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.
film reviews
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.
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.
Veronica Lee
A fool of my acquaintance told me, “This is the most racist movie I’ve ever seen.” The Blind Side patently isn’t racist, but anyone of a PC, liberal or atheist bent will feel a little uneasy at times during the film, dealing as it does with a black teenager being “rescued” from a life of financial and emotional poverty by a Southern Christian woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock giving a towering performance, which won her the Oscar for Best Actress).A fool of my acquaintance told me, “This is the most racist movie I’ve ever seen.” The Blind Side patently isn’t racist, but anyone of a PC, liberal or atheist bent will feel a little uneasy at times during the film, dealing as it does with a black teenager being “rescued” from a life of financial and emotional poverty by a Southern Christian woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock giving a towering performance, which won her the Oscar for Best Actress).
joe.muggs
The protests around the Iranian presidential elections of 2009 brought home to many in the West not only how dominated by youth the pro-democracy movement in Iran is, but also how westernised the youth of that country are. Symbolised by Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death at the hands of security forces was caught on camera and beamed around the world, this was an Iran a world away from the glowering Ayatollahs and pepperpot women in black chadors we tended to see on news reports.
sheila.johnston
Cuban boxers have always punched above their weight in the world arena: the little island has clocked up no fewer than 63 Olympic medals - 32 of them gold - in the last 40 years. Enjoying extraordinary access to the mysteries of the Havana Boxing Academy, this emotional documentary follows the fortunes of three ten-year-old lads over eight months as they submit to a punishing regimen of training for the National Boxing Championship. But, as with the best sports films, Sons of Cuba is about more than winning or losing. It's about more, even, than boxing itself.
Veronica Lee
Teenagers David and Emily are inseparable friends, who live year-round on a crummy seaside caravan park on the East Anglian coast. They play games of chase among the caravans, scare sheep in surrounding fields and steal from the sweet shop on site. The friends, although the same age, are at different stages of their development; he still looks boyish, she is already flirting with Steve, the much older security guard on site. But the pair are equally emotionally inarticulate and struggling to understand their nascent lust; as the increasingly dark story unfolds, we understand that The Scouting Book for Boys is a snapshot of that moment in our lives when our minds and bodies are caught in a battle between child and adult.
alice.vincent
The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the guitarist from drone doom band Sunn O))), expectations were hard to form. The organisers must have realised the mystery - four sheets of A4 were thrust into our hands last night by ushers upon entry as a means of explanation, although the itinerary was hardly kept to.
sheila.johnston
The opening scene of Martin Scorsese's new film - a storm-tossed ferry buffeting its way to an isolated island off America's East Coast - bears an unmissable resemblance to that of Roman Polanski's The Ghost. So too does its premise, of a vulnerable young man who falls under the sway of a powerful, indefinably sinister older one.
Adam Sweeting
It seems both Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass felt it was time to leave the Bourne franchise on the shelf for a while, fearing they would corner themselves into making The Bourne Redundancy. Instead, they have transposed their working partnership into this Iraq war saga. The result is a fast-moving conspiracy thriller, but with an underpinning of actualité in the way Greengrass alludes to a war waged on a false premise, and spotlights the criminal ignorance and stupidity of American attempts to rebuild Iraq.