Film
Nick Hasted
Terry Gilliam’s career currently resembles Orson Welles’ declining years, and not just in both men’s seemingly impossible quests to finish a film of Don Quixote. Gilliam too is trying to work outside a Hollywood system that has tired of his maverick talent, finding himself in far-flung European corners with motley casts of famous friends and fans, doing him favours in the hope his old lightning will strike.The bad sort of stormy weather has, though, buffeted Gilliam since his greatly underestimated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 16 years ago. The Brothers Grimm, Tideland, The Man Who Killed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BFI this month posted a list of 10 great lesbian films. Recently released titles included wereThe Kids Are Alright, Tomboy and Break My Fall, but there was no place for Blue is the Warmest Colour. Time will tell whether Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner will still be celebrated in a couple of decades, but for now it feels like a Trojan horse for same-sex cinema.Yes there’s more lashings of fleshy, slap-up sex than in anything not by Lars Von Trier. But there is also something radically new for a portrait of young lovers flouting social orthodoxies: the film is blessedly light on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ten-year-old Ahlo is the energetic, cheeky, joyous centre of Kim Mordaunt’s drama The Rocket (Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo, main picture), which follows him through a series of challenges towards a triumphant and redeeming final act. That may sound like a familiar narrative arc, but it’s told with new freshness and considerable humour in the film, which is billed as the first ever to come out of Laos.Made in the Lao language, it’s set in the remote and strikingly beautiful landscapes of the small, cut-off South East Asian nation. The peasant life that we see there may be poor, but continues Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The history of computer games being turned into movies has not been a happy one (Max Payne, Battleship, Lara Croft), but the blockbusting Need for Speed car-racing franchise fares rather better. This movie version is of course simplistically plotted and completely ludicrous for almost every one of its 130 minutes. But the action is frantic and non-stop, the stunts are performed by stuntmen rather than computer software, and the cars are freakin' awesome.What's more, you have Aaron Paul in the lead role of Tobey Marshall, a poor boy from the nondescript blue collar town of Mt Kisco, New York Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There are more bizarre, horrific and unnervingly beautiful moments in Jonathan Glazer’s much delayed third film than in the rest of his star Scarlett Johansson’s career. The strap-line - Scarlett as an alien fatally seducing Scottish men - suggests bonkers B-movie elements which Under the Skin has its share of. But by abandoning the hoary s.f. back-story of the Michel Faber novel this adapts, Glazer has made a film which teeters on the edge of pretentious absurdity, and to its detractors falls in headlong; which is broken-backed, losing its way for crucial periods; but which is also memorably Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Destin Daniel Cretton’s SXSW-award-winning debut is optimistically feel-good, bathed in Californian sunshine and night-time neon. This helps the sometimes bitter medicine of the damaged lives at its foster home setting slip down without a murmur. Cretton used to work at a “short term 12” home (where the state puts children for up to a year) and sympathises with everyone here.Self-help platitudes are never far away in a place where everyone’s in therapy and on medication, but neither are rougher barbs to hook you. Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher Jr) lead a laid-back staff, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
300: Rise of an Empire is the follow-up to perhaps the most homoerotic film of all time, 300 - a film whose obsession with the well-lubricated muscularity of the male form was matched only by its unabashed exaltation of ultra-violence (rendered endlessly and often tediously in slow-mo). It was hardly high art or sound history, but it had aesthetic bravado and a certain logic, with the strangely sexy battles effectively evoking the Spartan idea of a glorious death. 300 was less swords and sandals, more pants and posturing and its sequel delivers (too) much of the same.The original's director Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nick Cave called this ferocious, blackly comic Outback nightmare “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence”. Lost and almost forgotten since its 1971 nomination for Cannes’ Palme D’Or, as a film of innately Australian fear and loathing it compares well with Wolf Creek. But this tale of a smug English teacher having his civilised skin torn off him in strips during an endless week in a purgatorial mining town is less of a pure “Oz-ploitation” film than that. Though unhinged and buffeted by savage psychological currents, it's also precisely calibrated by Canadian director Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Only connect!” might be the unexpected motto for this Hollywood Hills story – hard to call it a drama – from writer-director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway). Because the worlds coming into contact in Starlet could hardly be more different: think, albeit with a generous pinch of salt, Legally Blonde mixing with an unhappy singlular version of On Golden Pond.Jane, played by newcomer Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel, for what it’s worth) has transplanted, complete with her titular chihuahua, from Florida to the San Fernando Valley to pursue what we might assume will be studies. Though as the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The beautifully adorned Grand Budapest Hotel is not only home to the fastidious, foul-mouthed concierge Gustave H. and his bellboy and confidante Zero but to a myriad of other fantastic characters. This is director Wes Anderson's candy coloured ode to the art of storytelling, and his tribute to the actors he's collaborated with and strong friendships he's forged via his illustrious filmmaking career. Anderson's eighth film is a warming, welcoming and, of course, whimsical comedy caper which whizzes by at a break-neck pace and is gifted with his signature air of melancholy.This hotel is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Ealing Studios was known for comedy, but when it released Dead of Night in 1945, it unleashed on movie-goers the classic template of portmanteau horror for decades to come. The film comprises six tales – five supernatural stories and a framing narrative in which architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Jones) arrives at a country house, only to find he recognises not only the house and its rooms but everyone in it, as figures from half-remembered nightmares that slowly, inexorably come to life as each one embarks on a tale of the uncanny.This nightmarish, circular framing device is part of what gives Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may not have won the Best Picture Oscar, but Gravity's sack of gongs for cinematography, sound editing, original score and more was richly deserved, while Alfonso Cuarón's acute directorial vision brought its own reward. I was amazed by Gravity on first viewing, and watching it again on disc it's even better. I've always found the notion of travelling into the infinite freezing vacuum of space a horrifying prospect, and perhaps only Kubrick's 2001 can match Gravity in its ability to evoke its incomprehensible and unfeeling emptiness. However, were one forced to part company with terra Read more ...