film reviews
Graham Fuller

The newly restored, 111-minute cut of M is being screened 35 times during BFI Southbank's current Peter Lorre retrospective. One only has to see and hear Fritz Lang's first sound film once, however, to appreciate its undiminished power as a vision of a Germany teetering on the abyss less than three years before the Nazis took power.

Karen Krizanovich

Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all, old folks like food, don’t they? Well, so do young people. Who doesn’t?

Katherine McLaughlin

The task of adapting 1978 novel The Switch by Elmore Leonard - who sadly passed away last year -  is given to relatively new director Daniel Schechter who brings together a superb ensemble cast, lush seventies set design and a gritty style. He mostly rises to the occasion thanks to confident camera work and an obvious rapport with his actors.

Katherine McLaughlin

Slap and tickle and slapstick meet to varying degrees of not very funny in this comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel as a married couple who attempt to spice up their love life with a home-made skin-flick. Extreme product placement, a lack of chemistry between the two leads and a tame script co-written by Segel and long-time writing partner Nicholas Stoller fails to deliver. Thankfully there are solid supporting turns from Rob Lowe and Jack Black.

Nick Hasted

Dan Stevens puts Downton behind him to become a CIA-built killing machine laying low in a New Mexico small town, in Adam Wingard’s bonkers new thriller. He looks all the better for it. Aristocratic English charm translates into Southern civility as his character David insinuates himself into a family grieving for a son he served with in Iraq. David’s just here to help.

Karen Krizanovich

Everyone loves a homegrown hero – and they don’t get more homegrown than Before I Go to Sleep, the thriller written and directed by Rowan Joffe, son of Roland Joffe, director of The Killing Fields and The Mission. Before I Go To Sleep is, arguably, one of the most anticipated British films of 2014. The script is based on the Faber Academy sensation of 2011, ex-audiologist S.J. Watson’s novel of the same name.

Emma Dibdin

Opening as it does on a frank, witty and somewhat extended discussion of female discharge, Obvious Child lets you know from the outset that it is every bit as uninterested in making nice as its blunt lead character. Jenny Slate is Donna, a late-twenties comedienne who drily mines her less-than-aspirational life and stagnant relationship for laughs during standup sets, only to be unceremoniously dumped one night when the boyfriend in question tires of being used as material. 

emma.simmonds

Disney's latest is a film which must have itself represented a hell of a pitch. Based on a true story, it's basically Slumdog Millionaire meets Jerry Maguire - two films that attracted ample awards-interest and that prompted cascades of cash, like crunchy autumn leaves to be raked up by the sackful. Million Dollar Arm finds a hard-nosed sports agent travelling to India in search of the next baseball sensation, his method of selection - the titular talent contest.

Katherine McLaughlin

 

Taylor Kitsch’s doomed film career continues with this trite but good natured Canadian mash-up of Doc Hollywood and Waking Ned. Just like in major box office failure John Carter, Kitsch finds himself dumped in a foreign, mysterious land but the strange inhabitants are far more welcoming in the small harbour village of Tickle Head, where he could prove to be their saviour.

Kieron Tyler

Returning to the small town you grew up in after a spell in the big city can often be problematic. Old friends now think you’re a big shot. The familiar is seen in a new light, and not necessarily a good one. There’s a sense that the ties which have been slackened might be irrevocably sheared. In Mystery Road, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan is a cop back in outback Queensland, in north-east Australia, after training. Now a detective, he quickly finds it’s sink or swim.