Film
Matt Wolf
If ever an Oscar ceremony pointed to the fundamentally schizoid nature these days of Hollywood’s defining love-in, the 86th annual Academy Awards was it. On the one hand, you had an out-gay host in Ellen DeGeneres taking selfies, ordering pizza, and generally trying to treat the crowd at the Dolby auditorium as an extension of her own funky, vaguely edgy persona.On the other, you had a running theme about heroism in the movies that landed as limply as leading actor Matthew McConaughey’s cringe-making acceptance speech, an extended paean to God and to the actor himself that seemed utterly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's the astonishing thing about the 2014 Oscars: for the first time in memory, there are actually three or four nominees that - dare one say it? - actually merit consideration as the year's best. Is this because films are actually getting better? That seems a perverse argument to make amid a climate when so much talent is migrating away from cinema towards TV or even the stage (Steven Soderbergh, for instance, who is in rehearsals with a play Off Broadway). But quite possibly as the tentpole franchises get increasingly generic, their opposite numbers are flourishing, as well, so that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For those who haven't seen it, the funny face of the title belongs to Audrey Hepburn. As preposterous as that seems for someone so iconically gorgeous and although when others fail to notice her beauty it seems insane, Hepburn was famously insecure, so when her character Jo Stockton says, "I have no illusions about my looks, I think my face is funny" it doesn't sound insincere.The ravishing, Technicolor-ed Funny Face sees an independent woman turned into a bride, an intellectual transformed into an obedient beauty. Hepburn plays Jo, an employee of a "sinister" Greenwich Village bookstore Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“Follow the instructions."David Lean’s suggestion to a costume designer shows the importance of the script – a film’s “recipe”. This is why the Oscar categories for Best Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay are so important: without great bones, we'd have nothing good to watch.In the second part of our Oscars preview, here are our predictions and picks for the screenplay gongs, alongside our look at the scene-stealers in the supporting acting categories.ADAPTED SCREENPLAYIn the Adapted Screenplay category, the leading nominee is, as expected, John Ridley’s superb script for 12 Years a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At some point during Non-Stop - a mostly serviceable though increasingly nuts peril-on-a-plane movie - I began to doubt that Liam Neeson had ever had a credible career. Recently we've seen him starring in assorted nonsense such as Battleship and Wrath of the Titans and if you go back a few years you'll recall him looking bored in The Phantom Menace. But what we've gotten particularly used to is Neeson as the middle-aged action man, the skull cruncher from the pretty hideous Taken movies. There might have been a time when we thought he was elevating such films with his presence, but I think Read more ...
David Nice
Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There aren’t many understated films about cannibal clans. Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, the Mexican original on which this American remake is based, reeked of despair and depravity, in a tainted Mexico City where a family fed on the homeless. Director Jim Mickle has almost inevitably made a sleaker, less disturbing film. More surprising is just how slow a burn it is. We know something is wrong with the Parkers: mother Emma (Kassie De Paiva), who falls down and dies hawking up black blood in the first scene, stern, grieving patriarch Frank (Bill Sage), teenage daughters Rose (Julia Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Is it just me or are the Oscars getting better? I don't necessarily mean the show itself, rather the films selected for nomination and the eventual winners. In recent years we've seen films as brilliant and diverse as The Artist, The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men take the top prize. And whilst The King's Speech, Slumdog Millionaire and Argo might have been crowd pleasers, they were also finely crafted and help banish memories of seeing Chicago, A Beautiful Mind and Crash crowned, or Forrest Gump trumping Pulp Fiction and Titanic sinking everything in sight.This year's nominees Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Basil Barrow (John Mills) is a proud, repressed, upper-class lieutenant colonel who was traumatized by his experiences in a Japanese POW camp. Shortly after the war, he fulfils his ambition by taking command of the Scottish battalion once led by his grandfather. When his by-the-book methods are ignored, his stiff upper lip doesn't quiver, but one of his eyes twitches dementedly and his head looks as if it it might burst, like a plum. Mills was able to twitch that eye at will.The cause of Barrow's apoplexy is the acting colonel he has replaced, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness), a coarse, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from Markus Zusak's bestseller, director Brian Percival's movie is well cast and brimming with good intentions, but it's too long, too safe and too uneventful to do justice to its subject matter. The story charts the rise of Nazi Germany through the eyes of Liesel Meminger and her adoptive parents the Hubermanns, but the horrors are sanitised and the anticipated emotional punch is never delivered.The Hubermanns are struggling to make ends meet, and have adopted Liesel (luminously played by adolescent Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse) because state funding is available to foster parents Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What's happening here?" Jennifer Connelly asks somewhere near the not-a-moment-too-soon ending of A New York Winter's Tale, a question filmgoers will have been muttering from pretty much the first frame. Not long after, Connelly lets rip with "this is crazy", a sentiment similarly likely to strike home with that hapless few who find themselves at this magical-realist foray into psychobabble and soap suds. Writer-director-producer Akiva Goldsman may have won an Oscar for scripting A Beautiful Mind (Connelly got her own trophy for that one), but his directorial debut has eventual triumph at Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Over many months, the release of stills and teaser trailers from Nymphomania, as well as the poster showing the faces of its stars (presumably) faking orgasms, have maximized press speculation on the nature of Lars von Trier's hardcore-laced saga about the life of a female sex addict.Would it be a garden of delights, earthly and unearthly? Would it be to 21st century global culture what the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover was to British society in 1960? Would it be yet another film made by the provoking Dane, in the misogynistic spirit of Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville Read more ...