film reviews
Karen Krizanovich

This could be the best Bond yet: light on sex, heavy on storytelling, hard on action. This is 100 percent pure Bond - a distillation of beauty, action, surprises and locations. Let's start with the latter: perhaps it’s best to stay away from Istanbul, given Taken 2 and now the exciting chase scene in the opening of Skyfall. It's a chase scene, sure, but with stunts and camera angles that make you sit up and take just enough notice. Same goes for MI6 and Macau: terrible things happen there.

Russ Coffey

At the end of 2007 Led Zep’s reunion concert took “hottest ticket in town” to melting point. Everyone now knows 20 million fans chased 18,000 seats at the O2. What we hear less about is, given previous disastrous reunion efforts, how hard the pressure was on. And yet they pulled it off.  Five years later people have still been asking for a tour. Earlier this week, however, the band categorically stated they’ve called it a day. Instead they’re releasing a film of their last concert. Last night, at Hammersmith Apollo, Celebration Day got its British premiere.

Nick Hasted

Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house.

Demetrios Matheou

Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Simon’s entrepreneurial cut and thrust is at odds with his purpose, which is merely to provide for himself and his 20-something sister Louise (Léa Seydoux), who despite her age is the childlike dependent of this unusual family unit, unable to hold down a job, wasting her time – and their money – with the local boys.

emma.simmonds

Set in the near future on the outskirts of New York, Robot & Frank sees a grizzled ex-con warm to his mechanical helper, eventually enlisting him as a criminal accomplice. It might sound like the plot of a genre flick (Short Circuit springs to mind) but, like the robot in question, this little movie will knock you sideways with its soul. Boasting beautiful performances and ample humour, director Jake Schreier’s accomplished feature debut considers the preciousness and precariousness of memories – how they make us who we are, and indeed what it means to be alive.

Demetrios Matheou

Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Simon’s entrepreneurial cut and thrust is at odds with his purpose, which is merely to provide for himself and his twenty-something sister Louise (Léa Seydoux), who despite her age is the childlike dependent of this unusual family unit, unable to hold down a job, wasting her time – and their money – with the local boys.

Demetrios Matheou

With the gloriously deadpan comedies 25 Watts and Whisky, co-writers and directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll were the leading lights of Uruguayan cinema, not exactly heading the kind of renaissance seen in other Latin American countries in the 2000s – the country’s industry is miniscule – but certainly making two of the region’s most idiosyncratic films. Then Rebella killed himself, a tragedy that threw his friend into a grief that seemed to end his career also.

Nick Hasted

The title couldn’t be more resonant, as the economic crisis makes the one-time First World visibly slip another notch. But in Tony Krawitz’s adaptation of Christos Tsolkias’s novel, the meaning is also literal: this is a bloody continent of unquiet ghosts.

Karen Krizanovich

From the makers of Little Miss Sunshine comes a funny, ethereal love story in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sunshine’s not all they have in common.

Nick Hasted

As Julian Assange continues to hold the world’s authorities at bay behind embassy doors, this new biopic offers Young Assange: a Melbourne teenager among the first generation of computer hackers, who cracked the Pentagon’s code on the Gulf War’s eve.