Film
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 above). Luckily, unlike great British failures like Eddie “The Eagle“ Edwards, Creation Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If ever there’s a film where the landscape itself seems to become a main character, it’s Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer. Action, such as it is, unfolds in the remotest Arctic regions of Russia’s Far East, where the personal conflict between the film’s two protagonists develops as they come to understand the nature of their different conflicts with the looming mountains and rough seascapes by which they are isolated.Last year’s Berlin Film Festival fêted How I Ended... with Silver Bears – one, appropriately, went to cinematographer Pavel Kostomarov for his outstanding Read more ...
anne.billson
BD, pronounced bédé, is short for "bande déssinée", the French equivalent of the comic strip or graphic novel, which has long been accorded a popular affection and cultural standing well beyond that of its anglophone equivalent. Luc Besson says he was weaned on BD, which comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his films. The only surprise is that it has taken him so long to direct an adaptation of one. But here it is - his 11th full-length live-action directing credit - Les aventures d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, a mash-up of two volumes from a series of BDs by Tardi, one of the most respected Read more ...
David Nice
At the risk of sounding falsely pious, as this stunning film never is, Des hommes et des dieux, to give its differently emphasised French title, should be screened in every school and to every faith around the world. Xavier Beauvois sensitively takes us through the true-to-life decisions of seven Cistercian monks in the Algerian monastery of Tibhirine to stay and face not martyrdom but the life they have always known during the civil war between Islamic extremists and the government.Their deaths, which took place some time after their abduction in March 1996, are not the point; it's the way Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and which favours quiet pluck over showy heroics. With a narrative shorn almost entirely of incident, its existential, quasi-religious minimalism recalls Waiting for Godot.Set during the earliest days of the Oregon Trail in 1845 and based on real events, Meek’s Cutoff is the story of three families who, in their pursuit of a better life, hire a guide, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
To describe this movie as slow-burn would be like saying snails live in the fast lane. The latest work from indie auteur Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA and Quiet City) who wrote, directed and edited, is 97 minutes long, but nothing happens for its first third and then when things do start happening - as the lead characters investigate the disappearance of a friend - the film abruptly ends. It may be layered with all manner of subtexts but they pretty much passed me by.Doug (Cris Lankenau) has dropped out of college in Chicago and moved back to his home town of Portland in Oregon to share a flat Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end, the media-industrial complex which takes responsibility for entertaining the planet doesn’t put your needs and mine near the top of the pile. But I think we know this already. Why am I even saying it? Saying it again. Bears make their toilet in the woods, pontiffs wave from balconies and highly remunerated people in Hollywood with popcorn for brains chair meetings the usual product of which are brazenly cheap concepts like Your Highness. Then they feed it to post-pubescents with an insatiable hunger for jokes about penises.Your Highness takes the spirit and the ethos of the gross- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The secrets and lies, delusions and foibles of a group of thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething friends are laid bare in French director Guillaume Canet’s third feature, following his breakthrough international hit Tell No One (2006). This alternately genial and scathing comic drama explores the dynamics of friendship and the fragility of romantic relations. It’s a story fuelled by the friction and frissons between companions, who come together in the aftermath of a tragic accident, and take off on a misguided getaway which becomes a fortnight of reverie and recriminations.Little White Lies is a Read more ...
james.woodall
I’ll confess it straightaway: I’m biased about this picture (as it surely would have been known in 1930) – wholly, shoutily in favour of it. I watched it last September at the Cambridge Film Festival on a big screen in Emmanuel College, with two pianists playing along, live, as this silent marvel told its really quite sophisticated story. I’d had no idea what to expect and came away mesmerised.
Modern moviegoers, as we all are, might be predisposed to ignore or be bored by it. A love story from the silent era: why bother? FW Murnau is probably best known for his early-1920s Nosferatu and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Once upon a time, Gary Oldman acted in the plays or films of Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett, bringing a deliberately disorienting intensity to whatever the role. But here he is in Red Riding Hood snarling commands like “You will die now, beast!” in a film in which considerable members of the cast – spoiler ahead! – go down for the count. That said, at least Oldman gets to appear in focus, which is more than can be said of the gauzy haze with which the director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) smothers most of Oldman’s co-stars. This film – let’s be beast-like about it, shall we Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963-64. As well as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Asti, who's still acting, had appeared in the pimp's tale Accattone, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who employed Bertolucci as an assistant director. (Bertolucci made his directorial debut on the 1962 serial-killer drama The Grim Reaper, written by Pasolini and about to be Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine a special two-hour-plus resurrection of that wannabe extravaganza Stars in Their Eyes. "So, young maestro André de Ridder, who are you going to give us?" "Well, in addition to showing my special flair for contemporary music in Ligeti, I'm going to be Herbert von Karajan conducting On the Beautiful Blue Danube to a ballet of spacecraft." With another rigorously calibrated turn of the screw, it can only be the unique counterpoint of music, sounds, speech and silence with vision that is Stanley Kubrick's 2001.Let me try and explain what I mean by de Ridder "being" Karajan. I'd completely Read more ...