Film Reviews
It FollowsWednesday, 25 February 2015
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. Read more... |
Oscars 2015: Birdman soars, Boyhood plummetsMonday, 23 February 2015
I hope someone by now has told Neil Patrick Harris how to pronounce David Oyelowo’s surname, but if anyone wants to see how not to host an Oscars, Harris’s stewardship of the 87th annual Academy Awards can provide that service in spades. Read more... |
The Duke of BurgundyFriday, 20 February 2015
At last, it’s here – the female-friendly BDSM movie that no grownups should restrain themselves from seeing. The one with the designer clothes and kinky accoutrements. The one with the “special” room for thrilling punishments. The one unafflicted by Christian Grey and his assorted neuroses. Read more... |
CakeThursday, 19 February 2015
Jennifer Aniston changes pace without changing any fundamental perception of her skills in Cake, the austerely self-admiring new film that finds the onetime Friends star playing a none-too-friendly sufferer from chronic pain. Read more... |
MaidanTuesday, 17 February 2015
I went into watching Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Maidan with the highest hopes, and came out, more than two hours later, cold. For a film about a successful national liberation movement, that’s something of a paradox. Read more... |
BlackhatMonday, 16 February 2015
From Michael Mann, the director of the monumental crime epic Heat and the original and best Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter, this lumbering saga of cyberhacking is really rather disappointing. Not that it doesn't include several torrid action sequences in exotic locations, while the basic theme is at least urgently topical. It's just that there's little evidence that the project fired Mann's imagination, or inspired him to breathe plausible life into his characters. Read more... |
Fifty Shades of GreySunday, 15 February 2015
Fifty Shades of Grey is upon us, more or less literally. It's a bit like the clamber-cam POV shot of Jamie Dornan materialising through Dakota Johnson’s spread legs. The teaser campaign has completed its titillating foreplay, and this weekend the fairytale fantasy franchise about fucking and slapping (but please, sir, no fisting) thrusts its entire length into the world’s cinemas. How will it be for you? Read more... |
Love Is AllFriday, 13 February 2015
Among contemporary British documentarists Kim Longinotto has surely travelled the furthest afield internationally – Iran, Japan, Africa – to find her subjects. Love Is All brings her resoundingly back home to Britain, across a timeline that stretches from the very end of the 19th century when the moving image was born, right up to the present day. Read more... |
Love Is StrangeThursday, 12 February 2015
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are two lucky people. They work in New York City where Ben paints and George teaches music. After they marry, the church school where George works fires him for being openly gay. Their life has come apart with the loss of one income. Read more... |
Dancing in JaffaWednesday, 11 February 2015
Your initial impressions of Hilla Medalia’s Dancing in Jaffa may be influenced by whether you go into it knowing anything about its central character, Pierre Dulaine. His is a name that needs no introduction to anyone familiar with the world of ballroom dancing: he has been a world star in that field for decades, who together with his dancing partner, Yvonne Marceau, set up the American Ballroom Theatre in New York in 1984. Read more... |
Two Night StandWednesday, 11 February 2015
A New York blizzard so intense that people can't get out the front door traps a random couple who have hooked up online into a rather longer mating dance than they had anticipated. That's the essence of Two Night Stand, the debut film from director Max Nichols (son of the late, great Mike, who died in November) that prolongs a wearyingly cute premise well past breaking-point. Read more... |
The Philadelphia StoryTuesday, 10 February 2015
Cynical writer Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and pragmatic photographer Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) are the tabloid team charged with getting the undercover scoop on the society wedding of the year, between old-moneyed Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and a self-made industrialist. Their way into the party: Tracy’s ex-husband, CK Dexter Haven (Cary Grant). Will Tracy actually marry a social-climbing stiff, or fall for the angry young reporter with an unnatural capacity for champagne? Read more... |
CoherenceMonday, 09 February 2015
This almost-no-budget feature by writer/director James Ward Byrkit was created by gathering eight of his actor-friends in his Santa Monica living room, and giving each of them a daily page of notes about their character on which to base their improvised performance. Five nights of shooting gave Byrkit enough material for the finished product, but questions must be asked about whether the process justified the flick's 88 minute running time. Read more... |
Jupiter AscendingFriday, 06 February 2015
The Wachowskis' sci-fi blockbuster has been getting a kicking from the Stateside critics, but perhaps that's because it's a bit of a shape-shifter with multiple personalities. Part dystopian fantasy, part fairy tale, part cosmic epic, all rolled up in a whole lot of astonishingly vivid special effects, Jupiter Ascending is like spending a day at Alton Towers with your brain marinating in mescaline. Read more... |
Amour FouThursday, 05 February 2015
Bringing a real-life story with a well-known and shocking outcome to the screen has an inherent major difficulty. When the end does come, it won’t shock. Amour Fou dramatises the suicide pact of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, a woman at the heart of high society who had been diagnosed as terminally ill. They both died on 21 November 1811. Read more... |
SelmaWednesday, 04 February 2015
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. Read more... |
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