Film
Karen Krizanovich
As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story of Eugene Allen, Daniels' approach is straightforward and highly emotive. There’s plenty for the crowd here, and, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, the fact that The Butler is accessible across almost every demographic will get its message through to those who need to see it - those who maybe wouldn't see it if it were, say, art house. In some Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The revitalisation of interest in films and TV dramas immersed in British folklore has seen the BFI issue Here's a Health to the Barley Mow, which is a 2011 DVD compilation of poetic documentaries going back a century, and last year's discs of the classic 1970s BBC ghost stories. This year's cinema releases of A Field in England and the restored The Wicker Man are now followed by the BFI DVD Robin Redbreast (1970), written by John Bowen and directed by James McTaggart for the BBC anthology series "Play for Today".It strongly anticipates The Wicker Man in its story of an outsider trapped Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
With his debut as a writer/director, the cute, cuddly, only-one-down-from-Gosling star Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes to bat against cold, casual sex and hits one into the mid-field for meaningful sex - even possibly older-woman sex - in Don Jon. This drama-comedy about compulsive sex and porn addiction is an uneven, bouncy story featuring characters that are admittedly stereotypes, but a storyline that could be a little too close to the truth for many and a wonderful scenario of a well-rounded life… that is headed to failure.Will she catch him making love to his laptop? Gordon-Levitt stars Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Raw fear is horror’s ideal state. The vertiginous drop through a trapdoor into primordial, gasping helplessness usually only lasts for the split-second length of a cinema-seat jolt. Jeremy Lovering’s debut aims to scare us for much longer. Unusually, he wanted to scare his actors too, feeding them just enough script to get by as they filmed on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor (standing in for rural Ireland) at night, and he threw shocks at them out of the dark. Fear is his theme and method.The set-up is brutally simple. Tom (Iain De Caestecker) surprises new girlfriend Lucy (Alice Englert) with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The team behind The East also created 2011’s stunning Sound of my Voice, which scrutinised an enigmatic cult with a charismatic leader. It was going to be tough act to follow. The East has many of the same elements: a secretive cult with a charismatic leader on a mission; co-writer Brit Marling in a lead role and weird, unexplained semi-ritualistic behaviour. Unfortunately, The East is a halfway house of compromises, tropes and characters following well-worn emotional arcs. Unlike Sound of my Voice, the film does not surrender itself to the world it depicts.Marling plays Jane, an employee of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? The answer is on often grievous yet ultimately heartening view in How To Survive A Plague, David France's immensely stirring chronicle of the activism - spawned in New York and then spun out elsewhere - that accompanied the first decade or more of the AIDS crisis. Nominated this year for an Oscar, journalist France's thoroughgoing record of events at first stirs Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
As a director, Alfonso Cuarón is a stickler. In his renowned Children of Men, he sought to dismantle cinema, to break down the glass wall between audience and content by making the film more like a live event. To a great extent, he succeeded, opening with a 17 minute continuous take and, later, using the expertise of Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski (known as Chivo), he would fashion takes of stunning length and complexity. No wonder that his next film, Gravity, took over four years to make: he needed to top his last one.So he has. Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Read more ...
David Nice
We’re in a Tokyo bar. As the first of two fixed cameras dominating the opening quarter of an hour gives a selective picture, a girl’s voice is heard offscreen remonstrating on her mobile with a pathologically jealous fiancé. The situation comes slowly into focus: the girl, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), is being compelled as a top-end call-girl to visit a client. Though some of the trajectory is what we think, or fear, it might be, many of the outcomes are far from expected.The symmetry is as carefully observed as everything else in this piece of genius filmmaking. There are only three main indoor Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Feature films about ballet are rarities - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the red eyes and OTT fantasies? Black Swan became an instant world hit on the strength of its purple take on showbiz (never mind it was packaged in a ballet scenario, this was more a riproaring horror story). Love Tomorrow is altogether something else. Like Black Swan it isn't really about ballet as such - that's simply the setting for a delicate, elusive romance-cum-friendship between two dancers, both facing a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One might think that of all the national cinemas, the one that least needs its own festival in the UK is the French; after all, Gallic fare has a better showing here than most foreign language films.That said, distribution-wise it’s a large slice of a tiny pie. And with 30 new films, the 21st edition of the French Film Festival offers a glimpse of the breadth of French cinema that isn’t always apparent from general releases. For Francophiles in London, Warwick and a handful of Scottish cities, the next month promises quite a boon.The festival opens with the first live action film by Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The 65th Cannes film festival acts as the backdrop for this compelling, if somewhat misguided documentary from James Toback. Accompanied by Alec Baldwin, Toback sets out to shame Hollywood for its decision to continually churn out megabuck franchises and mediocrity rather than investing in risky, original cinema as the pair try to get funding for their own film project.From the outset their plan to reinterpret Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (set in Iraq starring Alec Baldwin and Neve Campbell) is questionable; is this a real project, or are they simply trying to provoke a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), Read more ...