Film
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead? Writer-director Brian Helgeland knows his way around screen violence - he scripted LA Confidential – and he has been a tourist in England before: he paid a knockabout visit to the Middle Ages with A Knight’s Tale. The traditional thing to say about foreign directors on such Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The off-the-wall premise of The New Girlfriend could have been one adapted by Pedro Almodóvar. After married woman Claire’s close childhood friend dies, she gives an undertaking to look after the widowed father David and the couple’s daughter, to whom she is godmother. While keeping her promise, she accidentally discovers he is a secret transvestite – David says his wife knew of this. Claire helps him into the outside world in his female persona (which she names Virginia), learns the reasons for the cross-dressing, falls for him in his female guise and, in the process, discovers she isn’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Randolph Scott had ridden long in the saddle before Budd Boetticher directed him as a driven loner with a painful past in the six harsh “Ranown Cycle” Westerns (1956-60). His apprenticeship began with ten 1930s Zane Grey oaters, mostly made by Henry Hathaway, and concluded with the B-Westerns he starred in for Edwin L. Marin and André de Toth after World War II. Marin’s rousing Abilene Town (1946), newly released on Blu-ray, augured Scott’s becoming a genre icon.Though it lacks the melancholy poetry of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (also 1946), Marin’s Western similarly evokes postwar Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Any consideration of Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain will inevitably be through the prism of how it was made, and the director’s current position in his native country. It’s his second work, after This Is Not a Film from 2011, to be made despite the 2010 prohibition from the Iranian authorities that (along with a range of other curtailments of his freedom) the director should not engage in cinema for a period of 20 years.It’s rather more ambitious – though not in terms of its setting, the interiors of a single house on the shore of the Caspian – than the relatively simple Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Cartel Land opens with a group of crystal meth cooks at work somewhere in the dead-of-night Mexican wilderness. They boast about the quality of their goods: they have the best production equipment, and were even taught their expertise by a visiting American father-and-son team. They know the harm their drugs do, but what, they ask, are they going to do? They come from poverty. If life had gone another way, “We would be like you.”Matthew Heineman’s powerful documentary challenges our assumptions of loyalty – like you, like us? – as well as of good and evil. What happens when people rebel Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not even the Altman, charted that relation with quite as much complexity and ferocity as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which no-one emerges well from the class struggle.Written in 1888, the play represented Strindberg’s attempt to bring a new degree of naturalism to theatre. Its style and psychological acuity lend itself well to cinema; though being a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg specialises in claustrophobic, asphyxiating atmospheres, from his breakthrough family abuse tale Festen to the more recent study of small-town paranoia, The Hunt. Moving from domestic close-up to the Wessex wide shots and cosmic panoramas of Thomas Hardy, there’s a grinding of gears, and choosing Far From The Madding Crowd as his Hardy debut, when John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation is so revered, seems provocative.The Wessex countryside comes across as postcard-pretty rather than awesome and bleakVinterberg has cast well, and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I can hardly be cross with something that happened before we existed.” Andrew Haigh is a two-hand specialist intrigued by the space between lovers. His much praised debut Weekend told of two young homosexuals getting to know each other on a Saturday and a Sunday. In 45 Years, based on a story by David Constantine, he has shuffled the deck. The question of retrospective jealousy is the spark for a quietly devastating portrait of two old heterosexuals getting to unknow each other between a Monday and a Friday.Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play Kate and Geoff Mercer, in whose apparently Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any film about a series of real-life unsolved murders is ready to be tagged as exploitation. With The Town That Dreaded Sundown, the waters are muddied as it draws on a 1976 proto-slasher film of the same name which luridly retold the true story of killings which took place in the Arkansas-Texas border-straddling town of Texarkana in 1946. It features a murderer recreating the Seventies film in the present day while also revisiting the 1940's crimes.A meta-take on exploitation, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is not only a sequel but also includes sequences from its inspiration and seeks to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
En Équilibre addresses the impact of disabling and irreparable injury, thwarted ambitions, the questionable practices of insurers, and the connection between two dissimilar, yet both frustrated, characters. Despite its different strands, the film adeptly draws them together into a coherent and unexpectedly enthralling whole.The director of En Équilibre (In Harmony) is Denis Dercourt. His benchmark film The Page Turner (2006) echoes through En Équilibre. Both feature a female would-be concert pianist who has ended up in a job which frustrates (at a solicitors rather than, in En Équilibre, an Read more ...