Film
Graham Fuller
Michael Keaton – like Cary Grant, Bill Murray, and George Clooney – is one of those stars who frequently convey their awareness that the situations they’re in are preposterous. He tautens his jaw muscles; his eyes express a mix of incredulity and suffering. That look is one of the many pleasures of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 2014’s Best Picture Oscar-winner and Keaton’s crowning achievement as a mature actor.Alejandro González Iñárritu's heavy dramas (Amoros Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful) tend to the portentous. Turning to blackish comedy has rejuvented him. He didn’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.The setting is Bad City, somewhere in Iran. Arash ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Howard Hawks and Cary Grant made five films together. Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was A Male War Bride and Monkey Business were all screwball comedies, made by two of the genre’s leading exponents. As an adventure film, Only Angels Have Wings was the odd one out, but certainly no ugly duckling.Made in 1939, it has Grant playing a macho role far removed from his bespectacled boffins in Baby and Monkey Business, and more serious than his comic adventurer in the same year’s Gunga Din. That said, the actor is as willing as ever to find the vulnerability beneath his character’s self- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is still much to be said for George Miller's original 1979 Mad Max, a cheap but ferocious tale of rape, murder and vengeance in a gang-infested dystopia. However, only two sequels later, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) found the franchise blimping out into a steroidal freak-show. After a 30-year intermission, Fury Road is much more of the latter, now saturated with digital enhancements while almost dispensing with plot entirely.The potential audience for Fury Road wasn't born when its predecessors came out, so it was a brazen move indeed by Miller (still aboard as writer/director) to Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Hollywood characters revisit their youth it tends to be through the school reunion, with generally trite results; how typical of a French filmmaker, and of the cerebral, cinephile Olivier Assayas in particular, that his character should be an actress, who is pushed towards midlife crisis by a role.Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is an international film star, 40 years old, who is simultaneously dealing with a difficult divorce and the sudden death of the reclusive playwright, Wilhem Melchior, who discovered her as a 20-year-old, when he cast her in his play and subsequent film, Maloja Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been disturbing. Foxcatcher, the story of du Pont’s immersion in wrestling, is disquieting but Carell stands out. Creepiness defines every moment he is on screen.Foxcatcher draws from the real-life story of du Pont, the heir to his family’s fortune. He wrote books on ornithology, donated money to good causes and was also increasingly consumed by an interest in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A master of visceral cinema, Samuel Fuller (1912-97) directed 23 features during his exemplary career, writing 21 of them and an unquantifiable number of others. Clips from many appear in A Fuller Life, an affectionate documentary conceived, co-produced, directed, and introduced by Samantha Fuller, his proud daughter, and culled, word for word, from Fuller’s posthumous autobiography, which was co-authored by his wife Christa Lang Fuller (the documentary’s executive producer) and Jerome Henry Rudes. Oddly, those clips weren’t really needed.They illustrate, of course, Fuller’s frazzling tabloid Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The ongoing penchant for all things royal reaches a momentary impasse with A Royal Night Out, an eye-rollingly silly imagining of what the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth might have got up to on VE Day. Its release timed to coincide with the pro-monarchy rush of feeling that the latest royal birth has only intensified, Julian Jarrold's film will please those who want to feel as if they're vaguely au fait with the House of Windsor while getting to glimpse some rather grand houses in the process. If as much attention had been paid to the script as was lavished on the decor, the results Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much- loved institution and all who sail in her. An episodic tour through the galleries and the backrooms the public never see, it greatly lends itself to DVD. Indeed, much as one goes back to a gallery to look at just one painting, its 15 chapters can be visited and revisited on an individual and selective basis.Wiseman is as interested in people as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In The Tribe, his feature debut, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy has created something totally unexpected, and viscerally powerful to boot. This dark tale of life among inmates of a Kyiv institution for the deaf avoids spoken language completely, leaving viewers to assemble the narrative for themselves: communication is only in sign language, heralded consciously in an opening screen-title as presented without translation, subtitles or voiceover.Clearly Slaboshpytskiy’s predominantly teenage, non-professional cast know what they’re getting up to, but we’re left guessing until Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...
ellin.stein
Jon Stewart’s Rosewater falls into the micro-genre of films about foreign correspondents struggling with the moral imperative to move from observer to participant, not a question that keeps most viewers up at night. But where Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously engaged us through a stirring romance and Oliver Stone’s Salvador through a stirring bromance, Stewart takes a more austere approach. He wants to instill passion about an idea – the importance of bearing witness – rather than taking the audience on that X-Factor staple, an emotional journey.In his native US, Stewart Read more ...