Unquestionably the best film I saw at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury (better known as coming second), A Prophet is an extraordinary prison-based crime drama that is destined to be one of the finest works of the decade. In a year with little top-class French cinema to be found, this is exhilarating, intelligent, gritty and ruthlessly surprising - managing to capture the harrowing and detailed complexities of a young man’s life behind bars, and his rise through the criminal hierarchy. (more…)
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The dramatic opening scene of the 1995 film Strange Days features Ralph Fiennes plugging himself into another man’s reality. Whilst sitting on his bed with his eyes closed, Fiennes starts up a special device that enables him to take a vivid ride through someone else’s memory of a violent armed hold-up that ends with a wild chase across the rooftops.
Strange Days was written by James Cameron (who’s latest film Avatar has just been nominated for nine Oscars), and was directed by Kathryn Bigelow (who’s latest film The Hurt Locker has also been nominated for nine Oscars). The two filmmakers – who go head to head with their films (more…)
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A soulful and savagely beautiful meditation on the end of the world, Australian director John Hillcoat adapts Cormac McCarthy’s tale of despair and faith with great delicacy and care. At the opposite end of the movie spectrum from the other recent apocalypse tale, 2012, this is simple and bleak, intimate and touching and follows the straggling journey of a father and son as they wander through a grey and shattered landscape in search of some kind of significance for their desolate existence. (more…)
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Boasting an incredible female cast, Rob Marshall’s film of a musical of a film (Fellini’s classic 8 1/2) has moments of drama (in particular its promising cinematic opening), moments of sassy sexiness (for some Penelope Cruz’ solo dance number might be worth the ticket price alone), and moments of tenderness, thanks to a sensitive performance from Marion Cotillard. Yet it lacks the sense of passion, mystery and pain that should accompany any journey into the imagination of frustrated artistic genius. (more…)
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It may seem that an Italian-Glaswegian who spent three years working on a failed doctoral thesis about Milton’s Paradise Lost is the least likely person to put in charge of a biting contemporary film about transatlantic politics, but Armando Iannucci has long been observing and parodying the behaviour of those in charge. “At school I was always the one who impersonated the teachers and did the jokes at the Christmas concert,” he says, “and when I did a degree in English literature, I was known to be good at writing quick parodies of any style - from Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad.” (more…)
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I have to admit a certain trepidation whenever Americans adapt things that are terribly English. Think what Disney did to poor Winnie the Pooh, or NBC to The Office. They just don’t seem to, well, understand. (Back in 2003, acclaimed director Guillermo Del Toro departed the set of an aborted attempt to adapt The Wind In the Willows when Disney executives asked him to give Toad a skateboard and have him frequently say “radical dude”.) So how does Roald Dahl’s very English tale of foxes and farmers fare in the hands of quirky American auteur Wes Anderson? (more…)
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Sam Taylor-Wood, best known for her conceptual video art (including a famous work of David Beckham asleep) is probably not the obvious choice to make a film about the early days of John Lennon. Yet she has created a beautifully kind-hearted and cosy crowd-pleaser of how a young man with two mothers came to be one of the world’s greatest songwriters. In this her debut feature film, Taylor–Wood errs wisely on the traditional side of film style and tells the story with great care – if not a slightly patriotic sense of nostalgia. (more…)
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Stunningly beautiful, this ethnographic road movie follows a young boy on his first salt caravan into the Andes where he discovers life, a girl and an understanding of the power of the Goddess of the Earth. Thirteen year old Kunturi lives on the world’s largest salt flats high in the Andes and joins his father and a herd of llamas on a trip to take salt to the traditional communities in the Altiplano - a journey that lasts many months and allows him to observe the traditional customs of a vanishing way of life. (more…)
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Charlize Theron and Kim Bassinger star in an intriguing drama where past and present are brought together to reveal how you can be redeemed through love. Separated by time and space, Theron plays Sylvia, an emotionally strangled woman confronted by her past, whilst Bassinger plays Gina, dealing with a new affair that is dividing her family. (more…)
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Gently paced and exquisitely shot, this story - tinged with magical realism - tells of an anxious young woman finding her way in the world after the death of her mother. Uneducated and superstitious, Fausta (Magaly Solier), has grown up in a country racked by a violent struggle that has left its scars burned deeply in its people. (more…)
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