Film
Demetrios Matheou
Greta Gerwig has been sneaking up on us for a while now, a star waiting to happen. If this were the Seventies, it would have happened already, since that was a decade when Gerwig’s kind of effortlessly natural eccentricity was wholeheartedly embraced; it was when, indeed, the young Gerwig’s role model Diane Keaton came to prominence, as Woody Allen’s muse and onscreen foil. Gerwig, a writer and director as well as actress, certainly has the chops to be another Keaton.The 28-year-old was born in Sacramento, California. She studied ballet until her early teens, performing with the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Who knew back in 1999 that a comedy about a bunch of teenage boys desperate to lose their virginity before they graduated from high school would be so popular? Adam Herz's script for American Pie, filmed by debutant directors Chris and Paul Weitz, was a huge box-office hit, and spawned two sequels; American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and now a third - American Pie: Reunion. There were also four spin-off straight-to-DVD films. Perhaps most notably, it presaged the perils of sex and the internet and brought the term “milf” to worldwide attention.The title famously refers to a scene Read more ...
ash.smyth
There’s something in the water at the commissioning editors’ local, I think, resulting, of late, in a rash of rather good arts-n-culture biopics. This week, it was the turn of Roald Dahl, the Big Friendly Giant who made an absolute shit-load of cash telling really not-very-bedtime stories to young children.Our host for the evening – the channelling medium, more accurately – was David Walliams, comedian, campo supremo, and sometime quaffer of the Thames (oh, and he may have mentioned something about writing children’s books of his own). Walliams is not a world-beating comic talent, and Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The opening scene of Whit Stillman’s (The Last Days Of Disco) first film in 13 years comprises one of the most immediately familiar scenarios in the American high school genre. A wide-eyed new girl arrives on campus, is spied by a trio of queen bees and co-opted into their ranks, from where she embarks upon a journey of social self-discovery and inevitable hubristic downfall. But this is college, not high school, and the queen bees are something altogether subtler and stranger.Rather than Mean Girls, these damsels are philanthropists, on a mission to save their fellow students from depression Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just as you think you’ve got Tuesday, After Christmas pegged as an Eric Rohmer-style relationship drama, it gradually becomes clear it’s something else. The impact left by this ambiguous, non-judgmental examination of the emotional crisis affecting a married man and those around him is a result of its measured approach and deft sensitivity. Less about the dialogue, it’s more about interaction and nuance.Paul Hanganu (Mimi Brănescu) is married to Adriana (Mirela Oprişor). They have a bright little daughter. He works in some unspecified role for a bank, Adriana works in law. Adriana doesn’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Glenn Close always had it in her somehow. That mannish jawline was part of her steel cladding in Fatal Attraction. The lasting image of Dangerous Liaisons comes at the close, when Close’s Madame de Meurteuil scrapes off her painted mask to reveal a hard hatchet face. And then there’s her ruthless lawyer in Damages, not to mention two gruesome helpings of Cruella de Vil. If any of Hollywood’s leading ladies from the past 30 years can get away with strapping up her womanly parts and impersonating a man, it is surely an actress who has often played women who play men at their own game.Albert Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The long-threatened Avengers Assemble (in the US simply The Avengers) is an appositely extravagant big screen adaptation of the Marvel comic book sensation. More importantly for many, it’s an amalgam of several superhero film franchises, making it a great excuse to pile star upon star. Written and directed by cult favourite Joss Whedon, it really is a fanboy’s dream. Perhaps you’re relishing the prospect already, but even those for whom it sounds like a load of “crash, bang, wallops” may find themselves pleasantly surprised. Despite a predictably nonsensical plot, Avengers Assemble rises Read more ...
ellin.stein
Unlike the New Seekers, Whit Stillman does not want to teach the world to sing. He does, however, want to teach it to dance, specifically to dance the Sambola (or, to give it its full name, Sambola! The New International Dance Craze). Instructions and a demonstration accompany the final credits of his new film, Damsels in Distress.Social dancing plays a large role in all of Stillman’s work. His breakthrough, Metropolitan (1990) - which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and became a Withnail and I-level cult success with fans still quoting favourite lines years later - is set Read more ...
howard.male
It would be an impossible to do a comprehensive global history of cinema in just 15 hours. You could attempt it by throwing hundreds of thousands of second-long clips at the viewer in a firework display of celluloid. But film-maker and critic Mark Cousins opts for gentle hypnotism over dazzling pyrotechnics. In the opening episode alone, in a lucid correlation of words and images, he shows us how filmmakers evolved a grammar for this new medium which took full advantage of an intrinsic plasticity which theatre, photography and painting lacked. The close-up, the flashback, the move from one Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Incest, rape, torture and matricide, as well as an obligatory spot of cross-dressing, all played their part in making Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk the scandalous success of its day. But with such stuff the bread and butter of Hollywood’s unblinking horror departments, why would a contemporary director choose to revisit this period classic? It was apparently a lifelong ambition of Surrealism’s greatest filmmaker Luis Buñuel to adapt The Monk for the screen. It’s a tantalising prospect of what might have been, and one that speaks not only to the bloody and allusive thrills of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not so very rare for actors to be given a shot at directing their own film. It happens slightly less often that they find financial backing to work on their own script. What makes Breathing, which opened this week in the UK, such a collector’s item is that it is so very accomplished.Karl Markovics (b. 1963) has long experience as an actor in Austria. He is best – in fact, solely – known internationally for his extraordinary performance in The Counterfeiters (2007). Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film tells the true story of Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, a Jewish black marketeer who is rounded Read more ...