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Caren Pistorius in Slow West

The Best Films of 2015

There’s a tendency among people who watch a lot of films to boost ones that stand out rather than ones that are good. This can lead to some perverse choices in the “best of” lists that proliferate at this time of year. So that probably explains the rogue nature of the list below – ha ha. If you’re expecting to find Spectre (not at all bad) or the latest Marvel movie or Jurassic World, look elsewhere. These are just the films, of the maybe 350 films or so that I’ve watched in the past 12 months, that jumped out and grabbed me. Some of them are 2014 releases. Ten Best Paddington (dir: Paul … Read more
Rupert Friend and Hannah Ware in Hitman: Agent 47

21 December 2015-12-21

Out This Week North V South (Metrodome, cert 18) For reasons beyond the scope of human wit, the British gangster thriller has become a Christmas fixture, perhaps because it’s endangered, like the brussel sprout. This year’s front-runner takes the gang battle format – there’s a northern mob led by Bernard Hill, and a southern lot led by Steven Berkoff – adds a Romeo and Juliet romance subplot in the shape of a fixer for Hill (Elliott Tittensor) and the daughter of Berkoff (Charlotte Hope), then loads up with wrong’uns (Keith Allen, Geoff Bell, Freema Agyeman) and an exotic (Dom Monot in an Udo Kier role as a raging transvestite psychopath hitman), shakes and … Read more
Toma Cuzin as the escaped Gypsy in Aferim!

14 December 2015-12-14

Out This Week Aferim! (StudioCanal, cert 18) In spite of the fact that it won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Aferim! had no proper cinema release in the UK, and even its home entertainment release is a muted affair. What a terrible shame that is, because it’s a hell of a film, a powerful wonder following a cop and his son on a rambling journey through 1830s Romania. Shot in a slightly mucky black and white – easier to get period settings right when colour isn’t a problem – it’s a Don Quixote meets Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon affair, with the chase after an absconded Gypsy (Toma Cuzin) providing the loose frame of a … Read more
Tadanobo Asano (in horse's head) and Nathalia Acevedo in Ruined Heart

7 December 2015-12-07

Out This Week Trainwreck (Universal, cert 15) Amy Schumer takes that slightly fey, dizzy-smart, passive-aggressive female comedy type (Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Jenny Slate, Desiree Akhavan) and sticks a rocket up front and back passages in this very New York and very funny comedy. Schumer is the journalist on a self-important magazine sent off on a sports assignment even though she has no interest in … in fact it barely matters what the plot is, since all it’s there for is to give Schumer enough space to play keepie-uppie with the comedy ball. This she does, riffing hard on modern living as it affects a sexually active woman in the 21st century. When you … Read more
Paul Rudd in Ant-Man

30 November 2015-11-30

Out Now Ant-Man (Disney, cert 12) I’ve never signed up to the notion that Edgar Wright was the author of the Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, World’s End). That was Simon Pegg, clearly. But even so he was a vital component, and the news that he’d left this film before anything was in the can was a downer. On the upside, there is still plenty of his and Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish’s original script in Ant-Man – a fast, witty, inventive and playful thing, full of youthful energy, which Paul Rudd has made a decent fist of adapting (with Adam McKay). Rudd and McKay probably did the tinkering necessary … Read more
Tom Cruise hangs onto a cargo plane in Mission Impossible Rogue Nation

23 November 2015-11-23

Out This Week Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Paramount, cert 12) Tom Cruise’s desire to be James Bond really gets the better of him in M:I5, a flabby action spectacular which has visited Vienna, London, Langley, Paris and Havana within its first 20 minutes or so, right after the pre-credits sequence which sees Jason Bourne, hang on, Ethan Hunt clambering onto the outside of a cargo plane as it’s taking off. A stunt done for real, we’re told, and impressive whether it was or wasn’t. Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed, so there’s plenty of that “who is the real bad guy?” attitude that was the making of The Usual Suspects, but here is … Read more
The Minions hitch a ride

16 November 2015-11-16

Out This Week Minions (Universal, cert U) By the end of the first Despicable Me film, Gru, the archetypal bad guy, had been exposed as a bit of softie, which left Despicable Me 2 with nowhere to go, in terms of jokes about bad guys wheezing despicably and mwah-ha-ha-ing their way to world domination. But Gru’s Minions were still funny, and in this surprisingly lively, amusing, inventive spin-off, they get to show they can be funny at feature length, in spite of not being able to speak. Well, they do speak, but it’s a kind of Esperanto done with expressive voices and telegraphed emotions – Pingu, the Clangers and Shaun the Sheep territory. … Read more
Saoirse the kelpie goes for a swim

9 November 2015-11-09

Out This Week Song of the Sea (StudioCanal, cert PG) The Irish tricolour is firmly nailed to the mast in the follow-up to Tomm Moore’s animation The Secret of Kells – opening and end credits are in Gaelic – a whimsical tale of a young lad unaware that his dumb younger sister is in fact a kelpie, a mythical sea creature. Moore has set out to do the things with animation that Pixar rarely does, using its possibilities in a more expressive, impressionistic way, recalling Studio Ghibli and Sylvain Chomet, though the resolutely 2D approach also contains echoes of Noggin the Nog and other Smallfilms productions. The story is pure Ghibli though – … Read more
Amy Winehouse

2 November 2015-11-02

Out This Week Amy (Universal, cert 15) Amy is a misery-memoir documentary about the singer Amy Winehouse, whose life ended at the age of 27 after she drank herself to death – years of bulimia had rendered her body too weak to cope with booze as well as the crack, smack and partying she’d put it through. Director Asif Kapadia proceeds in much the same way as he did with his film Senna – hide the fact that it’s a talking-head doc by laying archive footage, newspaper headlines, TV appearances, radio interviews with Amy, whatever you’ve got, over the recollections of journalists who interviewed her, musicians who worked with her, friends, parents, and … Read more
Jacir Eid and Hussein Salameh in Theeb (aka Wolf)

26 October 2015-10-26

Out This Week Theeb (New Wave, cert 12) Jordan’s contender for this year’s Best Foreign language Oscar is, somewhat unexpectedly, an old school adventure story, the sort of thing Rider Haggard would recognise, set in a Lawrence of Arabia desert and starring Jacir Eid as a Bedouin kid. Eid is an untrained actor, as are most if not all of the excellent cast – goodies and baddies – and the plot is a basic dash across the desert, away from bad guys and towards a well which a floppy-haired English interloper wants to visit, for reasons probably nefarious. A sealed box provides a bit of a Maguffin, the cinematography knows that David Lean … Read more
Michael Fassbender shaves Kodi Smit-McPhee in Slow West

19 October 2015-10-19

Out This Week Slow West (Lionsgate, cert 15) One of the best westerns for some time, Slow West plays with the tropes of the pulp magazines that first connected the Old West with a reading public – the glamour, the danger, the hardship and the austere beauty are all here in Scotsman John Maclean’s really rather extraordinary feature debut. It’s framed like an odd-couple road movie, with Kodi Smit-McPhee as a naive, priggish kid following Rose, his one true love (Caren Pistorius, a star), from Scotland across the ocean to America, and then across the increasingly wild badlands. Joining him on the journey is Michael Fassbender as a bounty hunter – there’s a … Read more
Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes in Mr Holmes

12 October 2015-10-12

Out This Week Mr Holmes (EOne, cert PG) A bit of a something and nothing here, with Ian McKellen playing a crusty 90-something Sherlock Holmes coming to terms with the loss of his faculties, wrapping up an old unsolved case (in flashback) and putting his remaining wits in the service of cracking an even greater enigma – himself. McKellen has been here before, in Gods and Monsters, when he played Frankenstein director James Whale at the ignominious end of his life. And so has director Bill Condon, who also directed the 1998 film, and again proves himself to be a deft stylist of wipe-clean period drama – Holmes’s ancient house, his beautiful garden … Read more

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