Film
emma.simmonds
In Attenberg Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari illustrates that there is no species on earth more peculiar than man. A hit at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, where its lead Ariane Labed rightfully claimed Best Actress, it is on first inspection something of a hodgepodge. On the one hand it’s a quietly confounding and deeply moving study of a woman’s alienated (and almost alien) existence and, on the other, it’s a joyously infantile amusement. With the occasional disconcerting dash of prurience, this is a film which blows a raspberry in the face of convention and decorum. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When I interviewed the great Hungarian film-maker István Szabó (b 1938) in his native Budapest, he took me on a tour of the city centre on the Pest side of the Danube. On the way we were distracted by a flashy café designed to lure tourists. It was called Mephisto – after the film by Szabó, presumably, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1981. “I don’t know if it’s named after the film," he said, "but I think it must be because they have used the same typeface.” Then he added, “I’ve never been in there.”Mephisto, based on Klaus Mann's novel, tells of a brilliant Brechtian actor Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution intriguingly juggles the political and the personal. Their public stories are presented through the personal prisms of their surviving daughters, who recount, with some coolness and with very different perspectives, how their own lives were affected by the revolutionary choices that their mothers made.Children may open with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinematic virtuoso Pedro Almodóvar’s contribution to the body horror subgenre is a sumptuous nightmare with the precision and looming malevolence of its psychotic surgeon’s blade. His 19th feature is a film for our age – an age which has seen radical and sometimes grotesque surgical reinvention - concerned as it is with the troubling question: what actually lies beneath?Based fairly loosely on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In reunites Almodóvar with his former leading man of choice, Antonio Banderas. Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a cutting-edge (excuse the pun), Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Watching Incendies leaves you winded. Although it can be read as a thriller, Incendies is a drama that offers no hints of where it’s going. When it gets there, it hits hard. It’s about more than Middle East conflict, more than a search for identity. As director Denis Villeneuve puts it in one of this DVD’s extras, Incendies is a “Greek tragedy with a thriller inside it”.Based on a Wajdi Mouawad play which premiered in Montréal, the scope and the use of sudden explanatory, digressive flashbacks are cinematic rather than theatrical. Although there are very few characters in the film, and the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.In fact, there’s little that looks specifically Danish here (though the film swept the board at this year's Danish Oscars), except a certain Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than a main by way of welcome. Sound unfair? Sure, but love - indeed life, as it is honestly and genuinely lived - hasn't a prayer up against the breathtakingly vacuous conceit that drives One Day, a film that makes zero sense except where these things matter most: the box office. I recognise that not all will share my scepticism, if the reaction Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic bulk of Jason Momoa, the half-Hawaiian and half-Irish veteran of the celebrated cheesecake opera Baywatch.Plot-wise, it's a point-and-go revenge saga with an added long arc of ancestral evilMomoa doesn't look as if he likes to waste time studying the Method or boning up on the Nouvelle Vague, but he fills a Conan-sized 3D hole on the screen. Yet Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Chris Marker has made over 60 films in his long career (he's now 90). But his reputation has rested on just two. Sans soleil (1983), a meditative film essay on Japan, and La jetée (1962), a 20-minute sci-fi film in the ciné-roman photomontage style, are widely considered the finest examples of their respective genres. On top of that, La jetée was named one of the Top 10 sci-fi films of all time by Time magazine. Optimum Classics are re-releasing both this week on one DVD.With its eccentric eye, its exotic locations, its peripatetic ways, zipping between the economic miracle of Japan and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although FW Murnau’s pre-America years will always be defined by 1922’s Nosferatu, he’d already racked up nine films in the preceding three years. He made his mark on Hollywood with the 1927 landmark Sunrise but, although being overshadowed by Nosferatu, his earlier German films reveal how he reached these points. Schloss Vogelöd (also known as The Haunted Castle) is a Murnau obscurity, a stately, atmospheric meditation from 1921 that’s capable of giving the willies.But they take a while manifesting themselves. The straightforward plot is drawn out. Every scene is a carefully staged set piece Read more ...