Film
Nick Hasted
This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.Visual artists Forsyth and Pollard’s first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Haven’t we met before?” We hadn’t, but Stellan Skarsgård’s friendly greeting immediately sets the tone for an encounter which is so relaxed that thoughts of the explosive Nils, the quiet man who boils over in In Order of Disappearance, almost evaporate. How did this affable, chatty and thoughtful Swede become a man who kills repeatedly and so gruesomely on screen?Balancing this with his role as a world-weary banker in the recent Hector and the Search for Happiness and, less-recently as possible-dad Bill in the Mamma Mia! film as well as his recurrent portrayal of Dr. Erik Selvig in the Thor Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law is back in British cinemas 28 years after it joined Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in galvanising the embryonic American indie movement.The original catalyst was Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), an affectless account of a young Hungarian visitor (Eszter Balint) to Manhattan who short-circuits the hostility of her downtown slacker cousin (John Lurie) on their road trip with his friendlier gambling buddy (Richard Edson). The writer-director's second film, it led critics to re-mint words like "deadpan", "laconic", and " Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Other films have been and still will be released featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, since his death earlier this year. But A Most Wanted Man is the one that serves as the final testament to what’s been lost. Here is not just a final great performance, but a character one might otherwise have imagined revisiting.That character is Gunter Bachman, created by John Le Carré in his 2008 spy novel, who compares with George Smiley as a skilled and honourable spy, swimming against the tide of more treacherous peers.Bachman is the head of a highly secretive German counter-terrorism unit based in Hamburg Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s war in the world outside and much conflict at home in Norwegian director Eric Poppe’s A Thousand Times Good Night. The film is centred in every sense around the poised, taut performance of Juliette Binoche as war photographer Rebecca, whom we first encounter at work in Afghanistan, as she follows the detailed preparations of a female suicide-bomber being prepared for martyrdom. The opening minutes are extremely gripping cinema, quietly understated but no less powerful for that, and raise the question of whether Binoche’s character has stepped over a professional line.But it’s the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Buried deep in the final credits for theatre director Matthew Warchus's second feature film, Pride, is a shout-out to his late father for teaching his son the twin virtues of compassion and comedy. Both those qualities, as it happens, are on abundant display in this buoyant venture from Warchus fils which works on multiple levels, all of them richly engaging.In its broadest sense, the film reminds us that society works in different, often extraordinary ways, as is clear from this account of that period 30 years ago when the gay and mining communities came together to mutually enriching effect Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?Rasoulof has had plenty of problems with the regime in his native country over the years, including arrest back in 2010, in the same campaign that saw his fellow director Jafar Panahi imprisoned and later banned from working in cinema. Just as Panahi responded to those circumstances by working outside any official structures with his This Is Not a Film, so Rasoulof made Manuscripts…, which arrived at Cannes last year shrouded in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The release of a restored version of 1974’s Immoral Tales on Blu-ray raises inevitable and unavoidable issues: whether the film is pornography, art or arty pornography. Then, there’s the matter of whether its director Walerian Borowczyk was a misogynist; an objectifier of women. Consideration of its qualities as a film can be lost in such debate.Borowczyk (1923-2006) was working to the directive of his producer, who suggested he make a film to capitalise on France’s newly relaxed censorship laws. This had the added benefit of also, via its nudity and sexual themes, hopefully attracting more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The frozen north of Norway seems an unlikely spot for a Serbian drug gang to be operating alongside a local mob, but this is the world which snow-plough driver Nils meets head on when avenging the death of his son. Throw in larger-than-life characters, cartoonish but very strong violence and a beautiful snowy backdrop and the result is the Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, a revenge drama which doles out its thrills at a pace in total contrast to the bleak serenity of the landscape which defines this part of the world.This formula has been seen before, most notably in the Norwegian Read more ...
ellin.stein
Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the US Marines to high school, juvenile court, and the American Ballet Theater. His latest, At Berkeley, is an in-depth exploration of the University of California’s San Francisco Bay Area outpost (UC is made up of several self-contained component universities distributed across the state, with Berkeley the jewel in the crown).Expecting anyone who isn Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The newly restored, 111-minute cut of M is being screened 35 times during BFI Southbank's current Peter Lorre retrospective. One only has to see and hear Fritz Lang's first sound film once, however, to appreciate its undiminished power as a vision of a Germany teetering on the abyss less than three years before the Nazis took power.One of Lang's most meticulously calibrated films, it is ostensibly a docudramatic procedural thriller, albeit one with Expressionistic camera angles, shadowy compositions, and signifiers of madness (such as a bobbing arrow and a rotating spiral in a shop window) Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all, old folks like food, don’t they? Well, so do young people. Who doesn’t?The Hundred-Foot Journey is based on the novel by Richard C. Morais and screenplay written by Steven Knight (who wrote and directed the very good Locke with Tom Hardy), this is a filmic cuisine culture clash that benefits from a terrific cast and an alluring story. Shot as a Read more ...