Film
emma.simmonds
Often portrayed as corrupt or, at best, on the front line of a war zone, the officers of the LAPD are regulars on the big and small screen. On TV, Southland and The Shield have examined the LAPD in microscopic detail and earlier this year Rampart intermittently impressed with its focus on one cop in freefall. With police procedural End of Watch writer-director David Ayer is on home turf: he’s the man behind several LA-set police thrillers, including Training Day (for which he penned the screenplay).Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña play patrol officers Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala. Despite Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Through a haunted forest and entered by a secret doorway is Dracula's castle - but this isn't where virgins are deflowered by the Transylvanian count; rather it's where he, a widower, dotes on his daughter and runs a hotel for his his monster mates. Hotel Transylvania is where Frankenstein's Monster and his wife Eunice, Wayne and Wanda Werewolf, the Invisible Man and all manner of ghouls and ghosties go for their holidays to take refuge from those nasty humans outside.It's a neat set-up in a screenplay written by Peter Baynham (who wrote the Arthur remake and has worked with Steve Coogan, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze). They wrote the way jazzers performed - free-wheelingly, in the moment, without regard for the piffling orthodoxy of structure. Or as Kerouac' Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s little beauty of any conventional kind in this tale of the hidden queer - "gay" would have associations of a very different world - life of South African patriarch François (Deon Lotz) imploding. He falls for Christian (Charlie Keegan), the 20-something son of an old friend, with violent and wrenching consequences: the closet door may be opening, but the cracks are in a deeply repressed family life.An opening wedding shows François in all his provincial Bloemfontein status, a proud father giving away his daughter, the prosperous owner of a timber yard, a figure in the local Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The cast of On the Road is an embarrassment of riches. There’s Viggo Mortensen, high on many people’s lists of favourite contemporary actors, with a rum portrayal of William Burroughs; talented British actors Sam Riley and Tom Sturridge as those other Beat colossi Kerouac and Ginsberg; Kirsten Dunst and Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss, and indie stalwart Steve Buscemi.But the film’s biggest box office draw is the youngest of all. Kristen Stewart may just be 22, but having started acting aged nine she’s now a veteran of 26 movies; moreover, her best-known role is as a certain Bella Swan, heroine of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Films about the ballet life are rareties - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the curtains and OTT fantasies?Indeed, it’s unusual to see a dance film being made at all, let alone picked for a celebrated indie film festival like Raindance this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who are Wes Anderson’s films actually for? They can be read as wistful visits to the confusing domain of childhood or kids’ movies full of droll turns from Hollywood stars. Moonrise Kingdom, which tells of a pair of damaged runaways who find solace in the woods and each other, exists charmingly on that faultline. And in Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, it features delightful turns by its two young leads.Suzy, troubled oldest daughter of a loveless marriage, and Sam, an unpopular scout who is dumped by his latest foster parents, conspire a resourceful escape into the wilderness. They also take a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't. One's best advice for Elizabeth Olsen, who walks off with the film playing a lovestruck undergrad, is to get out - and fast. Instead, this vibrant actress spends most of the film mooning over Jesse (Josh Radnor, who also functioned as Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Like a Dirty Daddy Harry, Taken saw bad people get rough justice: if you kidnap a covert operator’s daughter, you'll be mercilessly tracked down and dispatched with giddy, impossible violence. In Taken 2, the whole family gets 'taken', making this sequel a study in scary togetherness. Conceived as a schlocky action vehicle for durable star Liam Neeson, Taken was a surprise hit. Doing what every good sequel should, Taken 2 puts the audience back into the exciting world of the first film where they can enjoy those lovable characters as well as a new twist on the story. It also prods them to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This year’s glut of haunted house films have been unusually, often painfully intimate. Elizabeth Olsen’s pure, panting terror in Silent House, like Gretchen Lodge’s depraved unravelling in Lovely Molly, added to the sub-genre’s essential horror: the thought that when you shut your front door you’re locking something awful inside, not out; that your home, every creaking floorboard and attic thud of it, isn’t a safe haven but an insidious foe. Even as a long-time horror film lover, I’ve found them at times almost unbearably tense, creeping under my skin in minutes.Sinister seems set to push the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Clare Stewart arrived in London from Australia a year ago this month, into one of the biggest jobs in the UK film industry. For film buffs, it might seem like she entered a giant playground, a job to die for. Stewart is Head of Exhibition at the British Film Institute, a newly-created role that brings together responsibility for the day-to-day programming of the BFI Southbank and IMAX and for the institute’s festivals, including the London Film Festival, of which she is the festival director. Her first LFF, which theartsdesk will be covering extensively, is about to kick off.It’s a massive Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Teenage angst is a tough thing to get right on screen. It's perenially popular territory for dramatic writers in part because of the heightened emotions it allows for – as Joss Whedon once phrased it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series which was in itself an extended metaphor for the horrors of high school, "everything feels like life or death when you're 16 years old."But push that inevitably narcissistic young worldview too far, and and your audience will be alienated, regardless of how appealing your performers are. Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of his own late Nineties novel Read more ...