Film Features
theartsdesk at the Dubai International Film FestivalSaturday, 20 December 2014
Dubai is a city that famously emerged from the desert, founded on oil and ambition, rising in an eruption of skyscrapers, luxury resorts and bling. Read more... |
Sci-Fi Week: 2001: A Space OdysseyThursday, 27 November 2014
No Gravity or Interstellar has challenged the might and influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey: its re-release this week is one of the movie events of the year. Read more... |
Sci-Fi Week: Scoring the ImpossibleWednesday, 26 November 2014
Classical composers have always enjoyed depicting the implausible. Operas based on mythological subjects abound, creating near-impossible staging demands. Musical works based on science fiction are far rarer. Haydn's plodding opera Life on the Moon isn't one of his most scintillating works. Read more... |
Mike Nichols, 1931-2014Friday, 21 November 2014
He was at home with screen newcomers like Dustin Hoffman and Cher and knew how to handle such old pros as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, while his stage work gave a leg up to then-unknowns Robert Redford and Whoopi Goldberg and he collaborated time and again with Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the ViennaleMonday, 10 November 2014
We’ve grown accustomed to cinemas asking punters to pocket their cell phones, or prohibiting food and drink inside the auditorium. But an unassuming sign on the doors of the Gartenbaukino in Vienna has a different plea: Bitte nicht laufen. Please don’t run. Read more... |
Leviathan: Attacking Putin's Russia From Inside the WhaleMonday, 03 November 2014
When Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan opens in Russia early next year it won’t be in the director’s cut. Given new legislation effective from this past July, it will be against the law to include the very distinctive Russian expletives, known locally as mat, that are plentiful in the director’s film, and add a very distinctive quality to his depiction of contemporary Russia. Read more... |
Opinion: What's the point of short film?Tuesday, 16 September 2014
The emergence of digital both as a technology and a culture has fundamentally changed the world in which short film now exists. Now short film has public, industry and social value and its role and routes have fundamentally changed. Read more... |
Immoral Tales: When Art Met PornographyWednesday, 10 September 2014
The release of a restored version of 1974’s Immoral Tales on Blu-ray raises inevitable and unavoidable issues: whether the film is pornography, art or arty pornography. Then, there’s the matter of whether its director Walerian Borowczyk was a misogynist; an objectifier of women. Consideration of its qualities as a film can be lost in such debate. Read more... |
Joan Rivers, 1933-2014Friday, 05 September 2014
Age could not wither her, or so it appeared. Joan Rivers has died, aged 81. On her 80th birthday she told an interviewer she’d be celebrating with her eightieth face. Her caustic humour could leave your nerves jangling, but she was the butt of it as often as anyone was. And in the field of cosmetic surgery you could almost call her a lone pioneer, of sorts, for what other American celebrity has ever been as candid about going under the knife? Read more... |
LFF 2014: Programme LaunchWednesday, 03 September 2014
A pair of Oscar hopefuls that take wildly divergent perspectives on World War II were confirmed today as the opening and closing night films of the 58th annual BFI London Film Festival, running 8-19 October at a range of venues across the capital. Read more... |
Richard Attenborough, 1923-2014Monday, 25 August 2014
Richard Attenborough made himself known to the British public as a shark-eyed, snivelling psychopath. Pinkie, the teen gangster he portrayed in the Boulting Brothers’ 1947 film of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, chilled with his lack of empathy, even to the angelic girlfriend he means to betray in the most vicious way (watch a clip below). He is a predator of Brighton’s seedy, damp backstreets, a manipulator and coward. Read more... |
Frightfest 2014: PreviewFriday, 15 August 2014
August bank holiday weekend is like Christmas day for horror fans thanks to Frightfest who deliver a sackful of disturbing delights in their 15th year. An inspiring line-up sees Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens reinvent himself as a charming psychopath in opening night film The Guest. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (You're Next) amaze once again with a blend of Eighties-style action and horror. Read more... |
Lauren Bacall: 'Just put your lips together and blow'Wednesday, 13 August 2014
Lauren Bacall, who has died at the age of 89, was an iconic figure on screen. She spoke one of the immortal lines in film history when all but exhaling the remark, “You just put your lips together and blow” in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not. But away from the screen and from such husbands as Humphrey Bogart and Jason Robards, Bacall shone just as brightly on stage, a medium that made plain a quality hinted at by her work in movies. Read more... |
Listed: The laughter and tears of Robin WilliamsTuesday, 12 August 2014
Robin Williams, who has died at the age of 63, was a very American comedian. The flow of invention that erupted from inside him had an unstoppable, domineering, emetic brilliance. In chat shows, performing stand-up, and in his greatest role as a DJ entertaining the troops in Vietnam, he was a not quite human force of nature. Read more... |
Opinion: The Tricycle were right over the UK Jewish Film FestivalFriday, 08 August 2014
Imagine an industrial disaster that manages to kill, maim or make homeless a significant percentage of the population of a densely populated city. Then imagine the effects of that disaster for years to come: the catastrophic physical and psychological effects on the city’s surviving inhabitants; the complete destruction of the region’s infrastructure; and the utterly devastating impact on its already struggling local economy. Read more... |
Some Like It HotSaturday, 19 July 2014
In what is undoubtedly one of the earlier recorded examples of the single entendre, the original ad campaign for Some Like It Hot yelled “Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom Companions”. Read more... |
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