Film Reviews
MichaelFriday, 02 March 2012
Michael is a work of fiction, but it is also clearly an amalgam of real-life events. For first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer (former casting director for Michael Haneke, whose influence you may detect), the subject must have particular resonance: in this story of a child abduction by a lone paedophile, it’s unavoidable that we think of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, as well as Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux. Read more... |
This Means WarThursday, 01 March 2012
Forget the action movie trappings of the aggressively titled This Means War: the latest film from the enigmatically named McG has a plot that Noel Coward might well have loved. Whether Sir Noel would have approved of the witless dialogue and the decidedly coy sexual politics is another thing altogether, though he doubtless would have admired the three stars' physiques. Read more... |
CaranchoWednesday, 29 February 2012
In the UK we call them ambulance-chasers, those personal injury lawyers who prey on the victims of accidents, encouraging them to seek compensation, in return for a tidy fee. The Argentines, as the title of Pablo Trapero’s new film suggests, have their own word for this mucky breed – vultures. Read more... |
If Not Us, Who?Wednesday, 29 February 2012
The Red Army Faction was Germany's key revolutionary force for a decade from the late 1960s onwards, and its story, especially the characters of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, has proved highly attractive to the country's filmmakers. Uli Edel’s 2008 The Baader Meinhof Complex told the key political story in lengthy detail through to its end in 1977 when four of its key members (in the official version) committed suicide in prison. Read more... |
The AdoptedFriday, 24 February 2012
Following her nuanced turn last year in Mike Mills’ quietly wrenching Beginners, Mélanie Laurent makes her directorial debut with another dimly idiosyncratic tale of thirtysomethings finding love and facing grief. Alas, while Laurent and her co-writers Morgan Perez and Chris Deslandes initially set up some intriguing dynamics, they give way all too swiftly to predictable scenes and a crushingly saccharine third act that’s no less risible for being heartfelt. Read more... |
The Best Exotic Marigold HotelTuesday, 21 February 2012
Travel, health permitting, knows few age barriers (if it did, there would be no Elderhostel), nor does charm, so there are two reasons up front why The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fully deserves to win over the so-called "grey pound" market and much more besides. The story of a septet of British retirees abroad who need to leave home in order to learn any number of home truths, John Madden's film provides a welcome corrective to our youth-obsessed celluloid age without going to the... Read more... |
RampartTuesday, 21 February 2012
A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late Nineties, it takes as its target one (fictional) Los Angeles law enforcer and his towering demons. Harrelson’s Dave Brown is an intelligent but difficult man, buckled into the straight-jacket of thuggery. Read more... |
HadewijchSaturday, 18 February 2012
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a 13th-century mystic whose poetry had a formative influence on Dutch literature. Though influenced by the courtly love tradition, the subject of her poems was the love of God and the mysteries of the divine. She was probably not a nun but a beguine – a devout noblewoman in a self-denying contemplative order that carried out works of Christian charity. There is a suggestion in her letters that she may have been exiled from her sisters and yearned to rejoin them. Read more... |
The Woman in the FifthFriday, 17 February 2012
Challenging the boundaries of reality and the way in which characters exist in and redefine their worlds has become something of a hallmark of director Pawel Pawlikowski. Considering his previous film My Summer of Love, one critic wrote of it as a study of worlds that “exist somewhere on the periphery of normality”. Read more... |
Extremely Loud and Incredibly CloseWednesday, 15 February 2012
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer once described his approach to the writing process as “trying to stop making sense, and create something that just has an effect”. It’s an intention that’s easy to track in his sophomore novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which uses an idiosyncratic mix of prose, pictures and blank pages to spin its two narrative strands. Read more... |
Position Among the StarsTuesday, 14 February 2012
Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich has spent a decade following the everyday lives of Indonesia’s Sjamsuddin family, a working-class clan with their roots in the countryside whose working lives have taken them into the hubbub of the country’s capital Jakarta. Position Among the Stars is the final work of a trilogy, its immediate subject the importance of granddaughter Tari going to college to receive the further education that will give her new opportunities. Read more... |
The Woman in BlackFriday, 10 February 2012
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts. Read more... |
The MuppetsThursday, 09 February 2012
Those of a certain vintage will recall with fondness their childhood years (or those as parents of small children) gathered in front of the television on Sunday evenings between 1976-1981 to watch The Muppet Show. But The Muppets movie, their first big-screen outing in 12 years, is no lazy exercise in nostalgia; it's bracingly original and postmodern, with dollops of self-knowing humour and irony. Read more... |
Girl ModelWednesday, 08 February 2012
American documentary directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin have made a reputation with stories that study, as they describe it, “variations of truth and falseness”. Their latest, Girl Model, is just that, in spades. It tells the story of 13-year-old Russian teenage would-be model Nadya, plucked from the talent contests of Siberia to work in the potentially lucrative Japanese fashion market, where the premium is on youth. Read more... |
A Dangerous MethodTuesday, 07 February 2012
Those who are “Jung and easily Freudened” (to misquote Joyce) need have nothing to fear from David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Read more... |
CarnageFriday, 03 February 2012
Yasmina Reza first came to theatregoers' attention with her 1994 play Art, a very funny three-hander about friendship and intellectual pretension. God of Carnage, this time a four-hander but an equally astute comedy of manners peopled by another bunch of bourgeois characters, debuted in 2007 - and now Roman Polanski has adapted it for the screen, co-writing the screenplay with Reza and moving the action from Paris to New York City. Read more... |
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