Brad Pitt
Demetrios Matheou
There have been a number of excellent science fiction films of late – Gravity, The Martian, Annihilation among them. But Ad Astra may be the most complete and profound addition to the genre since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s masterwork has set the bar for 50 years now and its proposition – from prehistoric ape to star child – remains in a league of its own for imaginative bravura. So it’s striking to what extent the new film, directed by indie stalwart James Gray and starring a scintillating Brad Pitt, has similar ambitions and narrative trajectory Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad). Stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard will guarantee some ticket-shifting action, but the apparent intention of director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight to recreate Hollywood's vintage wartime melodramas never quite comes off.Still, it's quite fun to see them trying. The opening scene is a shot of sun-scorched desert sands Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As the bald title suggests, Fury is a work of righteous, focussed rage. It's a combat film which swaps preaching and profundity for pure anger at the brutalising, destructive war machine, and still manages to be illuminating. For, even at its most thrillingly Hollywood, Fury retains a keen sense of the waste of life. Director David Ayer's fifth film features explicit, immersive and impactful violence and works best when it's pummelling the audience and Nazis alike, with deafening, meticulously executed action that threatens to punch a hole through both the screen and your ear-drum.Set in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Some films quite rightly have awards glory etched into their DNA, and when the admirably uncompromising Steve McQueen announced that his next project, focussing on the subject of slavery, would feature that cast, only a fool would have bet against it collecting armfuls of prizes. Moreover, the brutality and societal impact of slavery has seldom been seen on screen; thus in the words of its director, 12 Years a Slave fills "a hole in the canvass of cinema".Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup (as told to David Wilson) and adapted for the screen by John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave sees an Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Counsellor is a cinematic room divider: some people will like it, saying it is stylish and daring. Others will find it truncated, slick and pretentious. Whichever room you end up in, The Counsellor has a tang of its own. This violent, colorful thriller overflows with bravado and, like matching collars and cuffs, identical foreboding. The motto here is that bad things happen to bad people but when they're bad people we sort of like, it's different.Ridley Scott’s latest thriller is the first original screenplay written by novelist Cormac McCarthy. The author, responsible for No Country For Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters. Brad Pitt's zombie flick - directed by Marc Quantum of Solace Forster - falls short all round, and makes the evolving characters and storylines of TV's The Walking Dead look positively Shakespearean by comparison.Spoilers are of course to be deplored, but the story here is so predictable that there's not a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the rich," as Oakland's general manager Billy Beane puts it.A true story based on the bestselling book by bond-trader- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky. Above all, it’s a film which is buoyed – and which sometimes threatens to be sunk - by its own formidable ambition.The Tree of Life is only Malick’s fifth feature in a career spanning 38 Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's a strong distaff presence in theartsdesk's third DVD round-up. The headline film is Kathryn Bigelow's superb war thrillerThe Hurt Locker, currently mopping up awards in the US and a hot favourite for the Oscars. Also in the mix: Audrey Tautou as the redoubtable doyenne of French fashion in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel and Julie Christie in Sally Potter's avant-garde 1983 debut feature The Gold Diggers. Fear not, however: a robust testosterone level is maintained by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, by the hit stag-party comedy The Hangover and by Antichrist, Lars Read more ...