Jack English/Studiocanal
Borrowing a page from Darren Aronofsky's book, Tomas Alfredson takes steps to ensure that the new version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" swims with visible grain. It's a fine piece of calculated shorthand and works wonders for the ambiance. Every time Gary Oldman as George Smiley speaks from the shadows, the audience peers at him through a fog of silver halide chemistry. When Sir Alec Guinness walked this way, he also frowned through the grain but had a cast-iron excuse: It was 1979, and film grain came naturally.
Continue reading “From Chelsea With Love” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Last Circus (2010)
Diego López Calvín/Tornasol Films
Staking an immediate claim as the most delirious cinematic fever of whichever year it may eventually see the light of day, "The Last Circus" is unhinged. Directed by Álex de la Iglesia in a style which knows no restraint, it sets off at a mad sprint through a borderline-tasteless allegory of the Spanish Civil War and then just barrels straight ahead. It lassos echoes of the country's subsequent history into an overheated and baroque revenge tragedy, in which a pair of disfigured amoral circus clowns blaze away at each other with automatic weapons until narrative logic is a distant memory. None of which should be taken as a complaint.
Continue reading “Laugh, Clown, Laugh” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Divide (2011)
2011 SXSW Conferences & Festivals
"The Divide" plays to its strengths and doesn't chicken out of its logical conclusion; so as post-apocalyptic sci-fi downers go, it certainly has the courage of its throat-slitting, bone-snapping convictions. It also runs straight into the inherent nihilism problem. The idea that human beings are feral embittered creeps with morals and values that crumble under stress until "Lord of the Flies" looks like a nursery rhyme is cathartic, resonant and a path that has been worn smooth. It's a closed loop of narrative from which all surprise has drained.
Continue reading “Apocalypse Again” »
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'PAGE EIGHT'
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011
"Page Eight" feels like a throwback to an earlier, wordier kind of British spy drama, the kind in which M.I.5 bristles inwardly over not knowing all the facts and character actors from the Commonwealth arrive in shifts to deal with double agents over a double brandy. In short it feels like a slice of quality BBC television, and with good reason.
Marking David Hare's return to directing full-length feature films after many years, "Page Eight" has faith in the subtle powers of actors such as Bill Nighy, Judy Davis and Alice Krige to convey annoyance about a broken paper trail with a glance or anxiety over familial strife with a sigh. As long as your requirements of an espionage story don't insist on something blowing up, all this is very refreshing.
Continue reading “The Establishment Club” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Perfect Sense (2011)
2011 Sundance Film Festival
The sheer clarity of intent and scale of ambition in David Mackenzie's "Perfect Sense" is more than enough to obliterate the memory of his Hollywood misstep "Spread" as if it had never existed. Light years away from that film's glib delve into the lifestyles of adolescents whose world was too beautiful to care about, "Perfect Sense" is an icy fable about adults whose world has decided to shrug them off completely and start afresh.
Continue reading “Sense and Insensibility” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Mr. Nice (2010)
Internationales Filmfest Oldenburg
"How can you declare war on plants," muses Howard Marks, having become the biggest marijuana dealer in 1980s Britain without really trying and found himself squarely in the law's crosshair. "Ineffectually" turns out to be the answer, even when fighting someone born to be mild. Played by Rhys Ifans in full shaggy-dog mode in Bernard Rose's loose but very smart biopic "Mr. Nice," Mr. Marks appears to be as unhardened a criminal as they come, an amiable loafer who drifts into dope at Oxford University and never drifts out again.
Continue reading “Accidental Birth of an Anarchist” »
IFC Films
My favorite film of the year is on this list. My second and third favorites were too experimental to attract any wide distribution, but that's life. Mainstream distributors prefer event movies, and event movies are more to do with drug delivery and a repeat of whatever pleasant sensations seemed to work last time rather than anything more sophisticated, but that's life as well. The porn industry has done alright for itself with that business model for centuries, and with about as much need for critics, too.
Continue reading “Dream Country” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Tourist (2010)
Peter Mountain/Columbia Pictures
These are tough times for froth. When half of mainstream cinema is pastiche already and most of the rest wants its childhood back, what does deliberate frivolity even look like? "The Tourist" has a go at finding out, no thought in its pretty head beyond the visual pleasure of packing two pocket-rockets of screen presence off to Europe and having them stand in front of exotic buildings. Purged of every molecule of guile, it leaves the audience in a mild state of free fall, waiting for Hollywood snark that never arrives.
Continue reading “Venice Plays Itself” »
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Since the Edinburgh International Film Festival's move from August to June, the films and guests available in the early summer slot have fallen nicely for the headline writers, culminating in last year's double whammy of "Antichrist" and "The Hurt Locker." This year fate was less kind, and the absence of true talking points only emphasized that most of the higher profile films were days away from wide release — though some ("Get Low," "Winter's Bone") were excellent. There was more action down in the festival's low-budget laboratories; but there, the trend to instantly dismiss exactly the kind of films that resist instant dismissal was in full effect. With odd vibes at the top and bottom, the result was a festival with a mild identity crisis.
Continue reading “Edinburgh International Film Festival ’10: Notes From the Underground” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Lola (2010)
Swift Productions/Tribeca Film Festival
Two years ago I watched Brillante Mendoza's "Foster Child" at Edinburgh, an experience that could not have been more bracing if the director had turned up and slapped me in person. This year his "Lola" had a similar effect. Mr. Mendoza's welding of documentary staging and local color onto angry agitprop is a style which looks like no style at all — until the bruises start to rise. He is the master of the confrontational whisper.
Continue reading “The Granny Diaries” »