Film
Kieron Tyler
Ryan Gosling throws a lot at his first film as director but Lost River is a sign he has found a single discipline which can accommodate many of his scattershot tendencies. He does not, though, find a place for his own musical output in the avowedly arty Lost River.Instead, Lost River is overflowing with overt and less-direct cinematic references which position it as Gosling’s love letter to film. Casting Barbara Steele evidences an appreciation of Italian and Euro-horror in general. George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face crops up. Sections of composer Johnny Jewel’s soundtrack music echo Goblin’ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, a connection highlighted on this DVD of Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation. Only the breezy style of the newsletter which keeps eight female friends from Vassar’s Class of ‘33 in touch bears real comparison. This is a broader saga about women’s experiences and ambitions in the years up to World War Two. It’s also an unexpected entry in Lumet’s great series of New York films, as these Manhattan wives, daughters, doctors and socialites grip as strongly as his more familiar male cops and lawyers, moving to the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"He's not evil, he's just young," we hear in passing in Noah Baumbach's wickedly funny film about the growing pains that affect us at every stage of life. That's to say that by any objective standard, the 40-something Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) aren't especially old, but they inhabit an entirely different sphere from Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), the deeply hip – and younger – New York couple who soon take over their lives. Will youth triumph over the seasoning of age, or will experience trump innocence? Such time-honoured questions are folded into a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Julie Christie ushered in the swinging sixties as Liz, the girl whom Billy (Tom Courtenay) loves but isn’t man enough to accompany to London in Billy Liar (1963); director John Schlesinger introduced her swinging her bag as she bounces along a Bradford street. Christie does exactly the same in London when Schlesinger introduces her as the grown-up Diana Scott in Darling (1965), now restored and re-released on DVD and Blu-ray for its 50th anniversary. (The original trailer is the disc’s sole extra.)Schlesinger, screenwriter Frederic Raphael and producer Joseph Janni must have asked, “What Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Russell Crowe, who has played more than his fair share of rugged action heroes, makes his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, a film in which he plays, you’ve guessed it, a rugged action hero. He is Joshua Connor, a farmer living in the Australian Outback in the early 1900s, who has an uncanny knack of finding water sources, enabling him to farm this otherwise arid landscape (beautifully shot by Andrew Lesnie).Actually, this isn’t a film about water-divining or the Outback; rather it’s about one man’s search for his three dead sons, who went off to the Great War together as part of the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ron Mann’s laid-back documentary about the career vicissitudes and family life of Robert Altman (1925-2006) takes its cue from the tone of the director’s films. It was Altman’s habit to observe his character’s crises, collapses, and deaths with the same evenness and lack of melodrama with which he observed their humdrum moments.Although there’s a powerful current of liberal anger in Altman’s work, at the core of it there’s an acceptance of the reality of Social Darwinism, manifested particularly in the American Way. Optimism goes hand in hand with opportunism, as demonstrated by a scene that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s no shame in being a jobbing actor, but you can’t help missing the Anthony Hopkins who dissected repression with definitive, painful finesse, back when he was great. The Human Stain (2003) is the last I’ve seen of that, amongst the last decade’s Norse gods, Greek generals and judges. His turn as kidnapped lager tycoon Freddy Heineken resembles one of Larry Olivier’s later, international pay-cheques – as a project if not role, Wild Geese 2 comes unwelcomely to mind.The story of Heineken’s 1983 kidnapping, 21 days of captivity, the paying of a then-record ransom and its strange aftermath Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rude Boy is a rotten film. Nonetheless it exerts an inexorable draw as it includes live footage of The Clash which is amongst the best of any rock group on stage. The performance of “Safe European Home”, caught on camera in July 1978, is white hot. That is, the performance as seen. The audio track was subsequently modified in a recording studio.Rude Boy is not a documentary. It is a confabulation which didn’t represent The Clash as they saw themselves – which was a crafted persona anyway. The band did not want it released, and even had badges emblazoned "I don’t want Rude Boy Clash film" made Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, nothing can prevent love blossoming. Sebastian’s second encounter with Andreas is punctuated by the latter vomiting after too much booze. It doesn’t put the brakes on the former’s growing passion for the leather-jacketed object of his affections. Soon, the pair are lovers despite Andreas declaring that he is not gay. He cannot resist Sebastian.The path of love often takes strange turns. In the Swedish film Something Must Break, the roadmap is ripped up. Sebastian (Saga Becker, pictured below right) is androgynous and gay: he is transgender. Although accepting of who he is, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lushly produced to within an inch of its pictorially ripe life, the new Disney/Kenneth Branagh live-action Cinderella couples swoony imagery with a cloying message about compassion. But all its pro forma qualities fall away as and when Cate Blanchett takes to the screen, the actress as beady-eyed as she is bristling – and Branagh's film that much the better for it.Playing the stepmother from hell who makes poor Cinderella's life a nightmare, the actress is all but heaven-sent within the context of a movie that desperately needs her bite. That the two-time Oscar winner also looks magnificent Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film of Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann was the Archers duo’s crazily ambitious attempt to create a synaesthetic magical realm abstracted from realism through an immersion in “total art” – music, dance, colour, design – in the austerity Britain of 1951. They triumphed with the magic, though only the individual viewer can say if he or she can “hear” Moira Shearer’s dragonfly dance or “see” soprano Ann Ayars’s aria.The Archers slightly altered and rearranged Jules Barbier’s libretto. Between acts in a Nuremberg performance by the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Six apocalyptic Argentine stories of revenge combine in this hugely enjoyable and extreme anthology. Producer Pedro Almodóvar must have been impressed by the perverse humour, and the lack of a handbrake as actions rocket out of control. Writer-director Damián Szifron is, though, the sole author of his characters’ nightmarish misfortunes.An aperitif involving the mysterious link between the passengers on a plane sets up a sequence of satisfying main courses, connected by characters who utterly lose it against their enemies. There’s the thuggish loan shark who stops by a roadside diner, and is Read more ...