Film
Emma Dibdin
“There’s something wrong here. I don’t know exactly what it is, but something.” It’s no coincidence that this line bookends Paolo Sorrentino’s much-anticipated English language debut – it's a beguilingly strange, distancing, even discombobulating venture, at times gently lyrical, at others nightmarish. While there is indeed something about it that feels wrong, a more accurate turn of phrase might be that there’s something missing here. In brief, this is a film about a son avenging his father in which no father-son relationship exists.This is far from unintentional, and Sorrentino has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite being called Roger Brown, the protagonist of Morten Tyldum's wickedly stylish and knowing thriller (adapted from Jo Nesbø's bestseller) is Norwegian, and earns himself a comfortable living as a corporate headhunter. Prowling the coolly minimalist boardrooms and restaurants of a seemingly recession-proof Scandinavia, Brown (Aksel Hennie) tracks his fat-cat candidates with smarmy knowingness, congratulating himself on his mastery of his own private game.Yet for all his oily skills, Roger is also living way beyond his means, and has developed a lucrative sideline as an art thief to boost Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some gorgeous costumes get paraded about to little effect in Mirror Mirror, the latest in a series of Julia Roberts star vehicles to make one wonder whether this A-list thesp's management is actually out to torpedo her career. A terrific actress in material that actually asks something of her, Roberts looks irritated by her latest assignment in a wan Snow White rewrite, and who can blame her? British viewers may be less forgiving of the way the Oscar-winner possessed of the zillion-watt smile slaloms between accents, as if not entirely sure where her vowels should alight. Others may pass the Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For most film buffs, the name of director Vincente Minnelli immediately recalls the quintessence of the MGM musical of the 1940s and 1950s - a world of fantasy, brilliant colours, stylish décor and costumes in which Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance and sing. The name also evokes steamy dramas and civilised comedies such as Some Came Running and Father of the Bride. As the BFI launches a major season of his films this week, however, it's worth pondering whether there is more to his oeuvre than meets the eye. Could Minnelli make claim to being an auteur? Read more ...
ash.smyth
Attention! Required viewing: Jon Shenk’s Maldivian climate-change documentary, The Island President, starring one Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed in the title role.What might be called a natural sequel - or codicil, anyway - to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, The Island President tells the story of Nasheed’s long struggle against the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, his imprisonment, his exile, and his eventual jubilant ascension to the presidency in 2008 - only to discover that his country was sinking into the sea.To lose one island may be considered a misfortune; to lose 2,000… So it’s the run Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It sounded like a good idea at the time - go and see colossal special-effects epic at an IMAX cinema in 3D. There was even a fleeting pre-show visit from the stars, Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington, who play Zeus and his son Perseus respectively. However, having just about managed to say "Hello, enjoy the film," the pair of them couldn't get out of there fast enough.Perhaps they felt that nothing they could say would help, because Wrath of the Titans is a baffling mash-up of Greek mythology which seeks to batter the viewer into stupefaction with an almost continuous barrage of monsters, Read more ...
william.ward
Now here is something genuinely original and genuinely innovative coming out of Italian cinema, a very welcome surprise. Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature film has a freshness of outlook and a sharpness of overview that could put many of her more venerable rivals in Italy to shame. Corpo Celeste – Heavenly Body – based on the novel by acclaimed Anna Maria Ortese - recounts the story of 13-year-old Marta (Yle Vianello) and her somewhat traumatic return to the city of her birth in Southern Italy after spending the last 10 years in Switzerland as the daughter of poor immigrants. The most Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not hugely to the advantage of Hugo that its release on disc opens with a trailer for The Artist. The two homages to cinema’s silent age slugged it out for supremacy at this year’s Academy Awards. Where Martin Scorsese’s first foray into both 3D and children’s narrative justly cleaned up in all the technical categories, on the small screen there is less disguising the frailties of a redemptive story adapted from Brian Selznick’s breezeblock novel.Hugo Cabret’s clockwork lair remains a sumptuous visual treat, as is the bustling world of the Parisian station whose timepieces he Read more ...
fisun.guner
With only a modest, handheld camera and an iPhone at his disposal, the internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi shot this film in secret whilst under house arrest. His close friend, and co-director of this film, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, then smuggled it into France hidden in a cake as a last-minute submission to Cannes last year. Made whilst awaiting his appeal for a six-year prison sentence and a film-making ban of 20 years for publicly supporting the opposition party in Iran’s 2009 election, the film bravely and eloquently attempts to circumvent these restrictions: he is not " Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home. In Tiny Furniture the colourfully calamitous, low-key adventures of Dunham’s alter Read more ...