Reviews
Sarah Kent
Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera; he stands up and balances precariously as the boat bobs up and down on the swell; he falls overboard, climbs back on and stands silhouetted against the blue sky, grinning down at us.With his lithe young body, bleached dreadlocks and disarming smile he seems very amiable and laid back; it's impossible to imagine him in any sort of trouble. And Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Indie actress Brit Marling takes aim at a rigid power structure in this tense and pared down female-led revisionist Western from British director Daniel Barber. Set towards the end of the American Civil war three women are grappling to survive and make sense of it all whilst the men battle it out and the world around them is burning to the ground.Louise (Hailee Steinfeld), Augusta (Brit Marling) and Mad (Muna Otaru) make up this brave brood, two sisters and their slave, who are forced to come together to fight against a couple of rogue soldiers intent on taking them down. All the women Read more ...
fisun.guner
All human life, as they say, is here: we witness displays of warmth and tenderness in virtuous matrimony; reflection and contemplation in quiet solitude. We respond to the soft seductions of the flesh in its yielding ripeness, and we feel the pathos of the withering of the flesh in age; there’s even the mocking of the aged flesh still lusting for the piece of the old action. There’s civic pride and intellectual curiosity. And then there’s simply being; being in a fully conscious, thinking and feeling sense – don’t we get exactly that when we stand before a Rembrandt self-portrait? Here is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Few films this frightening are also so kind. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature starts with a pretty teenage girl suffering inexplicable, bone-snapping terror. He makes us wait to find out why, lingering in the lives of 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends in their deliberately timeless, golden, Spielbergian suburbs. This is a world where the sun always shines, black-and-white science-fiction is usually showing on TV, and only Disasterpeace’s John Carpenter-esque electronic score reminds you something awful is looming. Mitchell’s sensitivity to teenage lives, and intimate Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I was a nigger for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.” This astute joke, by American comedian Richard Pryor, is stencilled in black capitals on the gold ground of a painting by Glenn Ligon.I’ve long admired the work of this black American minimalist. In the late 1980s he invaded the territory of pure abstraction – a bastion of white, middle-class males – and introduced content, usually in the form of texts taken from black authors or activists. So what appear to be all-black paintings after Ad Reinhardt turn out to be canvases densely layered with capital Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale and (coming soon) Ben Affleck have all had a go at playing the fully-formed Caped Crusader, though for some Adam West's ludicrously campy Sixties incarnation remains the score to beat. But apparently that's still not enough. Hitched firmly to the ongoing craze for exploiting any nook and cranny of superhero folklore, Gotham whizzes us back to the story's embryonic days, when 12-year-old Bruce Wayne has lost his parents in a seemingly random double murder and has yet to emerge in his full Dark Knight regalia.The challenge here was to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race (*****) arrived at a strange time. With its remarkable accumulation of Soviet archive material and interviews with key figures, including Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the programme must have been a long time in the making and the fruit of lengthy collaboration of a kind that might not be so readily forthcoming today. Michael Lachmann’s film rightly reminded us of the achievements of the Soviet space programme and how in many areas it “beat” the Americans. But given more recent events some of its assertions rang with a somewhat new Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Purists may take issue with Anya Reiss’s incursion into the classics. Having already tackled The Seagull and Three Sisters, she’s now turned her dogged 21st-century gaze on Uncle Vanya. But Reiss’s adaptation, though fresh and punchy, is notable, in fact, for its amiable fidelity. The framing is in place for a provocative revamp, yet, in appropriately Chekhovian fashion, Reiss appears to have hit some kind of a psychological barrier partway through the process. This is one of the wittier versions you’ll encounter, honouring the comedy in “tragicomedy”, but it never develops an audacious Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jean-Luc Godard is still masterfully riding new waves, more than 50 years after Breathless. Following Film Socialisme’s epic engagement with digital cinema, here 3D becomes a dazzling illusionist’s trick. Goodbye to Language drew laughs when I saw it for sheer chutzpah, but also in the way Georges Melies elicited gasps at cinema’s birth. The sleight of hand of moving one 3D lens and not the other makes a man and woman overlap and morph, and our eyes scrabble for coordinates on a screen that’s restored as a blank slate of possibility, scrawled on by Godard the 83-year-old conjuror. Ravishing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”Sometimes the 3D effects are spectacular, and seem completely integral to the resultIt was an idea that obviously came to fascinate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tempting to assume that Homeland [****] had died along with Damian Lewis's Brody, last seen dangling gruesomely from a crane in Tehran at the end of series three, but this tense and uncomfortable season-opener suggested that all may not be lost. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has been promoted to CIA station chief in Kabul, but she's finding that the personal price of professional success is growing exorbitantly high.At front and centre was the question of the legitimacy of killing the enemy at long distance by remote control (in Homeland's first series, it was a drone attack which Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Argentine cinema is best known for its serious side – finely-honed arthouse fare from the likes of Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero and Lisandro Alonso. But the Argentines can do mainstream very well. And this is a big, bold, glossily-produced, highly entertaining black comedy – a collection of stand-alone stories connected by the theme of revenge, the practice of which is lent one spectacular expression after another.There’s the passenger flight that gives the film its visually impressive opening, on which everyone aboard has a particular acquaintance in common; the no-holds-barred road rage Read more ...