If Michael Moore's new film were a person, it would be diagnosed with a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. His Cook's Tour through the ills of capitalism spans, inter alia: forced repossessions; worker lock-ins; the breadline salaries of airline pilots, some of whom sell blood or use food stamps to pay the bills; a scam, perpetrated by a judge in collusion with a private company, to make money by sending harmless youngsters to a correctional facility; Hurricane Katrina; the election of President Obama; cats flushing toilets - in short, everything but the kitchen sink.Any one of these Read more ...

Read theartsdesk's reviews and interviews for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award-winners.The Hurt Locker: Best film, Best director, Best original screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Sound Fish Tank: Outstanding British film A Prophet : Outstanding foreign film An Education: Carey Mulligan, Best actress. Interview with Carey Mulligan A Single Man: Colin Firth, Best actor Inglourious Basterds: Christoph Waltz, Best supporting actor Precious: Mo’nique, Best supporting actress The Twilight Saga: Kristen Stewart, Rising Star Up in the Air: Best adapted Read more ...

The Palme d'Or at Cannes makes headlines. The Golden Bear in Berlin tends not to, and few films that win in competition at the German capital's annual film festival, the Berlinale, go on to command global clout, though that's no general reflection on the quality of entries. This year's winner, Bal ("Honey"), a lyrical story about a little boy and his father's beekeeping obsession, is the first, fully fledged Turkish film in recent memory to win; director Semih Kaplanoğlu might hope that Bal goes the same way as 2004's grim winner, Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand, which, though German-funded and Read more ...

A merciless anatomy of the inner meltdown that follows a hit-and-run accident, The Headless Woman is as baffling, brilliant, demanding and utterly original a work as you're likely to see all year. Its themes are confusion, amnesia, disavowal. The director, Lucrecia Martel, by contrast is in vice-like control of her material. This film might be a real head-scratcher. But no-one seeing it can come out unconvinced that Martel is a world-class talent.It is set in Northern Argentina, the location of the director's two previous features, La Ciénaga (The Swamp) and The Holy Girl.  Verónica, Read more ...

Take cover! The Pacific is the new 10-part World War Two epic from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, a follow-up to their 2001 series Band of Brothers. It was commissioned by HBO, who will premiere it in the States on March 14, and comes to Sky Movies HD in the UK over Easter.Shot in Australia at a cost of $200m, it follows the war across the Pacific theatre through the experiences of three US Marines, Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), and John Basilone (Jon Seda). “There was a very strong, desaturated quality to Band of Brothers,” said Read more ...

The late, lamented Simon Gray is best known for penning a string of black comedies for the West End stage such as Butley and Otherwise Engaged, but he also wrote prodigiously for the screen, mainly for the BBC's equally lamented Play for Today slot. But incredibly, one of these films, A Month in the Country, starring Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Natasha Richardson right at the start of their careers – now there’s a casting director who knew what she was doing - might well have ended up as landfill had it not been for the tenacity of one enthusiast.About 20 years ago, poet Glyn Watkins Read more ...

The final days of Tolstoy are innately dramatic, as the American author Jay Parini intuited. The Last Station, published in 1990, was his novel about the novelist’s own denouement. Towards the end of his long and prodigiously successful life, Tolstoy chose to embrace the simple values of the fabled Russian peasant he had lionised in War and Peace. To that end, he determined to leave his entire fortune and publishing rights to the political organisation set up to disseminate his credo. For his wife, it was naturally all rather upsetting.The main reason for watching the film of the book is that Read more ...

Jeff Bridges cranks his dude status up a notch or 10 or 20, and his payoff looks likely to be this much-loved actor's first-ever Oscar. So what if writer-director Scott Cooper's film plays out like the careful illustration of a Hollywood pitch: The Wrestler as filtered through the prism of Tender Mercies (with the Academy Award-winning lead of that Bruce Beresford movie, Robert Duvall, on hand here to make the connection complete)? It's high time Bridges stepped up to the podium, and here he really is very good.I wish I could muster the same enthusiasm for the entirety of a film that has a by Read more ...

A tiny incidental pleasure in a movie that could use a few more of them is the Mystery Telephone Voice in Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man. It’s the moment when college professor George Falconer (Colin Firth) gets some… er… very bad news over the phone.If the voice of the unseen caller should sound uncannily reminiscent of Mad Men’s Don Draper, that’s because it is indeed MM matinee idol Jon Hamm on the line. It seems that Ford asked Hamm to do it without consulting his agent, who flew into a rage when he found out because he doesn’t want Hamm doing voice-only work for some reason. Read more ...

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a murdered 14-year-old who hovers in metaphysical limbo over her grieving family, was once to have been filmed by the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. On the evidence of Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, her take on Sebold’s novel would have been a moodily lyrical but deadpan reverie that wouldn’t have skirted its engagement with evil. When Ramsay’s involvement ended, the project was inherited by Peter Jackson, who for all his spectacular CGI work on The Lord of the Rings knew when to leaven Tolkien’s epic saga with restraint and Read more ...

Our February DVD releases are light on stars, heavy on variety. We range from the Amazon rain forest to female wrestling and killer futons (we're not joking) in Japan and clandestine video reportage in Burma; from Pushkin’s Russia to Darwin’s England and the French criminal underworld. The Americans are under siege in love and war. Our DVD of the Month finds Britain's Sam Mendes taking a quizzical look at the all-American dream. Peter Watkins's Privilege, exhumed from the Age of Aquarius, is the selected re-release. And our reluctant choice of turkey is the thriller that caught Bertrand Read more ...

Everything has been immaculately planned for the big event of the evening: the prized possessions arrayed like trophies on the desk, the chosen suit laid out ready to wear, the perfectly colour co-ordinated tie alongside it with a note specifying, "Windsor knot".  Yes, indeed: it will be a death in the best possible taste, a very British suicide. The fashion designer Tom Ford's debut feature - designed with equal elegance and a fastidious attention to detail - has snared an Oscar nomination for Colin Firth as a British academic In Los Angeles battling depression after the death of Read more ...