Since it first premièred at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) has gone on to garner both audience and critical acclaim in its native France and further abroad. Appearing in the Un Certain Regard strand on the Croisette, Stranger bagged its helmsman Continue Reading
★★★★☆ “50% of Russia’s budget comes from the oil and gas industry,” asserts the quote – attributed to Vladimir Putin – that opens Russian documentary Pipeline (2013). Director Vitaly Mansky traces the path of the cash cow that is the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgirid pipeline, glimpsing the lives encountered en route. The conduit Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Like a sanitised French take on David Cronenberg’s superb gynaecologist drama Dead Ringers (1988) but with all the psychosexual undertones stripped away, Miss and the Doctors (2013) isn’t afraid to keep its story small. Its sibling doctors – though not twins this time around – do indeed fall for Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ With A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), Family Guy and Ted creator Seth MacFarlane gives us Blazing Saddles for Generation Y, a half-parody, half-skew-eyed western complete with all the trimmings of the director’s trademark digressions, pop culture references and flatulence humour. If you’ve not already been Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ We head to bat country this week for Charlie Paul’s new documentary For No Good Reason (2012), detailing the life and work of Ralph Steadman – the illustrator and cartoonist best known for his work with Hunter S. Thompson on the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Before Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Alien invasions have long been the scourge of the cinematic planet Earth and those pesky tentacled critters are up to their old tricks again in Doug Liman’s entertaining time-hopping sci-fi actioner Edge of Tomorrow (2014). Based on Japanese writer Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s slender novel All You Need is Kill, the film stars Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ When is too much enough and not enough moreish is the question one takes away from Sebastian Junger’s sequel to his award winning and epoch busting 2010 documentary Restrepo, which he co-directed with recently deceased photographer Tim Hetherington. Battle Company: Korengal (2014) again focuses with a piercing gaze on Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Having premièred at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Jessica Oreck’s Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys (2013) reaches UK cinemas this week on limited release. It’s a meditative study on the lives and rituals of reindeer herders in Lapland – a delicate, deeply evocative ‘slice of life’ that tranquilly Continue Reading
★★★★★ Of all the screwball masters, Preston Sturges was the one who came the closest to identifying himself as an artist. Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey et al were geniuses of the medium, but they invariably saw themselves as journeymen who made pictures for the masses and would have scoffed in Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A calmer, more inquisitive psychodrama from French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, Stranger by the Lake (2013) – which premièred in the Un Certain Regard section of last year’s Cannes and went on to bag the coveted Best Director and Queer Palm gongs – is a gorgeously minimalist homoerotic noir thriller Continue Reading
★★★★★ The Coen brothers are in fine form with Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a brilliant portrait of a struggling folk singer (Oscar Isaac). It’s 1961 and Llewyn is trying to make a go of it as a solo artist after the death of his musical partner. He drags himself from Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In 2010, writer and director Yoon Sung-hyun caught the attention of both critics and international film festival audiences alike with his debut film Bleak Night, an impressive character study made on a micro budget as a graduation film from the Korean Academy of Film Arts. The budgetary limitations are Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A snarling, scabrous adaptation of American playwright Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning familial drama, John Wells’ August: Osage County (2013) makes its way onto DVD and Blu-ray this week boasting embittered turns from both Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep, amongst many others. We open to the cardigan-clad, world-weary poet Beverly Continue Reading
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan this evening won Cannes’ top prize, the coveted Palme d’Or, for his latest film, Winter Sleep. A worthy award winner after previously coming close with such past efforts as 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Three Monkeys (2008), Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders and Bennett Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Having carried home the Grand Jury Prize for Best Film back in 2011 with the exceptional Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, celebrated Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to both the Croisette and the Official Competition with Winter Sleep (2014). Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) is a landlord and hotelier Continue Reading