Reviews
The original title of The Animal Kingdom is Le Règne Animal, because it’s a French movie. That’s why you most likely haven’t heard of it and also probably why it isn’t the global phenomenon it should be. First, let’s be clear that it’s nothing to do with Animal Kingdom, David Michôd’s superbly gnarly Australian crime … Read more
The media’s love-in with “the wild man of theory”, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, continues with this documentary about the bear/clown himself. Starting with Zizek’s rhetorical question, “What would be my spontaneous attitude towards the Universe”, Astra Taylor’s film continues in a playful vein through a US lecture tour and ends up back in Zizek’s … Read more
Jasmila Zbanic’s powerful drama Quo Vadis, Aida?, about the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, starts with a sad irony. As the production company idents come up, and various “with the support of” and “in collaboration with” credits list all the European and international organisations involved, remember that when the events in this flm were playing out … Read more
How should the world respond to the fact of America? Welcome Mr Marshall! (aka Bienvenido Mister Marshall!) is often rated as one of the best Spanish films ever made and retains its relevance – even though it was made in 1953 – because the fundamentals remain unaltered. America is still a mighty power, Spain relatively subordinate. … Read more
Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural. We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the … Read more
After Insomnia and Batman Begins, big Hollywood numbers taken on to show studio willing – or so it seemed – Christopher Nolan is back to being master of his own destiny, writing with his brother Jonathan and also producing this lavish smoke and mirrors cat-and-mouser. Clearly an attempt to “do another Memento”, it’s about a pair … Read more
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 November Death of Jacques Piccard, 2008 On this day in 2008, Jacques Piccard, one of the pioneers of really deep deep-sea exploration, died, aged 86. The son of Auguste Piccard, a balloonist who had ascended higher than any other human in the … Read more
Films about the immigrant experience are hardly unusual at the moment, but Golden Voices manages to get fresh juice from a well squeezed formula. Perhaps surprisingly it’s a comedy, from Israel, largely in Russian. That’s a venn diagram right there. It’s also incredibly charming, does not go for easy laughs and has two fantastic performances … Read more
How many America high school comedies have you seen? How many more do you want to see? Exactly my thoughts as I slid the DVD of Kids in America into the slot. But I was wrong and happy about it, because this is a smart and funny film, about smart and funny and intensely likeable teenagers … Read more
Director Dan Mazer edges further into the mainstream with The Exchange, an update on all those Michael Cera/Jon Heder-flavoured films from about 15/20 years ago – the geek shall inherit the earth. Tim (Ed Oxenbould) is the Canadian nerd and self-styled teen intellectual with a love of films with subtitles, existentialist novels by Camus etc, … Read more
A remembrance of Bonds past, No Time to Die is an evocative, elegiac farewell to Daniel Craig which also feels like a goodbye to the entire franchise – the familiar “James Bond will return” is there after the end credits, in case you need reassuring. It covers a lot of ground, flicks a lot of synapses … Read more
It’s not every fantasy film that comes complete with a scene of a brutal fascist captain sewing his own face up, but that’s what you get in Guillermo Del Toro’s best film since The Devil’s Backbone (better, certainly, than Blade II and Hellboy). It’s a dark fantasy reminding us that the Grimm brothers’ original tales … Read more