Film Reviews
National GalleryMonday, 05 January 2015
The octogenarian Frederick Wiseman is a cult documentary film maker, with his own idiosyncratic and recognisable idiom. He has both vast experience and extraordinary independence. Characteristically, he makes long, prize-winning, fly-on-the-wall inside-the-institution films: reportorial, non-judgemental, loosely narrative, and wide in subject – from a hospital for the criminally insane, to a high school, the largest university in California (Berkeley), or the Paris Opera Ballet. Read more...
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The Green RayFriday, 02 January 2015
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. Read more... |
Still AliceThursday, 01 January 2015
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EnemyWednesday, 31 December 2014
Filmgoers will either find Denis Villeneuve's latest art-house thriller to be a tantalising head trip or so much celluloid posturing, but there's no denying its contribution to the rise and rise of leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal. Racing up the outside track as a potential Oscar nominee for Nightcrawler even as he is making a (splendid) Broadway debut in the Nick Payne play Constellations, Gyllenhaal here gets to impress twice over and for a simple reason: Javier Gullon's... Read more... |
The Theory of EverythingMonday, 29 December 2014
It’s Turing versus Hawking, Cumberbatch v Redmayne, computer science v astrophysics, tragedy v the triumph of love. Ever since The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything appeared at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the head to head has been inevitable, leading all the way to the Oscars. Read more... |
BirdmanWednesday, 24 December 2014
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu,Birdman is the story of a fading star’s search for professional rehabilitation and personal redemption that perches adroitly between dark humour and darker despair and injects a familiar story of mid-life crisis with fresh vitality and emotion thanks to vivid flights of an intensely cinematic fancy. Michael Keaton, a leading man in light comedies before rising to the big leagues by playing Batman in the Tim B... Read more... |
UnbrokenTuesday, 23 December 2014
This year's award-courting survival picture (after 2013's All Is Lost, and 2012's Life of Pi) is based on the genuinely remarkable story of Olympian Louis Zamperini. It's a tale of heroic resilience in the face of an onslaught of adversity, helmed by someone who, in a very different way, is pretty unstoppable herself – Dame Angelina Jolie. Read more... |
Exodus: Gods and KingsTuesday, 23 December 2014
I wish Mel Brooks had directed this, but instead we've got the sort of stodgy techno-epic that has become all too common from the auteur-ial hand of Ridley Scott. Ridley's 150-minute rehashing of the Biblical story of Moses is often a feast for the eyes (especially in 3D), with its vast Egyptian panoramas and stunningly mounted action sequences, but the characters are largely cardboard, the dialogue is dire and a lot of very good actors are given nothing of any consequence to do. Read more... |
AnnieMonday, 22 December 2014
A lot of harsh words have been and will continue to be written about the new movie musical remake of Annie, the Broadway mainstay about the Depression-era tyke who exists to teach her elders a few life lessons on the way to a sun-drenched "Tomorrow" (to co-opt the title of the show's best-known song). But from where I'm sitting, a disproportionate share of the film's self-evident faults are swept away by its impossibly irresistible young star, Quvenzhané Wallis. Read more... |
Big EyesFriday, 19 December 2014
The worlds of marital abuse and artistic fraud collide to eye-opening if also frustrating effect in Big Eyes, Tim Burton's film about the unmasking of an elaborate deception that ruptures a family along the way. Read more... |
Dumb and Dumber ToThursday, 18 December 2014
“Comedy is all about timing” quips Lloyd Christmas at one point, something this sequel to the Farrelly Brothers' crass, gross-out comedy from 1994 very knowingly mocks. Those who hold a fondness for Lloyd and Harry’s shtick may be amused by the huge number of in-jokes and the silly slapstick, but overall this instalment is more filler than killer and relies way too heavily on nostalgia. Read more... |
Guys and DollsWednesday, 17 December 2014
This newly-restored version of one of MGM's most hallowed musicals is making the seasonal rounds with a run at the BFI and selected cinemas around the country. Directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1955, the piece drips with period charm, while its pairing of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra is still capable of generating a box office buzz 60 years later. But (I'll just whisper this) it may seem like a bit of a slog for modern audiences. Read more... |
Kon-TikiMonday, 15 December 2014
Nothing proves a theory better than practice, and this is exactly what Norwegian adventurer-archaeologist-ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl did in 1947 when he and five companions sailed a raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove his hypothesis of how the Pacific islands were originally settled. He thought people first arrived there from the east, not the west, contravening the then-prevailing scientific orthodoxy. But Polynesians didn’t have boats, cried the establishment. Read more... |
The CircleFriday, 12 December 2014
Remembering the early years of social and sexual liberation in Swiss gay life, Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary The Circle (Der Kreis) has rich affection for its subject. In particular, that’s the relationship between teacher Ernst Ostertag and drag artist Robi Rapp, who first met in the Fifties and have been partners ever since. Read more... |
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five ArmiesWednesday, 10 December 2014
“At the end of all things,” to quote Frodo Baggins in the dim and distant future, there is purgative fire and resounding clangour in the final instalment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit triptych. Thirteen years after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson has concluded his JRR Tolkien opus with an epic more thunderous than its two predecessors. The Battle of the Five Armies is also a little closer in tone to the LOTR films... Read more... |
The Great MuseumTuesday, 09 December 2014
I don’t think any of us will look at a museum in quite the same way after this dazzling documentary. For several years the Austrian film-maker Johannes Holzhausen and his team followed what seems to be scores of the working staff inhabiting Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (KMH), as they physically cared for the remarkable objects in their care, worried about how best to put them on view for the public, and met continually to discuss museum matters. Read more... |
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