Film
Nick Hasted
Treacle Jr is a cautionary tale of the fragility of UK film careers. Writer-director Jamie Thraves’s debut The Low Down (2000) is still regarded as a minor classic, but he took nine years to follow it up, then remortgaged his house to make this third film.He surely risked his home from a need to bring the film’s odd couple to life. Tom (Tom Fisher) is one of those men who walk out for the paper and don’t come back, nameless anxiety driving him from his young family and comfortable Birmingham home. Taking the train to London, he feels free for a while in a sunny park. He becomes homeless in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lars von Trier wants us to see the big picture. When Terrence Malick similarly returned cinema to the cosmic with The Tree of Life, he tried to make us feel the terrifying wonder of creation as much as death. The prelude to Von Trier’s new film instead sees Earth smashing into an indifferent planet 10 times its size. What’s more, when that planet, Melancholia, hoves into view from its hiding place behind the sun, the famously depressive director has suggested the catastrophe is a symptom, even affirmation, of his heroine Justine’s malaise. You can imagine her saying with grim relish as she Read more ...
ash.smyth
Since breaking onto the movie scene in 2001 with major roles in A Knight's Tale and A Beautiful Mind, London-born Paul Bettany (b 1971) has pretty much gone through the card. From a Darwinian ship's doctor (in Master and Commander) to Charles Darwin himself (in Creation), via romantic comedies, Dogme nightmares, CGI blockbusters and several turkeys involving religion, he has established himself as an actor of significant (and award-winning) versatility.Now, having covered everything between gangster and archangel – including a naked Geoffrey Chaucer and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It can’t be a coincidence that the simultaneous release of four Agnès Varda DVDs draws a film each from the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, bringing the opportunity for a broad-sweep appraisal. It’s equally unsurprising that the films share Varda’s non-judgmental empathy with her subjects and their day-to-day worlds.La pointe courte, released in 1954, is Varda’s first film. Although it captures the life of the eponymous fishing village, it’s a loose-ended examination of the collapsing relationship between a locally raised husband and his Parisian wife. Even at this point Varda had Read more ...
ash.smyth
John Madden's mainstream remake of Israeli thriller Ha-Hov – The Debt – features three Mossad operatives despatched to Sixties Berlin on an Eichmann-style mission to kidnap a former Nazi and escort him to Israel for trial.In pursuit of Dieter Vogel, "the Surgeon of Birkenau", Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain), Stephan Gold (Marton Csokas) and David Peretz (Sam Worthington) each carry the requisite array of general post-Holocaust baggage and individual character flaws, which, in the fullness of time, incline them predictably to a messy love triangle and an even messier Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It takes an ultra-liberal Catholic like Kevin Smith to tear into Christian fundamentalism with Red State’s ferocious accuracy. The writer-director’s 10th is being sold as a horror film, but the only demons to be seen are those of church and state.When his debut Clerks became a micro-budget paragon of independent cinema in 1994, Smith gently dismissed himself as “a 24-year-old with a talent for dick jokes”. In some subsequent films – Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), for instance - he’s seemed happy to live down to that, and massage his own cult. Red State is a radical change. An early Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Four years ago a film called Persepolis told the story of a young woman’s experience of revolution in Iran. There has been a modest abundance of Iranian films making their way west over the years, but this distinguished itself from the others by being a frank and unflinching account of recent historical events, told in the form of animation. So the concept of The Green Wave should not take anyone by surprise.In 80 compact minutes, it gives an account of a very different revolution in Iran: the street protests of 2009 before and after the rigged election. It is much less reliant on animation, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Irene (Carey Mulligan) realises just how much the Driver (Ryan Gosling) loves her as his boot caves in a man’s face on the floor of her apartment building lift. They have just kissed for the first time, and she tumbles from him, shaken and repelled. But she can’t stay away, and neither can he, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Cannes prize-winning tragic action romance.As its nameless hero, Gosling doesn’t speak for Drive’s first 10 minutes, and is so still in one early scene he looks plastic, only a flick of a finger confirming he breathes, let alone sweats. We see him move smoothly between three Read more ...
ash.smyth
After the international success of Not Here to Be Loved, Stéphane Brizé returns with a delicate, sentimental tale of small-town life disrupted when French builder Jean meets Véronique Chambon, his son's junior-school teacher.And, er, that's it. Pretty much. Jean (Vincent Lindon) doesn't manage his emotions very well (doesn't even seem to realise them for the most part); Véronique (Sandrine Kiberlain, pictured above) - a slightly insipid, freckly figure - doesn't do much better; Jean's wife Anne Marie (Aure Atika) gets a little suspicious. Some... thing... happens... But Read more ...