Film
Kieron Tyler
The reasons for enduring cult status can sometimes be hard to fathom for those not embedded in the minutiae of genre cinema. Take The Burning and Hell Comes to Frogtown, both of which are being given top-notch home cinema releases. The Burning is a dual format package with a booklet and masses of extras including an over-the-top three commentaries. Hell Comes to Frogtown is Blu-ray only, has no booklet or commentaries but is replete with extras. Both film looks great: the image quality for each is unlikely to have ever looked better. Even so, watching both induces a very thorough head-scratch Read more ...
graham.rickson
Werner Herzog isn’t visible in his documentary Lo and Behold but he’s a constant throughout, his sonorous, quizzical tones an ideal counterbalance to some of the more scary talking heads he encounters. In essence the film doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already suspect already: that the constantly evolving internet could either ruin us or offer salvation.Subtitled "Reveries of the Connected World" and organised in 10 short sections, the film’s title is explained in the first few minutes, an excitable academic breathlessly showing us the room in UCLA where one of the first attempts to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Whether you use its optional subtitle A Star Wars Story or not, Rogue One arrives with a diminutive air. Filling in some infamous but minor dopiness in the original Star Wars – why build the Death Star with such a fatal design flaw? – it’s essentially Episode IVa, a footnote to the main event like Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure or, more accurately, the numerous cartoons, novels and comic-books which have kept the franchise ticking during its core triple-trilogy’s lifetime-spanning longueurs. In fact, director Gareth Edwards has expanded his story to its maximum while keeping it lean, Read more ...
David Kettle
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, Kazakhstan, China and Russia. It’s a warm-hearted offering, almost to a fault – indeed, its set-pieces and lavish Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It says a great deal about how very bad this film is that the pre-title montage of viral cat videos clawed from the internet is the most amusing sequence in it. This is one of the most cynical "family entertainment" movies to come out of the Hollywood machine in a long time. It has all the charm of smelling an atrophied mouse left behind the sofa by a vindictive moggy. Kevin Spacey plays a Trump-esque mogul, Tom Brand, who is determined to build the tallest skyscraper in New York. He plasters his face all over his business in various heroic poses, but is loathed by all his investors Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 delivers all the impact of that experience, in an independent British production that manages the transfer from stage to screen more than Read more ...
Saskia Baron
William Friedkin’s super-stylish bad cop/bad villain thriller was his return to form after the disasters of Cruising and Sorcerer. To Live and Die in LA didn’t achieve the instant classic status of The French Connection when it was released in 1985, but it's enjoyed a cult following ever since, and this new edition in a restored print is a treat. It’s a familiar story of amorality and betrayal – the most effective cops are those who think like criminals themselves and are willing to cross the line to nail their target – but told with such slick energy that all clichés are forgiven.Based on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have described the budget on which they made their latest film Theo & Hugo – the French directors have been collaborators, as well as partners, since the mid-1990s – as a “pirate” one, its restrictions imposed not least by the fact that they had written a first sequence so sexually explicit that they believed it closed access to the usual public funding sources even in France. The film’s opening 20 minutes certainly have a bracing explicitness that put it almost on the boundary with pornography, although what follows morphs into a rather tender gay Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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's no great surprise to find that Stone portrays Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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. On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger kept his head to land his failing airliner on the Hudson, saving all 155 on board. The achievements are opposite in effect, but the professionalism Eastwood so admires is the same. “We did our job” is said in Sully like an article of faith. Kyle’s myopically racist view of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
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 ears, is listening to a patient breathe. Beside her is a man wearing a white coat. There’s shouting from outside the room Read more ...