Film Reviews
About TimeWednesday, 04 September 2013
The news that Richard Curtis will not direct any more films after About Time (which he also wrote) was met with sadness in some quarters and undisguised glee in others. Curtis co-wrote Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Mr Bean, created Comic Relief and is an all-round good egg, but none the less stirs up real venom in those who find his other creation, the modern British romcom, sickeningly sweet. Read more... |
No One LivesTuesday, 03 September 2013
“Hannibal Lecter meets Jason Bourne”: that’s how director Ryuhei Kitamura unbeatably sells No One Lives’ indestructible serial killer hero. But his film is at its most interesting before it’s clear who Driver (Luke Evans, pictured below) is, or where we stand with anything that’s happening. Read more... |
The Great BeautyMonday, 02 September 2013
Paolo Sorrentino's latest opens with a Japanese tourist keeling over at the mere sight of an ancient Roman vista: he takes a snap and wipes the sweat from his brow before his fatal fall to the floor. As the Small Faces sang in "Itchycoo Park", for this gentleman at least, "It's all too beautiful." The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a love letter to Rome, in the vein of and as grandly ambitious as a Fellini, but don't be fooled by the title. Read more... |
Pain & GainFriday, 30 August 2013
Michael Bay’s fleet-footed, queasy crime-comedy stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie but the less you know, the more you might like it. This is because the more you know, the less it seems an acceptable source of entertainment. Not that Hollywood and movies in general have any qualms about morality, ethical behaviour or what constitutes "entertainment": we shouldn’t laugh at... Read more... |
Upstream ColourThursday, 29 August 2013
Shane Carruth directs films in the same way as Aaron Sorkin writes scripts: seemingly oblivious to the fact that we are trailing in his wake. Sorkin can sometimes leave you floundering with his spitfire recitations of information and dazzling repartee, Carruth with the opaqueness of his ideas. Does either expect, or wish us to keep up? I suspect not. Buying into their work is a tacit agreement to be stretched. Read more... |
The Way Way BackWednesday, 28 August 2013
Coming-of-age films have frequently featured inebriated antics and ill-advised hook-ups, but it's usually the teenagers behaving badly. The Way Way Back sees a family decamp to an East Coast beach house for a summer vacation described witheringly by one teen as "Spring Break for adults". The film is the directorial debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (two of the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants), who also pen the excellent screenplay and take supporting roles. Read more... |
You're NextTuesday, 27 August 2013
You’re Next has chutzpah. It’s a home invasion horror made with the vigorous energy and imaginative violence of a Warner Bros cartoon. Feeling like a record that starts at a stately 33 rpm and finishes at 45, it becomes progressively more crazed and comic, even as the screen swims in gore. Read more... |
What Maisie KnewFriday, 23 August 2013
The notion of childhood as any sort of state of grace gets exploded big-time in What Maisie Knew, a largely blistering celluloid updating of the 1897 Henry James novel from The Deep End team of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. True (for the most part) to the spirit of its literary source if by no means to the letter, the movie on its own terms captures the terror that adults can inflict on children, a bequest that a brilliant cast makes painfully plain. Read more... |
We're the MillersFriday, 23 August 2013
We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here. Read more... |
ElysiumThursday, 22 August 2013
Neil Blomkamp’s got a thing for crafts. Spacecrafts, that is. With his first feature, District 9, alien ships hovered over Johannesburg in 1982. Now it’s 2154 and Elysium, a nirvana-like space station for the elite, floats in Earth’s orbit, using all the global resources and leaving the planet ravaged, polluted, riddled with crime and simply dreadful. Read more... |
Winter of DiscontentWednesday, 21 August 2013
The final words we see in subtitles in Ibrahim El Batout’s Winter of Discontent, a film centred on the events that began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January 2011 and would go on to change Egypt’s future, could not read more ominously today: “And counting…” They refer to the death toll in the popular uprising that would depose Hosni Mubarak, bringing a degree of freedom that Egypt had not known for 30 years. Read more... |
LovelaceTuesday, 20 August 2013
Shot in Seventies throwback grainy-cam, Amanda Seyfried is superb as Linda Lovelace in the surprisingly entertaining biopic Lovelace. Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Bobby Cannavle, Hank Azaria, Chris Noth, Juno Temple and James Franco round out a dream cast. Read more... |
KumaFriday, 16 August 2013
It’s the women who keep things together in Umut Dağ’s debut feature Kuma, and you can see the weight of the burden that matriarch Fatma (Nihal G Koldas) has been carrying etched on her face. Fatma’s latest endeavour to preserve balance in her Vienna-based Turkish family goes further than before, and provides the first surprise in Dağ’s film. Read more... |
2 GunsThursday, 15 August 2013
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. Read more... |
Kick-Ass 2Wednesday, 14 August 2013
With this sequel to director Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John S Romtia Jr, writer/director Jeff Wadlow has done his best to make Kick-Ass 2 into a two-part franchise. It certainly doesn’t help that its release date puts it into a piranha tank of action films with bigger budgets and ideas. Read more... |
BacheloretteMonday, 12 August 2013
"What do you call a bachelorette party without a bride?" asks maid-of-honour Regan (Kirsten Dunst). "Friday," comes her fellow hen’s deadpan response. In Bachelorette the bridesmaids lose the bride, tear up her dress and get trashed; these are high-school mean girls all grown up and, hey, they're just as mean as ever. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages...
...
That Bastard, Puccini!, Park Theatre review - inventive comi...
Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the...
Hamlet, Buxton International Festival review - how to re-ima...
Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a...
Friendship review - toxic buddy alert
The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have...
Album: Slikback - Attrition
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...
Interview: Quinteto Astor Piazzolla on playing in London and...
“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered...
Sir Brian Clarke (1953-2025) - a personal tribute
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-...
S/HE IS STILL HER/E - The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documen...
“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...
Album: The Near Jazz Experience - Tritone
As the name suggests, the Near Jazz Experience owe a huge musical debt to jazz, but that’s not the full story by any means. For a start, the...
Billie Eilish, O2 review - power, authenticity and deep conn...
Billie Eilish may be one of the biggest names in new music, but here at the O2 Arena, she’s just Billie – the one who stares deep into your soul,...