film directors
Nick Hasted
Atom Egoyan’s stock has dropped a bit in the 21st century. This box-set of his first seven films remains – along with his response to the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Ararat (2002) – the essence of his work to date.These early films have as much personal character as his compatriot and mentor Cronenberg’s. His feature debut Next of Kin (1984), in which a teenager escapes his loveless home by pretending to be a Toronto Armenian family’s long-lost son, introduces several themes: carefully faked identities, and the erasable memories enabled by video-tape. Family Viewing (1988), Speaking Parts Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Every cinephile is going to have a personal perspective on Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film, an engrossing, affectionate, and frequently revelatory look over how aspects of childhood, and children, have been portrayed on screen over more than half a century, from almost every cinematic tradition that we’ve heard of – or, rather more often, that we haven’t heard of.That cinephile issue is going to revolve itself around whether any of his or her personal favourites have been left out of Cousins’ final cut. So I’ll get my own ones out of the way, directly – the amazing 24 Eyes from Read more ...
David Nice
We’re in a Tokyo bar. As the first of two fixed cameras dominating the opening quarter of an hour gives a selective picture, a girl’s voice is heard offscreen remonstrating on her mobile with a pathologically jealous fiancé. The situation comes slowly into focus: the girl, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), is being compelled as a top-end call-girl to visit a client. Though some of the trajectory is what we think, or fear, it might be, many of the outcomes are far from expected.The symmetry is as carefully observed as everything else in this piece of genius filmmaking. There are only three main indoor Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be partial, because out of the 10 opera productions from the iconoclastic French actor-director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 68, I’ve seen but two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 films. Yet they all had a tremendous impact, one way or another.Not in a good way - let's get this over with first - as far as Intimacy is concerned: on a blistering hot summer day in Paris, "film by Patrice Chéreau"’ on the poster outside a small cinema in the Beauborg – a poster, moreover, showing a gathering at a cocktail party, suggestive of Rohmer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.Hunt v Lauda is one of motorsport's great fables, and many fans felt a queasy premonition of disaster on hearing about Howard's project, but it's pleasing to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, waged a vigilante campaign against the region’s small farmers, settlers, and rustlers. The film’s Ahab is Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), the supercilious, monomaniacal leader of the WSGA’s mercenary Regulators.Cimino included the conflict’s two most fabled incidents. One was the brave stand Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Newly restored versions of old films in cinemas are commonplace. This revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is set apart due to it being in 3D, as it was originally intended to be seen. But unless you were able to catch it in the few American cinemas where it screened after its May 1954 New York premiere, the original has proved elusive, although 3D versions have surfaced intermittently.It was seen by audiences in red-and-green specs in 1980, in a form which did the rounds for a couple of years afterwards. There was another attempt to bring it back to life in 2004. Then, last summer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.But it isn't just comedy, or perhaps it's comedy as the visible tip of a fully-rounded philosophical iceberg. Even Allen's shortest one-liners may Read more ...
David Nice
Fans of this bewilderingly popular musical, and they are legion, will not be disappointed. Director Tom Hooper knows how to tell a fast-moving tale that makes light of the final running time (originally 158 minutes, slightly shorter in this DVD release, which offers no extras. Those who went to the film more than once will, I'm told, miss a couple of scenes). The lighting is appropriately lugubrious, most of the settings convincing – though occasionally there’s too much dependence on CGI – and famously the singing actors perform their numbers on set, often in long takes. Casting is strong, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1988 uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia, in the Western Pacific, is apparently unknown to most French people, let alone we rosbifs, but director Mathieu Kassovitz has used the episode as a scalpel with which to probe issues of colonialism, race and political cynicism. It's something of a return to issues Kassovitz explored in La Haine (1995), following his excursions into the supernatural and sci-fi with Gothika and Babylon AD.The setup is pretty simple. A group of Kanak separatists launches a surprise attack on a gendarmerie on the island of Ouvéa, killing four French Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald, but he had failed to include Ben Affleck in his calculations. "This is a second act for me," announced Affleck, as he collected the Best Director award for his work on Argo at the recent BAFTAs in London, "and you're giving me that and this industry has given me that. I want to dedicate this to anyone else trying to get their second act - you can do it!"Stirring stuff. With Argo storming on to collect the Oscar for Best Film, the culmination of a brilliant streak of accolades from the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet. Side by Side is partly a manual in how films are made, the way in which light pours through camera apertures to create images, Read more ...