Film
Adam Sweeting
The protagonist in a coming-of-age movie is usually an adolescent, but in Cedar Rapids it's a fully-grown adult. The hapless ingénu in question is goofy and naive Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), dedicated 34-year-old salesman for the Brown Star Insurance company of Brown Valley, Wisconsin. In Lippe (pronounced Lippy) world, insurance isn't another name for dirty sales tricks and finding ingenious ways to weasel out of paying claims, but more like a kind of social service. Indeed, Brown Star's boss, Bill Krogstad (Stephen Root), prides himself on the firm's Christian values.When the action moves to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As genres go, it’s a broad church: the tale of the alien who visits our world (our world obviously being contemporary America) encompasses everything from The Man Who Fell to Earth to Galaxy Quest. The story tends to riff on the same tension: how our planet shapes up in the eyes of intergalactic visitors. It can be done for laughs, for thrills, even for tears (see, if you are indeed an alien and haven't already, ET). Thor, in which the titular Norse god is exiled to small-town New Mexico, makes a play for all three.Does it work? Are you kidding? Like, does Thor swing a mean hammer? Well Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Midway through Farewell, a civilian who is aiding a KGB spy is told by his nervous wife, “I married an engineer. Not James Bond.” In other films, this might be a cheap line, a postmodern quip; here it is spoken in earnest, and reflects the many nuances of a wonderfully retro spy drama. Farewell is a throwback to the purest of Cold War yarns, notably from the Sixties, in which psychology was more important than action, and characters struggled painfully with loyalty and betrayal in grimy rooms and wintry locales. Goldfinger in 1964 may have excelled with the Martini school of spying, but a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I thought I was creating metaphysical history by running Creation,” says the label’s Alan McGee in Upside Down. Seconds later the meat-and-potatoes rock of Oasis blasts from the soundtrack. The drug-assisted disconnect between such lofty aspiration and the grounded music of Oasis was never going to be bridged. Even by the man billed as “the president of pop”.Creation Records was destined to go down the tubes at some point, and the success of Oasis hastened that fate (Noel Gallagher of Oasis, pictured below). Luckily, unlike great British failures like Eddie “The Eagle“ Edwards, Creation Read more ...
ronald.bergan
When Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Moscow in December 1925, just in time to commemorate the 1905 Revolution, the film played to half-empty theatres, because audiences, then as now, preferred the products from Hollywood. Box-office figures were exaggerated by the authorities to demonstrate to the rest of the world that there was a large Soviet audience for Soviet films.The Battleship Potemkin's depiction of a (partially) successful rebellion against political authority disturbed the world's censors. The French, banning it for general showing, burned every Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The monumental documentary Sweetgrass captures the back-breaking final sheep drives by the herders of the Raisland-Allestad Ranch, Montana, into the vertiginous heights of the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, which lie north of the Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies. These herders’ purpose was to bring the huge flock to pasture on public land, a 19th-century tradition that became economically unviable in the 2000s. Lawrence Allestad and his wife Elaine ended up selling the ranch, which had been in business for 104 years, to a non-rancher in 2004 and their federal grazing rights to an Read more ...
lucien.castaing-taylor
I grew up in Liverpool, but my grandmother was from the Lake District - Wordsworth country, and about as rural and remote as could be. We used to stay with her on weekends, and I still remember the sense of freedom as we escaped the post-industrial detritus of Merseyside and Lancashire, and approached her cottage in this Arcadian paradise. But my bucolic fantasy was of course the projection of an urban child, who knew next to nothing about what it was like to actually inhabit this landscape, whether as a farmer, a sheep, a cow, a fox, or any other animal I spent my weekends gazing at.Decades Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At the heart of the creative orgy that was the Nouvelle Vague was one key love affair. A love affair so passionate it wasn't long before it turned into a full-blown hate affair. The friendship and fallout of directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut is the subject of Emmanuel Laurent's new documentary, Two in the Wave. For any Nouvelle Vague-ist, it ought to have been a joy. And for 50 minutes or so, it was. The story begins with the night of Les quatre cents coups's 1959 Cannes premiere. The night Truffaut the critic became Truffaut the director. The night the Nouvelle Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Back in 2004, Russell Brand performed Russell Brand's Better Now at the Edinburgh Fringe, one of the best shows I have ever seen. In it he described his recovery from addictions to alcohol and drugs and how he had lost his job as an MTV presenter after one too many, er, misjudgments - coming into work dressed as Osama Bin Laden the day after 9/11, for instance.Only Brand made it sound a lot funnier than that, and his descriptions of his life were phrased in the most fantastical and florid language. But he didn't even get a look-in for any awards, which was shameful, and ever since has Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Clive Donner’s 1968 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, which was released on DVD earlier this year, Barry Evans plays Jamie, a Stevenage sixth-former whose rush to lose his virginity leads him into a series of muted misadventures with girls. They are played by the likes of Adrienne Posta, Judy Geeson, Sheila White and Vanessa Howard. Jamie is randy but sweet, scarcely a rake, and Donner’s jocular film transcends its Swinging Sixties sex comedy label by getting under the skin of teenage doubt and desire. Geeson, playing the luscious blonde Jamie idealises, is the nominal female lead, but Read more ...
james.woodall
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. The worldwide success of Paris, Texas (1984), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made him a bankable director in the transatlantic movie business, but he’s always remained very European, if not necessarily in topic and location, then certainly in sensibility: sombre, quite slow, metaphysical on occasion – the latter displayed no better than in his famous portrait Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pina Bausch decided: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things - that’s where dance comes in.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Only if they’re bad words and good dance - bad writhing instead of, say, Shakespeare’s words isn’t much of a swap. But with Bausch, people tended to hang on every word, probably because so much of her dance was indeed pretty damn good, and it’s so difficult to put into words just why that was.Part of it was that it was a theatrical expression of adult instincts that we all share, rather than a school of dance that you had to know standards to access. Wim Wenders Read more ...