You wait ages for a French film about a teenage girl's sexual awakening and then two come along at once. Actually who am I kidding? As any filmic Francophile will tell you it's not exactly a rarity. Still, red-hot on the heels of the astonishing Blue is the Warmest Colour comes François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie.
film reviews
Karen Krizanovich
Classic children’s stories often have a darker side; a shadowy area that lends an eternal quality to an otherwise merely durable yarn. Such is Mary Poppins. How and why it came to the big screen is one of Hollywood’s best tales, previously untold until now with Saving Mr Banks, a controlled yet poignant story hinging on the persistence and pain essential to bringing even the cheeriest film to fruition.
Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s high-profile effort focuses on the psychological backstory of one of the most famous children’s stories of all. It is a big mission – even if few will know what PLTravers, the author of Mary Poppins, looked like. Nor will many younger viewers recognise Walt Disney, the moustached face so familiar to an older generation. Emma Thompson plays – with amazing focus – the picky, prickly, complicated and over-protective author resisting Disney’s lucrative offer to transform her adored children’s book into a feature film. Saying that it was the favourite book of his daughters, Disney (Tom Hanks, working his character’s calculated charm) won’t take no for an answer. Sending an emotionally sensitive chauffeur (Paul Giamatti) to pick Travers up from the airport is only one of Disney’s nice little ploys to soften her up. For the audience, returning scenes with Disney’s nimble team of incredible songwriters (Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak) lifts the tension with the original film’s trademark songs.
The clash between Disney, poised to succeed after 20 years of trying, and Travers, adamant to preserve her vision after 20 years of resistance, flashes back and forth from the 1960s to Travers’s girlhood in 1907 Queensland, Australia. Her father (Colin Farrell, pictured right) is a drunken dreamer, as adorable as he is unrealistic but, like most fathers, a hero to his daughter. His attempt to be a responsible adult is the emotional core of Saving Mr Banks – with a heady reveal at the film’s denouement. (But who is Mr Banks? If you don’t know, it’s worth watching the film to find out.)
Kelly Marcel’s script came through the Black List, a project that tracks the best unproduced scripts each year and its strength benefits from compelling performances. Saving Mr Banks relies too on sensational visuals: hair, makeup, wardrobe and production design cannot be discounted in its evocation of a period where manners, thoughts and actions were very different from today. This is an exploration of love, between that of an author and her work, between a daughter and a father but also between a creative businessman and a money-making film opportunity. The conflict between art and money – ever-present in filmmaking – is palpably displayed by Thompson as Travers protects not only her art from Disney but also her past.
Saving Mr Banks achieves the rare feat of taking us behind the candy-coloured curtain of fun to show how serious the world of Disney business really was. You may come for the story but you'll leave with a revelation. Make sure you linger through the credits to hear recordings of the real Travers, made at her behest.
TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks is the reason to see Dave Eggers's sentimental Saudi comedy
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance
Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks
Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism
Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie
Adam Sweeting
It's great to see Robert De Niro front and centre in a full-sized role again, even if we might wish it hadn't been this one. Likewise Michelle Pfeiffer, stepping up to play the hard-boiled wife of De Niro's mobster-in-hiding Giovanno Manzoni. Twenty-five years later, she's remarried to the Mob and giving it serious bada-bing.
Angie Errigo
The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.
Emma Dibdin
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty and ugliness, continually on the brink of change.
Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose treatment of his cast and crew has sparked the kind of controversy that unfortunately threatens to eclipse all that is good about the film, exhibits an almost clinical fascination with Exarchopoulos, who for her part gives a performance so vivid and vulnerable that at times you feel winded watching her.
Despite the inevitable attention that has been drawn by the film’s expansive sapphic love scenes, it’s generally closer to a character study than a love story; from the very first shots of Adèle leaving her parents’ house in the suburbs, boarding a bus and commuting to her school in central Lille, an almost anthropological intimacy is established in our view of her. We see her learning, walking, sleeping, eating, dancing, teaching, talking, often in snatches rather than complete A-to-B scenes, and when we do see her having sex it’s in the same matter-of-fact detail as everything else.
The graphic novel from which Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix’s script is titled Blue Angel, in reference to Léa Seydoux’s worldly art student Emma, who becomes Adèle’s first real love and first real loss. Prior to their meeting she has an ill-fated fling with a male fellow student, and predictable though this is as a plot element, the crushing sense of erotic disillusionment that Exarchopoulos conveys in the aftermath is painfully immediate.
It’s more telling, in fact, than most of the lovemaking she shares with Emma, which unfolds in self-consciously lengthy single takes that feel anatomical rather than illustrative; they tell us little about the couple, their relationship or the momentous passion between them. This we discover in other, less showy moments: they share the kind of conversations about art, literature and career ambitions that are too often overlooked by screenwriters, and when the emotional storm clouds start to gather, it’s clear exactly how much both have to lose.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour made Cannes history this year, becoming the first film to be awarded a shared Palme d’Or for its director and two leading actresses. While the trifecta has plainly not been a harmonious one, what they have produced is a rare thing: a passionate, wrenching and genuinely complete portrait of a human being in flux.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Blue Is The Warmest Colour
Katherine McLaughlin
Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital is the place where both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald died and it serves as the central setting for the most recent film to investigate the assassination of the 35th President. Former journalist Peter Landesman directs and approaches this much pored-over incident with a fresh perspective by putting the doctor who operated on the President, the man who filmed the footage of the assassination, the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald and the special agent in charge of security under the microscope.
Adam Sweeting
Hailed in some quarters as a wily and satirical retro-classic, Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess depends for its survival on threading its way through the eye of a tiny nostalgic needle. Bujalski's intention was to create a kind of hommage to the single-minded, possibly autistic computing pioneers of the early Eighties, often unsightly weirdos with hilarious hair and no clothes sense who nonetheless "saw this mountain and insisted on climbing it," as Bujalski puts it.
Karen Krizanovich
The Counsellor is a cinematic room divider: some people will like it, saying it is stylish and daring. Others will find it truncated, slick and pretentious. Whichever room you end up in, The Counsellor has a tang of its own. This violent, colorful thriller overflows with bravado and, like matching collars and cuffs, identical foreboding. The motto here is that bad things happen to bad people but when they're bad people we sort of like, it's different.
Ridley Scott’s latest thriller is the first original screenplay written by novelist Cormac McCarthy. The author, responsible for No Country For Old Men among many others, had the original screenplay published in October and it differs from the finished film in several ways, as most screenplays will. (Hardly anyone locks down a script these days.) What is interesting about this is that it stresses the difference between the media – books are not films nor vice versa. The story can be enjoyed, differently, either way.
The audience know they're in trouble. But as this is McCarthy, we'll hang on
The plot is easy to follow even if there is little explanation for those not paying attention. Counsellor is the handsome and successful lawyer (Michael Fassbender) at the centre of this crime thriller. About to wed his beautiful, understanding girlfriend (Penélope Cruz), he becomes embroiled in an enormous drug deal. Meanwhile, his pro bono work brings him into contact with a female convict (Rosie Perez) whose son is put in jail for speeding. He's carrying $12K on an expensive bike and he's in jail for a $400 fine? The audience can smell the heady stink of “get the heck out of there”. Counsellor cannot. After all, he just bought an enormous diamond for his lady from Bruno Ganz, who explains how diamonds are rated. In many ways, it's the happiest part of the film.
Meanwhile, peculiar gangster type Reiner (Javier Bardem) and his even stranger girlfriend, Malkina (Cameron Diaz, pictured with Cruz), have so much money to burn that she has silver fingernails and they spend the whole day watching a pair of tame cheetahs chase hares over the plains. A deeper discussion includes the line, "I think truth has no temperature." Hearing this, the audience know they're in trouble. But as this is McCarthy, we're attempting art, so we'll hang on. Oh, that “car scene” – Diaz’s character rubs herself against a windscreen - is not as shocking as it sounds. Reiner’s reaction, however, is worth the ticket price. The whole sequence is sexy, off-putting and hilarious.
Enter Nudie-wearing drug dealer Brad Pitt who is testing out that "know when to fold ‘em" quote from the song The Gambler. He decides, after telling Counsellor how much trouble he’s in, to escape his life of crime and, presumably, go straight. But when there’s $20 million worth of cocaine from Juárez, this is not so easy.
Cold and calculating and too deft for the cheap seats, The Counsellor starts out with a stellar cast and a lot of class – from its production design to its cinematography. But it is a hard sell: a cold story with cold people in it, in a world that is ruthless, harsh and cruel. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, some may think The Counsellor is nasty, brutish and short - clearly edited down to 117 minutes. But it could also be called mysterious, upsetting and alluring. The jury’s still out. It may be for some time.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
Nick Hasted
Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is addicted to his own voice, whether he’s soliloquising about his cock, his safe-cracking, his hangover, or telling the psychotic Russian gangster whose houseguest he is how much he wants to fuck his girlfriend. His ornately foul-mouthed verbosity exhausts even himself as he explodes through life, punching, bragging, drinking, drugging and self-destructing, skin puffy, teeth stained, face scarred, gut flabby and eyes staring with fierce confusion, constantly startled by the latest disaster he’s inexplicably ploughed into. “I’m a cunt!” Dom keeps realising.
And he is. He’s a piece of work, the most entertaining and least pretty work Jude Law has done on film. You’d be terrified if you found him leaning next to you at the bar, like lit TNT. Dom isn’t nice, likeable, relatable or excusable, and 90 minutes in his company, which is 90% of what this film amounts to, is an uneven ride. But blimey it’s fun.
American writer/director Richard Shepard has gorgeous form in sullying matinee idols, giving Pierce Brosnan his best role as a boozy, whoring, shaky-fingered hitman in The Matador (2005). That was a better film because Brosnan was a more naturally sardonic fit for a vain, handsome man going to seed (he’d already happily undercut his image in The Tailor of Panama).
The Matador also had a more tensely involving plot than Shepard remembers to write here. Dom simply gets out of jail after keeping silent for 12 years on his heist accomplices, during which time his wife has died of cancer. His loyal retainer Dickie (Richard E. Grant) takes him straight to the pub (where the smoking ban is unilaterally revoked), then on to the south of France estate of Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), the gangster he’s stayed silent for. A fitting reward is given then cruelly dashed from his grasp (an epic coke and booze binge is a contributing factor), and Dom finds himself back on the south London streets, begging for forgiveness from a daughter and grandson he’s barely known, and work from Lestor (Jumayn Hunter, pictured below left), the son of an old rival, now running a crime empire that wheezing Dom, with his pre-digital skills, needs humbling scraps from.
The sentimental family subplot feels wheeled in from a very different film. Redemption isn’t Dom’s style. Like Bichir’s sheathed, polite threat as Fontaine and the childishly resentful Lestor, Law’s outlandish mockney creation suggests the cartoonish work of a more talented Guy Ritchie, not Shepard’s British crime character models, the more unnervingly convincing Sexy Beast and The Hit.
The film’s real emotional counterweight is Richard E. Grant’s Dickie, the 10% and maybe much more that isn’t just about Dom. Dressed in superfly fashion from the Seventies, when he last felt on top, and blatantly, beautifully channelling Withnail, Dickie’s loyal love for Dom, and childish delight when he seems set to head-butt the odds and win the day, is perfect. Everything else is a long, wild riff by Shepard and Law, worth hearing at least once.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Dom Hemingway
Karen Krizanovich
As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story of Eugene Allen, Daniels' approach is straightforward and highly emotive. There’s plenty for the crowd here, and, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, the fact that The Butler is accessible across almost every demographic will get its message through to those who need to see it - those who maybe wouldn't see it if it were, say, art house. In some ways, the softer Butler is a filmic preparation for the agony of 12 Years A Slave.
In a tempered, credible performance, Forest Whitaker leads as Cecil Gaines, a southern African-American raised on a cotton plantation run by Thomas Westfall (Alex Pettyfer) and his mother Annabeth Westfall (Vanessa Redgrave). There, Cecil's father (an excellent performance by David Banner) has to watch on as his wife (Mariah Carey) is habitually raped and abused. Cecil eventually runs away and, starving, breaks a window to get to some cake. In a time when white people could kill black people on a whim, Cecil is discovered by a black clerk Maynard (Clarence Williams III) who teaches him the nuances of serving ignorant white people in a time of segregation. Cecil learns to survive amid the life-crushing racism of the era.
When Maynard turns down a job in Washington DC, he puts Cecil up for it. Serving in a posh hotel soon leads to a call from the White House where scary Freddie Fallows (Colman Domingo), a White House maître d’, subjects Cecil to a tough interview.
Robin Williams, James Marsden, Minka Kelly, Liev Schreiber, James DuMont, Nelsan Ellis, Jesse Williams and Colin Walker appear as famous figures from the past, all of whom cross paths with Cecil. Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan are particularly impressive while John Cusack's impersonation of Richard Nixon may take a few moments to sink in. Once you see the prosthetic nose, however… Other strong performances come from Cecil’s family: Oprah Winfrey as Gloria, his wife, making her first return to the screen in many years, is superb in her comic and dramatic timing. David Oyelowo has a surefooted presence as Louis, the eldest son, and an adorable Elijah Kelly almost steals the show as Charlie, the youngest brother. Cuba Gooding Jr, Lenny Kravitz and Terrence Howard (pictured above right with Winfrey) are excellent as Cecil’s serving White House colleagues. A discovery performance comes from Yaya Alafia, as Louis' revolutionary girlfriend with attitude (and armpit hair).
Based on the article “A Butler Served Well By This Election”, The Butler is a film that needed to be made. A crowd-pleaser that educates and illuminates, it may condense history and glide over the rough patches. But it is not a documentary: its strength lies in the road it paves. Like Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom (released early next year), The Butler isn’t a work of art but it is a film that everyone needs to see. Etched with tears and laughs, this is appealing historical entertainment at its most important.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Butler