Film Reviews
LFF 2014: PhoenixThursday, 16 October 2014
Director Christian Petzold avoided Germany’s grim version of heritage cinema – the war, the Wall – until last year’s Cold War hit Barbara. Read more... |
Björk: Biophilia LiveWednesday, 15 October 2014
From David Attenborough’s spoken introduction to the blonde, robed backing singers, Biophilia Live sees Björk in full experimental flow. Sometimes the film seems almost as if documenting the ceremonial workings of a science-based cult rather than covering an avant-garde pop show. Musically it is reverent, the atmosphere is cerebral, and, above all, Björk’s persona is shamanistic. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The Keeping RoomWednesday, 15 October 2014
Indie actress Brit Marling takes aim at a rigid power structure in this tense and pared down female-led revisionist Western from British director Daniel Barber. Set towards the end of the American Civil war three women are grappling to survive and make sense of it all whilst the men battle it out and the world around them is burning to the ground. Read more... |
LFF 2014: It FollowsTuesday, 14 October 2014
Few films this frightening are also so kind. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature starts with a pretty teenage girl suffering inexplicable, bone-snapping terror. He makes us wait to find out why, lingering in the lives of 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends in their deliberately timeless, golden, Spielbergian suburbs. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Goodbye to LanguageMonday, 13 October 2014
Jean-Luc Godard is still masterfully riding new waves, more than 50 years after Breathless. Following Film Socialisme’s epic engagement with digital cinema, here 3D becomes a dazzling illusionist’s trick. Goodbye to Language drew laughs when I saw it for sheer chutzpah, but also in the way Georges Melies elicited gasps at cinema’s birth. Read more... |
Cathedrals of CultureMonday, 13 October 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Wild TalesMonday, 13 October 2014
Argentine cinema is best known for its serious side – finely-honed arthouse fare from the likes of Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero and Lisandro Alonso. But the Argentines can do mainstream very well. And this is a big, bold, glossily-produced, highly entertaining black comedy – a collection of stand-alone stories connected by the theme of revenge, the practice of which is lent one spectacular expression after another. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The CutSaturday, 11 October 2014
There have been pitifully few films about the Ottoman Turks’ genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in World War One, surely thanks to the strategic usefulness of a modern Turkey which denies the genocide’s existence. Fatih Akin, the fierce German-Turkish director of Head On, doesn’t limit The Cut to its direct horrors either, preferring to sweep away his hero Nazaret (Tahir Rahim) on wider historical currents. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Listen Up PhilipSaturday, 11 October 2014
Listen Up Philip is so successful in its retro stylings that it comes across like a lost New Hollywood gem. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The Duke of BurgundyFriday, 10 October 2014
Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Thou Wast Mild and LovelyFriday, 10 October 2014
Ushering in the mucky-minded art-house crowd like the Pied Piper lining up kids for the snatching, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely describes itself as an erotic thriller set amidst the Kentucky wilds, while its fluid, meadow-fresh depiction of forbidden romance recalls Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. However, it's a film that turns surprisingly savage with 'hillbilly horror flick' a more apt description of where things end up. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The Imitation GameThursday, 09 October 2014
Benedict Cumberbatch leads a superb cast in The Imitation Game, the highly-anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, gifted mathematician and father of modern computing. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Camp X-RayThursday, 09 October 2014
What can another film about American malfeasance in its War on Terror add to our knowledge and disapproval? Camp X-Ray has too narrow a scope to offer much; yet it’s impossible not to be affected by its depiction of utter hopelessness for those illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Read more... |
Effie GrayWednesday, 08 October 2014
A peculiar slice of 19th-century cultural life is mined to minimal effect in Effie Gray, a stillborn labour of love that doesn't justify the long slog from screenwriter and supporting player Emma Thompson required to bring this tale to the screen. It's not just that her husband, Greg Wise, is miscast in a part - that of the visionary critic, educator and sometime-painter John Ruskin - for which he's several decades too old. Read more... |
‘71Tuesday, 07 October 2014
“You’ll only be staying here until one of the paddies shoots you.” The blunt caution given to Private Gary Hook on his arrival in Belfast sets the tone for the army’s attitude towards where he’s been posted, and the tone of locals towards an army any of them might ostensibly join. The breathlessly hard-hitting ‘71 not only captures these tensions with flair, but does so from the incompatible, irreconcilable points of view of those caught up in and sucked into them. Read more... |
The CallingMonday, 06 October 2014
Jason Stone’s directorial debut is chock-full of killer-thriller tropes. Serial killer with a religious bent; cop with a drink and drugs problem; smalltown investigator butts heads with intransigent chief of police in the big city; a lightbulb moment when a detective looks at the crime pinboard – they’re all here (plus a few more), but it’s no less enjoyable for that. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Blu-ray: Chocolat
Claire Denis’ 1988 debut is a sensual madeleine to her Cameroonian childhood, with its taste of termites on butter, sound of birdsong and insect...
Coote, LSO, Tilson Thomas, Barbican review - the triumph of...
Programme notes for Mahler’s monumental symphonies will often...
Conchúr White, St Pancras Old Church review - side-stepping...
If there’s a feeling of déjà vu, it isn’t detectable. Conchúr White played St Pancras Old Church in April 2016 with County Armagh’s Silences, the...
Our Mothers review - revisiting the horrors of Guatemala...
Director Cesar Diaz’s debut feature film was...
Rhod Gilbert, G-Live Guildford review - cancer, constipation...
Rhod Gilbert is disarmingly honest about his thought process when he received his diagnosis of head and neck cancer in 2022. Following quickly...
Album: Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown
It’s been a long while since Beth Gibbons released an album. Portishead’s Third was out in 2008. She has lived through so many...
Pop Will Eat Itself, Chalk, Brighton review - hip hop rocker...
By midway, things are cooking. “Can U Dig It?”, a post-modern list-song from another age (Ok,...
Britten Sinfonia, The Marian Consort, Milton Court review -...
Gesualdo was, in the words of New Yorker critic Alex Ross – “irrefutably badass”, a double murderer, sado-masochist and black magic enthusiast who...
Music Reissues Weekly: Little Girls - Valley Songs
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We...