Film
Graham Fuller
Like the Will Hay classic Oh! Mr. Porter and the droll BBC miniseries Love on a Branch Line, Charles Crichton’s 1953 Ealing comedy, the first shot in Technicolor, celebrates the English love of rural railways run by unworldly eccentrics in whose hands ancient locomotives are objects of love, and sometimes dangerous weapons. A slight but ineffably charming pipedream, it was both nostalgic for pre-war village life and prophetic of the Beeching railway cuts that slashed branch lines in the mid-1960s, ending a way of life. When a greedy bus company threatens the fictional Titfield Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Slavik Kryklyvyy was Jennifer Lopez's tush-shaking partner in Shall We Dance?, getting one over on Richard Gere. But that was 2004, and what happened then? Ballroom Dancer is a documentary feature about his year on the edge, 2010, when the former world number one Latin dancer tried to come back from a series of injuries and broken partnerships to mount his throne once more. This is Strictly Ballroom meets Black Swan, a film about a driven, spectacularly talented man for whom Latin dancing is a scarily obsessive vocation, a man who would give up almost anything, including his humanity, to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The movie version of the hardboiled, trenchcoated private eye, who, being “being neither tarnished nor afraid,” puts honour before personal gain in California’s 1940s noir cityscapes, was never as enduring as his literary original.The re-release of Roman Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown (which is being showcased at BFI Southbank throughout January) reminds us that the myth consecrated by Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), and as Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), was not an endlessly renewable resource. Once Jack Nicholson had played Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Les Misérables is revolutionary, but not in a French way. Oscar-winning director Tom (The King's Speech) Hooper’s film of a musical seen by over 60 million people in over 40 countries and in half again as many languages has engaged so much critical ink I’m almost dreading writing my own opinion. However, as a property that has run onstage for 27 years, Les Misérables - once nicknamed The Glums - is a stirring tale of love, loss, cruelty, salvation and predation that also comes with a built-in audience of which you may or may not be a member.Whatever you think about musicals (I hate Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The director James Marsh has made his name as a documentarian who brilliantly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Both Man on Wire and Project Nim seamlessly wove together archive and reconstruction. Although Shadow Dancer, an IRA thriller set in the early Nineties, is in many ways very stylised, it is not as needlessly overwrought as Marsh’s TV drama Red Riding, but nevertheless characterised by a cool absence of cliff-hanging narrative tension that is typical of documentary.With a script by former ITN newsman Tom Bradby, Marsh tells the grim story of Colette (Andrea Riseborough) Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Les Miserables got eight nominations, including the expected acting nods for Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, and Daniel Day-Lewis is poised to make history as the first-ever three-time winner of the Best Actor Oscar, this time for a performance in Lincoln that ranks among his very best.But the 2013 Academy Award nominees are light on Brits and big on the American indy/European art-house circuit. Indeed, a far greater surprise than the failure of Tom Hooper to get a directing nod for Les Misérables, Hooper having been bypassed for a Bafta as well, was the strong showing made by Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Jean-Luc Godard once said, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl". Aside from upping the ante to include a formidable arsenal of the former, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad hangs its fedora on that wisdom. It might however have aimed a little higher, as its glamour-and-guns story is trimmed to the point of frustration. There's action aplenty but with a story told in quips and shorthand, this is the gangster movie as entertainment pure and simple.Gangster Squad is a heavily fictionalised account of the Los Angeles Police Department's post-war assault on organised crime, loosely based Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Five years ago James Marsh won an Academy Award for the documentary Man on Wire. It thrillingly told the story of Philippe Petit’s audacious walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Marsh stayed on in the 1970s for Project Nim, a chilling documentary about a hubristic American scientist who as an experiment tried to bring up a chimpanzee as a human. Marsh is clearly attracted to stories about man’s vaulting ambition, because his next film featured the quest to bring about peace in Northern Ireland.Shadow Dancer, critically acclaimed on its release and now Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“It’s like you’re a vampire,” whey-faced LA security guard Jacob is told. He gives a dawning, diffident look of recognition. Back in the cramped apartment he’s stopped leaving by day, he places a crucifix on his face, not quite expecting it to sizzle. For much of director Scott Leberecht’s atmospheric debut, he seems to be following Jacob’s progressive weakening by a rare disease with vampirism’s effects: blood-thirstiness, and enforced night-dwelling, ever since sunlight first blistered his skin aged 12. It takes us a while to realise the “vampire” description’s truth. The transition to a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A dark night of the soul gets mined for maximum effect in Irish director Lenny Abrahamson's third film, a subdued yet infinitely disturbing portrait of a teenager, and by extension his community, undone by a sudden act of violence. Set among Dublin's comfortable Sandymount middle-class, the film couples an improvisatory vibe with a gathering sense of grief that brings Greek tragedy to mind. And when the movie's deliberately clamped-down feel cracks open, watch out: the howl it unleashes is terrifying to behold.Newcomer Jack Reynor (pictured below right with Roisin Murphy) gives a star-making Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
How could we have expected the London 2011 riots to be brought back for the big screen? The least likely answer must be as a black comedy about a bicycle cop who after a bad concussion has woken up as a one-man vigilante who’s taking out the villains on his beat, but asking their permission first. That last detail explains the title of Stuart Urban’s May I Kill U?, which brings this particular wayward member of her majesty’s constabulary rather into Carry On territory, with a twist of Ealing comedy on the side.The odds are already stacked towards absurdity when your hero’s called Baz Vartis, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Contemporary homages to the silent age are tuppence are dozen, but none are quite as eccentric as Miguel Gomes’s Tabu. One of last year’s oddball gems, it joins The Artist and Hugo in sending a love letter to cinema’s formative geniuses and yet sets its swooningly romantic silent section in a Portuguese colony of Africa in the turbulent early 1960s. Its starcrossed protagonists have a scene of frank lovemaking, and one of the silent stars is a baby crocodile.Tabu’s two segments – which take the names of Paradise Lost and Paradise – are the story’s effect and cause. The first is set in wintry Read more ...