Film Reviews
SouthpawFriday, 24 July 2015
The boxing movie has been a gift to filmmakers virtually since the dawn of cinematic time. In 1932 Jimmy Cagney was swinging for the title (and the gal) in Winner Take All, but some say 1947's Body and Soul, starring John Garfield as boxing champ Charley Davis, is the one most of the other screen boxers are indebted to, from Sly Stallone's Rocky to Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Read more... |
DVD: While We're YoungFriday, 24 July 2015
As Noah Baumbach moves into his forties, his youthful archness is becoming increasingly tempered with a wry melancholy. Read more... |
The Legend of Barney ThomsonThursday, 23 July 2015
Its title may hint at exotic worlds – a Western, even – but Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is anything but. Carlyle himself plays the title character, one of life’s losers (“haunted tree” being one of the more memorable descriptions we get of him) who’s barely getting by as a Glasgow barber until the story, and his own unplanned actions, pitch his mundane existence to another level altogether. Read more... |
MaggieThursday, 23 July 2015
We can’t seem to move these days without stumbling into the path of a zombie movie, making one wonder why walking dead with a penchant for fast food are suddenly so alluring. When George A Romero effectively created the genre in the late Sixties and Seventies, zombies were a device for satire; today they seem to reflect a communal sense of societal breakdown. While comedies such as Warm Bodies and Zombieland make broad fun of post-apocalyptic decay,... Read more... |
EdenWednesday, 22 July 2015
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. Read more... |
Ruth & AlexWednesday, 22 July 2015
All the charm in the world provided by two seasoned pros can't make a satisfying whole out of Ruth & Alex, a glutinous portrait of a longtime marriage that is gently tested when the eponymous couple decide to move house. Read more... |
Best of EnemiesTuesday, 21 July 2015
It wasn’t quite Ali vs Frazier. But the 1968 debates between William F Buckley, Jr and Gore Vidal were as bruising (nearly literally) as TV had seen, and haunted the protagonists for the rest of their lives. Morgan Neville and Robert Gordan’s documentary claims its aftershocks also damaged TV and America in ways we’re still suffering through. Read more... |
The Salt of the EarthSaturday, 18 July 2015
Had Wim Wenders not used the title Until the End of the World for his most ambitious road movie, it would have suited his biographical portrait of Sebastião Salgado. Since 1973, the Brazilian photographer has traversed the planet to document its natural beauty and diversity on one hand, and the greed, destructiveness, and murderous ferocity of man on the other. Read more... |
Ant-ManFriday, 17 July 2015
With its teeny tiny protagonist Ant-Man joins a movie tradition that includes The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace. And yet the 12th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels like a fresh perspective on the modern blockbuster, where bigger certainly hasn't always meant better. Read more... |
True StoryThursday, 16 July 2015
Truth isn't so much stranger than fiction as it is duller. That, at least, is the abiding impression left by True Story, the debut film from the adventuresome theatre director Rupert Goold that by rights ought to be considerably more exciting than it is. Read more... |
The Ecstasy of Wilko JohnsonWednesday, 15 July 2015
Wilko Johnson’s ecstasy started to fade when he was resurrected. The ex-Dr Feelgood guitarist seemed to be living out a surreal final chapter with an unavoidable end when his January 2013 diagnosis with inoperable cancer flooded him with the wonder of life, leaving him content for perhaps the first time. This reaction ironically raised his career to a new peak, as radio and TV queued to hear the dead man talking, and an album with Roger Daltrey hit the Top 10. Read more... |
The WondersWednesday, 15 July 2015
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. Read more... |
13 MinutesTuesday, 14 July 2015
The plot to assassinate Hitler that everyone knows about was on 20 July 1944. It had its Hollywood moment in 2008 with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Von Stauffenberg. That film unfortunately arrived on the coattails of Downfall, which has since made all Anglophone portrayals of the Third Reich look dismally bogus. Read more... |
Love & MercyFriday, 10 July 2015
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Read more... |
P'tit QuinquinThursday, 09 July 2015
When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity. Read more... |
Dear White PeopleTuesday, 07 July 2015
US films about and aimed at African Americans broadly fall into two categories: gangsta life in the ‘hood action flicks and broad comedies, the latter niche dominated by Tyler Perry, who does for Black Americans what Mrs Brown does for Irish women. Dear White People, on the other hand, is a sophisticated social satire in the vein of Spike Lee’s early She’s Gotta Have It or Bamboozled. Read more... |
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