Film
Graham Fuller
In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter onscreen than Bogart and Bacall, but their visual harmony as slender, diminutive blond(e)s – he hard and unsentimental, she silky and insouciant – made for noir's coollest romantic partnership.Arrow Academy has now rereleased The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahia (1946), the middle pair of the four thrillers that teamed Ladd and Lake, on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Ira Sachs is becoming a master at telling the small stories of life, giving them a resonance that speaks beyond the immediate context in which they unfold. That context, for his three most recent films, has been New York, and he’s as acute as anyone filming that metropolis today in sensing how the city itself plays a role in the lives of those who make it their home.Or rather, as often as not, who struggle to do so. His last film, Love Is Strange, was about the tribulations involved in finding a new home for a long-established couple whose circumstances had changed (as had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not having read Mike Carey's source novel, I enjoyed the luxury of settling down with my bag of Warner Bros promotional popcorn having no idea where this story was headed. And for the first third of the movie, this was a real bonus.Who were these mysterious young children in rust-coloured prison-style jumpsuits, strapped into wheelchairs and being ordered around under the guns of clearly nervous soldiers? Were they telepaths or aliens, or being weaponised in some way? What were they being taught by the diligent, simpatico Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton)? What was extra-special about Melanie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.There is no expressionist horror like 1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens nor intense romantic drama akin to Murnau’s first American film, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Instead, Read more ...
David Kettle
A single, lonely star might seem harsh for what is first-time director (and writer, and lead) Talulah Riley’s woeful debut feature. And it’s true that, if nothing else, the St Trinian’s franchise star packs a lot into her Scottish Mussel.Like an unconvincing storyline bringing together jokey, blokey Glasgow petty criminals, Highland hippy eco-warriors and an unlikely couple of mismatched lovers. And a cast of dozens, including fleeting cameos (usually gratuitous) from Harry Enfield, James Dreyfus, Russell Kane, Rufus Hound and more. And, of course, a trip back in time to the Scotland of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains. It’s a subject that has been tackled by many of the continent’s filmmakers, prime among them perhaps Pablo Larrain in Chile, for whom such explorations have themselves become part of the slow process of moving on from that past.The Clan has Argentina's Pablo Trapero dramatising a real-life story from the 1980s that is as chilling as they come, while the manner in which he approaches it only underlines Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Primal fear of the forest plus new technology made The Blair Witch Project a micro-budget phenomenon in 1999. Its “found footage” premise, with student film-makers’ tapes showing their gradual unhinging by a witch-haunted Maryland forest, has been widely copied. This and a poorly received sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, stymied further attempts to franchise what seemed to be a freak hit. The news that one of horror’s most brilliant young talents, Adam Wingard, had directed a new sequel was hugely promising, making the disappointment of this puzzlingly conservative, unscary rehash all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you happened to catch the second part of the Bridget Jones story – Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004, directed by Beeban Kidron) - on terrestrial television recently, or have read the character's creator Helen Fielding's novel Mad About the Boy, you may be confused by the opening sequence of the third instalment in the film franchise, Bridget Jones's Baby. It begins with Bridget, single and childless at 43, sitting alone in her flat on her birthday, with a glass of wine and a cake with a single candle, singing along to “All By Myself”. Didn't Mark Darcy, the love of her life, propose Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ralph Fiennes has long felt at home in the Russian repertoire, whether onstage in Fathers and Sons near the start of his career or, in 1997, taking the Almeida's Ivanov to Moscow as the first UK company to bring Chekhov home, as it were.Add in screen credits that include starring in the Alexander Pushkin novel-turned-film Onegin, directed by his sister Martha, and it begins to makes sense that here Fiennes is speaking what sounds to this untutored ear as very decent Russian in a film adaptation from the director Vera Glagoleva of Turgenev's A Month in the Country that appears to minimise Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stéphane Brizé’s film is about the grubby tyranny and humiliation of working life. Middle-aged Thierry (Vincent Lindon, Best Actor at Cannes and the Césars) has a hangdog face which fails to mask his anger after being unjustly laid off. He seems traumatised, tense. And every time he attempts to work, more self-respect is chiselled from him. At the job centre, or in an unexpected interview by Skype, his manner, posture and age are picked over as if he’s raw material or a coat on a rack, not a human being. Thierry lacks, he is told, “amiability”. He can’t quite bring himself, in other words, to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son Bodevan as he turns 18, orchestrated by his father Ben (Viggo Mortensen, bearded, back in The Road mode, on excellent Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ben-Hur, the remake of the remake, is an epic misfire starring no one you’ve ever heard of apart from, inevitably, Morgan Freeman. What in heaven, you may ponder if accidentally trapped at a screening, were the producers thinking? Their rationale is writ large in the film's no-messing-about opening sequence. Like its own trailer naming the elephant in the room, this Ben-Hur heads straight to the chariot race. It's some mission statement. Forget William Wyler's 1959 epic that won more Oscars than any film in history, it says. And forget Fred Niblo's ground-breaking 1925 silent classic. The CGI Read more ...