Film
joe.muggs
A confession: though very fond of the Beatles, I'd never seen their self-directed Magical Mystery Tour before this DVD release. Not that I have anything against psychedelic follies, but I felt like I'd had my fill of this sort of thing a long time ago and had never bothered seeking it out. Consider me chastened; it's a joyous film – yes, it's the result of a bunch of rich young men fooling about with drugs and looks like it, but there's so much warmth, so much colour, so much affection for the textures and quirks of a lost Britain shot through it that it's hard not to love.Two things make it Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York, released on DVD and Blu-ray today, is the fifth feature written (or co-written) and directed by the French actress-filmmaker and her sequel to 2007’s 2 Days in Paris. It is, therefore, another hyper, chaotic comedy of Franco-American cultural discord.Since we last saw her, Delpy’s neurotic art photographer Marion has split up with truculent boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) and moved into a Manhattan apartment with Village Voice writer and radio talk-show host Mingus (Chris Rock), forming a new family with her son and his daughter. Their stability is ruptured Read more ...
Steven Yates
Almaty may have lost its capital status to Astana in 1997, but this city of 1.6m inhabitants, about nine percent of the country's population, remains the commercial and cultural hub of Kazakhstan. The Eurasia Film Festival was first held here in 1998 with the support of the Filmmakers Union as a forum for movies from the CIS and Baltic countries. Though initially intended as an annual event, some years there hasn't been a festival at all - in 2009 it officially closed only to resume again in 2010. Prior to 2011 the program leaned heavily towards Central Asian films, but last year more Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Cleopatra didn’t hold a beast to her ass but in this lavish 1934 production, she could have. Cecil B DeMille amped up his two favourite topics - sex and sin - to create the world's second most opulent celluloid Cleopatra. Scripted by Waldemar Young (grandson of Brigham Young) and Vincent Lawrence (who seems to have kept working after his death), this hysterically fancy film was "based" on an "adaptation" of historical elements by Barlett Cormack - this is shorthand for “we only used the shiniest parts of the true story”. Despite phenomenal art direction by Roland Anderson and Hans Dreier Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mostly thanks to Armando Iannucci, we are currently spoilt for political satire. Between the two of them Veep and The Thick of It have Westminster and Washington running for cover: to use that gratingly pious phrase, they speak truth to power. One behemoth that Iannucci has yet to bring down is the befuddling, clusterfucked idiocy of the American electoral machine. Its cynicism has lately been exposed in George Clooney’s The Ides of March, but that was about a candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination who was too good to be true. What of Republicans lower down the pecking order?Step Read more ...
theartsdesk
Nick Wheatfield’s surreal comedy Skeletons won the Michael Powell Award for best new British feature at the 2010 Edinburgh Film Festival, and deservedly so. An off-beat film combining British eccentricity with a high-concept hook, there is more than a touch of Beckett about the central characters, Davis and Bennett, played with oddball appeal by Andrew Buckley and Ed Gaughan. The former is small and ferret-like, the other huge and ginger, and together they trudge the countryside between assignments, quarrelling about professionalism and the moral merit of Rasputin v John Lennon. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric. Following on from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which chose to set its verbose and violent social critique in a white stretch limo, Holy Motors uses a similar vehicle both to transport and transform its protagonist.The short prologue sees the film’s French director, Leos Carax, fumbling blindly about a hotel room, Read more ...
geoff brown
Five million dollars: in the 1940s that was enough profit to make this Technicolor melodrama 20th Century Fox’s biggest box-office hit of the decade. Reaching cinemas in January 1946 on the heels of World War Two, John M. Stahl’s film didn’t offer audiences the conventional home comforts. Derived from a best-selling novel by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven tells a crazed story of obsessive jealousy, of a family and marriage wracked by sudden death, a violent abortion, and arsenic poisoning, all perpetrated by its scheming heroine – a beautiful shoulder-padded basilisk played with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright. If Brick was conceptually ambitious yet small-scale, Looper gives us filmic chutzpah with the budget (and stars) to match.It’s set predominantly in a dystopian 2044, in and around Kansas City, with Read more ...
james.woodall
For a remarkable BBC Radio Four half-hour programme broadcast on 14 September, The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle, Chris Bowlby pieced together tales of treachery in the former German Democratic Republic. At one point a 1950s recording of a trial of a woman was played. Her cries above the rasping sound of the judge, if that’s what he was, sentencing her to death was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever heard.The GDR was a poisonous place, crawling with vengeful creeps like that Stasi judge whose mission in life was to maintain such a level of fear in its citizens that exposure of its actual rot Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Begun in 1943 and released in 1945, Les Enfants du paradis, which unfolds in two acts – the first frantic, the second slow – in Paris’s theatre quarter in the 1820s and ’30s, is regarded as the crowning glory of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s fertile partnership.It has traditionally topped French polls of the country’s greatest films, but it cannot be said to match Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion and La Règle de jeu or Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante for the depth of their humanism. Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève, Carné and Prévert’s gloomy, existential poetic Read more ...