Tarantino calls Big Bad Wolves “the best film of the year”. With its Reservoir Dogs-style scenes of mutilation that are never quite as awful as you fear, a thick streak of brutal black comedy, and a twisting plot in a confined setting, Israeli writer-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado could almost have designed their second feature to appeal to Quentin.
film reviews
Jasper Rees
Allen Ginsberg was once approached by two young acolytes eager to discuss literature. The bearded eminence of the Beats was the soul of generosity, giving up no small allowance of time to share his vast knowledge and experience. How they must have basked in the glow as a great poet treated them as equals. At a certain point, having put in sufficient effort, Ginsberg deemed it a good moment to change the subject. “So,” he said, “either of you guys suck cock?”
Katherine McLaughlin
Alexander Payne is at home with the road movie. From mid-life crisis in Californian wine country in Sideways to dealing with life after the death of a loved one in About Schmidt, he has a knack of tapping into the human spirit and an affinity with the American landscape. Taking great lengths to elicit the whirs and hums of vehicles and the many bumps along the open road, his exploration of the USA is always an eye-opening experience.
emma.simmonds
Although it begins, somewhat startlingly, with a 3D hacksaw to our collective mush - as it penetrates the ice on a frosted lake - the latest computer-generated offering from Walt Disney Animation Studios is far from an aggressive overhaul of Disney tradition. For the most part, Frozen marks a return to the studio's roots after the subversive, divisive Wreck-It Ralph (which I loved); it's a spirit-stirring musical crafted with finesse whose more schmaltzy moments are deftly (and thankfully) undercut by self-deprecating humour.
emma.simmonds
You wait ages for a French film about a teenage girl's sexual awakening and then two come along at once. Actually who am I kidding? As any filmic Francophile will tell you it's not exactly a rarity. Still, red-hot on the heels of the astonishing Blue is the Warmest Colour comes François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie.
Karen Krizanovich
Classic children’s stories often have a darker side; a shadowy area that lends an eternal quality to an otherwise merely durable yarn. Such is Mary Poppins. How and why it came to the big screen is one of Hollywood’s best tales, previously untold until now with Saving Mr Banks, a controlled yet poignant story hinging on the persistence and pain essential to bringing even the cheeriest film to fruition.
Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s high-profile effort focuses on the psychological backstory of one of the most famous children’s stories of all. It is a big mission – even if few will know what PLTravers, the author of Mary Poppins, looked like. Nor will many younger viewers recognise Walt Disney, the moustached face so familiar to an older generation. Emma Thompson plays – with amazing focus – the picky, prickly, complicated and over-protective author resisting Disney’s lucrative offer to transform her adored children’s book into a feature film. Saying that it was the favourite book of his daughters, Disney (Tom Hanks, working his character’s calculated charm) won’t take no for an answer. Sending an emotionally sensitive chauffeur (Paul Giamatti) to pick Travers up from the airport is only one of Disney’s nice little ploys to soften her up. For the audience, returning scenes with Disney’s nimble team of incredible songwriters (Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak) lifts the tension with the original film’s trademark songs.
The clash between Disney, poised to succeed after 20 years of trying, and Travers, adamant to preserve her vision after 20 years of resistance, flashes back and forth from the 1960s to Travers’s girlhood in 1907 Queensland, Australia. Her father (Colin Farrell, pictured right) is a drunken dreamer, as adorable as he is unrealistic but, like most fathers, a hero to his daughter. His attempt to be a responsible adult is the emotional core of Saving Mr Banks – with a heady reveal at the film’s denouement. (But who is Mr Banks? If you don’t know, it’s worth watching the film to find out.)
Kelly Marcel’s script came through the Black List, a project that tracks the best unproduced scripts each year and its strength benefits from compelling performances. Saving Mr Banks relies too on sensational visuals: hair, makeup, wardrobe and production design cannot be discounted in its evocation of a period where manners, thoughts and actions were very different from today. This is an exploration of love, between that of an author and her work, between a daughter and a father but also between a creative businessman and a money-making film opportunity. The conflict between art and money – ever-present in filmmaking – is palpably displayed by Thompson as Travers protects not only her art from Disney but also her past.
Saving Mr Banks achieves the rare feat of taking us behind the candy-coloured curtain of fun to show how serious the world of Disney business really was. You may come for the story but you'll leave with a revelation. Make sure you linger through the credits to hear recordings of the real Travers, made at her behest.
TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks is the reason to see Dave Eggers's sentimental Saudi comedy
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance
Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks
Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism
Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie
Adam Sweeting
It's great to see Robert De Niro front and centre in a full-sized role again, even if we might wish it hadn't been this one. Likewise Michelle Pfeiffer, stepping up to play the hard-boiled wife of De Niro's mobster-in-hiding Giovanno Manzoni. Twenty-five years later, she's remarried to the Mob and giving it serious bada-bing.
Angie Errigo
The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.
Emma Dibdin
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty and ugliness, continually on the brink of change.
Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose treatment of his cast and crew has sparked the kind of controversy that unfortunately threatens to eclipse all that is good about the film, exhibits an almost clinical fascination with Exarchopoulos, who for her part gives a performance so vivid and vulnerable that at times you feel winded watching her.
Despite the inevitable attention that has been drawn by the film’s expansive sapphic love scenes, it’s generally closer to a character study than a love story; from the very first shots of Adèle leaving her parents’ house in the suburbs, boarding a bus and commuting to her school in central Lille, an almost anthropological intimacy is established in our view of her. We see her learning, walking, sleeping, eating, dancing, teaching, talking, often in snatches rather than complete A-to-B scenes, and when we do see her having sex it’s in the same matter-of-fact detail as everything else.
The graphic novel from which Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix’s script is titled Blue Angel, in reference to Léa Seydoux’s worldly art student Emma, who becomes Adèle’s first real love and first real loss. Prior to their meeting she has an ill-fated fling with a male fellow student, and predictable though this is as a plot element, the crushing sense of erotic disillusionment that Exarchopoulos conveys in the aftermath is painfully immediate.
It’s more telling, in fact, than most of the lovemaking she shares with Emma, which unfolds in self-consciously lengthy single takes that feel anatomical rather than illustrative; they tell us little about the couple, their relationship or the momentous passion between them. This we discover in other, less showy moments: they share the kind of conversations about art, literature and career ambitions that are too often overlooked by screenwriters, and when the emotional storm clouds start to gather, it’s clear exactly how much both have to lose.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour made Cannes history this year, becoming the first film to be awarded a shared Palme d’Or for its director and two leading actresses. While the trifecta has plainly not been a harmonious one, what they have produced is a rare thing: a passionate, wrenching and genuinely complete portrait of a human being in flux.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Blue Is The Warmest Colour
Katherine McLaughlin
Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital is the place where both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald died and it serves as the central setting for the most recent film to investigate the assassination of the 35th President. Former journalist Peter Landesman directs and approaches this much pored-over incident with a fresh perspective by putting the doctor who operated on the President, the man who filmed the footage of the assassination, the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald and the special agent in charge of security under the microscope.