Film Reviews
Kill Your Darlings
Saturday, December 21st, 2013 Film Reviews,Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr. The first three were among the most famous writers of their generation, the last worked for 47 years as a news editor for United Press International. Yet in the formative years of the Beat Generation, Lucien Carr was the hippest of the hip. This brief, glittering […]
The Met: Captured Live in HD/National Theatre Live
Saturday, December 14th, 2013 Film Reviews,For those who hesitate to keep up a subscription at the opera or the theatre the live broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the National Theatre Live from Britain, are a pure pleasure. For less than $30 one can sample the very best these cities have to offer, getting ringside seats for shows […]
American Hustle
Saturday, December 14th, 2013 Film Reviews,There’s something irresistible in a wellmade film about con artists, who are invariably portrayed in a sympathetic light. Perhaps there’s not much difference between them, actors and directors. Filmmakers set out to con the viewer by creating an illusion, setting false trails and expectations. We, in turn, are happy to be conned. There are plenty […]
Night Train to Lisbon
Saturday, December 7th, 2013 Film Reviews,In Jack Cardiff’s Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), which marries pretension and sexploitation in a way that only the 1960s could conceive, Marianne Faithfull abandons her boring schoolteacher husband and roars off to Switzerland on a big Harley-Davidson for a romantic assignation with Alain Delon. Most girls might think this sounds like a perfectly logical […]
The Darkside
Saturday, December 7th, 2013 Film Reviews,Warwick Thornton’s The Darkside is one of those rare films that defies categorisation. It is being called a “documentary” for want of a better word, but it’s also a drama and a horror movie at one remove. A succession of wellknown actors tell us stories about ghosts and supernatural occurrences. These stories are word-for-word renditions […]
On My Way
Saturday, November 30th, 2013 Film Reviews,Watching Catherine Deneuve in On My Way, there were times when it seemed the film should be called Bad Grandma, or perhaps Mauvais Grand-mère. Like the revolting Irving Zisman in Jackass’s hit comedy, the elderly Bettie sets off on a rambling road trip to deliver her grandson to another relative. Her estranged daughter, Muriel, (played […]
Carrie
Saturday, November 30th, 2013 Film Reviews,Is there any difference between a ‘reboot’ and a ‘remake’? At some point during the last few years, the word ‘reboot’ quietly migrated from the land of computer jargon and became movie jargon. In purely semantic terms the idea of remaking a movie seems more ambitious than rebooting one. We reboot a computer by turning […]
Twenty Feet from Stardom
Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 Film Reviews,One of the features of world cinema over the past decade has been the resurgence of the feature-length documentary. Two outstanding new examples are getting theatrical releases this week: 20 Feet From Stardom, which looks at the careers of some of the leading back-up singers in popular music; and Blackfish, which examines the lives of […]
Blackfish
Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 Film Reviews,Blackfish is the kind of documentary that picks up on an issue that will rarely have entered the consciousness of most people, and makes it a matter of urgency. The starting point is the death of Dawn Brancheau, an experienced trainer of Orcas (or “killer whales”) at SeaWorld, Florida. The agent of destruction was Tilikum, […]
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 Film Reviews,Panem et Circenses was the Roman formula for keeping the population happy. In Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games novels, Panem (bread) is the name of the dystopian society in which the story is set. The circuses are the Games themselves, in which a boy and a girl from each district are chosen by lottery to partake […]