Film Reviews
TetroTuesday, 22 June 2010
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather trilogy has been here of course, his 1982 flop One From the Heart leading him to declare bankruptcy and spend a decade or more doing derivative hack work to pay off his debts. Read more... |
Villa AmaliaMonday, 21 June 2010
The fifth collaboration between iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert and director Benoît Jacquot tells the story of Ann (Huppert), a concert pianist who leaves her partner of 15 years after she sees him passionately kiss another woman. She decides to abandon her life, leaving no trace of her previous existence, and only one friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade), is allowed to know her plans. She has met Georges for the first time since childhood by a ridiculous contrivance but, as with so... Read more... |
Please GiveFriday, 18 June 2010
Charity begins at home - or maybe not - in Nicole Holofcener's lovely film, Please Give, which joins the superlative Greenberg as one of the beacons in a summer movie line-up given over to sequels, franchises and pitches that should never have got beyond the story board. Read more... |
The Illusionist, EIFF Opening Gala, EdinburghThursday, 17 June 2010
Last night’s gala opening of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival may have been touched by living history – in particular the presence of Sean Connery (pictured below, arriving at last night's screening), who strode up the red carpet looking sharp and dapper in black – but the film on show, Sylvain Chomet’s ravishing animated feature, The Illusionist, was haunted by old ghosts. Read more... |
HierroWednesday, 16 June 2010
What is it with horror films and water? Think back through all the watery episodes in the horror canon, not the grandiose creature-from-the-deep type but the more domestic scenarios – beaches, showers, baths, bathrooms. From Hitchcock’s originary shower scene onwards, the list is long and gory. Most recently we've seen the elegant atmospheric manipulations of Juan Antonio Bayona’s El Orfanato with its plot-significant headland setting and dark tidal caves; now following close... Read more... |
KillersWednesday, 16 June 2010
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually manage the word "bonjour". Small wonder that a vacationing, newly single Katherine Heigl falls for this clearly keen linguist in a lift in Nice. His bared torso has nothing to do with it - surely, not! Read more... |
Wild GrassTuesday, 15 June 2010
It’s an odd enough statistic that only four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays have been made into films. Odder still that, of those, three are the work of Alain Resnais, the grand old man of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it was a curious moment when the director of Last Year in Marienbad got into bed with the author of Bedroom Farce. Read more... |
Black DeathFriday, 11 June 2010
When were you last horrified by a horror movie? Really horrified, that is, as opposed to merely creeped out, or disgusted, or amused. Black Death is a proper horror movie, for grown-ups rather than ADD-afflicted teens, and I'll wager grown-ups will be duly horrified by it. Read more... |
Women Without MenFriday, 11 June 2010
Shirin Neshat's often compelling Women Without Men spirits us back to Tehran 1953, and the political atmosphere surrounding the British- and American-supported coup that deposed Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Read more... |
Letters to JulietWednesday, 09 June 2010
What happens when shlock is ennobled to something resembling a state of grace? The answer is on emotionally capacious view in Letters to Juliet, a by-the-books romcom that is raised beyond the ordinary, and then some, by the presence of the great Vanessa Redgrave. Read more... |
GreenbergWednesday, 09 June 2010
Anyone who saw Ben Stiller in Zoolander will know that he is a very fine actor. He made his over-the-top character both believable and lovable (well, up to a point on the latter, but you know what I mean) while playing the fashion model’s absurdities for every laugh he could get. Read more... |
Brooklyn's FinestTuesday, 08 June 2010
For the past decade or so, New York City has been bragging about its crime figures. Homicides are through the floor, whole fleets of firepower-toting cops are out there hassling hustlers, and the mean streets have been swept pretty much clean. I don’t think the creators of Brooklyn’s Finest can have got the press release. Read more... |
KicksFriday, 04 June 2010
This is a modest film – only 80 minutes long – with big things to say about the way celebrity warps the lives of all who come into contact with it: not only of the elect few whose faces adorn teenage walls, but also those lonely girls in their bedrooms who conjure up a sustaining fantasy that some of the fame will brush personally off on them. Read more... |
The Killer Inside MeThursday, 03 June 2010
We’ll never feel the real impact - an all too apposite word - of the violence in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, given that it has dominated pre-release publicity for the film. The suspense of waiting for it will surely distract viewers from any suspense that the director was trying to create naturally through the formal build-up of unease within the plot and environment he’s taken on from Jim Thompson’s noir novel. Read more... |
She's Out of My LeagueWednesday, 02 June 2010
Has modern cinema ever arranged quite so fetishistic an entrance? She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, and needless to say busty - a benign pneumatic deity who, gliding in slo-mo across a crowded screen, induces males of every age and hue to turn and gawp in frank, unreconstructed appreciation of her sheer unblemished wondrousness. Hollywood is zip-all without dream retail and the shameless objectification of women. But surely – surely – this is too much. Read more... |
Sex and the City 2Friday, 28 May 2010
There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the series neatly turned on its head, urging us to celebrate the beauty to be found in human flaw and error; yet, watching the self-assured sass of this once-mighty franchise sprawl headlong, it wasn’t beauty but a sense of raging... Read more... |
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