Movies | TV | Reviews
London Film Festival, 2012-10-22 Dominga Sotomayor’s remarkable debut feature is a sotto voce drama about a family on a road trip. Proceeding by suggestion rather than assertion, it is in some respects similar to Pablo Trapero’s early, soapy drama Familia Rodante. There are faint hints of the
London Film Festival, 2012-10-22 If you’ve seen 5X2, you’ll already know that François Ozon makes immensely clever yet highly entertaining films, and that there’s a point to the cleverness; he’s not just showing off. In the House, aka Dans La Maison, is Ozon to the bone, another
London Film Festival, 2012-10-22 Stories of Somali pirates hijacking ships and holding people hostage for months regularly make the news bulletins but rarely seem to make it to the big screen. Which is odd considering that foreigners waving guns about in front of frightened innocents’ faces is
Out in the UK This Week The Hunter (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) There’s a totally immersive sense of place in this engrossing thriller starring Willem Dafoe as the titular hunter in kill-or-be-killed Australia. He’s some sort of badass eco-transgressor working for a rapacious global megacorp and he’s
London Film Festival, 2012-10-21 At a certain point in the career of a successful film-maker who is not working in the English language, you expect him or her to make their “breakout” film, the one that gets them noticed in the multiplexes, the one that makes
London Film Festival, 2012-10-20 Giving a film’s plot away in its title: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford did it. So, with greater economy, did Snakes on a Plane. Here we have Simon Killer, about a guy called Simon, who’s a Killer.
London Film Festival, 2012-10-14 The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s most well known film to date, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, followed a pair of student girls in 1980s Bucharest into a grubby hotel where a back-street abortionist first took their money, then demanded extra
London Film Festival, 2012-10-15 What’s that, you say, Cronenberg? Surely not a relation of David? Indeedy, this is the son, Brandon, and, apples not falling far from tree, chips flying off of old blocks, he serves us up a rather lipsmacking portion of body-horror just like dad
Out in the UK This Week Silent Souls (Artificial Eye, cert 15, DVD) Two men from an almost extinct Russian ethnic sub-group, the Merja, take the dead wife of one of them to her final rest in this poetic, poignant drama which works brilliantly as
London Film Festival, 2012-10-15 There is a great film to be made about the whole Madchester/Stone Roses/Acieed moment of the late 1980s but Spike Island isn’t it. Fun but messy might be a fair way to assess it. Fatally flawed might be another. This is a
