Film
Thomas H. Green
Within moments of World War Z beginning Piers Morgan is onscreen. Zombies, schmombies - this is surely the face of true horror. Where that smug mug blossoms, the apocalypse cannot be far behind. Morgan pops up among intercut US news-streams and media that open the film. This collage hints at eco-disaster before we settle into the everyday Philadelphia home life of Gerry and Karin Lane (Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos, who was the lead in the US remake of The Killing) and their two daughters. Gerry is a house-husband but, as we slowly find out, he used to be a superhero UN investigator. Before too Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Orgasms aside, it was When Harry Met Sally’s edict that sex always gets in the way of male-female friendships that hit home. Drinking Buddies comes to more nuanced conclusions, as we watch Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) steadily drink and comfortably banter during and after work at a Chicago micro-brewery, and wonder just when they’re going to leave their straitlaced partners, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick), pictured below. When a double-date weekend in the woods sees Kate strip off in front of Luke, and Jill dig into her rucksack’s wilderness gear for a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cornelia is 60 and increasingly frustrated with her 34-year-old son, Barbu. He doesn’t communicate with her, she doesn’t approve of his girlfriend and the way he leads his life. Convinced she has to take command of her immature son, she’s suddenly presented with an opportunity to exert control. The release of the Romanian film Child’s Pose in the same week as Gloria – the Chilean story of a 58-year-old woman making the most of life – is uncanny, as each offers a wildly different take on similar raw materials.Luminița Gheorghiu’s Cornelia has exacting standards which hardly anyone can match up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A film of contrasts, Short Term 12 manages to be simultaneously dark and humorous, casual yet intense. The relationships between staff and patients in the group home for troubled teenagers where it’s set – the facility is meant to be a place of refuge for up to a year, hence the title, though many stay longer – are both thick and thin, and as in the wedding vow must endure through difficult times. They’re thick because the bonds created when exploring the reservoirs of sadness that these kids bring along with them run so deep; thin, because the slightest alteration in mood risks disrupting Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Directed by a Frenchmen, Foxfire adapts an American book to create a film with an archetypical stance and setting which could rank it alongside The Outsiders, Stand by Me or even Rebel Without a Cause. The problem is that despite depicting a passionate, wayward and issue-fuelled gang, Foxfire is not animated enough. It unfolds in deliberate steps, like a stage play. The young women may be on fire, but the measured approach of the overlong film tempers their spirit.Foxfire - Confessions of a Girl Gang is Laurent Cantet’s rendering of the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name. It’s been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gloria is 58. Divorced 12 years earlier, she’s intent on living life. Her two children are grown up, she works in a characterless office and is open to almost anything. She’ll try cannabis, attends a class where instruction is given on releasing laughter and tackles yoga for the first time. Beyond keeping in touch with her son and daughter, her greatest efforts are directed towards her nightlife. On her own, Gloria goes to ballrooms, bars and nightclubs where she hopes to make a connection. Then, one evening, she encounters Rodolfo. His opening line is “are you always this happy?”Gloria could Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Schalcken the Painter looks like a documentary shot inside a Dutch Golden Age painting, out of whose black depths the Devil one day materialises. Taking the truly ghastly guise of the invincibly wealthy merchant Vanderhausen (John Justin), he buys Rose (Cheryl Kennedy) for his wife from the great Dutch painter Dou (Maurice Denham). Dou’s pupil Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde), though thinking himself in love with Rose, does nothing to save her, and as the years pass, ambition for his painting career (destined to be minor) and brothel visits replace his callow feelings for the girl. But neither she Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins. And perhaps even more importantly than that, whilst making her first film, the ingenious documentary The Arbor, Barnard encountered Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Though never really part of the country’s groundbreaking New Wave, František Vláčil was a Czech master who's best known for his films like Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, both complex historical works. His first feature The White Dove, which appeared at the very beginning of the momentous Sixties, is the exact opposite of those two large-scale movies: it's a small film of poetry and mystery, which has a fabular quality remote from any political dimension (very likely the reason why its production in 1960, a time of continuing censorship, was possible).The symbolic nature of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We have plenty to be paranoid about in the most surveilled country in the world. British contributions to the conspiracy thrillers that bloomed so fruitfully in the US around Watergate have, though, stayed slim. Maybe that’s one reason Closed Circuit’s extreme Secret Service behaviour in the aftermath of a bomb atrocity at London’s Borough market feels so fake.CIA agents snuffing out inconvenient people on city streets is cinematic second nature. MI5 hunting Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall’s high-powered barristers through Dalston back-alleys takes more swallowing. So does some of the dialogue in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With a hero who’s an aspiring actor and an ensemble of theatrical types trapped outside time as supporting cast, the staginess of Ferzan Ozpetek’s A Magnificent Haunting comes as little surprise. It makes for sometimes nicely camp overplaying, though the comedy that made the Turkish-born director’s latest film a hit in his adopted Italy doesn’t travel easily beyond borders. Some elements, including gay traces, transvestite cameos and females at nervous breakdown levels, hint at eccentric sensibilities akin to those of Pedro Almodóvar. But Haunting doesn’t aim to be edgy, settling instead for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.Tucked just inside the north-west Read more ...