Set in 1984, presumably to recall George Orwell’s dystopic vision of totalitarianism, writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck recreates East Germany five years before the fall of the Berlin wall. The Ministry for State Security – or Stasi – one of the most effective intelligence operations in the world, used a huge network of […]
The problem with being one of the world’s most prolific and consistently strong filmmakers is that every new film has a lot of comparison available. Woody Allen is now 71, with more Academy Award nominations than any other writer/director, and fans all have a favourite film to recall: Annie Hall, Hannah and her Sisters, or […]
A quiet English country village – complete with vicars, old ladies and church fetes - seems an unlikely setting for a savage parody of the American cop-buddy genre, but the Shaun of the Dead team of Edgar Wright (co-writer and director) and Simon Pegg (co-writer and lead actor) come out with all guns blazing, combining […]
Opening like The Third Man and paying clear tribute to Casablanca with its ending, The Good German works more as a celebration of classic 1940’s filmmaking style than it does as a great story in its own right. This is director Steven Soderbergh (who also made Solaris with George Clooney) paying homage to a bygone […]
How do you make a contemporary 90-minute film from a nine-volume story written in the 18th century about a character who only manages to get born at the end of volume four? Michael Winterbottom, who clearly relishes filmmaking challenges, has managed to do it with biting British wit, mainly by superimposing another story – the […]
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