D.W. Mault

★★★★★ French critic and auteur François Truffaut’s tone and style have been both successfully and unsuccessfully mined by numerous directors over the years, including the likes of Wes Anderson, Richard Ayoade and Shane Meadows. Never as knowingly hip and revolutionary as others, his cinema belongs to Renoir and Vigo, and is carried on by that…

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★★★★★ Simplicity is often the conduit to a perverse complexity that grows more enigmatic the longer the gaze of the enchanted is maintained. Even in its present state of butchered grandeur, The Lady from Shanghai (1947) – back in UK cinemas this week – is a joy to behold. Like everything Orson Welles produced, there’s…

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★★★★☆ In his 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, Robert Evans proclaimed there are three sides to every story: “My side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.” In Mike Myers’ directorial debut (which he co-­directs with Beth Aala), Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon…

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★★★☆☆ Rebecca Zlotowski’s Grand Central (2013) arrives in UK cinemas this week after bagging the Prix François Chalais at Cannes last year. Zlotowski again anchors her film with the naturalism of Léa Seydoux after working together on her debut film, 2010’s Belle Épine. With the backdrop of a nuclear power plant in Austria, Grand Central…

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★★★★★ The term ‘alien’ is originally descended from the Latin expression ‘alienus’, roughly translating into modern English as something ‘belonging to another’. This points us firmly towards the direction of tonal enlightenment offered in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). There’s a Trojan horse-like nature to its formal audacity; are we watching an alien traipsing…

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★★★★☆ A revolution is a perpetually evolving entity, a constant presence in the lives of its participants. And yet, it’s rarely seen nor heard of once the white noise provided by visiting media conglomerates dissipates and they move on to new regions and with new entreaties to the bored mass populace of the West, offering…

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★★☆☆☆ Jean­-Baptiste Poquelin – or Molière to use his nom de plume – created comedy out of farce and underlaid a fierce anger that railed against the church and moral hypocrisy. In Philippe Le Guay’s Cycling with Molière (2013), we have what François Truffaut called the cinéma de papa; a bland concoction that peters out…

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★★★★☆ Immediacy is now as important as content for a certain type of documentary. This statehood has been pushed into circumstance by the availability of visual apparatus in everyone’s pocket and professional equipment getting smaller, cheaper and better. Now, your lived-in nightmare reality can be brought to the attention of the world via a couple…

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★☆☆☆☆ The ongoing digital revolution that has placed the means of film production into the hands of budding indie directors everywhere stutters somewhat with the release of British director Justin Hardy’s Love Me Till Monday (2013). A painful 89 minutes of banality and boredom ensues in this misfiring attempt at understanding the contemporary experience of…

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★★★★☆ There could be an argument for three being the most cinematic of numbers. Some would argue two, others one, but it surely has to be three; it’s better than two because it simply isn’t about unity but disunity in flux: pure dramatic tension that constantly seems ready to spill out of control but never…

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