Film Reviews
The FamilyFriday, 22 November 2013
It's great to see Robert De Niro front and centre in a full-sized role again, even if we might wish it hadn't been this one. Likewise Michelle Pfeiffer, stepping up to play the hard-boiled wife of De Niro's mobster-in-hiding Giovanno Manzoni. Twenty-five years later, she's remarried to the Mob and giving it serious bada-bing. Read more... |
The Hunger Games: Catching FireThursday, 21 November 2013
The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention. Read more... |
Blue Is the Warmest ColourWednesday, 20 November 2013
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty... Read more... |
ParklandTuesday, 19 November 2013
Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital is the place where both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald died and it serves as the central setting for the most recent film to investigate the assassination of the 35th President. Read more... |
Computer ChessMonday, 18 November 2013
Hailed in some quarters as a wily and satirical retro-classic, Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess depends for its survival on threading its way through the eye of a tiny nostalgic needle. Bujalski's intention was to create a kind of hommage to the single-minded, possibly autistic computing pioneers of the early Eighties, often unsightly weirdos with hilarious hair and no clothes sense who nonetheless "saw this mountain and insisted on climbing it," as Bujalski puts it. Read more... |
The CounsellorFriday, 15 November 2013
The Counsellor is a cinematic room divider: some people will like it, saying it is stylish and daring. Others will find it truncated, slick and pretentious. Whichever room you end up in, The Counsellor has a tang of its own. This violent, colorful thriller overflows with bravado and, like matching collars and cuffs, identical foreboding. The motto here is that bad things happen to bad people but when they're bad people we sort of like, it's different. Ridley Scott’s... Read more... |
Dom HemingwayFriday, 15 November 2013
Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is addicted to his own voice, whether he’s soliloquising about his cock, his safe-cracking, his hangover, or telling the psychotic Russian gangster whose houseguest he is how much he wants to fuck his girlfriend. His ornately foul-mouthed verbosity exhausts even himself as he explodes through life, punching, bragging, drinking, drugging and self-destructing, skin puffy, teeth stained, face scarred, gut flabby and eyes staring with fierce confusion, constantly... Read more... |
The ButlerThursday, 14 November 2013
As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story of Eugene Allen, Daniels' approach is straightforward and highly emotive. There’s plenty for the crowd here, and, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, the fact that The Butler is accessible across almost every... Read more... |
Don JonTuesday, 12 November 2013
With his debut as a writer/director, the cute, cuddly, only-one-down-from-Gosling star Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes to bat against cold, casual sex and hits one into the mid-field for meaningful sex - even possibly older-woman sex - in Don Jon. Read more... |
In FearMonday, 11 November 2013
Raw fear is horror’s ideal state. The vertiginous drop through a trapdoor into primordial, gasping helplessness usually only lasts for the split-second length of a cinema-seat jolt. Jeremy Lovering’s debut aims to scare us for much longer. Unusually, he wanted to scare his actors too, feeding them just enough script to get by as they filmed on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor (standing in for rural Ireland) at night, and he threw shocks at them out of the dark. Fear is his theme and method. Read more... |
How To Survive A PlagueThursday, 07 November 2013
What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? Read more... |
GravityWednesday, 06 November 2013
As a director, Alfonso Cuarón is a stickler. In his renowned Children of Men, he sought to dismantle cinema, to break down the glass wall between audience and content by making the film more like a live event. To a great extent, he succeeded, opening with a 17 minute continuous take and, later, using the expertise of Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski (known as Chivo), he would fashion takes of stunning length and complexity. Read more... |
Love TomorrowTuesday, 05 November 2013
Feature films about ballet are rarities - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the red eyes and OTT fantasies? Black Swan became an instant world hit on the strength of its purple take on showbiz (never mind it was packaged in a ballet scenario, this was more a riproaring horror story). Love Tomorrow is altogether something else. Read more... |
Seduced and AbandonedMonday, 04 November 2013
The 65th Cannes film festival acts as the backdrop for this compelling, if somewhat misguided documentary from James Toback. Accompanied by Alec Baldwin, Toback sets out to shame Hollywood for its decision to continually churn out megabuck franchises and mediocrity rather than investing in risky, original cinema as the pair try to get funding for their own film project. Read more... |
PhilomenaFriday, 01 November 2013
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son... Read more... |
Drinking BuddiesThursday, 31 October 2013
Orgasms aside, it was When Harry Met Sally’s edict that sex always gets in the way of male-female friendships that hit home. Drinking Buddies comes to more nuanced conclusions, as we watch Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) steadily drink and comfortably banter during and after work at a Chicago micro-brewery, and wonder just when they’re going to leave their straitlaced partners, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick), pictured below. Read more... |
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