Film
Matt Wolf
The oldies are back at Jaipur's Marigold Hotel and they're looking like goodies, too, thanks to a British dame or two and an Ol Parker script that knows when to leave off the breeziness and let the occasional intimation of mortality hold sway. And in a celluloid landscape plagued by sequelitis, the fact that a collective of British pensioners and their newfound Indian chums have been brought back for more is itself rather bracing compared to the usual spate of avengers, transformers or what not that keep most film franchises going.The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel's 2012 predecessor Read more ...
David Nice
Nothing pinpoints the Oscars' absurdity more than the absences of Mike Leigh’s masterpiece as Best Film candidate, of Timothy Spall from the Best Actor list - New York and London critics as well as Cannes made some amends – and even of Marion Bailey, Leigh’s partner, from the nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Spall fulfils the promise of his King Lear moment in Secrets and Lies as the artist described by Leigh as a "complex, curmudgeonly, convoluted character".Tenacious Dickensian dialogue – surely not all improvised, Leigh-style? – allows Spall to shine or appal in love, bereavement, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With a similar title to Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, White God, too, is an allegory on racism with a canine slant. Where the 1982 film centred on a dog trained to attack black people, Kornél Mundruczó’s film is set in a Hungary where mixed-breed dogs are rounded up and sent to pounds. An edict from a government which is neither mentioned specifically nor seen, permits only pure “Hungarian” breeds. Mutts have to be reported.In the main, society appears to accept this. Dog catchers in white vans roam Budapest’s streets to round up the forbidden mongrels. Neighbours report on each other if they Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. With his chilling follow-up Mitchell goes full horror, presenting us with a STH: a sexually transmitted haunting.It Follows updates Halloween's suburban horror story – where the adults disappear, leaving Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We have been doing sex” is Flora and Miles’s answer when housekeeper Miss Jessel asks what they are up to. The brother and sister have seemingly been violently attacking each other on a bed. The inspiration is gardener Peter Quint’s interactions with their governess Miss Jessel: Miles has been spying on them. The Nightcomers sought to provide the backstory for Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and, in so doing, explain the torments in the novella.While doing this unnecessary job, 1971’s The Nightcomers also tried to shock. Quint is played by Marlon Brando with a laughable Irish accent and a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I hope someone by now has told Neil Patrick Harris how to pronounce David Oyelowo’s surname, but if anyone wants to see how not to host an Oscars, Harris’s stewardship of the 87th annual Academy Awards can provide that service in spades.Sure, there were a few surprises in the final stretch of this year’s ceremony, including the triumphant 11th-hour trifecta achieved by Birdman, which swept best picture, director, and original screenplay, all at the expense of its closest rival, Boyhood. Indeed, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s extravagant fantasia was stopped in its tracks in the last half-hour Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At last, it’s here – the female-friendly BDSM movie that no grownups should restrain themselves from seeing. The one with the designer clothes and kinky accoutrements. The one with the “special” room for thrilling punishments. The one unafflicted by Christian Grey and his assorted neuroses.Aside from the brown and orange fritillary of its title and various unnamed butterflies and moths, there are no males at all in The Duke of Burgundy, writer-director Peter Strickland’s drily witty homage to the stylistically ambitious 1970s Euro-erotica of directors like Jesús Franco and Jean Rollin. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Blood Brothers" is the title of the featurette included with this DVD. It tells how Brad Pitt and his fellow cast-members learned what it felt like to be the crew of a World War Two tank – Fury is the name painted on the gun of their battle-scarred Sherman – thanks to some hard-slog dawn-to-dusk training and conversations with 90-year-old veterans of the US 2nd Armored Division. The actors (including Shia LeBeouf, Jon Bernthal and Michael Peña) seem sincere as they describe how the experience gave them some insight into the true nature of warfare, and blood brothers is what they felt like Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Jennifer Aniston changes pace without changing any fundamental perception of her skills in Cake, the austerely self-admiring new film that finds the onetime Friends star playing a none-too-friendly sufferer from chronic pain. Adopting a halting walk and clenched demeanour and delivering the majority of her lines with a gallows-humour mordancy that quickly palls, Aniston tackles the part head-on in a putative bid for the kind of career about-face Oscar glory that led Charlize Theron to the podium some years back in Monster. No such luck on this occasion: Aniston wasn't even nominated. But Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I went into watching Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Maidan with the highest hopes, and came out, more than two hours later, cold. For a film about a successful national liberation movement, that’s something of a paradox.It’s titled, of course, after Kiev’s Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the centre point of the Ukrainian revolution that saw huge public gatherings from December 2013 through February of last year which culminated with then president Viktor Yanukovych fleeing first his capital city on 22 February 2014 and a few days later his country (he remains in Russia today). A Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Wild River blurs documentary and fiction, tackles racism and segregation in America’s south, addresses the predicaments of little people coming face to face with the will of a behemoth of a government, considers the nature of progress and – maybe a minor concern in the light of these – is also an against-the-odds romance. If all that weren’t enough, it was seen in cinemas in über-panoramic CinemaScope. Wild River was ambitious.Released in 1960, Wild River was the last film Elia Kazan made while under contract to Twentieth Century Fox and followed 1957’s sly satire A Face In the Crowd. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Michael Mann, the director of the monumental crime epic Heat and the original and best Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter, this lumbering saga of cyberhacking is really rather disappointing. Not that it doesn't include several torrid action sequences in exotic locations, while the basic theme is at least urgently topical. It's just that there's little evidence that the project fired Mann's imagination, or inspired him to breathe plausible life into his characters.The set-up is as widescreen as you could wish. A nuclear plant in China is sabotaged by an unknown hacker (Mann makes sure we get Read more ...