Tag: drama
Samba
Saturday, April 4th, 2015 Film Reviews,Four years ago, French filmmakers, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano had such a huge hit with The Intouchables, it left one wondering what they could possibly do for an encore. The answer is Samba, another humanistic comedy-drama starring Omar Sy, the giant-sized wheelchair-pusher from the previous movie. The paradigm may be slightly different but the […]
A Little Chaos
Saturday, March 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,After watching Leviathan, a present-day tale with overtones of the Old Testament, it is almost a light relief to turn to A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman’s period drama of the Ancient Regime. Set in the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, it is the story of a fictional landscape gardener, Sabine De Barra, and […]
Leviathan
Saturday, March 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,If you’ve ever wondered why the Russians drink so much, Leviathan has all the answers. No nation does ‘bleak’ so well, but the art lies in creating something both bleak and magnificent at the same time. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov were exemplary, while Tarkovsky managed the feat better than any other modern Russian director. Enter […]
Big Eyes
Saturday, March 21st, 2015 Film Reviews,When New York Times art critic, John Canaday, wrote a scathing attack on the directors of the 1964 World’s Fair for choosing to hang a gigantic picture of 100 big-eyed children as a “theme painting”, the offending item was quickly removed. Those were the days! Art criticism (and the New York Times) were taken seriously. […]
‘71
Saturday, March 21st, 2015 Film Reviews,Yann Demange’s ’71, begins with two soldiers in boxing gloves beating each other to a pulp. This proves to be a relatively gentle opening for a relentless, heart-in-mouth thriller set in Belfast during the period euphemistically known as “The Troubles”. The movie follows a young British soldier, Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), who finds himself trapped […]
Inherent Vice
Saturday, March 14th, 2015 Film Reviews,Anyone who complains that the plot of Inherent Vice is confusing has obviously never read a novel by Thomas Pynchon. Confusion, or rather paranoia, is the standard condition of most of Pynchon’s characters, and perhaps readers, – which may explain why Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is the first attempt to bring this elusive author’s work […]
French Film Festival 2015
Saturday, March 7th, 2015 Film Reviews,Three years ago the ever-popular Alliance Francaise French Film Festival opened with Valérie Donzelli’s A Declaration of War. The film had been a hit in France but it provoked a good deal of muttering and eyebrow-raising among the first-night crowd at the Palace Verona who didn’t know what to make of a movie about a […]
A Most Violent Year
Saturday, February 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,Oscar Isaac does his best to channel Al Pacino in A Most Violent Year, while director, J.C.Chandor acts as the medium by which the late Sidney Lumet gets to direct another film. These flashes of déjà vu don’t spoil a slow burning thriller that smoulders but never quite blazes. Despite the title, A Most Violent […]
Fifty Shades of Grey
Saturday, February 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,Fifty Shades of Grey must be a deeply reassuring experience for anyone who believes western society is hopelessly mired in depravity. That such a confection might be seen as ‘erotic’ suggests we are more wholesome, more innocent, than might ever have been suspected. That it should be examined for underlying messages by psychologists and sociologists […]
Rosewater
Friday, February 20th, 2015 Film Reviews,Jon Stewart’s Rosewater can hardly fail to conjure thoughts of Peter Greste’s 400 days spent in an Egyptian prison for no apparent reason than having done his job as a journalist. Maziar Bahari suffered a similar fate, being imprisoned by the Iranian government from June to October, 2009, on trumped-up charges of espionage. Stewart, as […]