Film
Nick Hasted
The original Predator from 1987 is perhaps best remembered for taking Schwarzenegger’s borderline homoerotic body-fetishism to new heights, as he stripped naked to mud-wrestle the titular alien hunter. It was among the more efficient of the big, dumb action movies which defined Arnie in the Eighties. But for this fourth sequel, Sin City director Robert Rodriguez, producing here, has convinced himself he is returning to a rich, iconic mythos, and lured a cast led by Oscar-winner Adrien Brody to prove it.Predator benefitted from the post-Star Wars trend for science-fiction movies to have their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have barely been off the stage in productions all over the world. The Menier Chocolate Factory shrewdly revived the pair of them Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Isabelle Huppert has always had a wandering soul, ever since she cropped up as a strawberry blonde cowboy’s moll in Michael Cimino’s fabled folly, Heaven’s Gate. That was 30 years ago. Middle age has by no means withered but certainly has hardened her pretty freckled moue into something fierce and obdurate. The owner of that forthright jawline ploughs a self-sufficient furrow these days. The characters she chooses to embody are, for one reason or another, doing it for themselves out on society’s limb.In Villa Amalia a betrayed wife dumps every vestige of her marital existence to embark on an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The fourth and last instalment of the ogre animation is a belter. It’s in 3D for one thing and, while the pop culture and film references have been toned down in Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke’s screenplay (directed by Mike Mitchell), in order to tell a gentle morality tale, it takes as its inspiration Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. And that’s a very good starting point for any movie.Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers), now living in connubial bliss with his beloved Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and their three babies - a trio of burping, farting little green ogres - is in a rut. He may be a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oh, how we like to moan when the inevitably grubby world of Hollywood gets its mitts on one or another European "classic". The Birdcage, we're told, wasn't as good as La Cage aux Folles (actually, I preferred it), and the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle, Vanilla Sky, isn't a patch on its 1997 Spanish forebear, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes): I'm with the nay-sayers on that. Now comes the French popular success, Heartbreaker, starring Vanessa Paradis as an ice queen who melts in the hands of a bodyguard who is not in fact what he seems, and word has it that Universal Pictures and Working Title have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the Danny Sugerman-Jerry Hopkins biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, that kicked off the Doors death cult 30 years ago, at a point where the band's reputation was wallowing low in the water. Previously it had been quite acceptable to regard much of their work as cheesy pseudo-jazz with stupid lyrics, and their posturing vocalist Jim Morrison as a tedious drunk with a Narcissus complex.Then suddenly The Doors were propelled into Classic Rock nirvana, their collective efforts elevated to "Great American Band" status and Jim Morrison canonised as sage, seer and sex god. There they Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.The new broom brought new disorganisation. At the festival village ticket Read more ...
Graham Fuller
n Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, Larry David plays the fourth-wall-breaking narrator and protagonist Boris Yetnikoff. In his early sixties, Boris is an atheist, hypochondriac, divorcee, failed suicide, blowhard existentialist, and world-class curmudgeon, who’s abandoned his career as a nearly-Nobel-level physicist. He’s the most acridly loquacious - and easily the funniest - Woody Allen manqué yet, vehement in his conviction that life is futile, ready to assume that he has thyroid cancer, who wakes screaming “The horror! The horror!”, as mouthed by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (and Apocalypse Read more ...
neil.smith
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather trilogy has been here of course, his 1982 flop One From the Heart leading him to declare bankruptcy and spend a decade or more doing derivative hack work to pay off his debts. This time around, though, he has taken a self-sufficient route, using profits from his Californian vineyard and other businesses to finance modestly budgeted indies that enable Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The fifth collaboration between iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert and director Benoît Jacquot tells the story of Ann (Huppert), a concert pianist who leaves her partner of 15 years after she sees him passionately kiss another woman. She decides to abandon her life, leaving no trace of her previous existence, and only one friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade), is allowed to know her plans. She has met Georges for the first time since childhood by a ridiculous contrivance but, as with so much in this film, it helps to go with the flow because Huppert, who appears in almost every scene, is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Charity begins at home - or maybe not - in Nicole Holofcener's lovely film, Please Give, which joins the superlative Greenberg as one of the beacons in a summer movie line-up given over to sequels, franchises and pitches that should never have got beyond the story board. (Die, Killers, die!) Like a kinder, gentler Woody Allen, and without the peculiar prurience that has crept into Allen's films as he's got older, writer-director Holofcener anatomises middle-class Manhattanites in all their ever-mutable contradictions. This is the sort of film where a mother won't fork out dosh to a teenage Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Last night’s gala opening of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival may have been touched by living history – in particular the presence of Sean Connery (pictured below, arriving at last night's screening), who strode up the red carpet looking sharp and dapper in black – but the film on show, Sylvain Chomet’s ravishing animated feature, The Illusionist, was haunted by old ghosts. Not only the private phantoms of the late comic all-rounder Jacques Tati, who wrote the original script, but also memories of Edinburgh’s past. The audience even enjoyed the strangely dislocating experience Read more ...