road movie
Owen Richards
British director Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete is a heartfelt and surprisingly stark affair. Based on the novel of the same name by Willy Vlautin, the film follows a young boy and his stolen horse across America. Despite its simple premise, Haigh and his lead Charlie Plummer (main picture) deliver a complex and moving piece of cinema.Charley is a quiet 15-year-old, malnourished and poorly supported by his father Ray (Travis Fimmel), who mostly drinks beer and brings home women. There’s an awkward but distant love between the two, both evidently still struggling from Charley’s mother walking out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“With that film I became a filmmaker,” Wim Wenders remembers in one of the extras accompanying this new release of his 1974 Alice in the Cities. More importantly, it’s the one that convinced him that he wanted to be one. His third film after graduating from film school in Munich, it followed an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter which very nearly put him off cinema for good.He recalls here how the only thing that he enjoyed directing in that one was a single half-hour scene between Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer, whose central pairing is at the heart of Alice ( Read more ...
theartsdesk
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).AUGUSTThe Odyssey. Director: Jérôme Salle, starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. Jacques Cousteau: le movie. Released 18 AugFinal Portrait. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The X-Men films have frequently managed to bring a shot of ethical awareness and emotional engagement to the superhero party, but even so this swansong for Hugh Jackman’s Logan (aka Wolverine) is likely to take your breath away. With James Mangold at the helm as director and co-writer, this is a haunting elegy for times past, battles fought and comrades lost, as Logan finds himself grudgingly dragged out of a drink-sodden semi-retirement as a limo driver.Elsewhere in the Marvel and DC universes, they’re permanently upping the ante in terms of firepower, cities destroyed, and the number of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Jeremy Clarkson trio must have been vastly amused by the disastrous progress of the Chris Evans version of Top Gear, which staggered across our screens in the summer and prompted the new host to fall on his sword, but they shouldn't be resting on their laurels just yet. This long-awaited debut of their new show, The Grand Tour, was big, brash and lavishly budgeted – Amazon have reportedly stumped up £4.5m per show – but it flirted dangerously with bloat and bombast. Sawing off a chunk of its 70-minute running time would have been a smart move, while recruiting guest stars Armie Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s a business opportunity,” explains Jake (Shia LaBoeuf) to dreadlocked, wild-child Star (Sasha Lane). She’s eyeing him up in the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart while he dances around with a rag-tag, stoned young crew to Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. “We go door to door. We sell magazines. Come with us.” Sounds an unlikely proposition.Admittedly, 18-year-old Star doesn’t have much choice in the way of business opportunities. In the first scene, she’s dumpster-diving with two little kids outside that Walmart. Their biggest prize is a frozen bird. After they've hitchhiked home, the toddler sits Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs in 1965, he was intending to make a concert film. The backstage, limo and hotel room material was imagined as filler. But something unexpected happened: Dylan and his entourage, not least his constant companion road manager Bob Neuwirth, realised very soon that the performance didn’t end as the protest singer stepped out of the spotlight, high on Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I don’t really care about reviews because if someone slags it off, they’ve missed the joke. How can they slag off a fictional character? It’s win-win. It’s pain-free. It’s bulletproof – commercially and critically.”Ricky Gervais there, talking about the album tie-in with his new film David Brent: Life on the Road. In many ways, he’s right: the songs, written in the guise of Gervais’ best comic creation, are meant to be bad, but entertainingly so, like, say, Spinal Tap. It's a comparison that Gervais doesn't shy away from: “Once you know the context, you can enjoy the songs without jokes, Read more ...
David Kettle
"A funny wee film about music and death" goes the strapline. That’s a pretty accurate summary of Paul Fegan’s touching documentary Where You’re Meant To Be, which follows singer Aidan Moffat – formerly of 1990s indie rockers Arab Strap – as he tours his bawdy urban updates of traditional songs around Scotland.There’s plenty of humour – sarcastic or absurd for the most part – and at a mere 75 minutes it’s certainly wee. Music’s a constant presence, with footage of gigs in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, the Western Isles, Skye and elsewhere, to varying reactions from the locals. And death – well, that Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Fallout 4 has proven to be one of the year's biggest games launches. A sprawling role-playing game with a huge open world full of danger and decaying beauty, it casts you in the role of the Sole Survivor of an experimental cryogenic vault that has preserved you for two centuries while the outside world has slowly begun to recover from nuclear war. With just a loyal stray called Dogmeat for company, you must venture forth to find your missing child and face your destiny.The post-apocalyptic world of Fallout is vividly brought to life by Bethesda Softworks' relatively small team of artists, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mexico City itself is the dominant presence in Alonso Ruizpalacios’ debut feature Güeros, a road movie that restricts its journey to that megapolis and its environs. It’s not just the traffic that holds them up, more the fact that they don’t really have a destination. As one of its initially dispirited student protagonists says, “Why go if we’re going to end up back here again?”Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) and Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) are studying at Mexico’s National University – except they’re not, because it’s 1999, when students there went on strike to protest the introduction of fees. The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As further proof that films in a lower-key can often land with the greatest impact, along comes Mississippi Grind, a casually mournful, beautifully made road movie that is perhaps best described as the picture that Robert Altman didn't live to make. A conscious throwback to the era of Altman's California Split, this latest from the writer-director team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden locates an almost Chekhovian melancholy in its portrait of two gambling men, drifters both, in search of an actual and metaphoric pay-off from life. As unforced in its telling as the neatly arrived-at Read more ...