Film Reviews
Stranger by the LakeThursday, 20 February 2014
The lakeside beach that is the only scene of action in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a concentrated crucible of desires. The sense of languid summer and the limpid beauty of the lake itself, beautifully and compellingly caught throughout in Claire Mathon’s widescreen cinematography, are deceptive: this gay cruising area is a place of urgent, largely silent action, and deadly undercurrents, where sexual fascination can become potentially fatal. Read more... |
Only Lovers Left AliveWednesday, 19 February 2014
Unique, dreamy, super cool and splendidly silly, just like its maker Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire flick packed full of romanticism, wit and enchanting, fuzzy music. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast as a pair of vampires named Adam and Eve entangled for eternity by the bonds of love. Read more... |
John Travolta, Theatre Royal Drury LaneTuesday, 18 February 2014
Hopelessly devoted women queuing up for hugs and to cut a rug with a playful John Travolta all dressed in black were just two of the highlights of an often pensive and surprisingly serious discussion, hosted by film critic Barry Norman, but one that still came littered with moments of real fun. “I want to make love to you all!”, Travolta exclaimed as he came out on stage to rapturous applause and screams of adoration. Read more... |
BAFTAs 2014: Hollywood winners made in BritainMonday, 17 February 2014
Long before the stars had begun walking (and working) the red carpet, this year's British Academy Film Awards were a hot topic. Unfortunately it was for all the wrong reasons. A whistleblower writing for the Daily Mail alleged that many of the Academy's 6,500 members make little effort to consider the full gauntlet of options, often voting for the big-budget American favourites sight unseen. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: 20,000 Days on EarthMonday, 17 February 2014
He cuts a dash, that man Cave. Very tall, gangly, with his idiosyncratic snub nose and upside-down-U-shaped hair, the Australian is a one-off. His growly music isn’t always easy to like. In his fury days with the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, he was a post-punk rock poet. He has, of course, oceans of fans. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: The WinnersSunday, 16 February 2014
The Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice by director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the closing ceremony of the Berlinale last night, as well as picking up the best actor prize for its star Liao Fan. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Yves Saint Laurent, La belle et le bêteSunday, 16 February 2014
You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: The Circle, Love Is Strange, Land of Storms, Praia do FuturoSunday, 16 February 2014
Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at the Berlinale, in the documentary category: the Teddies have been going since 1987, making them no less of a pioneer in the gay world, their brief to acknowledge and support LGBT cinema from around the world. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: BoyhoodSaturday, 15 February 2014
Not the least remarkable thing about Richard Linklater's Boyhood is its being shot over a decade – that’s probably a first in film history. And it’s more than a sociological experiment, portraying in vibrant contemporary detail and a lot of observational fun the growing-up in Texas of a little boy, Mason, which will surely have an extraordinary impact on the life of the actor, Ellar Coltrane, who played him. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: TriptyqueFriday, 14 February 2014
French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off the street but which are never less than thoughtful – and that is part of the problem. Read more... |
HerFriday, 14 February 2014
Pretty well the last film in the current array of Oscar hopefuls to reach Britain is also (in my view, anyway) the best. That's saying something as we gear up for an Academy Awards ceremony paying tribute to the strongest selection of nominees filmdom has fielded in an age. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: Cathedrals of CultureFriday, 14 February 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”. Read more... |
8 Minutes IdleThursday, 13 February 2014
The makers of 8 Minutes Idle have a kickstarter campaign to thank for the cinema release of their offbeat comedy, which was made in 2012 but has sat on the shelf since. It's a charming (perhaps knowingly so) low-budget romcom, adapted from his novel of the same title by Matt Thorne with Nicholas Blincoe, and directed with a light touch by Mark Simon Hewis. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: Nymphomaniac, In Order of Disappearance, AloftWednesday, 12 February 2014
Stellan Skarsgård is having a good Berlinale. The veteran Swedish actor proved the main calming influence in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volume One (***), which the Berlin festival screened as a world premiere in the director’s version, running at 145 minutes. That’s about 25 minutes more than the UK will be seeing from 21 February, when both parts of the work will be released. Read more... |
Cuban FuryWednesday, 12 February 2014
The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us... Read more... |
BastardsTuesday, 11 February 2014
Whenever someone wants to dispel the gender simplification that female directors only make feelgood films, they wheel out Kathryn Bigelow, whose action movies are cited as being tougher than any man’s. It’s a spurious debate, admittedly, but if we were to play that game I’d definitely bring Denis into Bigelow’s corner. The Frenchwoman doesn’t do action, per se. But her films can be tough as nails, black as pitch, and as disquieting as they are marvellous. Read more... |
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