film directors
David Nice
It has to be partial, because out of the 10 opera productions from the iconoclastic French actor-director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 68, I’ve seen but two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 films. Yet they all had a tremendous impact, one way or another.Not in a good way - let's get this over with first - as far as Intimacy is concerned: on a blistering hot summer day in Paris, "film by Patrice Chéreau"’ on the poster outside a small cinema in the Beauborg – a poster, moreover, showing a gathering at a cocktail party, suggestive of Rohmer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.Hunt v Lauda is one of motorsport's great fables, and many fans felt a queasy premonition of disaster on hearing about Howard's project, but it's pleasing to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, waged a vigilante campaign against the region’s small farmers, settlers, and rustlers. The film’s Ahab is Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), the supercilious, monomaniacal leader of the WSGA’s mercenary Regulators.Cimino included the conflict’s two most fabled incidents. One was the brave stand Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Newly restored versions of old films in cinemas are commonplace. This revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is set apart due to it being in 3D, as it was originally intended to be seen. But unless you were able to catch it in the few American cinemas where it screened after its May 1954 New York premiere, the original has proved elusive, although 3D versions have surfaced intermittently.It was seen by audiences in red-and-green specs in 1980, in a form which did the rounds for a couple of years afterwards. There was another attempt to bring it back to life in 2004. Then, last summer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.But it isn't just comedy, or perhaps it's comedy as the visible tip of a fully-rounded philosophical iceberg. Even Allen's shortest one-liners may Read more ...
David Nice
Fans of this bewilderingly popular musical, and they are legion, will not be disappointed. Director Tom Hooper knows how to tell a fast-moving tale that makes light of the final running time (originally 158 minutes, slightly shorter in this DVD release, which offers no extras. Those who went to the film more than once will, I'm told, miss a couple of scenes). The lighting is appropriately lugubrious, most of the settings convincing – though occasionally there’s too much dependence on CGI – and famously the singing actors perform their numbers on set, often in long takes. Casting is strong, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1988 uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia, in the Western Pacific, is apparently unknown to most French people, let alone we rosbifs, but director Mathieu Kassovitz has used the episode as a scalpel with which to probe issues of colonialism, race and political cynicism. It's something of a return to issues Kassovitz explored in La Haine (1995), following his excursions into the supernatural and sci-fi with Gothika and Babylon AD.The setup is pretty simple. A group of Kanak separatists launches a surprise attack on a gendarmerie on the island of Ouvéa, killing four French Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald, but he had failed to include Ben Affleck in his calculations. "This is a second act for me," announced Affleck, as he collected the Best Director award for his work on Argo at the recent BAFTAs in London, "and you're giving me that and this industry has given me that. I want to dedicate this to anyone else trying to get their second act - you can do it!"Stirring stuff. With Argo storming on to collect the Oscar for Best Film, the culmination of a brilliant streak of accolades from the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet. Side by Side is partly a manual in how films are made, the way in which light pours through camera apertures to create images, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Often it takes a generation or two before a country can address its dark days on films; Hitler didn’t feature in a central role in a German film until Downfall, in 2004. This timorousness was certainly the case in Chile, where in the immediate years following the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1990, the local cinema was dominated by sex comedies.But the renaissance in the country’s film industry over the past decade has been accompanied by a willingness to look back. Andres Wood’s Machuca led the way, in 2004, with a powerful child’s-view account of the days leading to the army Read more ...
theartsdesk
Yesterday our film writers brought you numbers 10 – 6 in our movies of 2012 countdown. Looking back over that list it’s hard to imagine a clutch of finer films. Yet, testament to a year of remarkable filmmaking, it’s a hell of a race to the finish, taking in sex addiction, murder, spies, hostages and cults. And so we present our final five. Drumroll please…5 – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)Road movie, rumination of the meaning of life and death, shaggy dog story about dealing with a corpse, manual on the best in yoghurt, depiction of the transgressions which break Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s rare to get excited about a DVD release. It is even rarer to get excited about a director. Margin Call and its director JC Chandor are rare exceptions. Devised in 2005, the idea for the film came about when the director and his chums, testing the waters of the volatile yet lucrative New York property market, were offered $10m by a bank - few questions asked. By 2006, their plan of buying a building, renovating and flipping it became an undone deal as one of Chandor’s group pushed them to sell up - an act thatproved to be prudent in hindsight.Built upon those real-life tensions, Margin Read more ...