Film
Jasper Rees
The career of Natalie Portman has always had more light than shade. Even her lapdancing sylph in Closer erred towards the porcelain. Casting her in Black Swan was a calculated risk by Darren Aronofsky. The journey of her prim prima ballerina Nina towards a fatal knowledge of the dark side is mirrored in Portman’s odyssey as an actress in a compelling performance which deservedly won her an Academy Award.You probably need a big screen for all the colours to come out. Portman’s emotional march takes her from demure containment to a kind of orgasmic hallucinatory hysteria, and not just in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Several years ago the film career of Simon Pegg was launched by Shaun of the Dead, a comic tribute to the low-budget killer-zombie flick. Pegg has long since moved on to bigger, if not always better, things. Without him the film’s producers have returned to the same thematic patch, but with one crucial difference. This time the invading force is stalking not white middle-class slackers in their thirties but a tooled-up posse of teenage boys from the ‘hood. It feels like a much fairer fight.Earlier on this week on Front Row there was much talk of so-called negative stereotyping in Attack the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sensitive but unsparing, the debut feature from French writer-director Katell Quillévéré is a tender portrait of a shy, sweet teenager experiencing the first flushes of womanhood. Don’t be deterred by its somewhat sinister title; although Love Like Poison (or a Un Poison Violent, a phrase taken from a Serge Gainsbourg song) doesn’t dodge uncomfortable truths, it is distinguished and defined by its delicacy, insight and humanity.Returning from boarding school for the holidays, Anna Falguères (Clara Augarde), a taciturn teen, is confronted by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. Her Read more ...
william.ward
Blue Valentine takes place in two different time frames – the “now” (shot on Red One, which endows even the most intimate of scenes with an almost unsettling widescreen look), and the “then” scenes on Super 16 mm. They are interwoven in what appears to be random fashion, but which on closer inspection provides an almost perfectly choreographed explanation on why this most touching – and beautifully related – love story breaks down and disintegrates so utterly.Was all the effort – which resulted in both Williams and Gosling being nominated for an Academy Award – really worth it? Definitely yes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The traditional place for such films is below the radar. A low-budget portrait of an ethnic minority in America which has schlepped round the festivals, Amreeka could just as easily have been cold-shouldered by distributors. It tells of a family of Palestinians redomiciled in the Midwest just as America is invading Iraq and anti-Muslim prejudice infiltrates American streets and classrooms. A good three years after being shot, it would look a bit passé, a story that had missed its moment. But a certain Public Enemy No One being shot in the head last week has given Amreeka a shot in the arm.A Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It just worked. The rave reactions from critics and audiences, and the hail of Baftas, Oscars and Golden Globes which showered down on it, made it clear that The King's Speech wasn't just any old movie, but a rare moment in cinema history. It cost about $15 million to make, and has grossed $400 million worldwide so far. Now there's music to a producer's ears.Colin Firth's mesmerising portrayal of the stammering Duke of York, thrust traumatically into the imperial limelight by the abdication of his flaky Wallis Simpson-obsessed brother, has elevated him from mere greasepaint aristocracy to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Australia's cricketers used to call batsman Mark Waugh "Afghanistan", because (compared to his brother Steve) he was the Forgotten Waugh. It was a reference to the Soviet campaign against the Mujahideen during the 1980s. But few wars in recent-ish memory have been so deprived of the oxygen of damaging publicity as France's brutal struggle to hang on to colonial Algeria.It was a conflict that had been bubbling up since the end of World War Two, during which Algerian and other colonial troops had fought with the Free French. They reckoned that had earned them some control over their own destiny Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Can one enjoy watching a film supposedly about dance in which competition and being Number One is all and the word “artistry” is not mentioned once? And in which performers are nameless numbers? And the documentary-maker shows not a scintilla of curiosity about why this might be? One might, if it were handled with a twisted sense of humour and cutting observation.Unfortunately, Jig doesn't have that. Sue Bourne's film enters a dance-movie genre that has lately become surprisingly well stacked, but it lacks any of the imaginative lyricism of Wim Wenders’ Pina, the dramatic exhilaration of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most socially committed BBC drama producer of the Sixties and Seventies, best known for his exemplary partnership with Ken Loach, Tony Garnett has twice opted to direct. If Handgun (1984), his critique of American gun control, is largely forgotten, Prostitute (1980) is recalled for its worthy campaign to decriminalise soliciting for sex and for its single explicit scene - a massage-parlour handjob so ungainly it promotes self-gratification.Featuring professional actors and sex workers, the film follows two women flatmates in multicultural Birmingham: streetwalker Sandra (Eleanor Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Hanna begins with a bang, and there will be those for whom the excitement never lets up – especially if you like your action movies all but bereft of chat. The young assassin of the title scarcely needs words when her days are given over to taking careful aim. Sure, her father makes a case for the need for language, but determination and a good eye take the feral Hanna infinitely further than pleasantries such as “Hello”.Admirers of Joe Wright’s work on Atonement and Pride and Prejudice may ponder whether the English film-maker is atoning for those movies’ period pleasures this time out. Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch. Since his big break in the harrowing Let Him Have It (1991), playing Derek Bentley who at 19 was the last man to be hanged in Britain, Eccleston has played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and worked alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Kate Winslet (Jude, 1996), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, 1998) and Nicole Kidman (The Others, 2001).However, his best work has undoubtedly been reserved for the small screen. He is, of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It always amazes me that so many commentators dismiss drug experiences as somehow puerile, irrelevant, or even immature. Of course they can be all three but they're also integrally wrapped up in being human, in one's body, alive, so they can also be very much else.Gaspar Noé's film gets this, drawing a direct line, as Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and shamen for millennia before them did, between psychedelic drugs and the process of dying. Enter the Void undoubtedly drags, becoming increasingly turgid during the last quarter of its two hours and 41 minutes, but it aims so much higher than Read more ...