Film
Kieron Tyler
Michel Gondry’s last film, the unwatchably hyperglycaemic Mood Indigo (2013), was so arch and quirky it irritated more than appealed. Thankfully, Microbe and Gasoline resets the dial to the charm levels of 2008’s Be Kind Rewind. And things hadn’t been plain sailing before that too. The stilted, US-made The We and the I (2012) suggested that, after The Green Hornet, Gondry was a fish-out-of-water in America. Microbe and Gasoline is low-key, sweet, warm and made in France.Microbe and Gasoline (Microbe et Gasoil) is straightforward and feels autobiographical. It tells the story of the friendship Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both wonderfully talented comedic actresses in their own right (Fey best known for 30 Rock, Poehler for Parks and Recreation), first worked together on Saturday Night Live and more recently they have become known as a cheeky double act presenting awards ceremonies. Now ex-SNL writer Paula Pell has written Sisters for them; it's essentially a party movie, complete with some base humour and swearing, but Pell's slyly witty script has an underlying sadness about lives unlived, and how some people's inner child just won't grow up.Fey and Poehler play Kate and Maura, two Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There was a time when the BBC provided a creative context – free of the anxiety-fuelled micro-management that characterises commissioning today – that gave a great deal of space to original and experimental film-making. While the pioneering work of French documentarians in the 1950s and 1960s was subsidized by an enlightened state, British documentary made advances thanks to public (and later commercial) television.Subtitled "The Evolution of the British Documentary", this well-curated BFI compilation of BBC films from 1951-1967 pays homage to a variety of films and TV programmes that provide Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Next week the seventh episode of George Lucas's famed space saga will be released on a wave of hype and eager anticipation. Star Wars: The Force Awakens no longer has Lucas at the helm, the man with the Jar Jar Binks way with words having passed his company to Disney and the creative mantle to others, in the first instance JJ Abrams. We can expect homage and nostalgia accompanied by a frisson of fresh faces and new tricks. It ought to be a blast.But for whom, exactly? Star Wars was a groundbreaking phenomenon in 1977, helping to introduce the blockbuster movie, the marketing monster and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Forbidden Room, reviewed here yesterday, brings to a climax Guy Maddin’s thirty-year orchestration of the ghosts of world cinema past. A movie like no other, it’s a hectic, twilit construction and deconstruction of What Might Have Been: a pullulating assemblage of vintage movies that were either lost or never made reinvented by the Canadian filmmaker and his co-writers Evan Johnson and Robert Kotyk. And we’ve seen nothing yet: Maddin and Johnson, who co-directed the film, are reconfiguring it with other story strands for their Internet extravaganza Séances, which they’ll launch in 2016. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As a director of Westerns in the 1950s, André de Toth is seldom spoken of in the same breath as Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, but there’s a case to be made that he was their equal. Day of the Outlaw (1959), de Toth's ice-cold farewell to the genre, matches Mann’s James Stewart Westerns in its harnessing of landscape to psychological dynamics, while its story of a hardened loner who won’t be shaken from his mission recalls Boetticher’s Randolph Scott films.Constantly in dialogue with Shane (1953), it’s a redemption drama, set in a snow-shrouded Wyoming settlement called Bitters at the end Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It would take a brave soul to mention Peter Mullan and “national treasure” in the same breath. To start with, he’d be more than clear which nation has his allegiance, and then suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that maybe he was, well, a wee bit young for any such honorifics...So we’ll leave that for another couple of decades, and just salute an actor whose presence on screen is so distinctive, compelling and most of all real. (And hope that we’ll see him back soon in the other capacity in which he has distinguished himself, as a director, with three films, Orphans, The Magdelene Sisters Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Guy Maddin diehards will find the Winnipeg auteur’s delirious latest homage to antique cinema so mesmerizing they’ll be sorry when it ends. There are times during the 119-minute The Forbidden Room when it seems it’ll run forever, like M.C. Escher ants on a Moebius strip. But shortly after the rapid-fire montage of multiple climaxes, even the most dedicated fan must accept that it’s time to go home and bathe.Ageing roué Marv, played in a gaping dressing gown by Maddin regular Louis Negin (pictured below right), gives precise instructions on “how to take a bath” in the opening sequence ( Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art. There are not only her massive donations to a variety of museums, but the legendary Peggy Guggenheim collection in her Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, one of the most visited modern museums in the world, with some 326 works of art by 100 different artists. La Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The story of the Soviet Union’s ice hockey team's pivotal role in relations with North America is fascinating. Its players were not just sportsmen. They were also in the army and integral to their home country's portrayal of itself on the world stage. Central to the Cold War battle of wills, the seemingly unbeatable team was a propaganda tool and, after perestroika, its members played for American and Canadian teams. Russia had infiltrated its adversaries. The Werner Herzog-produced documentary Red Army tells this tale.The film is packed with characters. Chief among them is Vyacheslav Fetisov Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Seventies comic classic, almost unseen in Britain, starring Walter Matthau and Elaine May? Sign me up. A New Leaf’s first pleasure is its casting, which goes intriguingly against physical type, drawing superb responses from its stars. The hangdog Matthau plays an upper-class playboy, while May just about hides beauty she never showed much interest in. His would-be Bluebeard is eager to “mur-marry” her fabulously wealthy, eligibly unworldly, lonely wallflower botanist, to replace the fortune he’s carelessly spent. As his canny Mancunian butler, played by George Rose, observes: “It’s the only Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Television has been quite obsessed of late with reinterpreting horror myths, whether it’s Penny Dreadful’s gothic melange of vampires, werewolves and man-made monsters, Jekyll & Hyde, or The Frankenstein Chronicles, with Sean Bean currently playing a Victorian plod in pursuit of an evil, child-snatching surgeon.All of these have attempted to make something new of the archetypes. At first glance that’s exactly the ambition of the big screen’s Victor Frankenstein. But while writer Max Landis and director Paul McGuigan may think they’re offering a dazzling new spin on Mary Shelley’s creation Read more ...