Film Reviews
Captain America: Civil WarTuesday, 26 April 2016
This rousing instalment from the Marvel universe shares self-evident similarities with Batman vs Superman, the latest effort from their DC rivals. In both films we see superheroes at loggerheads, and in each case it's because they find themselves in a changing world where it's no longer acceptable for super-beings to roam around the planet leaving massive swathes of collateral damage in their wake. Read more...
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Miles AheadThursday, 21 April 2016
Catching the essence of the mercurial, secretive and notoriously abrasive Miles Davis on film might reasonably be described as a mission impossible, but Don Cheadle has put his heart and soul into it. He directed it and plays the title role, he co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman, and he put some of his own money into it. A jazz saxophonist since his youth, he took tips from Wynton Marsalis about playing the trumpet for the movie. Read more... |
Bastille DayWednesday, 20 April 2016
This Paris-set thriller was one of several films which had its release date postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital last November, giving the impression that it might be shockingly violent or provocatively political. In fact, it's a slightly uneasy mix of caper, buddy-movie and spy adventure, as its protagonists battle a high-level conspiracy involving the mother of all bank robberies. Read more... |
Mapplethorpe: Look at the PicturesMonday, 18 April 2016
“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity. Read more... |
Eisenstein in GuanajuatoSaturday, 16 April 2016
This is an unashamed, fulsome, extravagant tribute from Peter Greenaway to his cinema idol. The British director – though that description is probably more point of origin these days than allegiance – has long acclaimed his Russian-Soviet counterpart Sergei Eisenstein as the most adventurous figure that the film industry has ever known, one whose ground-breaking experiments and discoveries are as alive today as they ever have been. Read more... |
The Jungle BookFriday, 15 April 2016
It’s a risky venture, remaking a much-loved Disney classic, but Jon Favreau has tackled The Jungle Book with considerable enthusiasm, creating a digital 3D spectacular complete with hundreds of computer-generated animals and one real boy (Neel Sethi). It’s based on the original Rudyard Kipling stories featuring man-cub Mowgli lost in the jungle, raised by wolves and torn between staying or finding his way back to humanity. Read more... |
The Brand New TestamentThursday, 14 April 2016
In Jaco Van Dormael’s black comedy, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is an alcoholic arsehole living in 21st-century Brussels, who maliciously causes destruction across the world while bullying his silent wife and daughter Éa. As with much of Dormael’s work, the surreal, in his own words “not yet civilized” vision children have of the world inspires the lens through which we experience the film. Read more... |
Eye in the SkyWednesday, 13 April 2016
Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) has a problem: she suspects that a British woman who converted to Islam and tops the international terrorism hit list is holed up in a house in a suburb of Nairob controlled by Al-Shabaab. Can her local agent (Barkhad Abdi) fly his tiny spy drone inside the house and confirm the terrorist’s identity? Read more... |
CriminalMonday, 11 April 2016
Spying is not what it used to be. Old-schoolers beat the baddie, beat the house at roulette and then beat someone to death without even creasing their shirt. Today’s spy seems ill-equipped. Take Ryan Reynolds’s Bill Pope. We know he’s in the CIA because he’s dodging around the City of London looking conspicuous. Anarchist hacker Heimbahl (Jordi Molla) easily hookwinks and kills him. Read more... |
BoulevardSaturday, 09 April 2016
Robin Williams’s final released film is built around one of his finest performances. Perhaps fittingly, it shows the quiet, melancholy side of a star who first dazzled and after a while exhausted with his manic flights and weakness for sentimentality. As Nolan, a bank employee suffocating in suburban limbo, he rarely raises his voice, remaining devastatingly true to a state of depressed repression. Read more... |
Couple in a HoleSaturday, 09 April 2016
Traumatic obsession is hard to get right in film, to draw us as viewers into a situation far beyond our usual experience, make us believe in it, and fix us there. Sometimes it means pushing towards the frenetic energy of madness, which can bring a degree of moment-to-moment tension – no small dramatic advantage. Or there’s the opposite: when we’re invited deep into the withdrawal of catatonic grief, which can come with almost stuporous slowness and silences. Read more... |
The Man Who Knew InfinityFriday, 08 April 2016
The extraordinary workings of an unusual mind are reduced to TV-movie proportions in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the latest and least re-telling of the too-short life of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose tale has previously been told in novel form (David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk) and as an Olivier Award-winning play (A Disappearing Number). Read more... |
DheepanThursday, 07 April 2016
Migration is the lead story of modern geopolitics. So it’s surprising – even baffling – that so few films tell the migrant’s tale. British and French films across the broadest spectrum have dramatised the quest of colonial incomers to assimilate – from Bend It Like Beckham all the way across to La Haine – but Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan goes right back to the source. Read more... |
Midnight SpecialTuesday, 05 April 2016
Fans of writer-director Jeff Nichols might detect echoes of his hair-raising 2011 film Take Shelter in his latest effort, not least the presence of regular Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon as one of the leads, but this time his scope has broadened hugely. Cosmically even, since Midnight Special hints at hidden universes and galaxies far, far away, even though it's firmly rooted in the everyday detail of the rural American South. Read more... |
Eddie the EagleFriday, 01 April 2016
By finishing last in the ski jumping events at the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, Eddie Edwards became the epitome of the plucky no-hoper, a mediocre amateur equipped only with British true grit. He epitomised a curious strain in the national psyche, whereby our nation has been able to celebrate the calamity of Dunkirk as a heroic escapade, and endure with masochistic stoicism decades of humiliation in tennis or World Cup football. Read more... |
VictoriaThursday, 31 March 2016
The tag-line for this definitively audacious Berlin thriller-love story writes itself: “One take. One night. Who survives?” Director Sebastian Schipper filmed Victoria in one take that roams through dozens of locations in Berlin’s empty small-hours streets, with dialogue improvised by his core young cast of five. Read more... |
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