Film
Graham Fuller
Watching Victoria on home video is a good idea if you first hide the remote. It’s impossible to pause Sebastian Schipper’s ambitious heist thriller even for a few seconds without ruining its pleasurably disorienting effect: cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen shot it – digitally, of course – in real time in a single 138-minute take on 22 Berlin locations. It's unsurprising to learn that Schipper acted in Tom Tykwer’s kinetic Run Lola Run (1998) and has written with him.The story is not a little implausible. Victoria (Laia Costa), a friendless Spanish expat, meets feckless charmer Sonne ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after the Conservatives won the General Election last year. “Bastards,” he calls them, with a schoolboy-ish smile, at the beginning and end of the documentary.Except in the first half of the Thatcher ’80s, Tory policies have specialised in eliciting Loach’s fiercely oppositional cinema – so have anti-socialist Labour policies. For 53 years, he has been Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're disabled, it certainly helps to be as indecently rich as you are handsome while you make plans to end your life: that, in short, is the preposterous take-away message from Me Before You, the film version of the Jojo Moyes bestseller which Moyes herself has adapted for the screen. I haven't read the book and would imagine that the material's multiple irritations, both large-scale and small, might be somewhat more tolerable not blown up into celluloid dimensions.But as brought to the screen by OIivier Award-winning theatre director Thea Sharrock, who has spent her stage career Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“A porno film where the point was the plot?!” The Nice Guys asks you to make quite a few imaginative leaps: to find Russell Crowe endearing and Ryan Gosling funny and to believe that anyone in 1977 would set out to shoot a skin flick with a storyline. Implausibly, but delightfully, all of the above come to pass in a buddy caper in which Crowe and Gosling partner up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 1970s Los Angeles.Gosling plays Holland March, a widowed private investigator of low morals and lower ability who exploits confused old ladies for an easy living. He’s hired by one such to Read more ...
Ed Owen
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian.Like buses, Race is the first of three Owens biopics to come along. Disney’s adaptation of Jeremy Schaap’s Triumph is in production, as is another starring Owens lookalike Anthony Mackie. While first out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Penda’s Fen has so many constituent parts it could burst its seams. Almost-18 schoolboy Stephen Franklin is struggling with determining the nature of his sexuality. His school is about regimentation and promotes the army with drill, uniforms and expectations that commands are to be followed. With his father, the Reverend Franklin, Stephen has prolonged discussions about the nature of faith. The local landscape is mystical, and seems able to manifest historic and mythical figures from its own past. Reawakened Paganism is upsetting the Christian present. All this is happening against a backdrop Read more ...
Ed Owen
How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might actually enjoy what’s on offer.Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an early experiment with modern 3D, taking more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The latest in a long tradition of Russian Second World War films, Sergei Mokritsky’s Battle for Sevastopol itself emerged out of conflict. Initiated as a "status" joint project between Russia and Ukraine well before relations between those two countries soured, production continued despite the rift that deepened between them. The film premiered in both on the same day in April 2015, earning considerable – and equal – box office success on both sides of a border riven by war.It’s also that rare thing, a Russian-language mainstream film that has the potential to travel beyond its original Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.Playing in real time, its engaging performances and tight direction veer from thriller to comedy. Director Jodie Foster keeps the plot moving along swiftly with some well-placed suprises and comedic touches in the first half, after which it's too easy to guess how the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Berlin are, misleadingly, an arts unit from Antwerp, Belgium. They’ve been around for well over a decade and major in artily constructed documentaries that are presented in the manner of experiential installations. Their focus is usually the slow, commentary-free dissection of a geographical quirk or circumstance, hence past films have been about and titled Jerusalem, Moscow, Iqaluit (Canadian Inuit capital), and Bonanza (a tiny Rocky Mountains community).This time it’s the turn of Zvizdal, a Ukrainian village that falls within the Chernobyl isolation zone, and its two remaining inhabitants, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In a Lonely Place (1950) contains one of the most harrowing night-time drives in all of film noir. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart), a volatile screenwriter suspected of murder, accidentally learns that his new girlfriend, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), has been freshly interviewed by detectives. In one of his uncontrollable rages, Dix slaloms through the Hollywood hills, the terrified Laurel in the passenger seat, and scrapes the paint off another car. He beats up the young driver for yelling at him and is about to smash his skull when Laurel screams at him. Is it any wonder she starts to regret Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels. This is satire that cuts deep, and who better to wield the blade than director Whit Stillman, whose Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco have shown him such an idiosyncratic observer of the human condition?Austen’s story Read more ...