Film
Adam Sweeting
Having won early acclaim for his student feature film Under the Sun, Swiss-born but Germany-based director Baran bo Odar has taken a further leap forward with his commercial debut, The Silence. Based on a novel by Jan Costin Wagner, it's the story of the hunt for the killer of 13-year-old schoolgirl Sinikka Weghamm, whose disappearance uncannily mirrors that of 11-year-old Pia Lange 23 years earlier.Though the story is naturally concerned to some extent with police procedure, Odar's real interest is in the corrosive, unending effects of loss, loneliness, grief and guilt, which affect many of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some pretentiousness was inevitable. Any film that sets out to tell the story of the universe (we get the whole caboodle - big bang to eternal blackout - with cameos for dinosaurs, microbes, DNA and even Sean Penn) is I'd say bound, perhaps even required, to sink into the mud of philosophical grandiloquence. But to focus on this, or the film's frequent slips into the coffee-table visual language of Anselm Adams (electro-static trees, smoky waterfalls) or the moralising family lectures through which this story of the universe is mediated, would be unfair. For, however familiar Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Miss Bala, just to clear it up at the start, does not concern itself with beauty pageants. Or not like Miss Congeniality. Beauty is indeed involved in the form of Laura, a pretty young Mexican woman from a poor family who aspires to win the crown of Miss Baja California. Never has the advice to be careful what you wish for been more apposite. Confronting beauty there is a beast in the form of the organised drugs trade which corrodes and toxifies all who come near it: police, military, civilians, indeed the whole body politic in a country which, in the final credits, advises that 36,000 lives Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Everyone is working against type, or so it would seem, in Roland Emmerich's deeply bizarre Anonymous, which asks us to accept a celluloid slob (Rhys Ifans) as an aristocrat, a vaunted republican (Vanessa Redgrave) as Elizabeth I and a highly successful action film-maker (Emmerich) as a putative man of letters: well, one has to have something to read between set-up shots on Godzilla and Independence Day, so why shouldn't it be a Shakespeare sonnet or two to the Earl of Southampton?If you can accept the above catalogue of incongruities, then the film's central premise should come as a Read more ...