Film Reviews
Ex MachinaFriday, 23 January 2015
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of artificial, attractive intelligence rings subtle changes on familiar s.f. ideas, while keeping within the clean lines of a mostly three-hand drama. When callow internet search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a... Read more... |
A Most Violent YearWednesday, 21 January 2015
JC Chandor is rapidly turning into one of the most fascinating (and gifted) filmmakers out there, as A Most Violent Year proves in almost every way. Read more... |
La Maison de la RadioTuesday, 20 January 2015
Beyond being a portrait of a day in the life of French national broadcaster Radio France, it is hard to work out what La Maison de la Radio might be about. There is nothing about what the institution is meant to be for, little hinting at the attitudes defining the content aired and a lack of context for the people seen on screen. No one is specifically identified by name or role, and the nature of what is in production or being broadcast is hard to determine. Read more... |
Testament of YouthSaturday, 17 January 2015
If proof were needed that war exists in some quarters as an excuse for beautiful images, along comes this screen account of Vera Brittain's celebrated 1933 memoir Testament of Youth to offer up prettified pain in abundance alongside some fine performances that do what they can to break through the prevailing gloss. Read more... |
WhiplashFriday, 16 January 2015
Among the many pleasures of Whiplash, the low-budget indie film that is now up for five Oscar nominations (Best Picture included) and by rights deserved more, is a final sequence so breathlessly exciting that if this were a stage show, the ending would induce an instant ovation. Read more... |
Oscars 2015: Selma largely snubbed, Brits aplenty, and Meryl enters record books - againThursday, 15 January 2015
The Brits are back in the Oscar race big-time, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, and Rosamund Pike among the first-time Academy Award hopefuls who will be duking it out in the leading categories. Read more... |
American SniperWednesday, 14 January 2015
First there’s an “Allahu Akbar”, then an American tank’s rumble and clank. It’s an ominous and wearying start, the sound of Islam and invasion intermingled in the Iraq War, a violent conflict that today simply expands. When director Clint Eastwood lets us see, too, we’re by the treads of the tank, then within seconds we’re on a rooftop with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who spots a woman in a hijab with her child. They have a grenade, and he lines them in his crosshairs. Cut. Read more... |
WildTuesday, 13 January 2015
Stream-of-consciousness is a tough thing to pull off in the movies. Voice-over narration has now fallen so far out of favour that no internal monologue survives the journey from page to screen even remotely intact, and having your lead character slavishly deliver chunks of a novel seldom recreates the odd magic of reading those same words in one’s own head. Read more... |
The Last of the UnjustSaturday, 10 January 2015
It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of memories. Of all those conversations, there was one in particular which Lanzmann held back. Read more... |
Into the WoodsFriday, 09 January 2015
Woods and forests were given a fresh impetus as a psychic terrain for the cinema by Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the other sylvan spaces so ethereally or threateningly rendered in The Lord of the Rings films and, to a lesser extent, by the Mirkwood of the second Hobbit movie. Read more... |
FoxcatcherWednesday, 07 January 2015
Steve Carell makes the move from the light comedy of the American workplace to the dark side of that country as delusional blue-blood John Eleuthère du Pont in a transformative and creepy performance that borders on the grotesque. Foxcatcher is based on a shocking true story set in the wrestling world. Though some of the events occurred in the 1990s and over a longer time period, director Bennett Miller sets his film towards the end of the 1980s. Miller’s previous feature,... Read more... |
National GalleryMonday, 05 January 2015
The octogenarian Frederick Wiseman is a cult documentary film maker, with his own idiosyncratic and recognisable idiom. He has both vast experience and extraordinary independence. Characteristically, he makes long, prize-winning, fly-on-the-wall inside-the-institution films: reportorial, non-judgemental, loosely narrative, and wide in subject – from a hospital for the criminally insane, to a high school, the largest university in California (Berkeley), or the Paris Opera Ballet. Read more... |
The Green RayFriday, 02 January 2015
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. Read more... |
Still AliceThursday, 01 January 2015
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EnemyWednesday, 31 December 2014
Filmgoers will either find Denis Villeneuve's latest art-house thriller to be a tantalising head trip or so much celluloid posturing, but there's no denying its contribution to the rise and rise of leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal. Racing up the outside track as a potential Oscar nominee for Nightcrawler even as he is making a (splendid) Broadway debut in the Nick Payne play Constellations, Gyllenhaal here gets to impress twice over and for a simple reason: Javier Gullon's... Read more... |
The Theory of EverythingMonday, 29 December 2014
It’s Turing versus Hawking, Cumberbatch v Redmayne, computer science v astrophysics, tragedy v the triumph of love. Ever since The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything appeared at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the head to head has been inevitable, leading all the way to the Oscars. Read more... |
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