Film
Matt Wolf
A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”. But for all the deliberate theatrical artifice of a movie about a society that knows a thing or two about putting itself on display, the delicious paradox of the occasion is this: in framing his Tolstoy adaptation as if it were a piece of theatre, Wright has made the least stagey film imaginable.Staginess, in any case, has less to do with sets than a state of mind, and there’s no doubt from the off that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page realist novel and choke it in the grip of meta-theatrical conceptualising and Brechtian by-play. Anna Karenina feels as though its director just discovered the fourth wall and felt the need to graffiti all over it: “Joe Wright woz ere.”Apparently it was all a question of budget. Denied expansive tracking shots of snow-covered vistas and bustling St Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Being such a massive phenomenon has made The Hunger Games an easy target to tilt at but the truth is that, staying close to the Suzanne Collins novel, this film adaptation is a lean, smart science fiction thriller that there’s much to like about. The premise is that in the future the USA has become a nation called Panem, 12 serf states ruled by the Capitol who organise an annual televised competition designed to engender obedience in the populace. On it a pair of "tributes" from each district fight to the death on the live TV show of the title. Sixteen-year-old poacher Katniss Everdeen ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
According to US television anchor Stephen Colbert, there are only three ways to end your career as a rock star: overdose, overstay your welcome or write Spiderman: The Musical. Rockers, he says, during a televised interview with LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, don’t get to walk away - certainly not at the peak of their careers, when every album they release is still greeted with critical adulation and they’re capable of selling out Madison Square Garden.And yet, in April 2011, that’s exactly what the then 41-year-old New York performer and DJ chose to do. The Colbert interview, clips Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel). It therefore comes as no great surprise that Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era latest should be lawless not just Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Even though their names are bound together in the portmanteau title, the directors of the four short films that make up RoGoPaG - Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti - don't go for any sort of narrative tie-ins. The only thing that links the films are the Sixties themes: nuclear annihilation, the shifting role of women and the rise of consumer capitalism. The largely unsatisfying results would only recommend themselves to the dedicated arthouse fan or movie historian were it not for Pasolini's inspired contribution, La Ricotta.The generosity of vision in Pasolini's La Ricotta Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Alfred Hitchcock famously loved his blondes, and they didn't come much more lovable than Barbara Harris. A Broadway star during the 1960s who later shifted her attentions towards film, Harris was at the peak of her talent in Family Plot, a delightful if minor Hitchcock entry distinguished by a fine quartet of American leads (Karen Black, William Devane and Bruce Dern are the others) among whom Harris stands apart. Indeed, by the time of the conspiratorial wink from Harris that closes the film, audiences will surely find themselves already grinning right back.As it happens, Family Plot was Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
There’s no Mars or Arnie, but the new Total Recall has science fiction goodness running through it. A mile of Blade Runner, a yard of Fifth Element, a furlong of Star Wars and an inch of RoboCop make up the distances in Len Wiseman’s glossy, brooding take on Paul Verhoeven’s beloved Nineties hit. Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos must have been up for months watching the best science fiction films and deciding where their memorable bits would fit here. (He’s not left out I, Robot or Minority Report, in case you like those too.) As if to honour the story that inspires it, Total Recall Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Never one to underestimate the potency of a cameo (as evidenced by his own appearances in his films), Alfred Hitchcock had a particular genius with supporting roles – generating menace, intrigue or comedy with the fewest of brush strokes. Two of his earliest, and slightest, creations would also prove two of his most enduringly popular: cricket-obsessed duo Caldicott and Charters from 1938’s The Lady Vanishes.Played by Naunton Wayne (Caldicott) and Basil Radford (Charters), the two ex-Oxford men of sound character and indeterminate sexual preference all but transform a thriller into a social Read more ...
graham.rickson
Shadow of a Doubt was reputedly Hitchcock’s personal favourite among his films. Joseph Cotten was cast against type as the glamorous, homicidal uncle, fleeing from the police and pitching up unexpectedly in his sister’s household in a sleepy Californian town. Hitchcock’s decision to shoot Thornton Wilder's script largely on location gives the film a unique flavour.Hume Cronyn provides light relief as the shuffling Herb Hawkins, the crime-obsessed neighbour whose unwelcome intrusions punctuate the family gatherings. A maladroit, ageing manchild whose clothes never quite fit, he’s still living Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
If you hate zombies and East End gangster movies, Cockneys vs Zombies will wreck those prejudices. Expect to have them turned topsy-turvy by this pocket-sized dynamo of horror comedy. Visually, it gets the simple things right straightaway. The blood looks real(ish). The London locations are cheerily drearily evocative. Then there's the unique opportunity of seeing Goldfinger Bond Girl and all-around heroine Honor Blackman fire a machine gun. Certainly as good as if not better than Shaun of the Dead, there is no doubt that Cockneys vs Zombies will be, in some Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s remarkable how many of the 20th century's most culturally significant popular musicians – from Louis Armstrong to John Lennon – emerged from a childhood defined by lack or absence. As Kevin MacDonald’s epic and enlightening documentary about the life of Robert Nesta Marley illustrates, much of his righteous anger, steely determination and elusive nature stemmed from the dubious legacy of a shady, philandering English father who was white, feckless and an almost entirely ghost-like figure in his son's life.This is a vivid and balanced portrait, neither hagiography nor hatchet job, which Read more ...