Film
fisun.guner
Frances Ha has been likened most obviously to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, but the influence of French New Wave cinema, with films such as Godard’s Breathless, can also be seen. This very likeable and stylish film certainly captures the look and texture of both.But while Sam Levy’s black and white cinematography may not be a match for Gordon Willis’s stunning photography on Manhattan, the film’s New York location is just as key: as a wry study in aspiration and real estate, the film’s episodic narrative follows the impecunious Frances as she drifts through various apartments, her living Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History has been told in many ways on film, but Rithy Panh achieves something new, something unique and unsettling, in The Missing Picture. It’s the story of his native Cambodia, specifically the years from 1975, when the Khmer Rouge occupied the country's capital Pnomh Penh: driven by an ideology (a mixture of Marx and Rousseau, as it's described here) that sought to exterminate individuality in society, they created Democratic Kampuchea, an attempt at a new classless world that tried to do away with everything from the past, and killed a large part of the population in the process. It’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It took the last 16 years of Nelson Mandela’s life, almost to the day, to bring his autobiography to the screen. South African producer Anant Singh eventually handed Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to British director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson to make a film for international audiences. The iconic weight of a violent rebel who became a living saint can’t wholly be thrown off in this authorised (though freely made) biopic. It does, though, remind you that Nelson Mandela was very far from Mother Teresa. Rough and earthy struggle preceded his Robben Island refinement into Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)Writer-director Quentin Tarantino proves once again he’s a master filmmaker with this double Oscar-winning revenge drama which reinvents the Western for a modern audience. The central cast are all Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Upstream Colour charts the stages of a relationship. First, Kris is introduced as external forces impact on her, turning her life on its head. She then encounters Jeff. As they get to know each other, a medical crisis brings them closer together and they get married. They then realise these forces are affecting them both and are drawn towards a way of taking control by eradicating them. The film ends with them, and others also affected by what was out of their reach, taking charge of their own destiny.Upstream Colour (the film is actually titled Upstream Color and appears thus in its credits Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.So why have us film bods at theartsdesk plumped for a top 13 this year? Well, 13 is the number of TAD's film critics that voted in our end-of-year Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hollywood’s sexism and obsession with youth half-hobble this lunge for the grey dollar. In a cast seemingly assembled by birth certificate more than likely chemistry, 69-year-old Michael Douglas is playboy businessman Billy, whose Vegas stag weekend before marriage to a thirtyish beauty requires the presence of childhood pals Paddy (Robert De Niro, 70), Archie (Morgan Freeman, 76) and Sam (Kevin Kline, 66, pictured below).The four have mixed feelings as they ready their creaking bones for Sin City debauchery, and inevitable life lessons. Bored Kline’s wife sends him off with a condom and her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This progressively darkening Liverpool love story centres on scenes of sadomasochistic sex. Its 90 minutes divide neatly after 45, when Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) wrecks her relationship with Victor (Julian Morris) by carving his back with broken glass. But Kieran Evans’ feature debut is mostly gentler and sadder than that.The violence Kelly brings into the bedroom after she meets Victor at a club intensifies sex as a place of dangerous refuge from the outside world’s storms. When Kelly goes to her erratic mum’s for tea, she finds her violent ex-boyfriend there too; Victor’s happy-go- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Patchy but visual, actor/director Ben Stiller ignores the Hollywood motto of not remaking anything good to create an all-encompassing take on the daydreamer Walter Mitty.Stiller’s dramatic romantic comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is far from the beloved 1947 original starring Danny Kaye based on James Thurber’s magical short story of 1939. This glossy reboot written by Steven Conrad (Pursuit of Happyness) sees Stiller as Walter, an exceptional everyman (if there can be such a thing) whose life is spent in heroic daydreams as he copes with what he sees as a non-heroic life. Losing his Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Romania’s cinema renaissance continues with this Golden Bear-winning study of smothering mother-love and social division. Director Calin Peter Netzer sneaks in outrageous black comedy and unsettling emotion, as architect Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) has her 60th birthday spoiled when her son Barbu kills a working-class child while speeding through a village.As with Italy’s post-war cinema, Romania’s current films combine humanity and social purpose. Cornelia and her doctor sister-in-law know money and status can fix almost anything. They enter a police station puffed up with protective fur Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Going from a talky debut with Margin Call, J C Chandor plunges Robert Redford into the solitary, (virtually) silent sea. All Is Lost is Hemingway for now. As the story of a solitary sailor in a single-handed adventure in the Indian Ocean, metaphor and meaning abound. Unlike some heavy, worthy piece of obtuse art house, however, Chandor wrests a tense, puzzling dynamic from a situation that could go cold in another filmmaker’s hands.Redford once said that for all his work with the Sundance Festival, no one ever returned the favour and gave him a job – until now. Chandor, a laudable Sundance Read more ...
theartsdesk
We at The Arts Desk are as fond as the next person of swans-a-swimming, partridges and pear-trees, not to mention gold rings, but be honest: 'tis already the season to be jolly sick and tired of all those knee-jerk compilations of Slade, sleighbells and Celine Dion's "O Holy Night". Without wishing to audition for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s time to admit that not everything made in the name of Christmas is of the highest artistic merit. But, it turns out, there’s gold in them there hills – snow-capp'd, natch.Tireless champions of excellence that we are, we’ve raided our memory banks Read more ...