Film
Saskia Baron
Ghostbusters 2016 has suffered from dire predictions on the internet from fans of the 1984 original. Scorn has been poured on the trailers, the all-female cast and the very notion of rebooting the much-loved 1984 comedy. In the end, it’s an enjoyable blockbuster, not great, but not disastrous either.The Sunday preview audience – a mixture of adults and kids – which filled the 1700 seater enjoyed it well enough. Even my 12-year-old boy companion who had been predicting for weeks that it was going to be "the worst movie ever" came out of it very happy.Writer/director Paul Feig, who did such Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Weiner is the story of a rapid ride from comeback to meltdown. It’s an enthralling journey to witness, even if you sometimes feel like averting your eyes. What can be more inexorable than a political life – not to mention a private one – imploding on screen in a documentary where the subject has promised full access to the filmmakers, and sticks to that pledge regardless?The story of Anthony Weiner’s 2013 bid to become mayor of New York made front page news in America. He was clearly an extremely articulate and dynamic Democrat political operator, but that wasn’t the main issue. What made his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hail, Caesar!’s shortcomings are easily forgiven. You could complain that the multiple plotlines aren’t given enough time to breathe, or that the deeper issues rumbling beneath the film’s frothy surface could be explored in more depth. Superbly designed and beautifully shot on film by the Coens’ regular cinematographer Roger Deakins, this really needs to be seen on a large screen. But repeated DVD viewing allows the barrage of sight gags and wordplay to really hit home.Set in the early 1950s, it centres on Josh Brolin’s studio manager Eddie Mannix (pictured below with George Clooney), Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Her babyface spangled with tiny jewels and her lips painted fuschia, an adolescent with elaborately woven blonde hair lies on a silver velvet couch – round her neck and running onto her breast and down her right arm is a scarf of sticky blood as shiny as her blue vinyl (or cellophane) dress.Like a W magazine photo spread conceived by Baudelaire and art-directed in electric colours by giallo maestro Dario Argento, the opening of The Neon Demon offers a foretaste of the plasticated grand guignolerie that by the end of Nicholas Winding Refn’s meretricious psychological horror movie has yielded Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Accustomed as we now are to superheroes who can change size and shape, fly at nuclear speeds, levitate ships and vibrate themselves through walls, a bloke wearing pedal-pushers and jumping out of trees might be considered a bit of an under-achiever. Nonetheless Tarzan is back yet again (more than 200 Tarzan movies have been made since 1918), and Warner Bros are doubtless hoping to kick off a new big-budget franchise.If so, it's not a promising start. One of several damaging mistakes was casting Alexander Skarsgård (son of Stellan) as the simian-friendly protagonist. It must have been hard Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Back in 1959, Black Orpheus was a revelation – a reworking of the Greek myth of doomed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, played out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. It was the first movie to win both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. French director Marcel Camus cast his beautiful American wife Marpessa Dawn as Eurydice and Breno Mellor (a handsome Brazilian footballer Camus had spotted on a Rio street) played Orpheus. Cast for their looks, they were not great actors, and neither ever achieved much success again on screen.Criterion has Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rebecca Miller’s fiction and her previous films’ manifestly ambitious visual style and narrative structures led to high expectations from Maggie’s Plan. As a movie, it may appeal to audiences craving the kinds of films that Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Richard Curtis make – talky comedies revolving around middle-class professionals chewing over their relationship crises with their friends. But if that’s not your cup of decaf, it may just grate on your nerves.Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, an arts administrator in her early 30s, contemplating single parenthood with the help of donated sperm. She Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Notes on Blindness is an extraordinary film that wears its original genius lightly. The debut full-length documentary from directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney, it may seem complicated in its assembly, but has a final impact that is luminously simple. And to speak of a film whose immediate subject is the loss of sight – and by extension, of the visual element that comprises cinema itself – in terms of luminousness is finally no paradox at all.It’s the story of John Hull, an Australian-born theologian whose acclaimed 1990 book Touching the Rock recorded his experience of going blind. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Irish director Pat O’Connor’s 1987 adaptation of J L Carr’s A Month in the Country has been unavailable for many years; this BFI reissue was only possible after a few surviving prints were located. It’s a disquieting watch – a superficially English reflection on faith, loss and recovery, full of dark shadows and sharp edges. Simon Gray’s screenplay wisely avoids using a voiceover, the plot’s subtleties conveyed instead by a well-chosen cast.Notably a young Colin Firth as Birkin, a world-weary World War One veteran arriving in a remote Yorkshire village to uncover a mural in the Reverend Keach Read more ...
Ed Owen
The last film to feature the Chilean coup was No from 2012, which explored the referendum that finally rid the country of General Pinochet and returned the country to democracy. There a genius adman plotted a brilliant campaign to get the right answer. Perhaps worthwhile viewing for those planning referendums?In The Colony Daniel (Daniel Brühl) is an activist graphic designer and photographer based in Chile, making posters and flyers backing socialist president Salvador Allende immediately prior to Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Daniel's air stewardess girlfriend Lene (Emma Watson) arrives Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Luca Guadagnino’s previous film, I Am Love, confirmed the Italian renaissance begun by Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino. Star Tilda Swinton, ripe sensuality, rich landscapes and sometimes operatic emotion all return for A Bigger Splash. Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson complete its quartet, lounging and sparring on Pantalleria, the Italian island where Swinton’s Bowiesque rock star, Marianne Lane, is hiding out after a vocal chord op. Harry (Fiennes), with his apparent daughter Penelope (Johnson) in tow, is her former producer and lover, whose sudden appearance Read more ...
David Kettle
Even without any particular pomp or focus for celebration, the 70th Edinburgh International Film Festival has felt like a particularly strong and broad-ranging one, with a programme so big it was a struggle to take it all in.Opening golf drama Tommy’s Honour (reviewed by Demetrios Matheou last week) may have failed to thrill, but there’s been plenty more to entertain and provoke. And as the EIFF heads towards its closing gala – with the Gillies MacKinnon’s remake of Whisky Galore! on Sunday evening – it’s inevitably time for the festival to reveal its award winners.The Michael Powell Award Read more ...