Film
Kieron Tyler
How would a sighted adult react to becoming blind? What would their anxieties be? How would they construct their new world? Could they construct one? All these questions are central to the Norwegian film Blind. Ingrid can no longer see and is attempting to find her way anew without sight.Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen, who last cropped up on theartsdesk in King of Devil’s Island) is in her '30s and lives in Oslo with her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen, pictured below right with Petersen). Recently blind, she has chosen to stay within the womb of their apartment. While Morten is out at work, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Horror, fantasy, bleak humour and appalling taste combine to make The Voices that rare thing, a movie that defies packaging by soundbite. Iranian director Marjane Satrapi (of Persepolis fame), abetted by screenwriter Michael J Parry, has conjured a looking-glass world of simple, colourful surfaces and childlike charm, only to rip it away to reveal the gibbering psychosis beneath. The story is set in the flat, blank middle of America, where Jerry Hickfang (Ryan Reynolds) is a willing but none-too-sharp employee of bathroom company Milton Faucet and Fitting. The fact that Milton's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“You're plain as an old tin pail and you're bossy.” Tommy Lee Jones’s George Briggs doesn’t mince his words while sitting across the table from Hilary Swank’s Mary Bee Cuddy. She’s just told him that “if you lied to me and intend on abandoning your responsibility, then you are a man of low character, more disgusting pig than honourable man.” This undeniably funny exchange shines like a gold nugget in mud when set against the overall tone of the formidable The Homesman, a western which Jones describes, in one of the DVD’s on-set extras, as “minimal.”The Homesman also focuses on women in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Loving people doesn’t save them” could be the epitaph to the young Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s exuberant, emotionally draining fifth feature Mommy. Its vivid colours, concentrated in an unusual square screen ratio, seem to burst out with devilish energy as we follow the attempts of a loving but stretched mother to look after her 15-year-old son who suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.Over 139 minutes – Dolan again doubles as his own editor, and a degree of trimming would certainly have worked to crystallize the film further – we’re buffeted by the conflicting emotions Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally Sean Penn, earnest Hollywood liberal and hard-working humanitarian, didn't lightly undertake his role as professional hitman Jim Terrier in The Gunman. "The idea of making violence cute – I've never been interested as an actor in those things," Penn has commented. "But when I read this I thought there were a lot of real-world parallels to it."But let's face it, the fact that The Gunman is directed by Pierre Morel, who also helmed the irony-deficient revenge yarn Taken, doesn't augur well for anyone expecting nuanced dissection of moral conundrums, and the amount of promotional Read more ...
David Nice
Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make Rossellini’s gritty films made between 1945 and 1948 essential to the history of cinema. But cinema as vibrant life itself breathes in the pace and in most of the performances.You’ll probably be familiar with Anna Magnani’s passionate mother and lover and Aldo Fabrizi’s heartbreaking Father Pietro in Roma citta apertà (Rome, Open City). These were Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Susanne Bier follows the disappointing Serena with a well-acted and worthy drama that confronts societal prejudice, the sticky issues around child protection, and our inability to see what's right under our noses. Despite the plot's predictable and manipulative machinations, A Second Chance is rendered compelling every step of the way by Bier's searching direction and a mesmerising lead performance from Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.Coster-Waldau plays Andreas, a police officer working in rural Denmark who seems like the epitome of a good man. He's a new father and the devoted Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saul Dibb dispenses with the first half of Irene Nemirovsky’s great novel Suite Française in about a minute. Grainy newsreel footage disposes of the Fall of France in 1940, then it’s on to the occupation of Bussy, the country town where Lucille (Michelle Williams) falls for gentlemanly German officer Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts, pictured below with Williams). Their unconsummated, forbidden affair under the gimlet gaze of mother-in-law Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas) is the focus of this plainly filmed period romance, as the posters suggest it will be. Lovers of the novel will be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Leviathan is an urgent film about corruption in Putin’s Russia and you should make sure you see it. The story has an elemental simplicity: the remorseless state, in collusion with the church, sets out to crush the blameless individual citizen with the brutal use of the police and the courts. It is remarkably beautiful to look at, and acted with valiant truthfulness (and a lake of vodka). Perhaps the Academy’s voters missed a geopolitical trick in not anointing Andrei Zvyagintsev as this year’s best foreign film.Don’t expect to have a good time: this Russia has no truck with happy endings. For Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Sally Hawkins, Rafe Spall and Eddie Marsan form a super group of supporting actors in this heart-warming British coming-of-age drama which follows an autistic boy on his journey to the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO). Inspiration for Morgan Matthews’ first fictional feature came when he was working on a documentary called Beautiful Young Minds which charted the stories of a group of students heading to the IMO. Matthews admits he has taken much creative licence in telling this story (playwright James Graham wrote the screenplay) but its main concepts concerning Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A frivolous piece of hysteria. I liked it in a confused sort of way but when it was all over I must confess I couldn’t really see the point.” So ran the Daily Express review of The Manchurian Candidate on 5 November 1962. Other fascinating newspaper appraisals quoted in the booklet of this new Blu-ray/DVD edition of John Frankenheimer’s Cold War-era drama detect the shadow of Hitchcock looming over the film. Despite also mentioning Hitchcock, the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker was less equivocal, saying it was “a fiendishly clever spy thriller that might have been devised specifically Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The relationship between stars and their fans is symbiotic, but there are barriers for many reasons. Illusions can crumble when the star-struck come too close to their idol. Celebrities have to lead their lives, and intrusions by the obsessed hardly encourage day-to-day routine. Elle L’Adore posits a what-if which takes place when a star decides to breach the barrier.It’s an improbable what-if. Popular singer Vincent Lacroix (Laurent Lafitte - familiar here from his TV role in Birdsong) accidentally kills his girlfriend during one of their regular arguments and enlists the help of fanatical Read more ...