Film Reviews
21 Jump StreetFriday, 16 March 2012
Those of a certain age will remember the television series 21 Jump Street, a huge hit for the then fledgling Fox network in America. It ran from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp. The titular address was where he worked as an undercover cop, one of a team of youthful officers investigating crimes in high schools and colleges. Read more...
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In DarknessFriday, 16 March 2012
The world has heard of Schindler’s Jews, who were saved from the gas ovens by the patronage of an enlightened German industrialist. Socha’s Jews are not quite so celebrated. There are number of reasons for that. For a start, many fewer Jews were saved in this narrative, and their story has not found its own Thomas Kenneally - nor until now its Steven Spielberg. Read more... |
ContrabandThursday, 15 March 2012
I always used to avoid any film that had Mark Wahlberg in it, because he seemed to have the acting skills of a park bench. Then I saw The Departed - because you have to see Marty's movies - and thought he was brilliant as the astonishingly foul-mouthed Sergeant Dignam. Now I've seen Contraband and regrettably, it may be time to revert to Plan A. Read more... |
Once Upon a Time in AnatoliaMonday, 12 March 2012
A police procedural played out over a long dark night of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the magnificent sixth feature from Turkish writer / director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys, Uzak). So much more than a simple thriller, it transforms a murder investigation into something gratifyingly profound and perversely beautiful; its grizzled, largely unfamiliar faces and their tales of woe will remain with you long after the end credits roll. Read more... |
TrishnaFriday, 09 March 2012
Literary adaptations are a godsend to an industry that loves a good story but is too busy blowing the budget on chase sequences and explosions to pay a decent screenwriter. Read more... |
Bel AmiThursday, 08 March 2012
Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod - is to the celluloid manner born. Read more... |
CleanskinThursday, 08 March 2012
Hats off to independent British writer/producer/director Hadi Hajaig, who has doggedly piloted his thriller Cleanskin to the screen and picked up distribution support from Warner Bros in the process. Hajaig was never going to be splashing around in a Bourne- or Bond-sized budget, but he has played up the flick's British roots with pungent use of some prime London locations. Read more... |
The Decoy BrideTuesday, 06 March 2012
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. Read more... |
Blank CitySunday, 04 March 2012
Céline Danhier’s Blank City is a useful but slightly frustrating primer on the grass-roots No Wave cinema movement that blossomed in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side in the post-punk era of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Read more... |
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... |
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