Film Reviews

Ondine

Jasper Rees Thursday, 04 March 2010

Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than he. Breakfast on Pluto found Cillian Murphy’s girly boy swishing around working-class Dublin in frocks and furs. And now comes Ondine, Jordan’s reimagining of the watery fable transplanted to the rugged shores of Cork....

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Alice in Wonderland

Sheila Johnston Wednesday, 03 March 2010

Must rush, have to hurry: like the fretful White Rabbit with his pocket watch, fans have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice, which finally arrives in cinemas this week, albeit for a limited period following the controversial decision to push the film out quickly on DVD. Mindful of this, I hastened to the IMAX, Waterloo to catch it in 3D, larger than life and twice as natural, on the very biggest screen available. 30,000 people have already pre-booked tickets...

Chloe

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 03 March 2010

“I guess I’ve always been pretty good with words,” says the eponymous character in the opening, voiceover line of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe - and with that clunker we know the Canadian director's move into the mainstream isn't going to be as gripping or original as any of his previous indie efforts. With a join-the-dots script by Erin Cressida Wilson and overwrought music, it is, unusually for Egoyan, a linear movie and one that ultimately goes nowhere.

Nitin Sawhney and LSO, Yogoto No Yume, Barbican

Peter Culshaw Monday, 01 March 2010

When I last met Nitin Sawhney, I’d heard that he was a whizz at mental arithmetic. I asked him, perhaps impertinently, what was 91 times 94? “8,827,” he relied, quick as a flash. Several hours later, I worked out he was probably right. “Vedic mathematics,” he said. What I can say about last night’s performance was there was some interesting mathematics going on. Some time signatures rubbed friskily against others in certain scenes in ways a mathematician would love.

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Everybody's Fine

Matt Wolf Wednesday, 24 February 2010

For a while, actually, it appears as if a dollop of irony might just be on the cards, and during those passages, at least, British writer-director Kirk Jones's road movie looks poised to be quietly revolutionary. But once the dictates of convention settle in, watch out! At the press screening attended, a fellow near me was crying what seemed to be tears brought on by the helpless laughter that accompanies mockery. One can only assume he wasn't moved.

Capitalism: A Love Story

Sheila Johnston Tuesday, 23 February 2010

If Michael Moore's new film were a person, it would be diagnosed with a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

The Headless Woman

Sheila Johnston Saturday, 20 February 2010

A merciless anatomy of the inner meltdown that follows a hit-and-run accident, The Headless Woman is as baffling, brilliant, demanding and utterly original a work as you're likely to see all year. Its themes are confusion, amnesia, disavowal. The director, Lucrecia Martel, by contrast is in vice-like control of her material. This film might be a real head-scratcher. But no-one seeing it can come out unconvinced that Martel is a world-class talent.

The Last Station

Jasper Rees Friday, 19 February 2010

The final days of Tolstoy are innately dramatic, as the American author Jay Parini intuited. The Last Station, published in 1990, was his novel about the novelist’s own denouement. Towards the end of his long and prodigiously successful life, Tolstoy chose to embrace the simple values of the fabled Russian peasant he had lionised in War and Peace.

Crazy Heart

Matt Wolf Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Jeff Bridges cranks his dude status up a notch or 10 or 20, and his payoff looks likely to be this much-loved actor's first-ever Oscar. So what if writer-director Scott Cooper's film plays out like the careful illustration of a Hollywood pitch: The Wrestler as filtered through the prism of Tender Mercies (with the Academy Award-winning lead of that Bruce Beresford movie, Robert Duvall, on hand here to make the connection complete)?

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The Lovely Bones

Graham Fuller Monday, 15 February 2010

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a murdered 14-year-old who hovers in metaphysical limbo over her grieving family, was once to have been filmed by the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. On the evidence of Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, her take on Sebold’s novel would have been a moodily lyrical but deadpan reverie that wouldn’t have skirted its engagement with evil.

A Single Man

Sheila Johnston Friday, 12 February 2010

Everything has been immaculately planned for the big event of the evening: the prized possessions arrayed like trophies on the desk, the chosen suit laid out ready to wear, the perfectly colour co-ordinated tie alongside it with a note specifying, "Windsor knot". Yes, indeed: it will be a death in the best possible taste, a very British suicide.

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Jasper Rees Thursday, 11 February 2010

They always used to say that the worst books make the best films, and that the best books don’t prosper so much on screen. But then there are always complicated exceptions. In another life perhaps Stefan Zweig would have made a matchless screenwriter. His facility for perfectly crafted tales of doomed love brought him global fame just when the silent movies were processing such fare as romantic potboilers.

The Wolfman

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 10 February 2010

It was down to technological error that Spielberg couldn’t show you much shark. The mechanised rubber fish wasn’t working properly on set, but the studio told the director to carry on shooting anyway. Result: a genuinely terrifying film. Filmmakers have always known that the thing unseen is exponentially more unsettling that the unveiled object, there for all to gawp at. Filmmakers don’t always go by what they know. Hence Benicio Del Toro’s werewolf with its remarkable physical likeness to...

Beyond the Pole

Veronica Lee Tuesday, 09 February 2010

Do the words “British film comedy” cause your heart to sink as deeply as they do mine? Thought so. I wish I could say Beyond the Pole, which is perhaps the first eco-comedy and was made with the intention of raising awareness about polar melting while making us laugh, was worth the effort. Sadly, it wasn’t. It may throw up the odd chuckle, but mostly it’s predictable and unoriginal. The scenery, however, is stunning.

Ponyo

Sheila Johnston Saturday, 06 February 2010

Tucked away down a sleepy residential back alley in suburban Tokyo, Studio Ghibli, the headquarters of Hayao Miyazaki, is designed - by the visionary animator himself - in the shape of a boat. When I visited it five years ago, just before the release of his last film, Howl's Moving Castle, the team of young animators all had bowls of fish and terrapins on their desks. The result, Ponyo, is at last about to open in Britain: Miyazaki is a famously slow worker, and the delay...

Invictus

Jasper Rees Thursday, 04 February 2010

There is a problem with Nelson Mandela. He is, it is universally agreed, a remarkable man. His profound humanity is undoubted. He is on first-name terms with saintliness. When eventually he shuffles off his mortal coil, every newspaper on the planet will hold the front page. The problem comes when you stick him in a drama. Drama calls for its characters to go on a journey, to be visited by doubts, to overcome demons, to keep an audience guessing.