Film
Kieron Tyler
The home-cinema release of Absolute Beginners is a rarity, as it’s one where watching the bonus before the main feature is a must. In Absolute Ambition, those involved with the film are brutally frank about this most hyped piece. It’s also an eloquent, fascinating potted history of the pop-cultural milieu that led to it being made in the then still-resonating aftermath of punk. Despite being set in the 1958 of its source book, Colin MacInnes’S Absolute Beginners, director Julian Temple avers that the film was more about when it was made than when it was set.That wasn’t clear on its release, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name. It was Nixon who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Nixon who sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I. Those top notes of Marilyn Monroe’s in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s comforting to reflect that some of the anonymous children seen in Around China With a Movie Camera – a DVD culled from films spanning 1900-48 held in the BFI National Archive – must live on today. If only the means existed to identify those former kids so they could see those moments from their pasts when they were photographed with their parents and companions.The world of their infancy has largely vanished. This haunting assemblage of surviving fragments of commercial travelogues, missionary films, and home movies (one made by British honeymooners in 1928 Beijing) captures Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two cultural giants from different spheres align to occasionally sublime results in The BFG. Steven Spielberg's film locates the beatific in its (literally) outsized star, Mark Rylance, but lapses into the banal when its eponymous Big Friendly Giant – Roald Dahl's 1982 literary creation made motion-capture fresh – isn't careering across the screen.As a sort of companion piece to E.T., which shares this film's screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, who died last year, the film brings an otherworldly presence into our world of the everyday. And yet there remains something pro forma about the abiding Read more ...
Nick Hasted
New England in the 17th century is the primordial soup of American horror: where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hettie Prynne received her Scarlet Letter, the vampire nest in Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot was seeded, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible tested original, hysterical sins. There is a small, parallel English strand including some of its cinema’s most affecting horrors, too – Matthew Hopkins’ Civil War rampage in Witchfinder General, A Field in England, and The Blood On Satan’s Claw’s slightly later, sexually raw tale of a possessed village. The Witch, Robert Eggers’ debut as writer-director Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the third of the rebooted new generation Star Treks, and ultimately leaves you with the feeling that the intrepid crew of the starship Enterprise continue to boldly go, but still haven't quite arrived. On the other hand, the fact that a sprawling high-tech movie like this can manage to recapture some of the friendly intimacy of the old TV series gives it an undeniable charm.The opening sequence, where Captain James T Kirk is on a diplomatic mission to deliver a peacemaking gift to a funny-looking race called the Teenaxi, suddenly turns to farce when the angry locals prove teeny indeed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The opening shot of Chevalier trains the camera on a rocky beach surmounted by overcast skies. A dark form emerges from the water, then another and another. They're like creatures from the primordial soup making land all those millions of years ago, but actually they're scuba divers who happily pose with their catches before clubbing them to death. They return to the floating palace on which they are holidaying off the Greek coast, and strip off one another's rubber pelts to expose the tender white middle-aged flesh beneath. It turns out that the trip is an annual bonding ritual, but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The midlife crisis, the one-night stand in another city, the younger woman and the honeyed words that turn to dust – they happen all the time, in life and therefore in stories. In Anomalisa they are seen miraculously afresh thanks to Charlie Kaufman, that tireless cinematic frontiersman, and his co-director, animator Duke Johnson.The novelty of Anomalisa is that stop-motion figurines play out the life of Michael Stone, an inspirational self-help guru who can inspire everyone but himself. As he lands in Cincinnati to give a talk, his marriage has turned to dust, he is tempted by the siren lure Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Set at the beginning of the 1970s, Catherine Corsini’s Summertime (La belle saison) is a story of love in a political climate, one in which the post-1968 assertions of a changing society have infused the public context in theory but do not ultimately translate into liberation for the film’s two lead women characters. The restrictions of tradition, especially in the rural world in which the greater part of Summertime is set, finally prove too strong for their relationship.Delphine (Izïa Higelin) has grown up on the land, the only child of smallholders in Limousin: it’s a beautiful, sparsely Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Ben Wheatley is a one-off, drawing on his experience in commercials and taste for wacky comedy. He does art house with a surreal twist, crafting a fast-paced montage of disjointed yet interrelated images and sequences that suit the cut-up universe imagined by author JG Ballard, in his dark and satirical vision of a modern world in terminal decay.The brain scientist and psychologist Laing, played with disarming cool by Tom Hiddleston, moves into a residential high rise, in which the rich swan around in the upper storeys and lesser mortals have to make do with the lower floors. The film is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Half Man Half Biscuit have nothing on this. Splicing The Three Stooges and Island of Dr Moreau, this strange Danish film finds both slapstick and pathos in its grotesque premise. Part of the micro-genre in which adopted children search for biological parents, it takes its protagonists on some especially twisted country back-roads to get to where they’re going.Elias (Mads Mikkelsen) and Gabriel (David Dencik) have always been mismatched brothers. Hangdog university professor Gabriel inwardly despairs of his compulsively masturbating, gauche and rage-prone sibling. So when their late father Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Five years in the making, this is the dream documentary for every die-hard William Burroughs admirer. It was originally released in 1983 but was thought lost until the director’s nephew Aaron Brookner painstakingly restored it in 2011. Criterion has now released it in the UK for the first time on Blu-ray. It opens with flickering bootlegged footage of supermodel Lauren Hutton introducing "the greatest living writer in America" on Saturday Night Live, and then throws in every story and every character ever linked to Burroughs. Patti Smith says "he’s up there with the Pope, one of the Read more ...