• Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

    March 9, 2015 - By 

    THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. The preface of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 dark comedy film, Fargo, is perhaps one of the most discussed in recent cinema history. Claiming itself to be based exactly on factual events, the authenticity of these opening lines has long been debunked as simply a device to set the tone. No big deal. Screenwriters have been bending the…

  • American Sniper

    January 22, 2015 - By 

    American Sniper is one of the most grotesque films I’ve ever seen. A blatant piece of flag-waving Bush-era US propaganda, it’s a war movie where 100 dead Iraqis do not equate to one dead American. Where all brown people – children included – are enemies of ‘freedom’. Where the United States is a glossy land of BBQs, rodeos and pretty wives, and the Middle East is an “evil” pile of “dirt” populated by “savages”. These are expressions used by US Navy Seal Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), a skilled sniper who, over a lengthy military career, racks up a body count in the hundreds from behind…

  • Whiplash

    January 21, 2015 - By 

    True to its title, Whiplash hits like a double decker. I left the screening of writer-director Damien Gazelle’s astonishingly hot-blooded second feature dizzy and elated. Andrew Neiman (Miles Tenner) is a young, ambitious jazz drummer attending the fictional Schaffer Conservatory, the most prestigious music academy in the United States, and suffering from an acute case of what we might call ‘undergrad hubris’. Desperate to impress, he falls under the tutelage of the school’s alpha dog, Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), a merciless instructor who demands excellence of his pupils and enforces standards through a robust programme of terror and humiliation. Whiplash arrives on the…

  • Taken 3

    January 9, 2015 - By 

    Producer/writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton are filmmakers with a very specific set of skills, ones they have acquired over very long careers, and ones they apply liberally to Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s third round of familial brouhaha as Bryan Mills, retired spook and walking diplomatic incident. They can take the plainest of scenes, like two people in a room talking, or a basic freeway car chase, and turn them into impenetrable garbage. They can look at the reception to Taken 2, identify everything about it audiences disliked (the jumps in plot logic; the fun-sucking attention on Maggie Grace’s gormless suffering daughter routine; the softened…

  • The Theory of Everything

    January 8, 2015 - By 

    There are mercifully few equation montages in Theory of Everything, the hazy, heartfelt biopic of celebrity English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. There is a scene early on where Stephen (Eddie Redmayne), an spiritedly disorganised graduate student searching out a thesis topic at 1960s Cambridge, seeks inspiration by scribbling out theorems on a blackboard, with a hugging, affectionate camera angle and an upbeat piano score. Even then, what strikes clearest is the jittery chalk transcription, a warning of the doom to come. It is one of the film’s few concessions to the tropes of the ‘damaged genius’ biopic: elsewhere, an enthused physics student explains black hole theory…

  • Birdman

    January 6, 2015 - By 

    There are many motifs that come to mind when discussing Alejandro González Iñárritu. A deft comedic hand is not really one of them. An overly long trip on the Expresso-Depresso bus to Interconnectivity of Life Boulevard with a brief detour through Ugly Face Of Humanity Avenue is more akin to what has come to expect from a man whose work included 21 Grams, Amores Perros and Babel. His films are often negative to a fault, as is the case with his previous effort, Buitiful, which painted a portrait so devoid of any kind of salvation that you lost all sympathy…

  • Paddington

    December 4, 2014 - By 

    Like its eponymous Peruvian exile, the cinematic adaptation of Michael Bond’s iconic children’s book series arrives under choppy circumstances. A late-in-the-game change of lead voice talent (from Colin Firth to Ben Whishaw) and a flat teaser trailer were casting doubts on the viability of StudioCanal’s most expensive film to date. They need not have worried: like its marmalade-guzzling, duffle-clad hero, Paddington is a sweet, immensely likable creation that is sure to find a hearty welcome on adopted shores. Writer-director Paul King and co-plotter Hamish McColl have delivered a lovey, lovely live action/animation film which doubles as a great Christmas watch.…

  • Life Itself

    November 26, 2014 - By 

    The owlish, circular Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert famously championed 1994’s Hoop Dreams, an early documentary by Steve James looking at the aspirations of a group of black city kids, and with Life Itself James repays the favour. Lovers of film and film criticism will find much to appreciate in the film, which uses the memoir of the same name to tell Ebert’s story, from his beginnings in print journalism to his final days at home and at hospital, scenes James captures with intimate proximity. Life Itself is a candid and moving film about how to relate to art and…

  • The Drop

    November 14, 2014 - By 

    The Drop is a good example of how short stories and screenplays are different forms with different expectations and demands. Dennis Lehane, who writes the film, translates the material straightforwardly from his 2009 story ‘Animal Rescue’, producing a low-level Brooklyn crime drama which often feels both undernourished and padded. Director Michael R. Roskam impressed in 2011 with Bullhead, a Dutch-language feature about the animal hormone underworld in Belgium, and here he finds a similar, if less complex, story about day-to-day mob operations and the guarded, tense blue-collar men caught up in them. Bob (Tom Hardy) and Marv (the late James…

  • Interstellar

    November 7, 2014 - By 

    Houston, we have a problem. Christopher Nolan may be a spectacularly skilled constructor of film, but he’s no storyteller. In his last non-Batman film, Inception (2010), Nolan marshalled his technical enthusiasm into a giddy, multi-layered hacking of subconscious dreamworlds. With Interstellar he rockets off in the opposite direction, sling-shoting Matthew MaConaughey and a band of cosmonauts into the cold blackness of the far-away night, a fantastic voyage through wormholes, black holes and narrative rabbit holes. The feverishly anticipated Interstellar is a gorgeous, meticulously staged, hyper-expensive celebration of human discovery and a thrilling rebuke to the timidity of the average studio…