Film Reviews
22 Jump StreetSaturday, 07 June 2014
"We're too old for this shit," quips Jenko (Channing Tatum), quoting one of the greats of weary screen policing - Lethal Weapon's Murtaugh - in response to his latest nonsensically spectacular brush with death. "We started off too old for this shit," shoots back his partner Schmidt (Jonah Hill). Welcome to 22 Jump Street: a film that wears a lack of originality not just on its sleeve but as its whole outfit. Read more... |
When I Saw YouFriday, 06 June 2014
Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir excels at catching both individuality of character and wider background context in her second feature, When I Saw You. The initial background is a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, where displaced families arrive from their lost homes across the border after the Six-day War (the film’s title alludes to the fact that Palestine is so close as to be almost visible, at the same time almost impossibly far away). Read more... |
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets…Thursday, 05 June 2014
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Read more... |
Grace of MonacoWednesday, 04 June 2014
Sometimes a film captures the imagination of the critical establishment for all the wrong reasons, and there's a scramble to see who can file the most entertainingly bitchy copy. Read more... |
The DirtiesTuesday, 03 June 2014
Two movie-obsessed high-school students Owen and Matt (Owen Williams and Matt Johnson, who also writes and directs) are making a short movie about bullying for their film class. After they show it, to widespread derision from their classmates, the bullying gets worse (by boys they call the "dirties") and so the two teenagers decide to make a new version, incorporating secretly filmed footage of them being harassed and assaulted. Read more... |
Fruitvale StationMonday, 02 June 2014
In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. Read more... |
Edge of TomorrowSaturday, 31 May 2014
Tom Cruise has smugly saved the day in dozens of films. In Edge of Tomorrow, he utterly fails to save the same day dozens of times, dying and trying again, in a loop caused by being plastered in the time-warping blood of one of the aliens currently occupying Western Europe. Read more... |
Venus in FurThursday, 29 May 2014
For an artist who famously can't travel to America, Roman Polanski would appear to have an unstoppable passion for filming small-cast Broadway hits. On the back of Death and the Maiden and Carnage, both of which diminished their stage sources, along comes Venus in Fur, adapted from the David Ives play that had no fewer than three separate New York runs, making a star of its husky-voiced young leading lady, Nina Arianda, who won a 2012 Tony for her work. Read more... |
A Million Ways to Die in the WestWednesday, 28 May 2014
Nodding to John Ford, Shane and almost every other western ever made, baby-faced writer/director/producer/lead Seth MacFarlane (Ted) replaces the shocking genius of Blazing Saddles with swearing and jokes about bodily functions in a fast, funny, get-it-or-get-out comedy that will divide friends, ruin families and make a lot of people laugh. Whether you’re one of them, you’ll have to watch and see. Read more... |
Jimmy's HallWednesday, 28 May 2014
Ken Loach’s regular collaborators have said that Jimmy’s Hall will likely be the director’s last film, at least on the level of major projects. And his latest work is a big piece, both in scale and in heart; it’s not a defining work in Loach’s oeuvre, but more than a reminder of some of the familiar motifs that have recurred in a remarkable career that now spans half a century. Read more... |
MaleficentWednesday, 28 May 2014
For the latest in a seemingly endless line of misunderstood cultural icons, meet Maleficent, the preternaturally smooth-cheeked anti-hero (or maybe not ) of the new celluloid blockbuster of the same name. Read more... |
Miss and the DoctorsMonday, 26 May 2014
This low-budget Parisian dramedy about doctor-patient relations is as odd, timid and well-intentioned as its socially maladjusted protagonists. Miss and the Doctors is writer-director Axelle Ropert's second feature after 2009's The Wolberg Family. Read more... |
Run and JumpSaturday, 24 May 2014
Not a lot gets spoken in Run and Jump, the gently eloquent first feature from San Francisco-born filmmaker Steph Green, a dramatic strategy that leaves the actors to charge the unsaid with meaning and the audience - not to mention Ireland, ah Ireland - to do the rest. That the result is as finely honed as it is honours not just the unforced beauty of a country that looks especially gorgeous soaked in rain. Read more... |
Cannes 2014: Maps to the StarsFriday, 23 May 2014
There is a very old joke about a Hollywood actor, waiting to hear whether he has landed a plum role in an upcoming production, who gets a call from his agent. "I’ve got some bad news for you," says the agent. "Your mother has just died." "Oh, thank goodness!" says the actor. Read more... |
The Punk SingerFriday, 23 May 2014
“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin. Read more... |
Cannes 2014: Two Days, One NightThursday, 22 May 2014
Any synopsis of Two Days, One Night is bound to make it sound like a worthy, sub-Loachian drama: A young mother, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), recently off work with depression, is made redundant from a small factory. In her absence, 14 of her 16 colleagues have voted to take their bonuses rather than let her keep her job. But she persuades her boss to host a second round of voting two days later, to allow her the weekend to persuade her fellow workers to support her. Read more... |
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