Film
Jasper Rees
Cinema sometimes seems to have left the Age of Aquarius behind. The filmmakers who came of age in the Sixties have long since said what they needed to, and nowadays the decade’s evanescent aura feels confined to 50th anniversaries of the likes of Billy Liar and The Leopard. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air plunges us right back in as it which harks longingly back to the heady days of the soixante-huitards when apparently, for those who were there, it seemed possible the world could be fashioned anew.Assayas wasn’t quite there hurling bricks at the police at the Battle of the Sorbonne, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens takes its title from the Atlantic City Monopoly property, connoting the New Jersey resort’s then imminent future as a board game for real-estate developers. The conman Jason Staebler (Bruce Dern) acknowledges its status thus when his younger brother David (Jack Nicholson) arrives in town to bail him out of jail.Jason also imports David to persuade him to join in his fantastical scheme of acquiring and running a casino on an island north of Hawaii. David isn’t expected to invest in the deal, only to enjoy its fruits: the corrupt, cynical world of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
“Chronicle of a Summer” (“Chronique d’un été”) is one of the great documentaries of all time – and a work that could only have been made in France, home of the immensely influential Cahiers du cinéma and the constant ferment of speculation on the nature of film. The BFI’s release of the 1960 classic by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin couldn't be more timely: documentary flourishes today as at no other time in the history of cinema and attracts some of the world's best film-makers.The realm of non-fiction cinema, first explored by the Russian avant-garde pioneer Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, is free Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title says it all. Whatever John Wrathall’s script for The Liability might have promised is resoundingly undelivered in Craig Viveiros’s direction, and that’s despite the presence of Tim Roth in a lead role, and Peter Mullan giving a supporting turn that proves at least that he can parody himself. Possibly its comedy may work slightly better in front of a full cinema audience, but frankly I doubt it, and DVD is where this one is heading with a speed faster than the crime caper-cum-road movie itself ever manages.The eponymous role here goes to Jack O’Connell (a bright face best known to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first of the Dresden-born Robert Siodmak’s eight film noirs, Phantom Lady (1944) was adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel that typically endows its heroine with traditional masculine energy and guile while rendering its hero impotent and passive.Her dynamic investigator-avenger is eventually compromised by her becoming prey to the killer who framed the man she loves. However, Siodmak’s focus on her drive and her brief donning of a femme fatale guise during the second act powerfully reflects the male anxieties about women’s perceived threat to the patriarchal order during the war years.In Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Where there’s a stoker there must be a furnace, and this being Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s latest story from St Petersburg’s gangster 1990s, as well as heating some snow-bound Soviet industrial hulks, its flames also conveniently consume whatever corpses the local criminal gang brings in.That they have such immediate, unceremonial access is less the result of The Stoker inhabiting a world of absolute lawlessness, both literal and moral – that’s practically a given with Balabanov – than because the furnace is presided over by the vulture-thin stoker of the title, Ivan (Mikhail Skryabin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The mothership has landed. After a year or so of countless stage adaptations ranging from a recitation of the novel in its entirety to a themed party and (just this week) a dance piece, Baz Luhrmann's celluloid version of The Great Gatsby has finally arrived in all its superhero-style 3D scale and scope. So, is this Gatsby great? Not by some measure, and for every moment of inspiration and ingenuity comes another that fails both its literary source and Luhrmann's own instincts. Only in terms of the title character does the film deliver on the adjective that gets written out before us in Read more ...
David Nice
It took Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, melancholy last scion of a never very reproductive family, a lifetime to get round to writing one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. Publication of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), based on the life of the author's great grandfather and the changes of the risorgimento, only took place over a year after Lampedusa’s death in July 1957. Events then moved very fast. By March 1959 the book had gone through 52 editions. French and British translations won a warmer critical press than in Italy, but it was there that Luchino Visconti made his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
For those familiar with Ginger Baker’s virtuosic musicianship, but not with his life, the biggest revelation of the warts-and-all documentary Beware of Mr Baker may be that next to drumming, playing polo was the great time-keeper’s obsession. One might expect a jet-setting country gent like Bryan Ferry to mount up for a chukka or two before teatime, but the wild man of Cream and Blind Faith, late of Lewisham? Does Topper Headon play bowls?If, as an addiction, polo didn’t match Baker’s 19-year affair with heroin, it has been almost as ruinous a pastime. Toward the end of Jay Bulger’s film, Read more ...
David Nice
Fans of this bewilderingly popular musical, and they are legion, will not be disappointed. Director Tom Hooper knows how to tell a fast-moving tale that makes light of the final running time (originally 158 minutes, slightly shorter in this DVD release, which offers no extras. Those who went to the film more than once will, I'm told, miss a couple of scenes). The lighting is appropriately lugubrious, most of the settings convincing – though occasionally there’s too much dependence on CGI – and famously the singing actors perform their numbers on set, often in long takes. Casting is strong, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just like Vietnam in 1970s, the so-called War on Terror has been a boon to filmmakers. It has allowed Hollywood to send another generation of buff leading males off to the front and, as the ordnance explodes, bravely question why it is that they are there. However, there’s not been a lot of mainstream filmmaking which puts the Muslim point of view. The Reluctant Fundamentalist – in which a Wall Street highflyer from Pakistan heads home after 9/11 to be among his own troubled people - redresses an imbalance.Indian director Mira Nair caught sight of the slender novel by Mohsin Hamid before it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If JJ Abrams's first shot at reinventing the Star Trek franchise in 2009 was a memorable coup de cinéma, blending a plausible back story with a fresh cast imbued with the spirit of the TV originals, this follow-up is more about consolidation. There's bags of vertiginous interstellar action, retina-scorching 3D effects and earth-in-peril terror, though by the time you totter from the multiplex 130 minutes older, you may be asking yourself where the big payoff went.Still, to Abrams's credit, his cast is terrific and he wrings more genuine actorly mileage out of them than you might reasonably Read more ...