Film
Veronica Lee
On the face of it, The Infidel should be a hoot. The screenwriting debut of comic David Baddiel, one half of two of the cleverest comedy duos of the past 20 years (Newman and Baddiel, Baddiel and Skinner), and starring stand-up comedian Omid Djalili, it tells the story of a Muslim who discovers after his mother’s death that he was adopted and his birth parents were Jewish. (Let’s overlook for one moment that a similar scenario was given a very funny treatment in 1992’s Leon the Pig Farmer.) The Infidel, directed by Josh Appignanesi, could mine an endless seam of tasteless - offensive, even - Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Whip It is not about nefarious S&M practices, nor the art of patisserie, nor even dog racing - although it has trace elements of all of the above. Instead, Drew Barrymore's sweet and swaggering maiden trip as director is a confection set in the rough-and-tumble world of female roller derbies, at which rival teams hurtle around a curved rink like bats out of hell, inflicting grievous bodily harm on each other in the process. For those unversed in the finer points of the sport, the film helpfully explains these near the beginning. Basically, though, it involves "hot girls in Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A sensational performance by Sylvie Testud is the singular reason to catch this rambling biopic of Françoise Sagan - bestselling novelist, high-rolling playgirl, multiple addict, flamboyant bisexual, monstre sacré - which plays in repertory throughout April at the French Institute's Ciné Lumière. Testud, one of France's best young actresses (also currently to be seen illuminating Lourdes as a desperate young pilgrim), takes no prisoners in her electrifying account of the writer's train wreck of a life over half a century, from the precocious literary star who stormed the world in 1954 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just don’t say you weren’t warned. "The Legend Begins in 3D," it says outside the Odeon Leicester Square in rather boisterous capitals. This is very much episode one of what the moneybags on Mount Olympus, working out of their Hollywood 91601 address, envisage as an all-whizzing, all-banging trawl through the Greek legends. The formula is as you were. It’s the age-old cinematic derby, yet another epic widescreen face-off between man and special effect.Things have moved on a tad since the last time Clash of the Titans played across our screens. That was in 1981, when visual trickery was in Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A public telephone rings, unanswered, in the middle of the desert; a young girl pushes her grandmother in a rusty wheelchair, jerkily inching their way across the flat red expanse of the outback; a boy digs deep into the sand and lies brownly submerged in water the colour of his skin. The winner of last year’s Caméra d'Or for Best First Feature at Cannes, Samson and Delilah has bucked recent trends in Australian film, having already achieved substantial success both at home and abroad. It’s the least romantic love-story you’ll see all year, but probably also the least cynical.The story of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly presumed guilty - stalk his movies and television shows and now provide the inspiration for Double Take. Loosely based on a short story, August 25th, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges, it starts with the idea of the Master locked in a murderous mano a mano with his own double. "Two of you is one too many," as he puts it.That alone would be a juicy premise Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with their huge talons and fiery breath, steal their sheep and set fire to their houses as they attack on a regular basis. The opening scenes of How to Train Your Dragon, presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG (Shrek, Madagascar) in 3D, which portrays such an attack, are certainly vivid.The story by Will Davies, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (Lilo & Read more ...
fisun.guner
How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not, then, conventionally handsome, but still, we have those plaintive, expressive eyes and that rumpled yet quietly dignified presence. All perfect, actually, for put-upon Tim, the frustrated paper-clip-arranger in The Office who dreamt of better things and was played with touchingly eloquent bemusement by Freeman.And it's also a face that is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Since his astonishing debut Crane World a decade ago, the Argentine Pablo Trapero has been quietly asserting himself as one of the world’s most singular directors. He’s perhaps best known for his breezy verité approach – shooting on location, often using non-actors, and drawing his subjects from everyday Argentine life. At the same time, Trapero has always dallied, slyly, with genre: Rolling Family might be called a road movie, El Bonaerense a cop drama, though each is subverted so as to accord with his desire to be true to quotidian reality.Lion’s Den (Leonera) is a case in point. Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Now in its ninth year, London's East End Film Festival today announced its programme at a reception at the heart of its manor, at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The Festival kicks off on 22 April with a preview screening of Barney Platts-Mills' cult 1969 film Bronco Bullfrog, set in Stratford, East London and starring local kids, prior to its re-release this summer. Over 200 films will be screened in the next nine days, with a double focus on local culture, with new and old films exploring East London's roots, and on international cinema, with strands showcasing work from East Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Is there a God, and if so is He malevolent, and what's on the menu for dessert? Like one of her characters, Jessica Hausner, the relatively unknown, but startlingly talented director of Lourdes, doesn't shy away from asking the really important questions. Her witty, visually thrilling film is about, inter alia, miracles, faith and the thirst for grace; about sexual desire, base envy and the dynamics of a tight-knit group; about ritual and performance, and the very meaning of existence. Plenty to think about there then.From the exquisitely choreographed opening sequence, you know you're in a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Lee Hancock's film is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Michael Lewis's biographical book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Michael Oher is virtually homeless when Leigh Anne spots him wandering the streets of suburban Memphis one freezing night, dressed only in shorts and T-shirt. When her daughter Collins (Lily Collins) tells her he attends her Christian private school (because of his bulk, the gridiron coach had persuaded the school’s governors to offer him a free education), Leigh Anne invites him home for the night. But what was a simple offer of a bed becomes a lifetime Read more ...