Film
Kieron Tyler
It’s always irritating being told “you had to be there”. Even more irksome is when some author, film director or nostalgic creative decides to record – naturally, they “fictionalise” it – their contribution to some golden era or significant event for posterity. Whether they’re being truthful, bigging themselves up or playing fast and loose with history is beside the point. They’re saying they were there. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air is the French director and writer’s entry in the canon and, shockingly, it’s great.It’s great because Assayas has thoughtfully crafted a rich, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Neil Blomkamp’s got a thing for crafts. Spacecrafts, that is. With his first feature, District 9, alien ships hovered over Johannesburg in 1982. Now it’s 2154 and Elysium, a nirvana-like space station for the elite, floats in Earth’s orbit, using all the global resources and leaving the planet ravaged, polluted, riddled with crime and simply dreadful.Max (Matt Damon) is an ex-con gone straight. As a boy, he promised his childhood girlfriend Frey (Alice Braga) they too would live in Elysium. Of course, in the grown-up world, that’s impossible: they're only ordinary citizens. Making matters Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final words we see in subtitles in Ibrahim El Batout’s Winter of Discontent, a film centred on the events that began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January 2011 and would go on to change Egypt’s future, could not read more ominously today: “And counting…” They refer to the death toll in the popular uprising that would depose Hosni Mubarak, bringing a degree of freedom that Egypt had not known for 30 years. They assume new poignancy in the light of the recent events we have been watching on news reports from the country, 30 months on from those first protestations.But Winter… isn’t a film Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shot in Seventies throwback grainy-cam, Amanda Seyfried is superb as Linda Lovelace in the surprisingly entertaining biopic Lovelace. Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Bobby Cannavle, Hank Azaria, Chris Noth, Juno Temple and James Franco round out a dream cast.Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Howl) and written by Andy Bellin, it charts the harrowing rise of 1970s porn phenomenon Linda Lovelace from her Floridian girlhood as Linda Boreman through to her starring role in 1972’s big grossing adult film Deep Throat - said to have earned up to $600m on a production cost Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Cinema's unrivalled silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was influenced by Arthur Rackham's illustrations and by Chinese and Indonesian puppet theatre. Like her fellow German filmmaker Fritz Lang, she must have appreciated the intricacy and spite in Rackham's pictures. Those qualities abound in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surving animated feature and, at 65 minutes, the longest film Reininger made.It's a near-avant garde pastiche of Arabian Nights stories, primarily The Ebony Horse and the 18th-century addition Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp. Handsome Achmed is Read more ...
james.woodall
Feuchtgebiete has been the talk of Locarno. The word combines “damp” or “moist” with “areas” – yes, you might guess what’s coming. English-born, German-bred Charlotte Roche published in 2008 a novel of the same title, which became Wetlands in English. And as my mother’s reprimand of me and my brothers sniggering at what boys always snigger at went, “Will you please get your heads out of your pants…”The pants here are Helen’s (Carla Juri). She’s a hyper-imaginative teenager who can’t keep her mind off her fanny. She has bad haemorrhoids – don’t we just know that at the film’s start as she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wilfully perverse avant-hipster darling Harmony Korine has always teetered on the paper-thin border between vanguard edginess and trendy, emperor’s-new-clothes vapidity. His previous work, from the opening salvo of Kids, with Larry Clark, through various warped cinematic visions of a freakish American underclass, have set out to repel a wider audience. Spring Breakers, while equally determined to shock, is a change of pace. It has a cast that includes High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens and Bieber/Disney pop princess Selena Gomez, as well as Hollywood heavyweight James Franco, and revels in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s the women who keep things together in Umut Dağ’s debut feature Kuma, and you can see the weight of the burden that matriarch Fatma (Nihal G Koldas) has been carrying etched on her face. Fatma’s latest endeavour to preserve balance in her Vienna-based Turkish family goes further than before, and provides the first surprise in Dağ’s film.Opening with the colourful atmosphere of a village wedding in Turkey, we assume that Fatma and her husband Mustafa (Vedat Erincin, below right, with Koldas) have married off their good-looking son Hasan (Muruthan Muslu) to the innocently youthful country Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
With this sequel to director Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John S Romtia Jr, writer/director Jeff Wadlow has done his best to make Kick-Ass 2 into a two-part franchise. It certainly doesn’t help that its release date puts it into a piranha tank of action films with bigger budgets and ideas.Following on from the original, Mindy Macready (Chloe Grace Moretz - soon to be the new Carrie) is living with responsible surrogate father Marcus (Morris Chestnut), the best friend of her late crime-fighting father. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is no Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Sporting dreams and the Second World War are both bottomless narrative mines. German-Jewish high-jumper Gretel Bergmann’s attempt to compete in the German team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics unites these genres, but it’s no Hitler-era Chariots of Fire.Black American Jesse Owen’s Fuhrer-baiting victories are the ones we remember, but the injustice Bergmann suffered is equally symptomatic of the Reich’s early days, before its propaganda could be decisively driven home by dive-bombers and panzers. As Kaspar Heidelbach’s film begins, we find Bergmann (Karoline Herfurth) celebrating in a pub after Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"What do you call a bachelorette party without a bride?" asks maid-of-honour Regan (Kirsten Dunst). "Friday," comes her fellow hen’s deadpan response. In Bachelorette the bridesmaids lose the bride, tear up her dress and get trashed; these are high-school mean girls all grown up and, hey, they're just as mean as ever. Bachelorette is the spunky, spiky, sweary debut of writer-director Leslye Headland and appropriately it feels like a woman's work, albeit a woman proudly in touch with her inner bi-atch.The film begins with Becky (Rebel Wilson, pictured below) announcing that she's getting Read more ...