Film Reviews
SuburraMonday, 20 June 2016
An underage prostitute dies from a drug overdose at a mini “bunga bunga” party with a high-ranking politician. When that’s one of a film’s less shocking moments, you know you’re in for a bumpy ride. With its steady stream of killings, maimings, kidnap and a frothing-mouthed killer canine, Stefano Sollima’s brutal crime thriller exploring corruption and violence among... Read more... |
Tale of TalesFriday, 17 June 2016
The earliest known versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella appeared in an Italian compendium of fairytales known as the Pentamerone. They were collated by Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile and published in the 1630s after his death. The 50-strong anthology also includes versions of Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. None of these familiar stories has made it into Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone’s cinematic sampler of Basile’s collection. Read more... |
Cemetery of SplendourThursday, 16 June 2016
Stillness. Contemplation. Surreal spirituality. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films share qualities hugely distant from Hollywood, closer to his other career as a visual artist, and rooted in his responses to his Thai homeland. It’s been six years since his last feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, bringing his work as close to mainstream notice as its quiet otherness permits. Read more... |
The ViolatorsWednesday, 15 June 2016
British filmmaking does gritty suburban dramas better than anywhere. Stories stripped of superficial action, from Ken Loach’s early work through to more recent stand-out films like Tyrannosaur. The Violators offers a new voice producing a superb feature set in a bleak Merseyside suburb. Debut director Helen Walsh is better known as a novelist, creating tales thick with human drama, sometimes in grim settings, and The Violators adheres to this template. Read more... |
Where You're Meant to BeMonday, 13 June 2016
"A funny wee film about music and death" goes the strapline. That’s a pretty accurate summary of Paul Fegan’s touching documentary Where You’re Meant To Be, which follows singer Aidan Moffat – formerly of 1990s indie rockers Arab Strap – as he tours his bawdy urban updates of traditional songs around Scotland. Read more... |
Where to Invade NextThursday, 09 June 2016
There are a lot of cheerful people in the world, most of them outside the United States. That's the startling conclusion of Michael Moore's pointed comic jeremiad Where to Invade Next, in which American cinema's premier schlub decamps overseas to encounter numerous life- and work-related lessons that our ketchup-loving conqueror wants to take back home. Read more... |
When Marnie Was ThereTuesday, 07 June 2016
When Marnie Was There is the latest production by Japan’s animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, and the first since the retirement of its creative genius Hayao Miyazaki. An adaptation of the Joan G. Robinson novel of the same name, it’s a confident and powerful account of a young girl’s search for identity. Read more... |
WarcraftFriday, 03 June 2016
The Warcraft series of "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" (or MMORPG if you must) has apparently amassed over 100 million users since it all began with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. Ergo, turning it into a 3D multiplex-buster is a no-brainer. Surely? Read more... |
Versus: The Life and Films of Ken LoachThursday, 02 June 2016
The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after the Conservatives won the General Election last year. “Bastards,” he calls them, with a schoolboy-ish smile, at the beginning and end of the documentary. Read more... |
Me Before YouThursday, 02 June 2016
If you're disabled, it certainly helps to be as indecently rich as you are handsome while you make plans to end your life: that, in short, is the preposterous take-away message from Me Before You, the film version of the Jojo Moyes bestseller which Moyes herself has adapted for the screen. I haven't read the book and would imagine that the material's multiple irritations, both large-scale and small, might be somewhat more tolerable not blown up into celluloid dimensions. Read more... |
The Nice GuysWednesday, 01 June 2016
“A porno film where the point was the plot?!” The Nice Guys asks you to make quite a few imaginative leaps: to find Russell Crowe endearing and Ryan Gosling funny and to believe that anyone in 1977 would set out to shoot a skin flick with a storyline. Implausibly, but delightfully, all of the above come to pass in a buddy caper in which Crowe and Gosling partner up to crack jokes,... Read more... |
RaceTuesday, 31 May 2016
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian. Read more... |
Alice Through the Looking GlassFriday, 27 May 2016
How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might... Read more... |
Money MonsterThursday, 26 May 2016
This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street. Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Zvizdal, Corn ExchangeThursday, 26 May 2016
Berlin are, misleadingly, an arts unit from Antwerp, Belgium. They’ve been around for well over a decade and major in artily constructed documentaries that are presented in the manner of experiential installations. Read more... |
Love & FriendshipTuesday, 24 May 2016
Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels. Read more... |
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