Film
alexandra.coghlan
“The problem is that you’ve been told and not told.” While Ishiguro and his discerning fans would never indulge in anything so crass as hype, there have been whisperings in North London wine bars, over the coffee-morning brews of Home Counties ladies, on terraces of rented villas on the Amalfi Coast. Yes, Never Let Me Go is the one about human cloning, whose characters are living organ farms, existing solely for harvest. It is neither a twist nor a secret (and to treat it as such is to misunderstand Ishiguro’s withholding narrative), so when director Mark Romanek lays it out on the (operating Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve heard a lot about the American experience of Iraq: the internecine politicking in Green Zone, the deadly combat of The Hurt Locker, the tedium of camp life in Jarhead. In the cinematic reproduction of tumult in Iraq, one thing you never see a lot of is Iraqis. They are walk-on players in their own land, exiled to the margins of a national narrative which is all about high-tech kit and the travails of the liberators. The winners get to shape the way the story is told. "You won the world!” an Iraqi driver screams at a helicopter puttering overhead in Baghdad in Son of Babylon. Well, they Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor. Jeff Bridges, remaking the role of battered, boozing, one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' new incarnation, is nominated for the second year running after last year's triumph with Crazy Heart. Look out Colin Firth, because Bridges is in such barnstorming form that we could conceivably see him roaring off into the Hollywood night clutching another statuette, swigging moonshine and firing his six-gun in the air.But despite its services to the Duke, Hathaway's film also raised Read more ...
james.woodall
Katalin Varga was one of the finest films at the 2009 Berlinale. Directed by British auteur Peter Strickland, it was filmed, beautifully, in Romania: a heartbreaking story about rape, it was all, and really only, about the catastrophically unresolved - in Romanian official culture inadmissible - evils of the Ceauşescu past.Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is about the same thing. After his 2006 Cannes winner 12:08 East of Bucharest, nailing some of the so-called romance of the 1989 uprising against the then soon-to-be executed dictator, this low-key 2009 movie about a detective in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Tainted by its origins and association with the pulp cinema of the 1950s (classics like Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space and House of Wax were pioneers of stereoscopic technology), 3D cinema has remained the province of entertainment cinema, a novelty no art-house auteur would touch. Spin The Hurt Locker’s shock Oscar win in 2010 any way you want, it made an emphatic statement about the value the cinematic academy placed on technological advancement. For that was surely the terminal problem with Avatar. A thrilling visual spectacle, it harnessed its innovations to a recycled plot Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The timely arrival on DVD of Winter’s Bone as it heads for the Oscars ceremony gives a fresh chance to dwell on the film’s unshowy riches. Jennifer Lawrence plays 17-year-old Ree whose father has disappeared, leaving her to care for an invalid mother and a much younger brother and sister. If she can’t find him, a bail bondsman will repossess the family house in the Missouri backwoods.Her search takes her fearlessly into terrain patrolled by vengeful crystal meth dealers who trade in natural justice. Lawrence deserves every plaudit for a performance which mixes heartstopping vulnerability Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is not the first starring role in cinema history for an orang-utan. That honour belongs to King Louie, the banana-clad jungle VIP in Disney’s 1967 version of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It’s not actually the second either, or even the third. Students of the Primates on Film sub-genre will fondly recall Clyde, the orang-utan who hung out with Clint Eastwood so winningly in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) that the studio gave him another shot at the big time in Any Which Way You Can (1980). But unless there are gaps in my knowledge of this area (for which apologies), Nénette is probably Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A paean to working-class bellicosity set (and shot) in the rundown industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, David O’Russell’s boxing film The Fighter relishes its brawls. In one inspired scene, a character is unceremoniously slammed to the ground and punched repeatedly in the face. Not Queensberry Rules? That’s because the assailant is the eponymous pugilist’s girlfriend and her victim one of his seven sisters, who have arrived on her porch with their mother one morning to wrest him away from the siren’s clutches.It’s the fate of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg, who nurtured the project and has a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So many stage shows (musicals, mostly) are these days fashioned from films that the arrival of Rabbit Hole reminds us of the time-honored habit of plundering yesteryear's Broadway hit for this movie season's trophy-minded bait. And so we have Nicole Kidman Oscar-nominated for her turn as the grieving mum in a part that won Cynthia Nixon New York's Tony Award five years ago. Don't be misled, though, by the rather overemphatic talk of this comparatively below-the-radar venture as merely a comeback vehicle for Kidman; the virtues of the movie, modest though they are, extend without question to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Town narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and revisiting it on DVD I reckon it was hard done-by. True, it's possible to pigeonhole it under Heist Thriller, but it's a particularly fine one, and it's much more besides. Displaying multi-hatted expertise as star, director and screenwriter, Ben Affleck (deriving the story from Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves) has rooted his panicky shoot-outs and scorching car chases in a meticulously realised Boston milieu. Specifically, the story centres on the Charlestown district, notorious for its multi-generational Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He may have already taken the film to Cannes, but West Yorkshire represents a quirky step away from the regular festival beat for a man who in his mighty heyday once found it hard to set foot beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. Plotwise, film-goers in Bradford will be greeted in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger by the usual focus on marital disharmony and renewal through infidelity. Anthony Hopkins is married to Gemma Jones, whose daughter Naomi Watts is married to Josh Brolin, who has a thing for Freida Pinto while Watts finds herself falling for Antonio Banderas. Here’s a taster of what Bradford Read more ...
carole.woddis
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.That, of course, may have been due to the fact that we were confused and not willing to show it; on the other Read more ...