Film
Kieron Tyler
There’s a scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players where those gathered in a square hear “the wind of freedom is blowing” being sung. The wartime Nazi occupation is over. Greek, Russian and American flags are aloft. A bomb goes off. In asking whose freedom this was, Angelopoulos had chosen his moment carefully. The film was released in 1975, a year after Greece held its first election since the Colonels took power with American backing in 1967.Angelopoulos made his first film in 1968, just after the coup d’état had installed the quasi-fascist regime. A new four-DVD box set collects Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.Part-inspired by such masterful works of filmic melodrama as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), with more than a touch of the heightened, adulterous shame of Brief Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The trajectory of Terence Rattigan’s standing finds two peaks separated by a deep trough. From the late Thirties to the mid Fifties, he gave a voice to a social class which liked to keep its feelings under lock and key. Then in 1956 Rattigan was occluded by the dazzling verbal incontinence of Jimmy Porter. In 1991 a production of The Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida starring Penelope Wilton rebooted his reputation.His centenary amounts to another celebratory reassessment. Theatres small and large have been turning to the unvisited margins of Rattigan’s work. But Separate Tables and The Browning Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the rich," as Oakland's general manager Billy Beane puts it.A true story based on the bestselling book by bond-trader- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dream House’s crude selling point is the chance to see newly married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz co-star as Will and wife Libby, in the film they made just before their first date. In bed and around the home their characters have moved to with their two young daughters, they’re appropriately, easily affectionate. “We’re safe now Daddy’s home,” Libby brightly reassures, but this is far from the truth in a film which darkens intriguingly, till a jolting half-time twist unravels it.The rich man’s house where Will plans to write a novel seems a fragile fortress, with too many faces Read more ...
ellin.stein
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild. The other difference, of course, was that everyone knew what a hurricane entailed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When The Secret in Their Eyes beat the more fancied A Prophet and The White Ribbon to last year's Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, there was mild consternation. But Argentine Juan José Campanella’s film works both as a mystery with jigsaw pieces spread across a quarter-century, and an equally fragmented, frustrated romance.Retired legal investigator Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) visits his old boss Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil) to discuss the novel he’s struggling to write based on their shared experiences around a savage murder case 25 years earlier, in 1974. Love and justice Read more ...
ash.smyth
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.In little over 50 years since Kwame Nkrumah's groundbreaking election as Africa's first black prime minister, Ghana has been through five military dictatorships and four republics. The most notable figure in all this chequered history is Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, who seized power in Read more ...
Dylan Moore
What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough. The brooding landscapes of the remote Olchon Valley in Wales’s Black Mountains are put to much the same use as they were in the book: claustrophobic and accompanied by threatening storm clouds, they serve as a pretty obvious Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At Thanksgiving in 1999, a 75-year-old retired widowed museum director came out to his family. He had only recently been widowed after a marriage lasting more than four decades. One of the people to whom he broke the news was his son Mike Mills, then in his early thirties and not yet a film director. This year the movie inspired by that moment was released, and it now appears on DVD.Beginners, written and directed by Mills, features a delightful and zesty performance from Christopher Plummer in the role of Hal, who announces his homosexuality to his son, a cartoonist played by Ewan McGregor. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.We’ve been to Australia’s suburban badlands before, in Rowan Read more ...