Film Reviews
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![]() Read more... |
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... |
BirdmanWednesday, 24 December 2014![]()
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu,Birdman is the story of a fading star’s search for professional rehabilitation and personal redemption that perches adroitly between dark humour and darker despair and injects a familiar story of mid-life crisis with fresh vitality and emotion thanks to vivid flights of an intensely cinematic fancy. Michael Keaton, a leading man in light comedies before rising to the big leagues by playing Batman in the Tim B... Read more... |
UnbrokenTuesday, 23 December 2014![]()
This year's award-courting survival picture (after 2013's All Is Lost, and 2012's Life of Pi) is based on the genuinely remarkable story of Olympian Louis Zamperini. It's a tale of heroic resilience in the face of an onslaught of adversity, helmed by someone who, in a very different way, is pretty unstoppable herself – Dame Angelina Jolie. Read more... |
Exodus: Gods and KingsTuesday, 23 December 2014![]()
I wish Mel Brooks had directed this, but instead we've got the sort of stodgy techno-epic that has become all too common from the auteur-ial hand of Ridley Scott. Ridley's 150-minute rehashing of the Biblical story of Moses is often a feast for the eyes (especially in 3D), with its vast Egyptian panoramas and stunningly mounted action sequences, but the characters are largely cardboard, the dialogue is dire and a lot of very good actors are given nothing of any consequence to do. Read more... |
AnnieMonday, 22 December 2014![]()
A lot of harsh words have been and will continue to be written about the new movie musical remake of Annie, the Broadway mainstay about the Depression-era tyke who exists to teach her elders a few life lessons on the way to a sun-drenched "Tomorrow" (to co-opt the title of the show's best-known song). But from where I'm sitting, a disproportionate share of the film's self-evident faults are swept away by its impossibly irresistible young star, Quvenzhané Wallis. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today


Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like...
What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons...

Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the...

Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a...

The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have...

In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the...

“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered...

Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, ground-...

“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile...