Film Reviews
Everybody Wants Some!!Thursday, 12 May 2016
After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right. Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Brighton – Symphony of a City, Brighton DomeThursday, 12 May 2016
Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital. Read more... |
Our Kind of TraitorMonday, 09 May 2016
John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor. Read more... |
Arabian NightsSaturday, 07 May 2016
Early in the first part of his sprawling metafictional docu-whatsit Arabian Nights, the director Miguel Gomes is reflected in a café window as he flees his crew for conceiving the absurdly overambitious project he’s set up. It was "the dumbest idea", he says in voiceover, to think “I could make a fine film of wonderful, seductive stories while following Portugal’s miserable situation for a year.” To reconcile militancy and escapism, he goes on: “That is betrayal. Disengagement. Read more... |
Florence Foster JenkinsFriday, 06 May 2016
The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary... Read more... |
I Saw the LightThursday, 05 May 2016
The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season. Read more... |
Knight of CupsWednesday, 04 May 2016
There are times when you sit in the cinema and wish that you didn’t speak English and could just enjoy what you’re seeing. Unfortunately Knight of Cups is one of those times. This is a stunningly beautiful film, the first of Terrence Malick’s films to be (mainly) set in Los Angeles, and it features amazing work by long-term collaborators cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and designer Jack Fisk. But its narrative voiceover and dialogue are excruciating, quasi-parodic and they drag... Read more... |
Son of SaulFriday, 29 April 2016
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Golden YearsThursday, 28 April 2016
There’s a great film waiting to be made about the demographic crisis – old-age poverty, worthless pensions, abuse of the elderly, ramshackle retirement homes, disregard from the young. Likeable though it is, this breezy tale of ageing bank-robbing Robin Hoods from writer/director John Miller (with a little help from TV’s Nick Knowles as co-writer/exec producer) isn’t that film. Read more... |
DemolitionWednesday, 27 April 2016
How would you behave if your wife was killed in a random car accident? In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Davis, a wealthy banker, is almost relieved – he can ditch his job, his house, nearly everything of his old life, and shack up with a total stranger. Read more... |
Captain America: Civil WarTuesday, 26 April 2016
This rousing instalment from the Marvel universe shares self-evident similarities with Batman vs Superman, the latest effort from their DC rivals. In both films we see superheroes at loggerheads, and in each case it's because they find themselves in a changing world where it's no longer acceptable for super-beings to roam around the planet leaving massive swathes of collateral damage in their wake. Read more... |
Miles AheadThursday, 21 April 2016
Catching the essence of the mercurial, secretive and notoriously abrasive Miles Davis on film might reasonably be described as a mission impossible, but Don Cheadle has put his heart and soul into it. He directed it and plays the title role, he co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman, and he put some of his own money into it. A jazz saxophonist since his youth, he took tips from Wynton Marsalis about playing the trumpet for the movie. Read more... |
Bastille DayWednesday, 20 April 2016
This Paris-set thriller was one of several films which had its release date postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital last November, giving the impression that it might be shockingly violent or provocatively political. In fact, it's a slightly uneasy mix of caper, buddy-movie and spy adventure, as its protagonists battle a high-level conspiracy involving the mother of all bank robberies. Read more... |
Mapplethorpe: Look at the PicturesMonday, 18 April 2016
“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity. Read more... |
Eisenstein in GuanajuatoSaturday, 16 April 2016
This is an unashamed, fulsome, extravagant tribute from Peter Greenaway to his cinema idol. The British director – though that description is probably more point of origin these days than allegiance – has long acclaimed his Russian-Soviet counterpart Sergei Eisenstein as the most adventurous figure that the film industry has ever known, one whose ground-breaking experiments and discoveries are as alive today as they ever have been. Read more... |
The Jungle BookFriday, 15 April 2016
It’s a risky venture, remaking a much-loved Disney classic, but Jon Favreau has tackled The Jungle Book with considerable enthusiasm, creating a digital 3D spectacular complete with hundreds of computer-generated animals and one real boy (Neel Sethi). It’s based on the original Rudyard Kipling stories featuring man-cub Mowgli lost in the jungle, raised by wolves and torn between staying or finding his way back to humanity. Read more... |
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