Film
Matt Wolf
The 2014 Oscar nominations are out, and many of the expected awards-season favourites will be popping yet another champagne cork tonight (or, given that the nods take place at 5.30 am in Los Angeles, maybe over breakfast). But even as Cate Blanchett, Bruce Dern, and Jared Leto toast the further kudos that continue to come their way, let's spare a thought for such hopefuls as Emma Thompson (Saving Mr Banks), Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips), and - most astonishingly - Robert Redford (All Is Lost), who lead the list of odds-on nominees who were left this morning at the starting gate.One wonders Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Filmmaking collective Radio Silence - who comprise Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who take on shared directorial duties for this film), Chad Villella and Justin Martinez (Devil's Due's executive producers) - shot to fame on the genre circuit in 2012 with the visceral and funny haunted-house sequence from found-footage anthology V/H/S. Presumably off the back of that they got a deal working with 20th Century Fox to make a feature-length horror film. Unfortunately, the final product is somewhat underwhelming, touted as the found-footage Rosemary’s Baby, Devil's Due lovingly pays Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It was Benjamin Franklin who said "money has never made man happy...the more of it one has the more one wants," and there is no shortage of examples of boundless greed and how an abundance of cash can upturn and empty lives. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, a former stockbroker convicted of fraud, The Wolf of Wall Street gives us one such example. This is Martin Scorsese's 23rd narrative feature and with it he proves that, at 71, he's inarguably still got it, with a flamboyantly immoral tale very much for and of our age, which is apparently the most effing foul-mouthed film in the Read more ...
David Nice
The dishonourable parents call each other "fucking headcase" and "asshole" in front of the child rather than "nasty horrid pig" and "your beastly papa", but the essence remains of Henry James’s social comedy with queasy undertones. As transplanted by directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel from late Victorian London to contemporary New York, six-year-old Maisie – she doesn’t age, as she does in the novel, for obvious reasons – is still the shuttlecock rebounding from one careless divorcee’s racket to the other’s.Since the fragments of dissolution and dishonour are seen entirely through Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Crystal Fairy (or to give it its full, original name Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012) is an endearing curio from odd-couple director and star Sebastián Silva and Michael Cera, who have teamed up for a double-bill of projects: the other one is the psychological thriller Magic Magic, currently scheduled for an April release. Silva describes Crystal Fairy as being about "the birth of compassion in someone's life"; it's a comedic drama, improvised by its cast and buoyed by character-sensitive direction and a pair of perfectly pitched, often squirm-inducing, performances.Silva is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Niko (Tom Schilling) just wants a decent cup of coffee. With this ambling excuse for motivation, he drifts through a day and night in Berlin, contriving to lose his girlfriend, driver’s license and college funding (Dad’s just discovered he dropped out two years ago). Coincidentally similar to Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, this black-and-white indie film about late-twentysomething urban ennui has touched a nerve in Germany, where it won six German Film Awards, as well as the European Film Awards’ European Discovery prize, and is still showing in Berlin a year after release.Writer-director Jan Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
“There’s not much more I can do in action apart from explode,” says Sylvester Stallone with a grin on his face on being asked about the next step in his career. Following a video montage of the sweaty, musclebound action heroes Stallone is adored for (minus any clips from Rhinestone, his musical collaboration with Dolly Parton), a jolly and reflective Stallone took to the London Palladium stage in sharp suit full of sage advice and revelations about his writing process. From the centre aisle of the Royal Circle, Sly looked fit and healthy and, thanks to the entire evening also being projected Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a wealth of stories in Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, a highly articulate, visually flamboyant and finally moving documentary journey around the wilder edges of the performance genre. Director Beth B, a veteran of New York’s experimental film world, followed her eight subjects over the course of some years, and allows each of them to speak for themselves with full honesty and considerable humour, while at the same time creating a fluid picture of this “immediate, honest and sometimes brutal art form,” as British artist Mat Fraser describes it.They come from a range of backgrounds, but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In one of the extras on the DVD release of Computer Chess, director Andrew Bujalski explains that the film came about after he realised how to marry two ideas which he had been conjuring with for a while: a then undeveloped interest in the period when computers were programmed to play chess, and a yen to make a film with vintage black-and-white video technology.An exercise then, Computer Chess is hardly about the film itself. Making it was a means to enact these ideas. It’s a knowingly meta film. It looks amazing and comes over as an authentic-seeming archive resurrection, with all who appear Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Some films quite rightly have awards glory etched into their DNA, and when the admirably uncompromising Steve McQueen announced that his next project, focussing on the subject of slavery, would feature that cast, only a fool would have bet against it collecting armfuls of prizes. Moreover, the brutality and societal impact of slavery has seldom been seen on screen; thus in the words of its director, 12 Years a Slave fills "a hole in the canvass of cinema".Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup (as told to David Wilson) and adapted for the screen by John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave sees an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The agony of war and of surviving it almost destroyed Eric Lomax. A British POW after the fall of Singapore who was put to work by the Japanese on the Burma Railway, he suffered brutal and prolonged torture, trauma he dealt with in subsequent decades by sealing it inside him, and plotting revenge on his abusers as he fell into troubled sleep. Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man describes this and the reconciliation with one of his captors which finally defined his life.The week after Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Jonathan Teplitzky’s film again shows a man’s extraordinary capacity for forgiveness Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sacrilege alert: half the films released in the cinema can almost as happily be seen on a smaller screen. Flatulent Hollywood comedies, low-budget domesic dramas, most romcoms, the oeuvre of Leigh and Loach. The Great Beauty is not one of those films. As it comes out on DVD, it is important to advise anyone contemplating a purchase that the cinema is, if at all possible, the place to see this magnificent love letter to Rome, la città eterna. But it may not be possible, which is why this DVD is still an essential purchase. And even if you’ve already had the pleasure, this is also a covetable Read more ...