Film
Kieron Tyler
Amsterdam is in ashes. The Vatican City has been wiped off the map. Abandoned cars litter Trafalgar Square. The National Gallery has become the base camp for an arms-dealing Major. It’s a bad time alright, yet a group of people aren’t fussed about that. Instead, they are exercised by the death of the father of Jerry Cornelius. Dad had a formula, a computer programme they’re seeking. It’s the final programme. A programme which will create a super-human.This adaptation of the Michael Moorcock science fiction-adventure book of the same name was released in 1973. It was retitled The Last Days of Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It's dueling stars when Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson go quite delightfully toe-to-toe as Walt Disney vs P L Travers, author of Mary Poppins, in Saving Mr Banks, the closing film of the London Film Festival 2013. The title suggests the Russian doll-like nature of the story – a story within a story wrapped in an enigma, with seriously fabulous hair and make-up turning both Hanks and Thompson into characters you can almost completely believe in.Travers is a total pain who would rather starve to death in her rather nice London pad than go to Hollywood where someone (Disney no less) wants to film Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Common sense indicates it’s a rare film which retains the impact it had on first exposure. Films can often reveal new depths and fresh detail with repeated viewing, but that initial effect is tough to duplicate. This new release of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens actually captures the thrill of the first-time experience. Partly, that’s due to the extraordinary restoration. It’s also because experiencing the film in the cinema is utterly unlike seeing it at home.Nosferatu should be experienced before a screen in darkness, with the film flooding your senses. It is a powerful, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of this year’s Oscar contenders, Lincoln, covered the ending of the American Civil War as it played out in the comfortable confines of the Capitol. 12 Years a Slave, an exceptional film that will surely be in the running next year, reveals the “fearful ill” that set the country alight in the first place.It’s based on a true story that is shocking even for antebellum America, of a free man from upstate New York, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Compared to Steve McQueen’s previous films, Hunger and Shame, the narrative style is conventional Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Jim Jarmusch's characters have always been ineffably cool, whether the slackers of Stranger than Paradise, the accountant lost in the Wild West of Dead Man, or the hit man with samurai pretensions of Ghost Dog. It goes without saying that if he makes a film about vampires, they’ll be dripping with style.From the opening sequence of Only Lovers Left Alive – a spinning camera peering down upon the lounging, elegantly clad, pre-Raphaelite figures of Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston – this gently satiric vampire film has us in a seductive grasp. Adam and Eve are a married couple who, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Earlier this year we saw Tobias Lindstrom's A Hijacking, a Danish-made thriller based on true events, about a freighter hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Featuring familiar faces from Borgen and The Killing, the film skipped the part where the vessel was seized, and focused on the excruciating and seemingly infinite negotiations between the hijackers and the shipping company in Copenhagen. Harrowing and claustrophobic, it evoked the sufferings of the crew incarcerated below decks while businessmen calculated what value they could afford to ascribe to their lives.But Hollywood Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation was a marriage of drama, melodrama and social observation that was beyond compare; it’s expecting too much of his new film to equal it. That said, The Past confirms that few can match the Iranian's attention to the psychological minutiae of family relationships. It's riveting.An Iranian, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris to sign divorce papers with his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo), four years after their separation. The couple have an easy rapport, with no evident rancour, and Ahmad gets on well with Marie’s daughters from an earlier Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ground-breaking though it is as one of the first gay films to come out of Poland, Tomasz Wasilewski’s Floating Skyscrapers brings home how happy endings on such subjects are hardly to be hoped for in the conservative, Catholic country. Wasilewski’s second feature has real visual style though, with laconic imagery and accomplished performances. It has garnered plentiful festival acclaim already, and opens in the UK in December.It’s set in an anonymous-feeling city of underpasses and motorways, a largely dark world where interiors are cramped, like the flat that Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk, below Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
James Gandolfini stars as an overweight charmer in the best romantic comedy of the year, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money). As Albert, Gandolfini – it's one of his last roles, in a film dedicated to “Jim” – brings all his warmth and allure to bear on lively divorced masseuse Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).When the two meet at an LA party they’re so adorable that we instantly want them to become a couple. At the same party, however, ominous tones reverberate as Eva also meets the fabulous poet Marianne (Catherine Keener). Not only is Marianne fascinating, she mesmerises Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Naomi Watts’s rare misstep with Diana is forgotten as this playfully provocative tale of female friendship and forbidden love unfolds. It’s an equally rare return to Australia for Watts, who plays Lil, whose deep childhood bond with Roz (Robin Wright) lasts into middle-age, as their respective teenage sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) join them in an idyllic life spent roaming freely between neighbouring beach-side homes. The ad hoc family’s laissez-faire attitudes are taken to extremes when Ian and Tom, both strapping 18-year-old Adonises, end up having sex with each other Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating and touched with despair, as Moodysson confronted how truly terrible lives can be.We Are the Best! is, in startling contrast, about a pair of 13-year-old punk schoolgirls in Eighties Stockholm, and fizzes with wide-eyed idealism. Based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel, Moodysson lets his young actresses Mira Barkhammer (as introspective Bobo) and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's been nine years since Jonathan Glazer's last film, the courageous and underrated Birth. If that film had its moments of audacity then Under the Skin - an adaptation of Michel Faber's gloriously revolting novel - is a real feast of filmmaking flair, which elevates its director to the rank of auteur. Glazer resists the book's explanations, and ultimately its message, in favour of something more intriguing and unsettlingly ambiguous. At the centre of this cinematic cyclone is Scarlett Johansson, who's not only got the requisite visual va-va-voom but who turns in a performance up there with Read more ...