Film
Nick Hasted
Director Bong Joon-ho watched Psycho as he prepared his latest film, one of the most discomfiting visions of mother-love since Norman Bates last ran a motel. There is Hitchcockian perversity, too, in Bong’s casting of Kim Hye-ja, an iconic Korean actress specialising in benign mothers, as a far more troubled maternal spirit. This nameless mother will do anything for her son, which feels like a threat as much as a promise, as Bong’s gothically atmospheric melodrama plays out.Hye-ja is the elderly single mother of Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin), a 27-year-old who has a child’s mental age, and is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You’ve heard of the Curse of Frankenstein. You know all about the Curse of Hello! But you may not be aware of the deadliest hex of them all. It goes by the name of the Curse of Cruise and, you just never know, it may be about to strike again. Film-goers have nothing to fear personally, not even if they find themselves watching potent soporifics like Interview with the Vampire or Eyes Wide Shut. No, the only way in which the Curse can possibly affect you is if you’re a young actress, and only then if you’ve been cast as Tom Cruise’s leading lady. Cameron Diaz, we suggest you look away now. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
NB Since it was co-opted by the New Labour project to make them sound like humans, I’ve gone off the word “kids”, but let’s make an exception for a film called Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The film is based on Jeff Kinney’s book series, first published in the US in 2007, which I suspect has not been as big over here as in the States (illustrated below).Greg Heffley is an adroit draughtsman, and fills his journal with doodled caricatures of the figures he comes across in his first year at middle school. There’s his porky pal Rowley, the unspeakable geek/ freak Fregley and a cool girl who loiters in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Amid the cinematic dog days of late summer, François Ozon's Le Refuge comes aptly named: a character-led, intimate tale in the style of the late Eric Rohmer that will infuriate those who like their films more purely driven by plot even as it offers a refuge to moviegoers for whom the curves of a pregnant belly or a handsome young man's spine contain within them their own narrative.A meditation on the subtleties of tenderness and the legacy of pain, the film possesses something of the qualities of an exceedingly smart novella. Well, at least up until a final sequence that threatens to undo Read more ...
neil.smith
With no Bonds or Bournes on the immediate horizon, no more Bauer with the end of 24, and the future of the Mission: Impossible series reportedly hanging in the balance, there appears to be an opening for a new secret agent franchise. It remains to be seen if Salt will plug the gap, though I for one will be more than happy if it does.None of the above could be any more preposterous than Phillip Noyce’s film, which started out as a Tom Cruise vehicle before undergoing gender re-assignment surgery. No doubt there’s a thoughtful treatise in here somewhere about the interchangeability of Hollywood Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“You guys aren’t gonna start sucking each other’s dicks, are you?” Bruce Willis asks Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger - an image any gay porn producer would triple the trio’s fees to see happen. It’s typical of a tone which teeters between knowing and not caring, in writer-director Stallone’s all-star homage to his Eighties action lunkhead prime.The cast is the concept - Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts and wrestler Steve Austin are along for the ride too, an assemblage of straight-to-video royalty that has just sent The Expendables to No 1 in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nobody can remember seeing a film about a piano tuner before. Happily, Pianomania isn’t merely unique; it’s a riveting documentary into the bargain. It takes as its subject the micro-detailed and nit-pickingly demanding routine of Stefan Knüpfer, Master Tuner for that Rolls-Royce of the piano industry, Steinway & Sons. Among Knüpfer’s celebrated clients are such titans of the keyboard as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner and Julius Drake, all of whom appear in the film’s 93-minute span. The main driver of the narrative is the ongoing account of how Knüpfer helps Pierre-Laurent Read more ...
james.woodall
It had to happen. Until now, I've always resisted. But last Thursday, I had, finally, to tear open the plastic container to get to the protection inside. A nice man from Screen International gave me his before leaving - he'd have no use for it. He added that he wouldn't have handed it over had it been stamped with the festival rubric; you know, something that would make it a keepsake.Nice man, you've been had. As I unfurled the crinkly, wafer-thin, yellow kagoule, there it was, in black, on the back: "Festival del film Locarno with compliments of Pardo Boutique" ("Pardo" being Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is one of those films it’s impossible to imagine being fashioned by an Anglo-Saxon sensibility. Part legal procedural, part autumnal romance, The Secrets in Their Eyes is an intriguing weave of tones and colours. It flirts at once with melodrama and slapstick while never finally deviating from a commitment to intense seriousness and emotional intelligence. No wonder it won this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.Adapted by Juan José Campanella from a novel by Edoardo Sacheri, El segreto de sus ojos is set across a 25-year period in which Argentina slipped into rule by military Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Five Easy Pieces is the nominal sibling to Easy Rider, which put Jack Nicholson a step from stardom in 1969. But Pieces, this 40th-anniversary reissue reminds you, was a very different film. The soundtrack is Patsy Cline, not Steppenwolf, and we first see Nicholson working in a hard hat, the music and garb of pro-‘Nam hippie-bashers in 1970. But the cultural action is mostly in Nicholson himself, and the simmering storm of dissatisfaction and high intelligence in his odd-angled, lean face, not often inclined here to split into that trademark super-smile.Director Bob Rafelson and producer Bert Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! But this visual and musical treat of a film wastes no time in informing us that there is no room for pity in the story of this resilient collective of musicians who, rather Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director James Mangold says he "set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic". Somehow he ended up with Knight and Day, which feels completely unreal and is modestly amusing in places. Tom Cruise, playing CIA super-agent Roy Miller, is so "real" that he can survive lethal assaults by swarms of assassins, plummet unscathed from high windows, swim underwater for miles and leap off flyovers onto speeding vehicles. Walking through gales of automatic-weapons fire, he suffers only a cut across his ribs.Somewhere on the travel itinerary any Read more ...