Film Reviews
Cannes 2014: The HomesmanMonday, 19 May 2014
For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability. Read more... |
Fading GigoloMonday, 19 May 2014
Favourite of the Coens, John Turturro’s fifth turn at the helm is a surprisingly lively, enjoyable fable of male prostitution. After the shuttering of the New York City bookstore where he worked for Murray (Woody Allen), Fioravante (Turturro) is talked into being the male meat in a female sandwich between Selima (Sofia Vergara) and Murray's dermatologist Dr Parker (Sharon Stone). Meanwhile, Fioravante doesn't fall for either of his lady-pals. Read more... |
ConcussionSunday, 18 May 2014
A blow to the head provides the catalyst needed for Abby (Robin Weigert) to re-think her life in Concussion, writer-director Stacie Passon's acute American indie about a lesbian couple coming adrift and the new life charted by one of the two women, in particular. Would Abby end up welcoming (female) sexual partners for pay to her freshly purchased high-end Manhattan loft had her young son not accidentally sent a baseball winging its way to her head, thereby jolting her reality? Read more... |
The Two Faces of JanuaryFriday, 16 May 2014
Discussing what appealed to him in Patricia Highsmith’s simmering thriller The Two Faces of January, first-time director Hossein Amini landed on the deliberate lack of character motivation: “She doesn’t really explain why people do things.” This very obfuscation drew attention at the time of the novel’s 1964 publication, when the reader at Highsmith’s publisher identified “a frightening sense of the neurotic” in her... Read more... |
GodzillaThursday, 15 May 2014
Born in an era when the Japanese were censored out of making a straightforward post-Hiroshima film, King of the Monsters Godzilla – or aka his infinitely cooler Japanese name Gojira – is a hero, cultural phenomenon and metaphor: he represents nature that can both kill and save. As a film star, however, he’s moved from ultra low-budget to high in over 28 films of various quality. Read more... |
A Touch of SinWednesday, 14 May 2014
Speaking at the BFI's recent preview Jia Zhang-ke revealed that his surprisingly bloodthirsty latest is in fact, contrary to the shift it seems, the next logical step in his journey as a filmmaker: an amalgamation of his interest in personal crisis and his great love for the work of John Woo. Jia described A Touch of Sin as the film where he finally puts a "gun in the hands" of his beleaguered protagonists. Read more... |
An Autumn AfternoonTuesday, 13 May 2014
The classic Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu named a number of his films after the seasons, but he restricted himself to spring, summer and autumn. I don’t believe he ever titled one after winter - not that his work doesn’t touch on the closing of the year, and its associations with death. Read more... |
In SecretMonday, 12 May 2014
As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Read more... |
Before the Winter ChillSaturday, 10 May 2014
French cinema is full of long-term marriages hit by a meteor in the form of an attractive younger female. So there is a heavy sense of déjà vu to Before the Winter Chill. It also features another increasingly common trope of modern French film, which is Kristin Scott Thomas playing a perfect French speaker with an English heritage, and accent. So is there a twist? Sort of. Read more... |
The CanyonsFriday, 09 May 2014
“At the time, I was bored, and I needed something to do,” Tara (Lindsay Lohan) says, trying to explain her participation in a film. “And now…I’m looking for something else to do.” And she gives a small, bottomless sigh. The notorious, bedevilled Lohan is the hot spot in Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis’s chilly nightmare about love in Hollywood. Her Marilyn-style on-set unreliability led every pre-release story about their experiment in micro-budget, Kickstarter-funded cinema. Read more... |
The Wind RisesThursday, 08 May 2014
Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises is grand, sweeping and bursting with the kind of beautiful animation we've become accustomed to from Studio Ghibli (which celebrates its 30th birthday next year). Miyazaki delves into Japanese history with a soaring autobiography of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi, which also acts as a tribute to the writer Tatsuo Hori - who penned the original short story "The Wind Has Risen". Read more... |
Paths of GloryTuesday, 06 May 2014
Paths of Glory (1957) stars Kirk Douglas as a First World War colonel who's as fearless leading his poilus on a suicide mission as he is arguing for mercy for three of the survivors. A lawyer in peacetime, he defends them when they are tried as cowards before a panel of French officers who have no intention of exonerating them. Read more... |
The Truth About EmanuelTuesday, 06 May 2014
The growing pains of teenager Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario, best known for TV's Skins) are ably handled in Francesca Gregorini’s gentle and melancholy drama about grief, mortality and motherhood. Emanuel is obsessed with her mother’s untimely passing at childbirth and when new neighbour Linda (Jessica Biel), who bears an uncanny resemblance to her, moves in, Emanuel can’t help but become attached. Read more... |
Silent SonataMonday, 05 May 2014
The forces of death and life come up against each other in the strange, somehow impressive Slovenian war drama Silent Sonata. I say “Slovenian” only because director Janez Burger hails from there, and that’s where some of the filming took place (the rest was in Ireland, which was the major, but not the only European co-producer of the film), but the cast and crew are markedly international. Read more... |
Bad NeighboursFriday, 02 May 2014
Zac Efron has well and truly left behind his cute High School Musical persona. First he bared all in That Awkward Moment and now in Bad Neighbours he plays his first unsympathetic role – but his fans will be delighted to know that he gets lots of opportunities to show off his six-pack again in Nicholas Stoller's winning comedy. Read more... |
Willow CreekThursday, 01 May 2014
The Bigfoot legend rests on something close to found-footage: 1967’s grainy film of a large ape-like creature loping through the remote American North-west. The Patterson-Gimlin expedition’s reels are the Sasquatch conspiracy theorists version of the Zapruder footage. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Album: Bab L'Bluz - Swaken
Bab L’Bluz are a French-Moroccan four-piece that play a tasty blend of fiery psychedelic rock backed up with hypnotic North African gnawa rhythms...
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Disney+ review - h...
To mark the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s second-greatest gift to rock’n’roll,...
Album: Pokey LaFarge - Rhumba Country
Pokey LaFarge has always defied categorisation. He likened his 2020 album Rock Bottom Rhapsody to a mix tape, with elements of...
L'Olimpiade, Irish National Opera review - Vivaldi...
In Vivaldi’s more extravagant operas, some of the arias can seem like a competition for the gold medal. L’Olimpiade is relatively modest...
Red Eye, ITV review - Anglo-Chinese relations tested in junk...
Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air...
Album: Josienne Clarke - Parenthesis, I
Parentheses, I is an album title – (I) – that’s a hieroglyph of the self, the brackets like...
Music Reissues Weekly: West Coast Consortium - All The Love...
West Coast Consortium’s first single was July 1967’s “Some Other Someday,” a delightful slice of Mellotron-infused harmony pop which wasn’t too...
Love Lies Bleeding review - a pumped-up neo-noir
Somewhere along a desert highway in the American Southwest, where there's not much to do besides get drunk, shoot guns, and pump iron, a stranger...
Remembering conductor Andrew Davis (1944-2024)
As a human being of immense warmth, humour and erudition, Andrew Davis made it all too easy to forget what towering, incandescent performances he...
Brancusi, Pompidou Centre, Paris review - founding father of...
One hundred and twenty sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the...