Film
Tom Birchenough
Pawel Pawlikowski took a leap into the unknown with Ida. The reasons for advance box office scepticism were clear: the film was black and white, made in an old-fashioned ratio, in Polish (until then the director had only worked in English), and more than bleak in subject. But the risks have more than paid off: as the highest grossing Polish-language film in the US ever, Ida has proved his most commercially successful work to date.And critically, too, a category I suspect Pawlikowski is much more concerned with. It’s on the shortlist for next month’s European Film Awards in both best film and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
He was at home with screen newcomers like Dustin Hoffman and Cher and knew how to handle such old pros as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, while his stage work gave a leg up to then-unknowns Robert Redford and Whoopi Goldberg and he collaborated time and again with Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Mike Nichols was comfortable within the knockabout world of Monty Python, winning one of his nine Tony Awards for directing the musical Spamalot, a decade after he forsook the glitz of Broadway and Hollywood to make a rare acting appearance in the National Theatre premiere of the Wallace Shawn Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu), is a monumental film. Not merely in its scale – though at 196 minutes, it certainly clocks in on that front – but in its emotional heft.It’s like one of the great Russian novels, and in his seventh feature Ceylan shows the influence of that country’s culture more strongly than ever (remember the direct references to Andrei Tarkovsky in the wintry Istanbul of Uzak, his first prize-winner at Cannes back in 2003?).This time his script, as acknowledged in the film’s closing titles, is a loose Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clearly the makers of this delightful film from New Zealand have watched a lot of movies, as so many are neatly and obliquely referenced – Nosferatu, The Blair Witch Project, The Lost Boys, Grease, to name just a few - in a comic tale about a group of vampires in Wellington.It's spearheaded by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi – collaborators as performer and writer respectively in Flight of the Conchords - who write, direct and star in here, and are ably abetted by any number of their friends from New Zealand's thriving and deeply inter-connected arts community. It is, my Kiwi pals tell me, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Fortune, as a rule, does not favour Part Threes. Hollywood history is replete with sequels that outstrip their predecessors, but second sequels have an altogether patchier track record – for every Return of the King, there are five Spider-Man 3s.The Hunger Games’s third instalment has a lot of things stacked against it, from the cynical bifurcation of an already slow-paced story into two parts, to the fact that Mockingjay is by far the least loved of Suzanne Collins’ novel trilogy. It’s a prickly, bleak war story with no actual Hunger Games to speak of, its once gutsy heroine Katniss ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Taking inspiration from classic westerns even as it vigorously sets itself apart, The Homesman combines the taciturn and muscular with a feminist bent, and manages to be stirring and sweeping while also embracing the odd. It's a gorgeous, painfully sad tale of a man who's been nothing but a disappointment to himself and a woman constantly disappointed by others who, together, shepherd three lost souls on a desperately treacherous journey. This is the second directorial effort from actor Tommy Lee Jones who once again shows a keen grasp of the genre (his first film was also a western, The Read more ...
David Nice
If you have trouble grasping all the plot-lines of Fritz Lang’s 1928 silent thriller, fear not: they’re chimerical, existing only to display all the accoutrements of a spy-movie genre which Lang is credited with having launched. All paths lead to the sinister Lenin-Trotsky visage of master-spy Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, slickly transformed from his villainous roles in the Doctor Mabuse films and Metropolis). The essence is a love-triangle between him, the infinitely various Sonja Barnikowa of Gerda Maurus, Russian exile at his command, and “No. 326” as played by Willy Fritsch, who brushes up Read more ...
ellin.stein
James Brown has always been on my Desert Island Discs list, because, should despair threaten, his brand of propulsive funk could be guaranteed to make the castaway "Get Up Offa That Thing". But despite a compelling performance from Chadwick Boseman that vividly captures Brown’s blend of charisma, drive, self-absorption and business savvy, the film is short on Brown’s most defining characteristic – vitality. The result is a missed opportunity that ends up being good enough when it should be galvanizing.All the hallmarks of a modern musical master’s biopic – a booming genre – are there: the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
More frequently and accessibly than his fellow veteran directors of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff has captured the pandemonium wrought by Nazism – in in his Palme d’Or-sharing masterpiece The Tin Drum (1979), its quasi-sequel The Ogre (1996), and The Ninth Day (2004). Though Diplomacy, his latest World War II drama, threatens an unimaginable Götterdämmerung that never came to pass – Hitler’s willed devastation of Paris and its population – the tension it generates is undiluted.A movie dominated by talk in a hotel room, it creates indelible mental pictures of rubble mounds Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The world is getting hotter. Unbearably so. Along Fleet Street, the centre of British newspaper production, on-the-skids, drink-sodden Daily Express reporter Peter Stenning (a square-jawed Edward Judd) begins looking into the reasons for the change. With the help of his charismatic science editor Bill Maguire (a wonderful Leo McKern), he begins piecing things together – nuclear weapons testing has shifted the Earth’s axis. Even worse, the orbit has changed and a spiral towards the sun has begun. On his hunt for information, Stenning finds love in the arms of the beautiful Jeannie Craig (a Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
In keeping with his impressive body of work, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Steve James approaches the details of the life of film critic Roger Ebert with honesty and the utmost respect. James was granted unprecedented access to Ebert in the final stages of his life in December 2012, just after he had been admitted to hospital for a hip-bone fracture. Though James didn’t realise it at the time his celebration and documentation of the life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic also marked the last few months of Ebert's life. It is a raw, moving and fitting tribute to a passionate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.The piece opens with a voice-over in a whiny Brooklyn accent, as if we might be in Scorsese land or Sopranos world. It's a jolt to discover that the voice belongs, entirely plausibly, to the Read more ...