Film
Jasper Rees
It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a verbatim musical with the addition of Adam Cork’s deftly knitted score. The stage version travelled to the big screen with Rufus Norris directing, and now makes it to the small screen.Television, in the shape of BBC drama Five Daughters (2010), is where the story of the murder victims was first told. London Road has widescreen moments, particularly at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The question of the Macbeths’ dead child is one of those Shakespearean quandaries, like Hamlet’s age, Iago’s cuckolding and Beatrice and Benedick’s earlier dalliance. How much do they really matter? In this new film version of the Scottish play, it’s all about the back story. Everything – Macbeth’s disdain for death in battle, Lady Macbeth’s descent into somnambulant madness – hinges on the loss of a child.The solemn, wordless opening locates the Macbeths’ motivation in bereavement for a little child onto whose dead eyelids Macbeth places pebbles before the body is paganistically cremated on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though packaged as a tale of an ageing rock star, Danny Collins is really an autumnal comedy-drama about regret, redemption and trying to seize life's second chances. As the title character, a cheesy AOR veteran pitched somewhere between Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, Al Pacino demonstrates why he and rock'n'roll have never been intimately linked – he can't sing, he can't dance, and he hasn't a clue what to do with a baying live audience.Nonetheless this is Pacino at his warmest and most soulful, and, abetted by such wily old veterans as Christopher Plummer (as his manager Frank Grubman) and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of French director Lucie Borleteau’s first feature conceals a range of meanings. Fidelio is both the name of the enormous maritime freight vessel on which most of the action takes places, and a clear hint at “fidelity”, a concept with which its independent heroine Alice (Ariane Labed) negotiates throughout. If its French original, Fidelio: l’odyssée d’Alice, also suggests something else, the “Odyssey” of Alice’s journey meaning a return to the starting-point of home, then our expectations are challenged.The balance between home and away, with the different codes of behaviour Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
How kind of the boffins at NASA to announce their spectacular discovery of water on Mars this week – giving a timely, real-science boost to the release of Ridley Scott’s The Martian. In truth, the film needs no such assistance. Despite following fast in the warp drive of Gravity, Interstellar and Scott’s own Prometheus, this fabulously entertaining film doesn’t suffer either through space fatigue or by comparison.It’s day 18 of a manned mission to Mars. Scientists are collecting their samples from a very red desert plain, when a severe storm hits the planet. Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s easier to admire than enjoy 2013's Hard to Be a God. The 177-minute final film directed by Leningrad-born Alexei German depicts medieval squalor and butchery so intensely that the viewer is forced to shrink from its portrait of life without culture, humanism, and soap. Like another protracted masterpiece, Béla Tarr’s 2011 The Turin Horse, German’s miasmic swansong imparts its riches mostly after being endured and reflected upon.Adapted from the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, whose Roadside Picnic begat Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Hard to Be a God was filmed between 2000 and Read more ...
james.woodall
With eyes trained on sporty Rio de Janeiro once more for next year’s Olympic Games, cultural portals on to the city are bound to be offered in all sorts of places around the world. One such is Rio+Film, a new film festival at the Barbican Centre focusing exclusively on the great Brazilian city by the sea. Rio+Film is likely to have further editions elsewhere.Curator Adriana Rouanet says the “+” in the festival’s name underlines that the chosen films burrow beneath the usual image of beach, football and carnival. In the Saturday-night hot spot was Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s 2002 Read more ...
David Kettle
Craig Roberts first made his mark in Richard Ayoade’s 2010 debut feature Submarine, playing a socially inept Welsh teenager. For his own debut feature, as writer, director and lead, Roberts plays – well, a socially inept Welsh teenager. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable – and possibly even intentional, too. But they’re also a bit unfair, partly because Ayoade’s film is by far the more assured of the two, but also because in Just Jim, Roberts seems to be attempting something a bit darker, and far more dream-like. He might not always succeed, but he certainly has a lot a fun Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In an age when film stars take selfies at the Oscars and photobomb other celebrities, and when the bashful have little control of their image saturating the internet, it may be hard to imagine a time when an actor could be on the verge of stardom without anyone having any idea who he was – or a moment when a photographer could have the inclination or intimate access that could actually touch on something truthful.But by all accounts this was the case in 1955, for the actor James Dean and for Dennis Stock, the Magnum photographer who took the pictures that have become most associated with the Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's that time of year again, with autumn casting a shroud over London and the LFF offering the perfect tonic. The only problem is that with 238 fiction and documentary features over 10 days, even diehard cinephiles with no desire for human contact or fresh air would be hard pressed to sift and select. The festival programmers attempt their customary guidance, with films tucked (sometimes too neatly) into themes such as Love, Thrill, Debate and Dare. For our part, theartsdesk's film writers offer some very personal tips – films we've seen and would highly recommend, others that we ourselves Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce.The Son's Room dealt with the raw anguish of the sudden, violent demise of a child that rips through a happy family like a tornado. Mia Madre, on the other hand, is a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...