Film
Jasper Rees
The first thing that must be said is the paintings, captured by Herzog and his crew, are breathtaking beyond description. Among the animals depicted with remarkable clarity are mammoths, horses, bison, rhinoceros, ibex, lions and the only known instance of a panther in paleolithic art. There is even a giant creepy crawly clambering up one wall. And the cave itself is a mini-miracle of preserved evidence. Skulls of a vanished species of bear litter the floor, while their claws left the first scratch marks high on the walls some 40,000 years ago.Herzog has never been a film-maker to swim Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Yes, we’ve always claimed her as one of ours, even though her parents were both American and they moved her back to the States as war loomed. She appeared in her first film, There’s One Born Every Minute, with Universal Pictures, with whom she signed her first contract for $100 a week. It wasn’t renewed. Her production chief famously suggested that: “She can't sing, she can't dance, she can't perform.” Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer snapped her up and by 1942 she had appeared in Lassie Come Home (1943) opposite Roddy McDowall and a canine co-star who stole every scene. But her real elevation came the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A chorus of "Hooray! No CGI!" has greeted Kevin Macdonald's new film version of Rosemary Sutcliff's popular novel, The Eagle of the Ninth. Not for him a Gladiator-style digital Rome, or Troy-like computer-generated navies stretching away into infinity.Laying off the gadgetry is lighter on the budget too, but Macdonald claims it was part of his plan to stick to the human scale and traditional virtues of courage and honour that drove Sutcliff's book. In fact, it's hard to see how else he could have done it, since the story boils down to two men, Roman officer Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hailed by swarms of critics for its wit, warmth, compassion and daring challenge to conventional notions of gender and matrimony, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right strikes your correspondent as an exhaustingly solipsistic exercise in Californian smugness. The supposedly bold notion of casting two senior Hollywood dames - Annette Bening and Julianne Moore - as lesbian couple Nic and Jules does raise an eyebrow when Moore supposedly pleasures Bening under the bedclothes with a vibrator, while male gay porn plays on the TV.Yet otherwise, Nic'n'Jules's relationships with each other and Read more ...
anne.billson
In Wake Wood, Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle play a married couple who lose their nine-year-old daughter in horrific circumstances. In mainstream cinema, this would lead to the earnest soul-searching and Oscar-bait performances of films like In the Bedroom, The Door in the Floor or Rabbit Hole. But Wake Wood is the latest film from the new-model Hammer Film Productions. Which of course means the soul-searching is followed by lots of running, and screaming, and blood.In Wake Wood, Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle play a married couple who lose their nine-year-old daughter in horrific Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As he did with his Spanish idyll Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen supplies his fourth London film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, with an anonymous male American narrator whose air of irritatingly breezy omniscience distances us from the proceedings, limiting the empathy we may feel for the four protagonists. This is a shame, because two of them - tetchy, unhappily married Sally (Naomi Watts) and her divorced, needy mother Helena (Gemma Jones) - are, for all their faults, characters we hope to see prosper.As he did with his Spanish idyll Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Route Irish isn’t the St Patrick's Day parade along Fifth Avenue in New York, but the “most dangerous road in the world”, from Baghdad airport to the relative safety of the heavily fortified Green Zone. With impressively opportunistic timing, Route Irish’s makers release it the day after the Irish saint’s celebrations but anyone expecting shamrockery will be disappointed - Ken Loach’s latest is a smile-free affair set among the lawless private security firms that “supported” the allies after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Route Irish isn’t the St Patrick's Day parade along Fifth Avenue in New York Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Czech New Wave sprouted out of a fertile collaboration between film and fiction. Milan Kundera started out as a lecturer in film, lest we forget; one of his pupils was Miloš Forman. Both flew the communist nest to live and create abroad, which is why their names reverberate down the decades much more than those of the director Jiří Menzel and novelist Bohumil Hrabal, whose collaboration on Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967. They followed it with the delightful Larks on a String but, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia having put an end to the Prague Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Former Los Angeles Times crime reporter Michael Connelly struck gold with his books about LAPD detective Harry Bosch, before pulling a deft gear-change with the creation of criminal defence attorney Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer. The movie version, directed by Brad Furman and scripted by film and TV veteran John Romano, sticks pretty close to Connelly's novel, even if Matthew McConaughey's lead character has mysteriously morphed from Mickey to Mick.Though rooted in a familiar low-life Los Angeles peopled by surly cops, hookers, petty criminals and irascible prosecutors, the film lifts Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Sundance Film Festival: you have to pack moonboots, parka and thermals. The showcase for independent films, whose public face since its inception in 1978 has been Robert Redford, takes place each January in Utah. In April of next year it is setting up a new branch in the moonboot-free environment of the 02 Arena in London.Sundance London won’t confine itself to the movies. The multi-disciplinary four-day event will include not only screenings but also live music and discussions. One imagines that other festival directors in London will welcome it through gritted teeth. Raindance – an Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Comedian Richard Ayoade’s kinetic, charismatic and accomplished directorial debut follows an introspective adolescent with his feet clamped firmly on dry land but with his head all at sea. In Submarine, our protagonist haplessly negotiates the quagmire of first love, whilst simultaneously dealing with his parents’ romantic disillusionment.An adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s acclaimed novel, Submarine tells the story of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an utterly unremarkable 15-year-old living in a Welsh village who is elevated to greatness, albeit only in his own mind. Oliver is a dictionary- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The opening images have mighty symbolic heft. A boy dashing across a blasted wintry field compels a flock of birds to take to the air, hundreds if not thousands of them blackening sky and screen, squawking and flapping in cacophonous unison. Cut to a freight train, truck after truck, thundering under clouds across the barren land. Cut to two plastic deer parked outside a wooden prefab. By the end of this brief montage it is clear we are being invited into a world from which, for its tragic human inhabitants at least, there is no chance of escape.Ballast, from first-time director Lance Hammer Read more ...