Film
Nick Hasted
The Master is one of several remarkably challenging epics which have somehow been financed in 21st-century Hollywood. Like Tree of Life, Synecdoche New York (also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman) and There Will Be Blood (also written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), it attempts a fractured, literary grab at the American soul. The Master’s calamitous box-office means it might be the last.Joaquin Phoenix returns to acting after the career-immolating performance art of I’m Still Here as Freddie Quell, a dislikeable World War Two vet on the run from the post-war US dream, and everything Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen Soderbergh would have us believe that this might be his last movie, which is difficult to believe. But if so, he's bowing out with one his sharpest, most devious and most watchable pictures, in which a shrewdly-chosen cast does full justice to a screenplay over which Scott Z Burns has pored painstakingly for more than a decade.Our subject at first seems to be the evils of Big Pharma, the giant drug corporations which seek to exploit human weakness and the stresses of 21st century life to keep their market share high and their stock prices soaring. Their questionable ethics and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I'm so worn out with it," a character remarks in a different context well into Rufus Norris's film Broken, to which one is tempted to respond, "Ain't that the truth!" A dissection of so-called "broken Britain" in all its jagged disarray, stage director Norris's debut film wants to be excoriating but is instead mainly exhausting and feels infinitely longer than its briefish running time. Norris gets good performances out of a notable cast, and it's interesting (to put it mildly) to see certain actors cast defiantly against type, but the material suffers from being a continuous, non-stop Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Of all the pairings you might have thought would star in a cross-generational road movie, I suspect Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand would be the last names you would have put together, despite their undoubted comedic talents.Rogen is Andy Brewster, an immature single guy who has invented a green cleaning product that he's schlepping around various uninterested companies, Streisand his long-widowed smothering mother Joyce, constantly calling him with inane questions that he impatiently replies to if he can bothered. They live at opposite ends of the country and don't see each other much beyond Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald, but he had failed to include Ben Affleck in his calculations. "This is a second act for me," announced Affleck, as he collected the Best Director award for his work on Argo at the recent BAFTAs in London, "and you're giving me that and this industry has given me that. I want to dedicate this to anyone else trying to get their second act - you can do it!"Stirring stuff. With Argo storming on to collect the Oscar for Best Film, the culmination of a brilliant streak of accolades from the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
We've hardly gone wanting for big-screen robots of late – Michael Fassbender's inpenetrable cyborg was the best thing in Ridley Scott's overly ponderous Prometheus last year, while many have argued that Pixar reached its pinnacle with disarming robot-rom WALL-E in 2008. But with this oddball debut, director Jake Schreier is reaching for something different, something smaller and lonelier and more human, and if he never quite grasps it his pursuit makes for compelling viewing. The eponymous Frank (Frank Langella) is a retired cat burglar, living alone and succumbing to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The spirit of Glasgow has never been better caught on screen than in two movies local director Charlie Gormley made in the Eighties. His Heavenly Pursuits from 1986, starring Tom Conti and Helen Mirren, may be better known, but Living Apart Together, from four years earlier, is a low-key delight that knows how to steal the heart.Singer BA Robertson plays Ritchie Hannah, a Scottish singer-musician whose success has taken him far from home territory (Robertson provides the film's music, except for a closing title track by Carol Kenyon). Touring has Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's about time the world got to know South Korean director Park Chan-wook. His "vengeance" trilogy (and its middle segment Oldboy in particular) made an indelible impression on many but Stoker, Park's frighteningly meticulous English-language debut starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode, will considerably broaden his reach. This master of the macabre may have toned it down a tad for his ninth film but the majestic violence and taboo infatuations are pleasingly present and correct. Channelling Winona Ryder's seminally surly teen Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, Wasikowska Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran director Jerzy Hoffman is a chronicler of Polish history on the widest possible scale - still going strong, he turned 80 just after the 2011 3D release of Battle of Warsaw. His 1999 film With Fire and Sword caught earlier national heroics, from Poland’s 17th-century struggle with Ukraine, and tops Polish box office results to this day. His latest film captures the 1920 resistance of newly independent Poland to Red Army forces invading from the east, intent on spreading Communism through Europe.Principle players here are Ola (Natasza Urbanska), star singer in a Warsaw cabaret Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When Cesar (Luis Tosar) sees Clara (Marta Etura) leave for work in the mornings, he wants to wipe the smile from her face. And as the barely noticed caretaker of her Barcelona apartment building, he’s in the perfect position to do so. Cesar is a strange monster for this psychological thriller from Jaume Balaguero, director of the visceral hit [REC] horror films: a misanthrope so incapable of happiness, he feels others’ laughter like a stab. His hospitalised, mute mother is the silent confessor who weeps horrified tears at his plans. Otherwise, we’re his only, appalled witnesses.His innocent Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It doesn’t look broken from above. Broken City now and then takes to the skies over New York to look down on the splayed conurbation. Grand views of the skyline find silver towers a-shimmer, blue rivers a-glimmer and autumn’s burnished-bronze trees aflame. Wow, you think, could we stay up here way more and spend a little less time down there in the squalor, the corruption and, worst of all, Allen Hughes’ risible coloured-crayon stylings?You may recall Hughes’s big-screen breakthrough From Hell (2001). Big fan of blood, and the values of the graphic novel. He brings those tropes to an action Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in an Italian prison, performed by criminals? If it sounds like a gimmick, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die is anything but. Following a popular tradition of freshening up Shakespeare's works with a shift in setting or location (think 10 Things I Hate About You or Ran), the Tavianis' deft editing creates a lean and intriguing 76 minutes that outstrips three hour epics in meaning and depth.Now in their eighties, the brothers are no strangers to effective cinema, with Padre, Padrone and Night of the Shooting Stars hallmarks of their time. Discovering Julius Read more ...