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The sort of film that has an inbuilt media audience – women’s magazines – who will receive it with the same lack of scrutiny as they treat each launch of a new beauty product, The Devil Wears Prada is a clever title halfway towards being a clever film. It’s adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna from … Read more
Gypo is a Dogme film, the 37th made according to the strictures of the protocol dreamt up by a group of Scandinavian film-makers, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995. Naturalism is the stated idea, but Dogme could also be seen as an extension of Ikea flatpack design principles into film-making, or those … Read more
Out This Week John Wick (Warner, cert 15) Like some kind of undead film star, Keanu Reeves manages magnificent returns every few years – Speed, The Matrix and now John Wick, a super-sleek bit of badass comic-book adaptation relying heavily on Reeves’s blank persona (no one does it better) for much of its appeal. He plays … Read more
Out This Week Phoenix (Soda, cert 12) Nina Hoss and Christian Petzold have made six films together, of which I’ve seen only one – the outstanding left-field supernatural thriller Yella. Phoenix builds its drama in a similar way to that 2007 movie – withholding a piece of information and asking us to guess what exactly … Read more
Out The Week Far from the Madding Crowd (Fox, cert 12) A remake of the 1967 film, rather than another version of the novel. Well that’s what it looks like, and considering how closely so many of the scenes mirror – in length, composition, camera angles even – scenes from John Schlesinger’s original film, the … Read more
Out This Week Dear White People (Signature, cert 15) A sharp, smart and almost breathless satire on race, racism, post-racism and the whole damn thing, set in an American university where an all-black college asks the question that all black people are asked in some way… integrate or segregate? This basic question – hard enough – … Read more
Out This Week The Salvation (Warner, cert 15) Having made his name with austere Dogma films, Kristian Levring makes clear he’s more than a one trick pony with a film that pulls every “big movie” trick available – lighting, cameras, costumes, location and sound are all used to the max in a lavish western that sees … Read more
Out This Week Good Kill (Arrow, cert 15) What happens when you force a Top Gun kinda guy out of his plane and into a bunker, where he is now commanded to kill people in Whereveristan remotely, using drones? Writer/director Andrew Niccol and his Gattaca star Ethan Hawke reteam to answer the question in an … Read more
Out This Week Cake (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Child actresses signal they’ve grown up by shedding their clothes; older actresses their bid for independence by shedding their makeup. So it proves with Jennifer Aniston, in a feel-my-agony performance as a woman wracked by relentless physical pain after some sort of accident (all is eventually revealed) … Read more
Out This Week Kajaki (Spirit, cert 15) To find a really good, really British war film (so, no, not Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, both of which are over-rated) you have to go back a very very long way. Or watch Kajaki, which is out right now. It’s a … Read more
Out This Week Selma (Pathe, cert 12) Martin Luther King’s life done as a triumph, not the usual tragedy, the focus being the series of marches King led from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. These effectively rode a coach and horses through the prevailing practice of disenfranchising Negros by making registering to vote all but … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Clouds of Sils Maria (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Olivier Assayas follows Something in the Air, his largely autobiographical personal meditation on the aftermath of the events of May 1968, with a different type of dramatic reflexivity. Clouds of Sils Maria is a meditation on acting, performed by a trio … Read more
