Film
Graham Fuller
“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s Twickenham in the early Sixties, the age of austerity's not yet over, and they’re sitting in his Bristol outside her house at night. She tells him she sometimes thinks he’s the only person who’s done anything in “this whole stupid Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russians are prone to ask the big questions, and among them, resonating periodically and patriotically, from film studio corridors to the Kremlin itself, is, "What is the state of our national film industry?" A partial answer is provided by a fleet of films in three forthcoming British festivals. And the forecast? Much darkness visible. But a rare chance to see five classic Soviet musicals from the 1930s to the 1940s on the big screen in Britain does something to brighten the picture.Film professionals here in Moscow seem an unusually cliquey lot (unless it just goes with the territory). Read more ...
theartsdesk
After theartsdesk's round-ups of new music and classical releases on CD, this week we offer our choice of the most interesting new releases on DVD of recent films, and also of box sets and re-issues. Not forgetting this month's stinker. The selection was made by Anne Billson, Ryan Gilbey, Sheila Johnston, Jasper Rees and Adam Sweeting. Click on a DVD cover to find it for sale. DVD of the Month Sleep Furiously, dir. Gideon Koppel (New Wave Films)by Jasper ReesThe wider world is possibly not aware of such a thing as Welsh cinema. The Principality’s export drive has produced several Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Woody Allen has made four. Christopher Guest starred in and co-wrote the best one of all time, then directed some damn fine examples of his own. Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais have built their careers and reputations on them. Now the Uttoxeter-born writer-director Shane Meadows has thrown his hat into the mockumentary ring with Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee, the profile of a bitter, weather-beaten and entirely fictional roadie.The filmmakers have been careful to point out in interviews that Le Donk himself (real name: Nicholas) was cooked up many years ago by Paddy Considine, the actor who Read more ...
anne.billson
Just when you thought vampires had lost their bite, along comes Korean director Park Chan-wook with Thirst. It's a loose adaptation of Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin in which the adulterous lovers also happen to be drinkers of blood. They suck, they fuck and they kill, and, in the event of a vampire death-match, they would surely make mincemeat out of a toothless teen idol like Edward Cullen. Twilight this is not.The leading man is Song Kang-ho, one of the better-known Korean actors in the West thanks to his enjoyably broad performances in The Host and The Good, The Bad, The Weird (in which, Read more ...
anne.billson
Your friends never learn. No matter how many times you tell them you don't look on going to the cinema as a social activity, they still insist on dragging you along with them. And even though you've told them a hundred times that, after a hard day's writing about Béla Tarr the only film you can even consider watching afterwards is District 9, they still call up and say things like, "Hey, let's go and see the latest Michael Haneke," or, "What do you say to Hunger?" or, "How about that new Iranian film?"The usual arguments ensue. They say, "But Mr McCritic gave it five stars and four smiley Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Staycationers who didn't make it to their favourite Greek isle this summer may constitute a ready-made audience for Driving Aphrodite, the travelogue masquerading as a film that has opened just in time to tap into a collective desire for sun, sand, and the odd drop of retsina just as the nights are beginning to draw in.Others will merely roll their eyes at the predictability of it all, from the boorish stereotypes of Mike Reiss's script to the feel-good ending that lands our lovesick heroine, My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos, in a big fat Greek clinch. (Oops, I gave it away, but c'mon Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Philip Roth once perversely suggested that Eastern European novelists whose work was banned under Communism were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to scour their navels for material; it was all there, dumped in their laps. In the second half of the 1980s, I devoured a lot of their fiction. If the novel came from the other side of the Iron Curtain, I’d buy. My policy was indiscriminate. It didn’t seem to matter if the author had been born too early for Communism. One of them was by Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew who was shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942. The volume contained two shortish pieces Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The door to a pristine apartment is opened by a rivetingly beautiful young woman. “You're early," she says matter-of-factly. "I was just masturbating.” Has a date, and indeed a romantic comedy, ever started so winningly? Not that it goes so well for short, fat, snub-nosed Mark Bellison. At the restaurant she informs him that she’s way out of his league and the evening will not conclude in sex or even a kiss. And the waiter hits on her, unsuccessfully. Mark takes all this on the chin because he’s used to it. Everyone is. In the brilliant conceit of Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying, this Read more ...
elaine.lipworth
Daryl Hannah’s played sexy, sassy, funny and dangerous, from the naive mermaid in Splash, to the vicious one eyed assassin in director Quentin Tarantino’s ultra violent Kill Bill films. Her leading men are among the all-time greats: Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Robert Redford in Legal Eagles, Michael Douglas in Wall St and Steve Martin in Roxanne. And it would appear that real life has been just thrilling for the alluring actress. She started acting at 11 and was a bona fide movie star by the time she was 23.
Her boyfriends would be on many women’s fantasy lists: the late John F Read more ...
anne.billson
The trailer for Farewell - released in Paris this week - was so dull I nearly didn't bother to go and see the film. The problem with selling Cold War thrillers to the masses is that realistic spy movies have little truck with trailer-friendly stunts, explosions and one-liners. But as any reader of Le Carré knows, the world of espionage is a world of smoke and mirrors, where no-one is who they appear to be, and where cynicism and expediency rub shoulders with slow-burning paranoia. In the right hands, these ingredients can have you on the edge of your seat, and fortunately for us, the hands of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Mobile phones aren't usually allowed at film previews. Usually, hard-working hacks trying to earn a crust are relieved of such items at the cinema door lest they record the movie and pirate it on the Internet. But at last night's British premiere of Rage, Sally Potter's satirical thriller about the fashion industry, Blackberries and laptops were positively welcomed. Especially if they were switched on.There was a bid to make the evening a bit of a conventional do, with champagne first, an after-party afterwards, a scattering of stars, both corporeal and virtual (more of this shortly) and the Read more ...