Film
james.woodall
In a major festival upset last night, the Taviani brothers Paolo and Vittorio won the 2012 Berlinale’s best-film award, the Golden Bear. Their film, Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), defies categories. Set in Rome’s Rebibbia maximum security jail, this extraordinary hour and a quarter charts the making by inmates of a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.The sheer daring and troubling intimacy the directors bring to the dozen-plus prisoners’ engagement with drama clearly knocked sideways the Berlin jury, headed by Mike Leigh. There was much else to choose from, including Barbara Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a 13th-century mystic whose poetry had a formative influence on Dutch literature. Though influenced by the courtly love tradition, the subject of her poems was the love of God and the mysteries of the divine. She was probably not a nun but a beguine – a devout noblewoman in a self-denying contemplative order that carried out works of Christian charity. There is a suggestion in her letters that she may have been exiled from her sisters and yearned to rejoin them.So it is with the novice (Julie Sokolowski) named Hadewijch who’s cast out of her rural monastery at the Read more ...
ash.smyth
Right, out with it: who else had their Valentine’s dinner-out ruined by 36 consecutive requests for Whitney Houston? Not even the entire back-catalogue, either: just “(And I-ee-I-ee-) I…”, over and over.I mean, the basic message is all right, I guess; but knowing what one knew about the recently departed – i.e. that she was recently departed – didn't really help with the whole romantic mood (if you know what I’m saying). And then what was on telly when we got home? The Bodyguard. Of course it was. The whole point of which movie being, by the way, that, notwithstanding her bad-girl Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pawel Pawlikowski was named BAFTA’s Most Promising Newcomer for his feature debut Last Resort (2000), then the follow-up, 2004’s My Summer of Love, won Outstanding British Film of the Year. But neither felt obviously British, reflecting border-zone existences in a sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific country. Last Resort’s Margate seems a frightening, science-fictional prison camp for a Russian mother and her teenage son as they fight deportation; My Summer of Love’s rural Yorkshire is the backdrop as Emily Blunt’s posh teenager toys with her blooming power over a smitten working-class Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Challenging the boundaries of reality and the way in which characters exist in and redefine their worlds has become something of a hallmark of director Pawel Pawlikowski. Considering his previous film My Summer of Love, one critic wrote of it as a study of worlds that “exist somewhere on the periphery of normality”. His new film The Woman in the Fifth pushes this further, revealing in a second-half twist that the boundaries of what we had assumed to be reality actually exist in the imagination, somewhere close to madness, to a darkness inside. Rich in mood, and evocative in its images of a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, an aspiring beauty queen becomes an unwitting accomplice in the dirty deeds of a criminal gang. If it sounds like the plot of a cheap thriller, it isn’t – it’s visceral and uncommon, capturing the ferocity and reach of Mexico’s criminal underworld and the terror of being caught in its crossfire.
After witnessing a massacre and confiding in a (unbeknownst to her) corrupt police officer, a shell-shocked Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) find herself in the grubby hands of the perpetrators. Dragged from one hideous predicament to another, her life becomes a blur Read more ...