Film
Matt Wolf
Many is the mother the world over who announces that she won't die happy until she has lived to see her daughter (or son) happily wed. And so, out of a familial condition that transcends ethnicity and geography comes It's a Wonderful Afterlife, the Gurinder Chadha movie that carries this shared fretfulness one step further, throwing in curry jokes as it goes. What would happen if a mum were so desperate on her daughter's behalf that she resorted to murder? The answer is best pondered as and when this London-set Indian romcom is released on DVD, at which point you can Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Cheering news for Brits in Cannes (always assuming anyone is actually able to travel there this year). Originally rumoured to be in line for the Critics' Week, a young British filmmaker, Alicia Duffy, has now secured an even better berth: her first feature has been selected by the Directors' Fortnight, the prestigious parallel (and rival) event to the main competition.All Good Children is about two young Irish boys who move to rural France after the death of their mother and, we're told, "hypnotically plays out in the gap between childish fantasy and adult reality". Duffy's prize-winning Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Amazing untold stories remain waiting for cinema. Alejandro Amenábar has found one in the female philosopher Hypatia's quest for knowledge during the religious turmoil that gripped 4th-century Alexandria as the Roman Empire fell into the Dark Ages. Somehow he has managed to parlay the freedom given by his 2004 Foreign Language Oscar for The Sea Inside into a cosmic, 50-million-Euro epic of ideas which leaves Hollywood's narrow narrative parameters far behind.The Spanish director's follow-up to The Sea Inside (starring Javier Bardem as a paraplegic determined to die) apparently took shape Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's a piquant French perfume to our April round-up. DVD of the month is Olivier Assayas's magnificent family drama Summer Hours, reissued in the US with revealing extras (and available worldwide from Amazon). Maurice Pialat's work is considered at length and Séraphine and Rumba are among the new releases. We unearth an extraordinary Czech epic,The Valley of the Bees, and watch Ernst Lubitsch's delicious early Berlin comedies. Films covered previously, including New Moon, The White Ribbon, 2012 and Zombieland are noted in brief, with a link to the original review. Our critics are Anne 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 eleventh 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 ...
Jasper Rees
From The Bridge on the River Kwai onwards, the Japanese haven’t tended to come up smelling of roses in war movies. Kind of unsurprisingly. In recent years it was Clint Eastwood who moved the story on. In Flags of Our Fathers he painted the Japanese military as the yellow peril, but gave them the benefit of the doubt in Letters from Iwo Jima, the other half of his Pacific diptych. City of Life and Death attempts to do in one film what Eastwood split into two: a portrait of the Japanese war machine as a manifestation of pitiless amorality; and the component parts of that machine as Read more ...
sheila.johnston
New films by Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Sophie Fiennes figure in the line-up of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, which was announced at a press conference in Paris this morning. As expected, Leigh's Another Year will vie for the Palme d'Or, the only British film to be selected. Frears's Tamara Drewe, based on the Guardian comic strip, plays out of competition, as does Oliver Stone's Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps and Woody Allen's London-set You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Also out of competition, Fiennes's Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a film about the artist Anselm Kiefer, gets Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Cemetery Junction is no ordinary day in the office for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Anyone seeing their names above the title (or, indeed, Gervais’s inappropriate presence on the poster) could be forgiven for expecting their acute observational comedy, fronted by Gervais’s shtick for wince-inducing egomania. Think again.This is clearly a deliberate sidestep for the writing-and-directing pair, a reining-in of their comic inclinations for an altogether different sort of film: a period coming-of-age story, laced with broad comedy, romance and social commentary. But while one might admire Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Making movies has never been cheaper. Learning how to make them is another matter altogether. Film courses abound, but they invariably cost many times more than, say, Marc Price claims he spent on Colin, his £45 zombie flick. Mindful of this, the East End Film Festival is offering impecunious would-be producers a chance to learn the business for a mere tenner. Subsidised by Skillset, the one-day course takes place on 28 April and consists of "training, mentoring, peer review and networking". There are just 10 places, so hurry while stocks last. The application form can be downloaded here and Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Roman Polanski's vice-like paranoid thriller received its world premiere in Berlin in February amid the Chilcot inquiry and headlines about MI5's complicity in torture at Guantánamo Bay, and its topical echoes will rumble on uncomfortably (for some) in the run-up to next month's UK elections. Based on Robert Harris's best-seller, The Ghost (or The Ghost Writer, as it's titled in certain territories), it features an ex-prime minister accused of precisely such crimes and the perhaps even more heinous ones of being in possession of bouffant hair, a cheesy, unconvincing grin and a manipulative, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Somehow the title sounds more sonorous in Italian. Io Sono l'Amore is a big, fat, full-blown melodrama, a film with the button marked "passione" forced up to 11. It looks exquisite, is a glittering showcase for Tilda Swinton as the restless Russian trophy wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist and is elegant in spades: the cuisine, the couture, the shoes, the decor, the diamonds, the lipstick, they're all to die for. So what if it's also just a bit kitschy around the edges?The film, by the hitherto little-known Sicilian director/co-writer Luca Guadagnino, opens in style with a series of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Justin Kerrigan was only 25 when he made Human Traffic. A bristling portrait of rave culture at the dawn of New Labour, it did well enough commercially and enjoyed a cultish afterlife on DVD. That was 11 years ago. Kerrigan hasn’t made another film since. Or hadn’t. With I Know You Know he returns with a script from his own pen. Whenever a promising debut is followed by a long silence, the question is always the same: was the wait worth it?It’s hard to say, and that’s partly to do with the character at the heart of a perplexing portrait of psychiatric breakdown. Robert Carlyle plays a Read more ...