America
Karen Krizanovich
Scarecrow tied for the coveted Palme D’or of 1973. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg, the man who did Panic In Needle Park and importantly Street Smart, which captured the electrifying moment when Morgan Freeman became a star, this sombre comedy stars Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. In fact, every element of Scarecrow aims for classic status. Thanks to nifty distributor Park Circus, we can now see first-hand on the big screen why this pedigreed film has been so little heard of or seen since its 1973 French triumph.As the film after Hackman's Oscar for The French Connection (1971) and The Poseidon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only faintly cracked note in this zinging early-season blockbuster is that, just as spring belatedly puts in an appearance, the action is set around Christmas time, with snow, Christmas trees and even some Yuletide hip-hop beats. Still, think of it as just a further example of the smart counter-intuitiveness that director Shane Black (stepping in for Jon Favreau) has brought to the party, helping to make it the fizziest and funniest of the series so far.Naturally IM3 bristles with CGI and mind-bending technological set-pieces, such as an apocalyptic helicopter assault on Tony Stark's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While it’s impossible to recreate the impact of their astounding first Sixties sally, it’s still a thrill when a new album appears bearing the name “Stooges”. Punk’s ragged-arsed Detroit progenitors first popped up again in 2007 with visceral live shows but a lacklustre album, The Weirdness. Since then original guitarist Ron Asheton has died and, in a strange mirror to history, James Williamson, guitarist on 1973's classic Raw Power, has returned to the fold (following a 30 year career in engineering management!)For fans who dared to hope, it’s good rather than great news. This isn’t an Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Unburdened by conventional narrative sense, Upstream Color is a true curiosity. Seductively strange, woozily kinetic and above all romantic, Shane Carruth's second feature is a little film with big, bizarre ideas. Incorporating pig farming, scientific experimentation and sound recording, it proves that you don't need a sizeable production budget to swoop and soar on the big screen, and that you don't always need to know precisely what's going on to be immersed in a story.Amy Seimetz plays Kris, a successful creative. One night she's kidnapped, seemingly at random, and force-fed a specially Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie Nugent. The format of the film is recognisable from countless documentaries: talking heads giving us the lowdown on a crime. But in Bernie Richard Linklater boldly combines fact and fiction and handles the darkest of subjects - the real-life murder of an elderly woman by her younger male companion - with the lightest of comic touches and, by god, if Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Promised Land is much better than its poster suggests. Winning Special Mention at its premiere at this year's Berlinale, this message movie takes on some extremely sensitive topics with a gentle determination and a relatively unblinking eye: the demise of the independent farmer, waning economics and the controversial concept of fracking – drilling deep into shale to inject high pressure fluid to free natural gas within the rock – that slots very nicely into desperate rural areas that are flailing (and failing) to survive.For anyone who feels even mildly passionate about the environment, or Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Major Lazer first appeared half a decade ago they were two on-the-rise DJ-producers, Diplo and Switch, touting a novel mash-up of electro and Jamaican rhythms. Like Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz before them, they hid behind a jokey conceptual conceit – the character of Major Lazer, a zombie-killing cartoon hero. Since then the duo has split and Diplo has taken the reins alongside new accomplices Jillionaire and Walshy Fire, both from West Indian-US sound systems. Aspects of their sound have been influential to the American electronic pop crossover, notably with “Pon De Floor” becoming the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Director Joseph Kosinski's second film feels dispiritingly like his first, the bastion of excitement and originality that is TRON: Legacy. That film was an empty shell which at least managed not to be catastrophically irritating. Oblivion stars Tom Cruise, proving yet again that his ego is in inverse proportion to his physical stature. He plays "one of our best" in a soulless film which has the gall to place tangible cultural pursuits on a pedestal whilst clonking you round the head with sterile CGI.The year is 2077 and, yes, Tom Cruise is still an action-man. His Jack Harper bounds about Read more ...
Dave Eggers
A new edition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, with an introduction by Dave Eggers, forms part of a series of classic reissues from Abacus. The publishing imprint this year reaches its 40th birthday, and to celebrate it is giving 18 books from its back catalogue a fresh lick of paint, each with a new jacket design and some with a new introduction. They include monolithic memoirs by Primo Levi and Nelson Mandela, seminal British fiction from the likes of Beryl Bainbridge and Iain Banks, and significant works of contemporary American literature such as Infinite Jest and Candace Bushnell Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"If you ride like lightning you're going to crash like thunder" Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendlesohn) tells his reckless partner-in-crime Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who will later be dubbed the "Moto Bandit". Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that threatens to do likewise, never quite keeping up with its own soaring ambition. Nevertheless it's a compelling, occasionally exciting saga with an invigorating aesthetic and a gently melancholic tone - akin to that of the director's previous picture Blue Valentine.With a narrative stretched over 15 years and a cast who zoom in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul F Tompkins has been lauded by Rolling Stone magazine and the Huffington Post, both for his observational stand-up and his podcasts. But for someone praised for a very modern form of entertainment, he strikes a rather old-fashioned figure when he comes on stage. Three-piece suit, shiny tie, watch fob in his waistcoat pocket, big hair - it's like he's channelling the late, great Dave Allen.The mention of that superb Irish comic is no accident, for Tompkins is, like him, a wonderful raconteur. He too favours the long-form, shaggy-dog story that meanders around the subject with accents Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Whilst Zac Efron is getting urinated on in The Paperboy, his High School Musical co-star Vanessa Hudgens is taking the piss in an entirely different sense. In Spring Breakers Hudgens and Disney princess Selena Gomez bin their clean-cut images to hook up with James Franco's metal-mouthed miscreant during the US rites-of-passage party season. Harmony Korine's fifth feature gives us girls in bikinis packing heat. It revels in the fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me of it all and it's hard not to be seduced by its glamorously anarchic brand of entertainment.Spring Breakers follows four college Read more ...