Film
Matt Wolf
At the same time, those of a certain generation will be curious to see Jonah Hill breaking free from the Judd Apatow stable, playing the overgrown kid, 21-year-old Cyrus, of the title. But outshining both the fellas is Marisa Tomei, who completes the film's sexual and emotional geometry with charm and flair. I know she won her My Cousin Vinny Oscar nearly 20 years ago (hard to believe!), but Tomei's getting better as she gets older, as The Wrestler, her ongoing New York theatre work, and now Cyrus prove. Indeed, as was true of a ravishing performance opposite Mickey Rourke that was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A drop of menstrual blood spatters the ground in the opening shot of The Runaways, an insolent enough metaphor for the unstaunchable female energy that drives writer-director Floria Sigismondi’s bracing biopic of the pioneering all-girl teenage 1970s rock band until it heads up a narrative cul-de-sac. The blood is leaked by future lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), experiencing her first period while scampering to a club with her less innocent twin sister Marie (Riley Keough), who’ll soon be left in the slipstream of Cherie’s fame to become a drudge. The evening later finds them Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy pastoral, pitting town and country against one another in the dirtiest and most gleefully anarchic of fist-fights. Heaving bosoms, brooding farm-hands and a herd of murderous cows all await you in this rural idyll of a comedy, which proves that bucolic nastiness is not always confined to the woodshed.The opening sequence of Tamara Drewe might as well have “A Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's a fascination that comes with films/ plays/ you choose the art form that contain within them their own critique: the sort of thing you find, for instance, in Chekhov done badly when one character or another opines about how "boring" proceedings have become, and you are tempted to nod in assent. But it's been some while since I sat through anything that shoots itself in the foot with such witless insistence as Dinner for Schmucks, the sickliest and most craven of the numerous "bromances" to come down the cinematic pike of late.For a brief while, it's rather entertaining cataloguing the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full of fearsome but unfulfilled ideas on the terrors waiting at your front door.For the first few minutes, as middle-aged Mike (Tom Butcher) and Christine (Rachel Blake) settle down in their north London semi after work, uncorking the wine and preparing dinner, the atmosphere is indefinably uneasy, the conversation faintly dislocated. Mike’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Every year the European Film Academy asks film-goers to become an electorate. They have the chance to vote on their favourite film for the People’s Choice Award. Last year they plumped for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. Previous winners include Volver, Life is Beautiful and Amélie. Which film will it be in 2010? You decide.This year the winner will be picked from one of 10 very disparate films - the candidates include a French cartoon, a British political thriller, Swedish fantasy and an Italian domestic comedy. Not all have yet been released in the UK. Have a look at theartsdesk's What's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three languages. It’s the latest of la bella Toscana’s many starring roles in what’s been - let's face it - a chequered sort of film career.The film is curious and gets curiouser. Shimell’s art historian, as he reveals in his opening lecture to a respectful audience, is a kind of prophet in his own land. He is presenting a new book on fakes and copies to a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Step aside Prince Charming – there’s a new fairy tale in town, and your only substantive contribution fits into a small plastic sample pot. At some point in the last few years the Shangri-La, the unattainable dream of romantic comedies, shifted from man to baby. Hollywood started asking itself what happened after Happily Ever After, and the answer – they started trying for a baby, went through several painful, unsuccessful courses of IVF before he cheated with a work colleague – wasn’t pretty. With Jennifer Lopez’s The Back-up Plan and lesbian artificial insemination drama The Kids are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This middle adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium crime trilogy will be followed almost instantly by the last. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the elfin abuse victim and avenger who is the heart of the Larsson phenomenon, remains compelling. But after the surprise UK success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo earlier this year (Swedish-language, like this), there is the strong whiff of the distributors offloading the rest while they can. Because this is a very bad Girl.Apart from Salander, Tattoo had several strengths which stuck in the mind: an intricate and satisfying story stretching Read more ...
laura.thomas
The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.Lampedusa’s novel Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Domestics of varying kinds have always figured prominently in the cinema, from Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Mary Reilly. (Julia Roberts playing the hired help? Uh, don't think so.) But there's rarely been as sullen and indrawn a family employee as the stone-faced Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the eponymous nana, or maid, in the Chilean film of the same name. The script posits that Raquel has been working for the clearly prosperous Valdes family for 23 years and is going to carry on doing so, and what difference if she's an agent of destruction who hoovers Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD- Read more ...