Film Reviews

Berlinale 2014: Cathedrals of Culture

Tom Birchenough Friday, 14 February 2014

Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.

8 Minutes Idle

Veronica Lee Thursday, 13 February 2014

The makers of 8 Minutes Idle have a kickstarter campaign to thank for the cinema release of their offbeat comedy, which was made in 2012 but has sat on the shelf since. It's a charming (perhaps knowingly so) low-budget romcom, adapted from his novel of the same title by Matt Thorne with Nicholas Blincoe, and directed with a light touch by Mark Simon Hewis.

Berlinale 2014: Nymphomaniac, In Order of Disappearance, Aloft

Tom Birchenough Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Stellan Skarsgård is having a good Berlinale. The veteran Swedish actor proved the main calming influence in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volume One (***), which the Berlin festival screened as a world premiere in the director’s version, running at 145 minutes. That’s about 25 minutes more than the UK will be seeing from 21 February, when both parts of the work will be released.

Cuban Fury

Emma Simmonds Wednesday, 12 February 2014

The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us...

Bastards

Demetrios Matheou Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Whenever someone wants to dispel the gender simplification that female directors only make feelgood films, they wheel out Kathryn Bigelow, whose action movies are cited as being tougher than any man’s. It’s a spurious debate, admittedly, but if we were to play that game I’d definitely bring Denis into Bigelow’s corner. The Frenchwoman doesn’t do action, per se. But her films can be tough as nails, black as pitch, and as disquieting as they are marvellous.

Berlinale 2014: Two Men in Town, '71

Tom Birchenough Monday, 10 February 2014

The opening days of the Berlinale have seen mixed reactions to high-profile English-language offerings. With its stylish sense of mittelEuropa, the festival’s premiere, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, apparently went down a treat. Much less kudos, though, went to George Clooney’s The Monuments Men (released in the UK this week, reviewed on theartsdesk today).

The Monuments Men

Karen Krizanovich Monday, 10 February 2014

The Nazi war machine had great taste: it wanted all of the world’s art treasure for itself. Someone had to stop them .Based on Robert M Edsel’s book, George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s screenplay takes a starry stab at telling a culturally serious World War Two story. Shot in both the UK and Germany, its moral values are high, but this tasteful war heist/thriller hits the ground flat-footed and doesn't get better.

RoboCop

Katherine McLaughlin Friday, 07 February 2014

José Padilha’s glossy reimagining of RoboCop is entertaining but mostly forgettable. Geared towards the profitable 12A market, its good looking but illogical action sequences are no replacement for the grimy, grubby and magnificently realised dystopian world from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 scathing satire.

The Invisible Woman

Karen Krizanovich Thursday, 06 February 2014

Delve into the personal life of Charles Dickens and she emerges, revealing another side of an author whose stories seem so wholesome. According to The Invisible Woman author Claire Tomalin, Ralph Fiennes’ film about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is very different from the book upon which it is based.

Dallas Buyers Club

Emma Dibdin Wednesday, 05 February 2014

Extreme physical transformation is a double-edged sword for actors. Setting aside the metabolic repercussions of shedding huge amounts of weight from an already lean frame, as Matthew McConaughey did for the role of rodeo cowboy and accidental AIDS activist Ron Woodroof, there’s a risk that the aesthetic will distract from the work.

This is a performance for which...

Lift to the Scaffold

Kieron Tyler Monday, 03 February 2014

A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments.

The Armstrong Lie

Jasper Rees Thursday, 30 January 2014

Lance Armstrong is a Hollywood villain who just happens to be real. He bullies, lies, manipulates, cheats and destroys lives until righteous crusaders hunt him down and drive a stake through his heart. And that, more or less, will be the plot of the movie Stephen Frears is working on now. Popcorn munchers demand nothing less than a comeuppance for the bad guy. To cite Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily: that’s what fiction means. It’s not quite what happens in The...

Read more...

Out of the Furnace

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 29 January 2014

After his outsized triumph as conman Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle, Christian Bale is gaunt and stringy again (Jennifer Lawrence will be happy to hear) in this minor-keyed, intensely atmospheric story of two brothers in an America that time forgot. It's set in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, a ghost town all but abandoned by its devastated steel industry. "Born down in a dead man's town", as the Boss put it in "Born in the USA".

Lone Survivor

Emma Simmonds Tuesday, 28 January 2014

Just what kind of beast is Peter Berg's Lone Survivor? A jingoist justification for the continuing conflict in Afghanistan? A cautionary tale questioning the rules of engagement? War porn? An intense vehicle for its talented stars? Or, in fact, a critique of the American war machine which sends young men out to be slaughtered and provides them with scant support?

That Awkward Moment

Matt Wolf Monday, 27 January 2014

Who'd have thought that buried deep within the bromance antics of That Awkward Moment, the latest essay in celluloid dude-dom to confirm the notion that guys will be guys, would lurk a Shakespeare comedy?

Grudge Match

Nick Hasted Saturday, 25 January 2014

It’s hard to believe your eyes when you see a film now actually exists in which Stallone meets De Niro in the boxing ring. It’s Rocky v Raging Bull, of course, a fantasy match-up no one sane ever fantasised about. It sounds like the result of a Hollywood pitch meeting gone mad, stunt casting of imperial chutzpah.