Film
Jasper Rees
He played chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, was crucified as Jesus in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told and diced with the devil in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. There’s something magnicent and elemental about the life and work of Max Von Sydow. Born in 1929, he has looked like a craggy old monument for at least 30 years.For several decades Von Sydow has been Hollywood’s Nordic figleaf – an emissary from the farthest shores of European arthouse cinema who gives Hollywood integrity and ballast. No one felt that more keenly than Woody Allen, Bergman’s self- Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer once described his approach to the writing process as “trying to stop making sense, and create something that just has an effect”. It’s an intention that’s easy to track in his sophomore novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which uses an idiosyncratic mix of prose, pictures and blank pages to spin its two narrative strands.The first of these, following a nine-year-old boy grieving his father’s death in the 9/11 attacks, is intact here while the second is all but entirely excised. The course from stage to screen seldom did run smooth and cuts are inevitable Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich has spent a decade following the everyday lives of Indonesia’s Sjamsuddin family, a working-class clan with their roots in the countryside whose working lives have taken them into the hubbub of the country’s capital Jakarta. Position Among the Stars is the final work of a trilogy, its immediate subject the importance of granddaughter Tari going to college to receive the further education that will give her new opportunities. But, as much as anything else, Retel Helmrich (himself of part-Indonesian descent) captures the sheer variety and vitality of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Calling Zift hard-boiled undersells it. This Bulgarian film is so tough, it’s as though director Javor Gardev blow-torched the conventions of film noir so the picture he paints from the ashes is pure black. It’s in black and white, and had to be. Despite the darkness and violence, Zift is a compelling, breathless ride which flies by.The word "zift" has a few meanings. Medically, it’s the acronym for Zygote Intrafallopian Transfer. In Bulgarian slang it doubles for shit. It’s also Bulgarian for tar, wads of which were a predecessor of chewing gum. Zift’s main man Moth (Zachary Baharov) is a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Artist was showered with awards by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts last night in an elegant occasion at the Royal Opera House, London, hosted by Stephen Fry. Director Michel Hazanavicius won for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Music, Cinematography and Costume Design, while Jean Dujardin's extraordinary silent performance was judged Best Actor. Meryl Streep won Best Actress for her Maggie Thatcher - quipping that as half her ancestry is from Lincolnshire, she had every right to have been cast in the role.The much-nominated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came Read more ...
Amy Liptrot
In the same way that some chase the thrills of extreme sport, extreme art fans can now take the challenge of visiting this small art festival, which is uncompromising in terms of location, climate and content. Orkney as a whole has natural beauty, a rich history and a thriving cultural life, with a disproportionate number of artists compared to the size of the population. The prestigious and high-brow St Magnus Festival of arts, held each midsummer, is patronised by composer and isles resident Peter Maxwell Davies.However the Orkney "mainland", the largest island of the group and home to most Read more ...
David Seidler
George VI had been my hero since childhood because I was such a terrible stutterer. We had been evacuated from England to the US and during the war, particularly the latter stages, my parents would encourage me to listen to the King’s speeches on the wireless. “Listen, David,” they’d say, “he was a far worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect but he can give these magnificent stirring speeches that really work. So there’s hope for you.” It didn’t help me at the time but I thought, wow, he’s brave. When I grew up to be a writer I thought I would like to write something Read more ...
ash.smyth
Mea culpa. I take it all back. Christoph Waltz can act, and like a dream. You know, that dream you have where Tarantino's favourite pantomime Nazi demonstrates his apparently incurable fixation on apple-based desserts, and then Kate Winslet yakks all over his shoes. In fact, in Roman Polanski's oddly flat Carnage, I'd go so far as to say that Waltz is the only one really pulling his weight. It may be, of course, that this is just a side-effect of Yasmina Reza's French play being shipped across the Atlantic; but when Reza's Parisian characters did spite, you got all spitey with them. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts. As its daring do-gooder, it features boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe, now a man and here a father who, in his continued battle against evil, is hardly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gil Pender is in Paris with his intended and future in-laws. He wants to be a proper writer, rather than hacking for Hollywood. No one else cares about that and he’s belittled by his girl, her Tea Party father and her overbearing American friend who just happens to roll up. Strolling off on his own, midnight strikes, he climbs into a car and is transported back to a golden age to hang out with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Picasso, Hemingway, TS Eliot and Marion Cotillard’s artist’s muse Adriana. Naturally, Gertrude Stein loves the book Gil is writing. He even gets to meet a tour Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of a certain vintage will recall with fondness their childhood years (or those as parents of small children) gathered in front of the television on Sunday evenings between 1976-1981 to watch The Muppet Show. But The Muppets movie, their first big-screen outing in 12 years, is no lazy exercise in nostalgia; it's bracingly original and postmodern, with dollops of self-knowing humour and irony.It's also produced by Disney (which now owns the Muppets brand), making the accusation that, with its message of anti-corporate greed, the film is the work of pinko communists so much funnier. As Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American documentary directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin have made a reputation with stories that study, as they describe it, “variations of truth and falseness”. Their latest, Girl Model, is just that, in spades. It tells the story of 13-year-old Russian teenage would-be model Nadya, plucked from the talent contests of Siberia to work in the potentially lucrative Japanese fashion market, where the premium is on youth.That strong clash of cultures is enhanced by a distinction between sheer naivety - in Nadya’s expectations of what she will be doing - and the reality of an industry in Read more ...