Film Reviews
Zero DaysFriday, 06 January 2017
A computer virus – even one as apparently malevolent and unstoppable as the infamous Stuxnet – would make an unlikely subject for a feature-length documentary, you might think. But New York documentary maker Alex Gibney’s Zero Days is a remarkable achievement – and in so many ways. Read more... |
Best (and Worst) of 2016: FilmSaturday, 31 December 2016
Prepare to disagree. 2016 has been getting bad reviews all year long, but for film it was actually pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that there are big omissions from this list of our best films from the past 12 months. Our method of selection was arbitrary: each of the theartsdesk’s film reviewers was invited to volunteer one film each as their favourite of the year. No one was allowed to choose two. So there is no place in our top seven for the film which was this... Read more... |
SilenceSaturday, 31 December 2016
Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are... Read more... |
Crash and BurnThursday, 29 December 2016
Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London. Read more... |
A Monster CallsWednesday, 28 December 2016
It's not often you hear the sound of film critics sobbing quietly to themselves, but this really happened at the screening I attended of A Monster Calls. Having seen the trailer, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around a spooky-looking rural landscape, I'd marked it down as one to avoid. How wrong can you be. Read more... |
Why Him?Monday, 26 December 2016
One hardly expects a film like Why Him? to be high art, which is another way of saying that if you approach it in the right spirit (and with enough drink inside you) this well-timed holiday release should provide guiltily entertaining fun. Most easily described as a coarsened Meet the Parents redux, John Hamburg's generation-gap comedy pits the decent but fundamentally square Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston) against the spectacularly badly behaved Silicon Valley... Read more... |
Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to HollywoodSaturday, 24 December 2016
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white photos in the middle; what we get in the text is undoubtedly erudite but also racy, gossipy, anecdotal, list-inclined, sometimes camp and a tad hit and miss. Read more... |
PassengersWednesday, 21 December 2016
Despite being kitted out with a full-scale intergalactic spaceship and all known computerised effects, Passengers is essentially a two-hander for its stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Or you could maybe stretch that to a two-and-a-half-hander, if you include Michael Sheen's oily and obsequious bar-tending android. Perhaps it's part of director... Read more... |
Rogue One: A Star Wars StoryThursday, 15 December 2016
Whether you use its optional subtitle A Star Wars Story or not, Rogue One arrives with a diminutive air. Read more... |
The Eagle HuntressWednesday, 14 December 2016
Thirteen-year-old Aishopan desperately wants to be an eagle hunter. The problem is, she’s a girl. And in the traditional Mongolian nomadic community where she lives, rearing a golden eagle chick to hunt foxes for their fur is very much the preserve of men. British director Otto Bell’s sumptuous film is certainly an inspirational story of struggle and triumph, and it’s set against an arrestingly unfamiliar context – the icy peaks and frozen rivers at the crossroads between Mongolia,... Read more... |
The PassFriday, 09 December 2016
John Donnelly’s play The Pass scored a slate of five-star reviews when it ran at the Royal Court early last year – theartsdesk called it “scorching” – and plaudits for Russell Tovey’s central performance were practically stellar (“a star performance from onetime History Boys student that this actor's career to this point has in no way suggested,” we raved). For those who missed that sell-out, small-stage, seven-week run, Ben A Williams’ film adaptation... Read more... |
The Birth of a NationTuesday, 06 December 2016
DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice. Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation... Read more... |
SnowdenMonday, 05 December 2016
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK, this account of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden keeps clutter to a minimum as Stone fashions a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good. It... Read more... |
Sully: Miracle on the HudsonFriday, 02 December 2016
The pilot and the sniper have a lot in common for Clint Eastwood. In his previous US blockbuster, American Sniper, Chris Kyle’s cool shooting under pressure helped extract his comrades from overwhelming assault in Iraq, as part of at least 160 kills confirmed by him there. Read more... |
The Unknown GirlFriday, 02 December 2016
The Dardennes brothers' latest tale from the grim streets of the industrial suburb of Liège in Belgium is another quietly powerful masterpiece; it’s perhaps their best film since The Child. Re-edited since it debuted at Cannes to mixed reviews, it fuses elements from social realist cinema, morality play and a whodunit murder mystery. The result is a wholly gripping narrative told with understated eloquence. The film opens with no introductions: a young woman, stethoscope in... Read more... |
Chi-RaqThursday, 01 December 2016
“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women... Read more... |
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