Film
Graham Fuller
From The Steel Helmet (1951) through The Big Red One (1980), Samuel Fuller has shown more empathy for US Army infantrymen in combat than any other filmmaker, including Oliver Stone. During the making of Fixed Bayonets!, Fuller’s second gripping Korean War film of ’51, he had Lucien Ballard’s camera pore so closely over the grimy, unshaven “dog faces", it’s clear he was memorialising the real soldiers they represent and those he fought alongside in World War II. The film is set in the winter of 1950 shortly after Mao had mobilised the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army to protect North Korea Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The flip side of the apocalyptic evolution-and-destiny concerns of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's previous foray across the Last Frontier, The Martian is a feelgood take on the theme of space travel. Having landed the first astronauts on Mars in 2029, NASA is pursuing its Ares programme to establish a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet. However, a calamitous storm forces the NASA crew to evacuate, leaving behind botanist Mark Watney, seemingly killed by flying debris.But Watney is Matt Damon and he's the star of the show, and has better luck this time than he did as the stranded astronaut Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A "guests-from-hell" saga on a panoramic scale, Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash is a reworking of Jacques Deray's 1969 sex-and-jealousy movie La Piscine. The action has been transported from the south of France to the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily, where rock icon Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating after a throat operation with her filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts).The couple sprawl luxuriously and nakedly around the pool at their idyllic island eyrie, where the view offers both craggy hillsides and sun-baked plains stretching away to the sparkling Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fidelio: Alice's Journey can literally be described as relating a journey of self-discovery. A mechanic on the Marseille-registered freighter Fidelio, the equally titular Alice navigates the seas with an all-male crew and explores who they are while investigating her own sexuality.She’s left her cartoonist boyfriend Felix (Anders Danielsen Lie) on dry land and tells him to use “C” for cock and “P” for pussy in their e-mails to disguise what they’re discussing. Soon, things become more complicated. The ship’s captain Gaël (Melvil Poupaud), turns out to be her first great love. Alice (Ariane Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” Miss Bennet has been a busy Lizzy. In recent years she's popped up in a British Bollywood setting (Bride and Prejudice) and in the present day (Lost in Austen), and solved a murder mystery (Death Comes to Pemberley). Her latest outing – as played by literary pin-up of the moment Lily James – is as a sword-wielding, pistol-toting scourge of the zombie hordes. Naturally, she’s very good at what she does.The title tells it exactly like it is. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the first feature by writer-director Stephen Fingleton, and has earned him a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut. Set in Fingleton's native Northern Ireland, it's a pared-down tale of post-apocalyptic struggle, compensating for its lack of budget with rigorous economy and a watchful intelligence.Martin McCann plays the titular survivalist, a gaunt and unsmiling homesteader who guards his shack in the forest, around which he cultivates his own vegetables. Dialogue has been kept to a bare minimum, so McCann has to create his character largely through facial expressions (suspicious Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Trumbo depicts the 13-year struggle by the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) to break the blacklist imposed on him and the other members of the Hollywood Ten in 1947. By continuing to get his scripts produced throughout the Fifties, Trumbo made a heroic, if morally complex stand against rabid Red Scare-mongers like the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne (David James Elliott). It’s disappointing that his courage and brinkmanship should grace a movie with no attitude of its own – that has the narrow sensibility of a 1980s or 1990s telefilm.Cranston nails the Read more ...
graham.rickson
The jokes come thick and fast in this debut feature from the team behind the BBC’s Horrible Histories. Released theatrically to little fanfare last autumn, Richard Bracewell’s Bill is a delight – a joyously funny film which wears its erudition lightly. An examination of Shakespeare’s lost early years, it follows the young writer’s unwitting embroilment in a fiendish Spanish plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Matthew Baynton’s Shakespeare is a likeable doofus, kicked out of his boy band Mortal Coil (yes, they do shuffle off) after one too many extended lute solos. He decides to become a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The opening scene of Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes plunges us into the darker depths of American society, post-2008 financial crisis. We’re in the world of home repossessions, and the blood spattered around the bathroom of one property by an ex-owner who wouldn’t go quietly speaks chillingly for what is in store.Bahrani’s title hints at wider issues, principally the 99/1 wealth distribution inequality that was a slogan of the Occupy movement, and his film shows how that process is consolidated in practice. We first encounter single father Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) as he attends a court hearing Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Toward the end of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, a tough-as-nails Hollywood diva played by Jane Fonda informs Harvey Keitel’s creatively spent director that television has supplanted cinema as the home of screen drama. True or not, this has been the industry consensus for about five years, but Sorrentino demonstrates there’s life in cinema yet by orchestrating a flow of effortless-seeming sequences that combine widescreen grandeur with whimsicality.A one-time lothario has a disturbing dream about an erotic nocturnal encounter with a voluptuous modern Venus on a causeway crossing the glittering Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Communities function in different ways depending on their constituencies, to note just one of the many salient points made by the deeply compelling and equally disturbing Spotlight. The Catholic church in Boston for years closed ranks and shut its eyes so as to enable the systemic culture of child abuse that a cadre of Boston Globe journalists in time uncovered, winning a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their work: one societal sector pitted against the other only for the scribes' sleuthing to emerge triumphant alongside a legacy of damage that time will never fully put right. The Globe's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Georgian director Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines made the shortlist of five for last year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar category (it didn't win). It was nominated from Georgia, but could equally well have represented Estonia: this incrementally powerful anti-war film is that rarest of things, a co-production between two rather different countries with a story that draws genuinely on the worlds of both.The consequences – human, most of all – of the break-up of the Soviet Union as it accelerated through the second half of 1991 haven’t been reflected all that widely in cinema, and Tangerines is Read more ...