Film
Graham Fuller
Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled character reminded me of the power often exerted by songs explicitly or implicitly germane to a movie's narrative. They tend to have far greater resonance than songs added during post-production to build atmosphere, stoke emotions, or sell soundtrack albums, not that there aren't stirring examples of extra-diegetic songs: Tex Ritter's "The Ballad of High Noon", "The Windmills of Your Mind" in the 1968 The Thomas Crown Affair, "I Wanna Be Adored" in Welcome to Sarajevo, and "Skyfall", to name four Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Raoul Walsh's 1941 High Sierra, a late entry in the Warner Bros gangster cycle, made Humphrey Bogart a star. It was adapted by John Huston from the novel by WR Burnett, who was also the author of Little Caesar and one of Scarface's screenwriters. A fatalistic character study of a Dillinger-like bankrobber with a craving for domestic bliss, the film indicates that human striving is a fool's errand. It thus augurs film noir – notwithstanding Tony Gaudio's gleaming black-and-white outdoors cinematography (surely influenced by Ansel Adams). Huston and Bogart's next collaboration, The Maltese Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're going to make a film whose title mocks a particular tone of voice, it helps to have a voice of your own. And that turns out to be one of the many hugely beguiling aspects of In A World ... , the actress Lake Bell's first film trebling as writer-director after years playing goofball also-rans in films starring the likes of Meryl Streep. A wry look at Hollywood and the (sometimes) wonderfully whacked-out people who inhabit it, the venture takes its name from the doomily spoken opening words beloved (or not) of movie trailers. How lovely, then, that Bell's own achievement heralds so Read more ...
David Benedict
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.To be fair, film composer Neil Brand was onto a winner since TV, the home of show and tell, is an ideal place in which to examine and explain exactly how music works with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the most mystifying of working relationships is that between an artist and model. For any sitter the experience must be tiring, if not tiresome, but for the artist their compliance is as integral as paint or clay; one may become famous, while the other remains anonymous, the silent partner in a work of art; there’s also the fact that, in the most common permutation, the arrangement involves a man staring for hours at a naked woman, without reproach – and where else can you find that? Well, filmmaking.The Artist and the Model is not the first film to explore the relationship, nor the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.Hunt v Lauda is one of motorsport's great fables, and many fans felt a queasy premonition of disaster on hearing about Howard's project, but it's pleasing to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, with its meditative visual beauty, but that one was very much the exception in the director’s oeuvre to date.Almost all Kim's other films have been marked by varying degrees Read more ...
Graham Fuller
How we look at and value art, the stuff we accumulate around us, and our daily surroundings; how we look at and communicate with each other (or avoid doing so in the digital age); and if we do or don't see: these are some of the themes explored in Museum Hours, an immersive docufiction made in Vienna by the experimental, socially progressive Brooklyn filmmaker Jem Cohen.Just as João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodrigues's The Last Time I Saw Macao investigates the former Portuguese colony via a thin neo-noir tale about a search for a gang-targeted drag queen, Museum Hours deploys a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Fall of Eagles, a 13-part series which combines history and lavish costume drama, was first broadcast in the same year as The World at War. But while one continues to be seen as landmark television 40 years after it hit our small screens, I vouch that few have heard of the BBC's Fall of Eagles. Both productions at any rate testify to a time when broadcasters were not afraid of length (Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews, currently on BBC Two, seems to defy what has become the usual three-part BBC format with its five episodes).Though half the length of The World at War, Thames Television's Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A sultry Scarlett Johansson picks up hitchhikers with a nefarious agenda; an astronaut that looks suspiciously like Sandra Bullock is cast out into space; a monstrous Michael Fassbender beats the man he keeps as his slave; Joseph Gordon-Levitt struggles to tear himself away from his porn; and vampire lovers Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are reunited. I think you'll agree that's quite a lot to take in on a Wednesday morning - and it's just for starters. These are some of the clips guests were treated to at the London Film Festival press launch, compered with genial elegance by Festival Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The question of what makes a romance click on screen – what combination of elements goes into creating that indefinable spark between two projected faces – is one of the most eternal for filmmakers. David Lowery’s wistful, lyrical neo-Western has just over 10 minutes to make you invest in doomed lovers Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) before fate and justice do them part, and succeeds with breathtaking ease.Their snatched moments together, like most of Lowery’s film, settle over you like half-remembered dreams, images that burrow deep into your subconscious and re-emerge Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The news that Richard Curtis will not direct any more films after About Time (which he also wrote) was met with sadness in some quarters and undisguised glee in others. Curtis co-wrote Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Mr Bean, created Comic Relief and is an all-round good egg, but none the less stirs up real venom in those who find his other creation, the modern British romcom, sickeningly sweet.Me, not so much, but then again I'm partial to a bit of schmaltz and any kind of four-wheel event on film – christening, wedding or funeral – will have me in tears before you can say Read more ...