Definitely no standard biopic, Russian director Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half captures part of the life, and a great deal of the spirit, of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in a rare and rather brilliant gallimaufry of forms – from archive material (some of it skilfully doctored), via plentiful animation, to re-enactment scenes. It also catches the cultural milieu that formed the winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for literature, and the double city - Leningrad/St. Petersburg - of his birth.Brodsky was born there in 1940, and the film opens with the post-WWII return of his father, a Read more ...

Why make a documentary about Italia 90? It’s just another tournament that England didn’t win, isn't it? If the World Cup hosted by Italy in 1990 deserves exhumation, it’s for its trickle-down impact on football as we live and breathe it now. Hence the subtitle that won't make it onto the billboard outside cinemas: The Inside Story of a World Cup that Changed Our Footballing Nation Forever.This is the film of the book of the tournament which has a lot to answer for. Gazza cried, Pavarotti opened his lungs, and football became irreversibly commoditised. Attending as a reporter for the freshly Read more ...

It’s an accepted truth that Chris Morris is a comedy genius. Now the word "genius" is so overused in some quarters as to be rendered meaningless, but in Morris’s case it's a richly deserved description; he created or co-created some of the funniest, cleverest and most original comedy on British television, including The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam. Not a bad CV, even if it also contains the rather less amusing Nathan Barley. So what of his feature-film debut, Four Lions, which he directed and co-wrote with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Peep Show fame)?Well it has the Morris trademark of a Read more ...

In a stone-faced analysis of the political and historiographical connotations of action hero films, the Guardian’s Film Blog found Iron Man 2 to be “a throwback to a Cold War sensibility,” as well as “the first post-Bush superhero movie.” However, a reader known as Corrective suggested that, au contraire, “perhaps it’s just something dumb to look at while you munch your popcorn.”As I munched my popcorn, I saw Iron Man 2 becoming dumb and dumber before my eyes. It presents the grim symptoms of Sequel Bloat, where a successful first outing of a potential franchise is hosed down with even more Read more ...

The Peruvian Claudia Llosa's debut, Madeinusa, took place in a remote Andean village, whose religiously fervent inhabitants had an unusual spin on the festivities: during their tiempo santo, God was deemed dead, and all could sin with impunity before Easter Sunday. Unhappily, one girl's loathsome father intended to use this "free pass" to take her virginity. A village girl tormented by superstition is also at the heart of Llosa's sophomore film, The Milk of Sorrow, but this time she's struggling in the capital, Lima. Thus the writer-director broadens her gaze, while demonstrating that Read more ...

The world is turned literally upside down in Revanche's long, eerie opening shot. We see trees reflected in a dark forest lake, hear animal and bird sounds - discordant, wild, somehow unsettling - and the faint boom of distant thunder. Then something (we can't see what) plummets into the water. This superlative psychodrama sends out ripples too, that last way beyond the tight parameters of its plot.A word about the title. The film, from Austria, is partly about revenge, but the common translation for that is Rache. Revanche, according to Götz Spielmann, its writer-director, involves much more Read more ...

Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn has already displayed unsettling form as a filmmaker intimately acquainted with violence. His Pusher trilogy probed into the black heart of Denmark's criminal underworld, while Bronson surfed a monster wave of ultraviolence in its account of psychotic jailbird Charlie Bronson. With Valhalla Rising, Refn has thrown his gears into reverse and screeched backwards to Pagan-era Scotland, though the director may be intending his location to evoke an all-purpose Nordic wilderness. Mads Mikkelsen plays a mute, expressionless fighting slave, kept in a wooden Read more ...

One evening in 1970, Princess Anne ventured forth from her manor to attend a screening of Bronco Bullfrog at the Mile End ABC. Three decades later, the same cinema, now called the Genesis, hosted a screening of Barney Platts-Mills' debut feature last night in equally ceremonious circumstances: the launch of the East End Film Festival. Rarely seen, indeed almost lost (the original 35-mm negative was salvaged from a rubbish bin at the film lab), Bronco Bullfrog, which will be released nationally on 11 June, emerges as a minor revelation.Bronco Bullfrog might have been made in 1969, but Read more ...

A father keeps his three adult children in a state of retarded development. They are deprived of books, education, television, indeed denied any access to the world beyond the electronic gates marking the perimeter edge of their known territory. In the place of knowledge is disinformation, disseminated on tapes. The sea is a leather chair, a zombie is a yellow flower, a vagina is a keyboard. And so on. In all this the mother is quiescent, complicit. The father is an absolute patriarch, the source of all morality and law. Dogtooth, a film by Giorgos Lanthimos set in contemporary Greece and Read more ...

Within the space of a single year - 1979 - Barrie Keeffe  wrote two scripts which together summed up the very essence of the East End on the eve of Thatcherism. The first, which barely needs introduction, was the now-classic The Long Good Friday. The other was Sus, an explosive play about a black man detained by two racist police officers on the night of the General Election. Sus has since been performed worldwide and a screen version receives its premiere at the East End Film Festival on Saturday, prior to release on 7 May - the day after a certain other election. Meanwhile, a new stage Read more ...

Many is the mother the world over who announces that she won't die happy until she has lived to see her daughter (or son) happily wed. And so, out of a familial condition that transcends ethnicity and geography comes It's a Wonderful Afterlife, the Gurinder Chadha movie that carries this shared fretfulness one step further, throwing in curry jokes as it goes. What would happen if a mum were so desperate on her daughter's behalf that she resorted to murder? The answer is best pondered as and when this London-set Indian romcom is released on DVD, at which point you can Read more ...

Cheering news for Brits in Cannes (always assuming anyone is actually able to travel there this year). Originally rumoured to be in line for the Critics' Week, a young British filmmaker, Alicia Duffy, has now secured an even better berth: her first feature has been selected by the Directors' Fortnight, the prestigious parallel (and rival) event to the main competition.All Good Children is about two young Irish boys who move to rural France after the death of their mother and, we're told, "hypnotically plays out in the gap between childish fantasy and adult reality". Duffy's prize-winning Read more ...