Film
Kieron Tyler
Watching Incendies leaves you winded. Although it can be read as a thriller, Incendies is a drama that offers no hints of where it’s going. When it gets there, it hits hard. It’s about more than Middle East conflict, more than a search for identity. As director Denis Villeneuve puts it in one of this DVD’s extras, Incendies is a “Greek tragedy with a thriller inside it”.Based on a Wajdi Mouawad play which premiered in Montréal, the scope and the use of sudden explanatory, digressive flashbacks are cinematic rather than theatrical. Although there are very few characters in the film, and the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.In fact, there’s little that looks specifically Danish here (though the film swept the board at this year's Danish Oscars), except a certain Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than a main by way of welcome. Sound unfair? Sure, but love - indeed life, as it is honestly and genuinely lived - hasn't a prayer up against the breathtakingly vacuous conceit that drives One Day, a film that makes zero sense except where these things matter most: the box office. I recognise that not all will share my scepticism, if the reaction Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic bulk of Jason Momoa, the half-Hawaiian and half-Irish veteran of the celebrated cheesecake opera Baywatch.Plot-wise, it's a point-and-go revenge saga with an added long arc of ancestral evilMomoa doesn't look as if he likes to waste time studying the Method or boning up on the Nouvelle Vague, but he fills a Conan-sized 3D hole on the screen. Yet Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Chris Marker has made over 60 films in his long career (he's now 90). But his reputation has rested on just two. Sans soleil (1983), a meditative film essay on Japan, and La jetée (1962), a 20-minute sci-fi film in the ciné-roman photomontage style, are widely considered the finest examples of their respective genres. On top of that, La jetée was named one of the Top 10 sci-fi films of all time by Time magazine. Optimum Classics are re-releasing both this week on one DVD.With its eccentric eye, its exotic locations, its peripatetic ways, zipping between the economic miracle of Japan and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although FW Murnau’s pre-America years will always be defined by 1922’s Nosferatu, he’d already racked up nine films in the preceding three years. He made his mark on Hollywood with the 1927 landmark Sunrise but, although being overshadowed by Nosferatu, his earlier German films reveal how he reached these points. Schloss Vogelöd (also known as The Haunted Castle) is a Murnau obscurity, a stately, atmospheric meditation from 1921 that’s capable of giving the willies.But they take a while manifesting themselves. The straightforward plot is drawn out. Every scene is a carefully staged set piece Read more ...
ash.smyth
It is easy to see why Danish director Susanne Bier’s latest movie would have scooped up all the Foreign Language gongs, made the festival selection lists and generally five-starred it all over the shop. Riffing on the theme of violent conflict as it arises both in an African refugee camp and a generic Danish town (here, picnics in wheat fields, fresh lakes for swimming, unlocked front doors, faces like golden apples; there, Darfur-style dirt-scratching), In a Better World centres on the friendship of two schoolboys, Elias (Markus Rygaard) and Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen), one perennially Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directing and writing his first full-length feature, John Michael McDonagh fully exploits the wild and windswept landscapes of Connemara, and similarly extracts maximum value from his leading man, Brendan Gleeson. Perhaps he picked up tips from his brother Martin, who directed Gleeson in In Bruges. As Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle, Gleeson finds himself on the trail of a trio of ruthless drug smugglers, about to land a colossal stash somewhere on the Irish west coast. This has attracted the attentions of FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle).The narrative is partly driven by the culture shock Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006) is a shadowy study in exile, set in and starring a Lisbon neighbourhood of Cape Verdean migrant workers. Ventura is the damaged, dignified old man who fills nearly every scene. With a lurching walk and disturbed, sad stare, dictating letters to relatives who no longer exist and lending an ear to the local heroin-addict mum he calls his daughter, he’s alienated yet loving. “The ceiling is full of spiders,” he imaginatively complains to a letting agent, as he refuses yet another pristine impersonal flat in the new block the neighbourhood is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The title is the film. In a new low point for high concepts, producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg only needed to see the cover of the titular, unfinished comic book to give Cowboys & Aliens the green light. Iron Man’s director Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams’ writers, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig similarly found the prospect of the sort of six-shooter/laser dust-up last seen when 1980s schoolkids tipped up their toy boxes irresistible. It’s nothing like as much fun as it should be, the strain of turning the concept into an actual film overwhelming everyone.It’s 1873 and we’re in Absolution Read more ...