Film
Mark Kidel
In 1969, just before he made M*A*S*H, the innovative film that launched him in the world, Robert Altman had made his first proper feature. That Cold Day in the Park was a piece of period weirdness, all but forgotten in the shadow of his iconic Korean War black comedy "debut".An uptight upper-class Vancouver spinster rescues an apparently mute homeless teenager she finds drenched with rain on a bench in the park. She becomes fascinated by the boy, as years of repressed desire give way to an obsessive passion that comes out all wrong – tainted with shades of perverse fantasies she can hardly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stillness. Contemplation. Surreal spirituality. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films share qualities hugely distant from Hollywood, closer to his other career as a visual artist, and rooted in his responses to his Thai homeland. It’s been six years since his last feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, bringing his work as close to mainstream notice as its quiet otherness permits. One shorter film, Mekong Hotel (2012), and much visual art, filled the gap till this contemplative return (which itself won Un Certain Regard at Cannes).In what isn’t a story Read more ...
Ed Owen
British filmmaking does gritty suburban dramas better than anywhere. Stories stripped of superficial action, from Ken Loach’s early work through to more recent stand-out films like Tyrannosaur. The Violators offers a new voice producing a superb feature set in a bleak Merseyside suburb. Debut director Helen Walsh is better known as a novelist, creating tales thick with human drama, sometimes in grim settings, and The Violators adheres to this template.Three siblings live together under the care of their constantly smoking, constantly angry older brother Andy (Derek Barr), terrified that their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Telegram Sam” by T. Rex spent its second and final week at the top of the singles chart in the week of 12 February 1972. A month later, on 18 March, Marc Bolan and his band played two shows at Wembley’s Empire Pool to a sell-out crowd under the spell of what was labelled Bolanmania or T. Rextasy. Bolan seemed unstoppable. Before “Telegram Sam”, the success of “Ride a White Swan”, “Hot Love”, “Get it on” and “Jeepster” suggested he was as big as The Beatles. Fittingly, a real-life Beatle directed the camera crews capturing the Wembley shows on film.Born to Boogie was made at these shows. Its Read more ...
David Kettle
"A funny wee film about music and death" goes the strapline. That’s a pretty accurate summary of Paul Fegan’s touching documentary Where You’re Meant To Be, which follows singer Aidan Moffat – formerly of 1990s indie rockers Arab Strap – as he tours his bawdy urban updates of traditional songs around Scotland.There’s plenty of humour – sarcastic or absurd for the most part – and at a mere 75 minutes it’s certainly wee. Music’s a constant presence, with footage of gigs in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, the Western Isles, Skye and elsewhere, to varying reactions from the locals. And death – well, that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is it about Toby Jones? A decade ago he had a stroke of luck when a film producer spotted his physical similarity to Truman Capote and cast him as the lead in Infamous. The luck wasn’t unadulterated. Philip Seymour Hoffman played the same role in a different film and won an Oscar. While Infamous was overshadowed, Jones wasn't. The latest advance in his career finds him playing a medieval king in a film from the director of Gomorrah, the ultra-violent portrait of organised crime in Naples.Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales adapts three of the many fairy stories anthologised by 16th-century Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The language of documentary is shot through with conventions. Rare is the occasion when a film-maker breaks the rules and throws the genre wide open. It takes a versatile artist like Laurie Anderson to free the medium from genre and invent a whole new way of doing things.Heart of a Dog is a resolutely personal, emotionally charged and often witty exploration of the passing of Anderson’s rat terrier Lolabelle, but the film is also a meditation on dreams, death and love. Without ever seeming gimmicky, pretentious or over-intellectual, Anderson manages to seamlessly draw together reflections on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are a lot of cheerful people in the world, most of them outside the United States. That's the startling conclusion of Michael Moore's pointed comic jeremiad Where to Invade Next, in which American cinema's premier schlub decamps overseas to encounter numerous life- and work-related lessons that our ketchup-loving conqueror wants to take back home.What surprises isn't Moore's view of present-day America, which is unexceptional in its assessment of a hard-scrabble country ruled by multiple iniquities – not least the overriding potency of money, and a signal inability to face up to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Revenant is released as a home entertainment garlanded in fewer Oscar laurels than it might have been. Its impact as a pure cinematic experience is far greater than this year’s best picture Spotlight. Hence awards for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The paucity of dialogue means that few best actor winners can have had as little to say as Leonardo DiCaprio. He plays Hugh Glass, a tracker and guide abandoned by the party in his charge when he is mauled by bear and presumed next to dead. Spurred by the ghost of his Native American wife, slaughtered in a Read more ...
Ed Owen
When Marnie Was There is the latest production by Japan’s animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, and the first since the retirement of its creative genius Hayao Miyazaki. An adaptation of the Joan G. Robinson novel of the same name, it’s a confident and powerful account of a young girl’s search for identity.The book, written in 1967, is infused with the growing public interest in psychology. R D Laing’s classic text The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, which puts forward the idea that madness stems from people living in an insane world, was published the same year, and Robinson's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An increasing concern for society at large, dementia has become a recurrent theme in films and TV too. Concussion comes at the subject from an unusual angle, as it tells the story of Nigeria-born neuropathologist Dr Bennet Omalu, who identified a form of dementia which was killing an alarming number of American football players.Working as a forensic pathologist in Pittsburgh, Omalu conducted an autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steelers superstar Mike Webster (played here by David Morse), who'd died destitute and mentally shot away at the age of 50. This prompted Omalu's identification of what he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Warcraft series of "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" (or MMORPG if you must) has apparently amassed over 100 million users since it all began with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. Ergo, turning it into a 3D multiplex-buster is a no-brainer. Surely?I could foresee a couple of potential pitfalls. Firstly, passively watching a movie is quite a different proposition from playing an interactive game. Secondly, it's not as if we've been deprived of this kind of sword-and sorcery, dungeons-and-dragons, mystical kingdom stuff lately, with Game of Thrones, the Hobbit / Lord of Read more ...