Film Review: ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’
★★☆☆☆ Ben Stiller directs and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), this festive season’s family-friendly dramedy. Based on a short story...
★★★☆☆ It’s 1918, and the elderly woman that terrorised the screaming youths of X is still a tender young thing, stuck on her parents’ farm and dreaming of a life of stardom in faraway Hollywood. How far removed from that wizened psychotic killer this cherubic vision now stands.
★★★★☆ There is tragedy and there is comedy, but the hinterland has never really received a proper definition. Melodrama suggests histrionics and musical accompaniment milking the emotional teat. Drama is too broad. And anyone who suggests “dramedy” should be punished. It would be “dramedic”.
★★★★☆ One year on from the events of the previous franchise entry, Ghostface is up to their old tricks again, slicing and dicing their way through a new batch of shrieking victims, the action now shifted to New York. With the new generation of Screamers now firmly installed, headed by the Carpenter sisters Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega), can the ghost(face)s of the past be laid to rest?
★★★☆☆ His heavyweight champion status secured, the now-retired Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) spends his days lounging around his Hollywood mansion, having tea parties with daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) and running his gym with coach Little Duke (Wood Harris). But when a long-forgotten figure from Adonis’ past returns, his future is thrown into question.
★★★★★ Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are best friends. At 13, they are intelligent and autonomous enough to be allowed a certain freedom, but still full of the childish and spontaneous joy of being and imagining. They pretend villains are attacking the castle, run through the flower fields, and have so many sleepovers together that Leo’s mum wonders aloud if he’ll ever come home.
★★★☆☆ “Family isn’t a word…it’s a sentence”. So ran the tagline to The Royal Tenenbaums. For Hirokazu Kore-eda it could be argued that it’s a whole career. From Still Walking to the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, the Japanese auteur has spent the greater part of his career delineating the lines of attraction and repulsion, the dynamics of duty and care that make up families – both real and alternative.
★★☆☆☆ Ben Stiller directs and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), this festive season’s family-friendly dramedy. Based on a short story...
★★★★☆ J.C. Chandor follows up 2011’s talky but tense Margin Call with polar opposite All Is Lost (2013), a near-silent survival procedural that celebrates...
★★★★★ Sixty-five million years in the making, Steven Spielberg’s spectacular 1993 dinosaur romp Jurassic Park returns to Blu-ray this week thanks to a brand...
★★☆☆☆ There are drawbacks to acting alongside Jennifer Aniston – mainly the fact that you have to take second-billing to everyone’s favourite Friend. Rawson...
★★★☆☆ In 1972, Linda Lovelace shot to stardom as a sexually frustrated woman with an oral clitoris in the controversial porno Deep Throat (1972)....
★★★★☆ It’s over fifty years since the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy on 22 November and over recent months we have seen...
★★★★☆ Western society’s love affair with superstition has quelled in recent decades. We no longer take solace in the extermination of those deemed ‘different....
★★★★★ A worthy winner of Berlin’s Golden Bear and a strong contender for Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Academy Awards, Child’s Pose...
★★★★★ A menacing adaptation of Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton’s 1961 chiller The Innocents is rereleased this week as...
★★★★☆ After a slightly mixed response to the first instalment, Peter Jackson’s return to Middle-earth for the second part of his Hobbit trilogy, The...
★★★☆☆ New York-born, Jerusalem-raised director Rama Burshtein’s feature debut, Fill the Void (2012), is an accomplished social drama with potential appeal for international audiences....
★★★☆☆ Recognised for her work as a multimedia artist and candid photographer of A-list celebrities, Deborah Anderson follows up her renowned art books Room...
★★★★★ Forget Coppola’s The Godfather, Disney Pixar’s Toy Story and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films. Forget even the original Star Wars series. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s...
★★★★☆ If the medium of film is to be considered a legitimate art form then this memorable BBC period piece from 1979 is probably...