Film
Nick Hasted
The animals 17-year-old Josh Cody has to survive are his own criminal family. The Codys are hardly the Corleones. Led by sweetly smiling, grandmotherly matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver) as they fume and feud in Melbourne’s suburbs, this motley gang of five’s only outstanding quality is their ruthlessness. Deposited with them when his mum overdoses on drugs, the shy teenager navigates between armed robber Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) and wired drug dealer Uncle Craig (Sullivan Stapleton). Senior detective Leckie (a moustached, understated Guy Pearce) would also like a word, as Josh tries to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s difficult now to imagine Hollywood conceiving a one-two punch as ferocious as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, which were released a month apart in the summer of 1957. Their target was the absolute corruption of media figures who acquire untrammeled fame and power: Face’s coarse cracker-barrel philosopher “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), an ex-hobo who becomes a politically influential TV superstar; and Sweet Smell ’s monstrous Broadway gossip columnist J J Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) whose Stalinesque sway has senators quaking at his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sorry if I haven’t seen you since New Year, darling, but I've been non-stop. Last night it was the whatsonstage.com awards, I’m in LA next weekend for the Oscars of course, and I ruined my Jimmy Choos at the Globes - such a riot! I had to pop into a couple of dull old Critics Circle awards, but there's only wine, lovey, and at least Melvyn's South Bank do gives you a decent dinner. Was so hungover I had to positively skulk at the National Television Awards the next night. God knows how I stitched myself together for the BAFTAs last week. At least the Brits were less starchy, but they drink so Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nobody who plays Ashton Kutcher quite like Ashton Kutcher and, in this pleasant and undemanding romcom, he plays another cute guy whom all the girls (and boys of course) swoon over. This time he’s Adam, the sweet and rather vulnerable twentysomething son of Kevin Kline’s rascally-old-devil father, who's three-times divorced, still doing drugs, and chasing young women as his 60th birthday looms.In fact, it’s that paternal girl-chasing on which this initially episodic film turns after we have met Adam and Emma (Natalie Portman) at several points in their lives - first as teenagers Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What a time of ferment of artistic revolution the 1920s were in the Soviet Union. Pioneering arts techniques overlapped for an all-too-brief period with the progressive ideology of communism. Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal and Zvenigora were at the forefront of such trends, but as a Ukrainian his feelings about Moscow’s new leaps forward were ambiguous. Dovzhenko had a deep visual love for the old order, even while he celebrated the dynamism of the new.Dovzhenko’s 1930 film Earth is widely considered his classic, completing the loose silent “Ukrainian trilogy” that began with Zvenigora in Read more ...
james.woodall
Another 400 films, another rush for seats, another biting wind from Vladivostock: the 61st Berlin Film Festival - the Berlinale - has packed ’em in in the centre of town at Potsdamer Platz (mainly) over the last 10 days and hoped to light up the inevitably gloomy middle of February, and almost succeeded. But boy were there some tedious competition films this year.2011's Golden Bear Jodaieye Nader az Simin ("Nader and Simin: A Separation", the lead actors Leila Hatami and Peyman Moadi pictured below) was a hot contender from the moment the Iranian film hit Berlin. Director Jafar Panahi, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In some ways it’s been an odd career. Everyone else in Another Country (1982), the stage play by Julian Mitchell about gays and Marxists in a 1930s English public school, shot out of the blocks. Colin Firth was the only actor to play both lead parts, one onstage, the other on film (1984), but he took the slower road to outright stardom and only now is he clearly the bigger cheese than Rupert Everett, Kenneth Branagh and possibly even Daniel Day-Lewis. For years as a young actor he laboured somewhat in their shadow. He was in a film adaptation of Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangéreuses, but not the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In films featuring computer whizzes, there is always a key scene in which, to illustrate the whizziness, a star actor bashes on a keyboard at implausible warp speed. The Social Network is the first major film to respond to the drama inherent in the internet boom. (What’s next? Google in China: the movie? Tehran: the Twitter Revolution?) But it’s one of The Social Network's unremarked attractions that a movie starring computers has no truck with fetishising geekery.As the cast and writer Aaron Sorkin bend over backwards to explain in the DVD extras, this is not a film about Facebook. It Read more ...
josh.spero
Inside Inside Job is an interesting film struggling to get out. Sadly, one has to sit through two hours of Financial Meltdown 101 to see it. Narrated by Matt Damon in his serious voice (and if you're anything like me, you'll always be thinking of his Team America caricature), the film starts with the perfect glaciers of Iceland being ravaged as the free market takes its toll. The financial engineering that brought its banks down is exposed, and it's cut to a rock song overlaying swooning shots of New York that would not be out of place in Sex and the City.These first five minutes tell us Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Based on a novel by Kanae Minato, Tetsuya Nakashima’s provocative, serenely sinister thriller is fuelled by the murderous desire of its teens and the righteous anger of their teacher. Best known for the inebriated mania of Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, in Confessions Nakashima trades his outrageous rainbow hues for a distinctly funereal aesthetic. It’s as if a dark veil has been drawn across his signature style, with the film bowed in sombre recognition of its troubling subject matter.Confessions opens on familiar scenes of unruly schoolchildren, in this case Class B, who are all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sylvain Chomet’s hand-drawn animation of a previously unproduced Jacques Tati story is a delight in every way, in which the French film-maker pays homage to the great man by making him the illusionist of the title. He is unmistakably Tati - all elbows and angles, and, of course, distinctive bottom and nose.Seeing his work drying up as the incipient youth culture is taking over theatres and music halls, the illusionist leaves France (Chomet’s change to the original story) and accepts a gig in a tiny Scottish town, where he meets a star-struck young girl who follows the magician to Edinburgh, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have come a long way from Spaced, the Channel 4 sitcom Pegg created with Jessica Hynes (then Stevenson). When it was canned after two series in 1999 and 2001, Spaced - a very funny and edgy comedy about a group of assorted idlers and oddballs - assumed cult status; now More4 are unashamedly cashing in on Pegg and Frost’s Hollywood debut, PAUL, by repeating Spaced on Sunday nights, which is good news all round.PAUL is Pegg and Frost’s third movie collaboration after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, both entertaining, feel-good bromances that spoofed zombie movies and Read more ...