Film
Emma Dibdin
There’s a whole genre’s worth of films that would be improved tenfold if they’d only focused on a different character, and it’s often possible to pinpoint a better candidate among the same film’s supporting cast. Zal Batmanglij’s undercover thriller The East focuses on Brit Marling as a former FBI agent who infiltrates an eco-anarchist group but (would you believe it) becomes sympathetic to their mission.Marling is a talented young writer and producer, having worked previously on surreal sci-fi Another Earth and cult drama Sound of My Voice, but in this instance the film would have benefited Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The youngest of the seven children officially fathered by 1908-16's liberal Prime Minister, the writer-director Anthony Asquith was a socialist who wore a blue boiler suit on the sets of his films. If that was a gesture of solidarity with his crew’s gaffers and grips and the British working class generally, it carries over into the second of his four silent films, Underground, a light romantic-triangle melodrama that morphs unexpectedly into a cruel thriller and culminates in a vertiginous chase.Asquith appears to pluck three of his four main characters at random from the hoi polloi packing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
People do the funniest things. Seth Rogen is not one of those people. Or not this week. An amiable enough graduate of Judd Apatow’s school of slackers, stoners and other bromantic under-achievers, Rogen has in his time swum upstream by industriously tossing off scripts. Pineapple Express and The Green Hornet told of his one-tracked interest in do-gooding beta males, and his latest project travels down the same road, all the way to the end. This Is The End rounds off a kind of loose trilogy celebrating slobby moral infantilism.Usually when Tinseltown imagines the apocalyptic obliteration of a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If the Nazis had remained in power, and the Holocaust been hushed up and excused, how might an SS officer feel in his autumn years about those slaughters in Belorussian clearings? What happens when the culture that demanded mass murder simply continues, and the murderers are treated as heroes, free to bask in their rewards for half a century?Such questions arise as, having been arrested whenever he tried to interview victims of Indonesia’s Sixties anti-Communist Terror (in which up to 2.5 million were killed with Western complicity), director Joshua Oppenheimer instead asked some of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and acclaimed for the likes of Sunrise, found himself in 1929. He came along with documentarist Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), but what had been planned as a joint project ended up as Murnau’s film; Flaherty shot the opening sequence (including the famous fisherman shot, below right), before handing over cinematography to Floyd Crosby, who Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion," writes Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace, and it's these words that open Stories We Tell, fellow Canadian Sarah Polley's fourth film. This is Polley's first documentary - although it hardly does it justice to call it that. It starts by telling a family story - a story Polley herself is indeed smack bang in the middle of - which requires her to be both director and detective, and presents her with the seemingly impossible task of distancing herself. Yet as it progresses Stories We Tell evolves into something Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Benjamin Wallfisch was born into an extraordinarily musical family. His father Raphael Wallfisch is a cellist of international repute and his grandmother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch would not be alive today had her cello not served as a refuge for her soul while she was an inmate at Auschwitz. Benjamin did not play the cello but instead graduated from piano to baton in pursuit and fulfillment of his musical passions.He also fell in love with the cinema and while watching ET take his leave of Elliot in the closing sequence of Steven Spielberg’s classic movie he realised how much of the emotion of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters. Brad Pitt's zombie flick - directed by Marc Quantum of Solace Forster - falls short all round, and makes the evolving characters and storylines of TV's The Walking Dead look positively Shakespearean by comparison.Spoilers are of course to be deplored, but the story here is so predictable that there's not a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lincoln was intended by Daniel Day-Lewis to reincarnate the face on Mount Rushmore: to give him sinew, sound and breath. This DVD’s extras show the film-makers’ efforts to help that process: real 19th-century clothing, accurate White House wallpaper and a jacket that hangs just right on Abe’s weary shoulders. “The words are the living part of him,” Day-Lewis explains, and the reedy voice he gives the folksy yet formal cadences in Tony Kushner’s screenplay sounds wryly resilient, and thin enough to snap in the buffeting winds of the Civil War’s climax. A yearning to relax, as he settles and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mobster roles have helped define many of America's greatest screen actors, from James Cagney to Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Thanks to his portrayal of Tony Soprano in HBO's TV masterpiece The Sopranos, James Gandolfini has made an unforgettable addition to their ranks.Though he has died, apparently of a heart attack, at the shockingly early age of 51, Gandolfini's performance across the six seasons of The Sopranos felt more like a piece of American folklore than a mere acting performance. Violent and thuggish yet also confused and conflicted, Tony Soprano was the all-powerful Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community. From its Italian title Io sono Li (I Am Li), we might have expected a subject based on more documentary strands involving the life of the film's eponymous Chinese immigrant heroine, who’s paying off an unquantified debt to those who arranged her journey to Italy by working in any job she's assigned, but Sigre’s film develops far beyond that towards human drama of the subtlest kind.Li mostly Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
All this beauty in continuum is almost an overdose. Terrence Malick’s remarkable The Tree of Life brought this controversial American filmmaker’s skills to the forefront so much so that he didn’t follow his past form and wait five or six years to make his next film: To The Wonder came hard on the heels of the winning Tree of Life and seems aimed to capitalize on the previous film’s popularity.Starring Ben Affleck as Neil, a man caught between two alluring women (Olga Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace and Oblivion, and Rachel McAdams, recently seen in Midnight in Paris), the story loosely Read more ...