Film
Jasper Rees
There was a time not long ago when British films and television dramas were shot in the Czech Republic and Hungary, where the studios were cheap and the landscape looked roughly analogous to our own. In recent years what feels like the entire film industry has migrated south, principally to South Africa, also for budgetary reasons (although the light is ideal). While this is good news for South African film technicians, vanishingly few films which can describe themselves as South African are made, even fewer released internationally. Life, Above All is therefore a collector’s item.Needless to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Warner Brothers are anticipating that The Hangover Part II will gross $100 million over the coming Memorial Day weekend, which would put it comfortably on course to trounce the $470 million earned worldwide by its 2009 predecessor. It might even deserve it.If you saw the first Hangover, you'll know what to expect (wedding-party dudes experience surreal amnesiac gross-out with walk-ons by gangsters, hookers and animals), but you also get a guaranteed supply of hot-button sew-my-sides-together moments. For instance, I love the one where camp Asian gangster Chow (Ken Jeong) snorts a giant Read more ...
david.cheal
A young outdoorsman is shimmying through a canyon in Utah when a boulder falls and pins him by his arm. He is trapped for 127 hours before he severs the arm with a blunt knife and makes his way out. It’s a compelling scenario, but there are two difficulties that might have presented themselves to any film-maker planning on making the true story of Aaron Ralston’s survival into a movie.First, there’s the Touching the Void problem: we know how it will end (in Touching the Void: he cut the rope! In 127 Hours: he cut the arm!). Whence will the narrative tension derive? And second, it’s a static Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Last night Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, described by one critic there as “a hymn to the glory of creation”. At last year’s festival another film fitted the same description, only it achieved its ends in a leaner, far quieter fashion; and unlike Malick’s film, Le Quattro Volte can be seen not only as dabbling with the profound, but as being delightfully and accessibly tongue-in-cheek.Set in and around a Calabrian hill village, it opens on the person whom we imagine is to be the chief protagonist, an elderly shepherd. We follow this Read more ...
stefan.simanowitz
During the 1960s, when decolonisation movements were sweeping the world, it was joked that, after achieving independence, a country had to do three things: design a flag, launch an airline and found a film festival. Western Sahara has a flag but no airline and, despite a 35-year struggle, has yet to achieve independence. The closest Western Sahara comes to its own film festival is the Sahara International Film Festival (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, whose eighth edition took place this month in a refugee camp deep in the Algerian desert.FiSahara takes place Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Surely, any film called Win Win and starring Paul Giamatti is being deeply ironic? After all, you don't expect the hangdog star of Sideways and Barney's Version to do the feel-good Hollywood thing, and it seems of a piece with Giamatti's baleful, ever-defeated demeanour that a scene of him jogging along should end with the actor coming to a panting halt.Life isn't easy in the Job-like landscape in which Giamatti has specialised on screen, to the degree that a clanking boiler beneath his Win Win character Mike Flaherty's New Jersey office begins to sound doomily apocalyptic. Even his six-year- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Peter Mullan’s incendiary and long-overdue third feature is an unflinching, often hilarious look at a teenager’s inexorable descent into delinquency. NEDS (or Non-Educated Delinquents) begins in Glasgow in 1972, immersed in a rosy haze of promise as the chubby-cheeked, saucer-eyed John McGill graduates from primary school. Moments later he’s being threatened with a beating to end all beatings by a malevolent peer.It’s a story told in academic milestones, violent street clashes and graffiti. When the talented scholar John starts secondary school his older brother Benny’s name adorns the walls Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Feminism it certainly isn’t, though it is bizarrely refreshing to observe that the heroine fleeing a maniac in a state of comely undress is in her mid-forties. It might be baby steps rather than huge strides of progress but nevertheless, The Orphanage’s Belén Rueda once again makes a cheeringly mature and cerebral, yet still hauntingly beautiful scream siren. It’s a shame that Julia’s Eyes as a whole lacks her class and consistency.The Spanish director Guillem Morales’s second feature (after 2004’s The Uncertain Guest) is an entertaining shambles which begins with the death of Sara ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once more unto the beach, dear friends. Pirates of the Caribbean is back for a fourth raid of the world’s wallet. This time it’s in 3D. As in Dumb, Dumberer and Depp. Film scholars may also wish to note that Pirates 4 was actually shot 6000 miles away in Hawaii. Among those places closer to Barbados are Zimbabwe, Syria, Greenland and Antarctica.If one weren’t slightly wise by now to the jaw-dropping cynicism of Tinseltown’s service providers, the film which calls itself On Stranger Tides would take the breath away. The latest instalment comes courtesy of the following rationale from Jerry Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At the end of Joanna Hogg’s acutely observed drama of bourgeois manners, Patricia (Kate Fahy) and her grown-up children Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) and Edward (Tom Hiddleston) restore to the living-room wall of their Scilly Isles holiday house a painting they’d removed for being “rather horrible". It turns out to be a dark, stormy seascape - a metaphor not only for their miserable vacation, which had been intended to give Edward a happy send-off to Africa where he is (or was) to work as a sexual-reproduction health volunteer during his gap year, but also for the family's compatability. William, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To the relief of many an international batsman, there has never been anything to rival the stupendous West Indies teams which bestrode Planet Cricket with intimidating ferocity from the late Seventies into the Nineties. Fire in Babylon is the story of the side that Clive Lloyd built, and the way it became a formidable socio-political force in the Caribbean as well as a sporting global superpower.The interlocking themes of sport, colonialism and the struggle against racial prejudice add up to a celluloid Molotov cocktail, and director Stevan Riley and producers John Battsek and Charles Steel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A low-budget Britflick in which four middle-class young men go on a sentimental road trip to Pembrokeshire: doesn’t sound like much of a movie, does it? The twist is that one of them has terminal cancer. To prick your interest further, he’s played by Benedict Cumberbatch. There is a small actorly elite whose members can read out the phone directory and make it sound like the King James Bible. Cumberbatch has lately become one of them. He’s the reason Third Star got past first base and boy does it lean heavily on the charisma of his performance.The title is a misquotation from Peter Pan – “ Read more ...