reissue package, it's a gripping exploration of how Simon went to South Africa searching for fresh inspiration, made possibly the most memorable album of his career, but found himself embroiled in the poisonous politics of apartheid.Looking back a quarter of a century later, and 18 years after Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa's Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Turin Horse begins with a prologue in which a novelistic male narrator, talking over a black screen, describes the probably apocryphal incident that caused Friedrich Nietzsche to suffer a terminal mental breakdown (the more likely reason being syphilis). In a Turin plaza on 3 January 1889, the German philosopher supposedly saw a horse being whipped by a coachman and, sobbing, threw his arms around its neck. After two days of prostration, he proclaimed “Mutter, ich bin dumm”(“Mother, I am stupid”) and abandoned his vocation for good, living in the care of his mother and sister for his Read more ...