Alps
Alpeis
Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos
2011
Greece
93 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Aggeliki Papoulia, Aris Servetalis, Johnny Vekris, Ariane Labed
Language: Greek
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhT8TQG_7AE
Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps opens with an image no less forbidding than the peaks and
crevasses evoked by its title: a cavernous indoor gymnasium, painted many tones of
chilly blue and empty except for a slender teenage girl and a tiny, watchful figure in the
background. As "O Fortuna" fills the air, the young woman (Ariane Labed) executes a
rhythmic ribbon dance, then halts abruptly. "Why can't we use a pop song," she asks the
older man (Johnny Vekris). "You're not ready for pop," he answers, with an unexpected
severity (and threats of physical castigation) that hints at hidden meanings churning
beneath this seemingly simple scenario between an athlete and her coach. Every
relationship in this grave, unnerving, and often disconcertingly humorous film is imbued
with a similar sense of mystifying rules and rituals, of characters struggling to decipher
life's signs and meanings when not using them to create metaphorical prisons for each
other.
As in Dogtooth, the Greek writer-director's previous, breakthrough portrait of identity in
suffocating communities, Lanthimos drops the audience context-free into the
obscurantist middle of his narrative and works toward illuminating clues slowly, teasingly.
(As such, spoilers herein.) "Alps" turns out to be the codename of a quartet of
strangers—the aforementioned athlete-trainer duo, a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), and the
group's leader, a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) who dubs himself "Mont Blanc"—who
specialize in providing comfort for the bereaved. Their services take the form of opaque
play-acting for grieving family members, with the "Alps" role-players engaging in
torturously detailed recreations of moments from the lives of the recently deceased. At
times, the impersonation means having tea and reading magazine articles for a blind old
widow. At others, it means portraying a diabetic swimmer whose argument with her
husband segues into a bit of unsimulated cunnilingus in the basement of his store. (Even
the coital moans have to be just right. When Papoulia's unnamed nurse listlessly recites
the line, "Please don't stop, it feels like paradise," while playing the late wife, the man
promptly raises his head from between her thighs to correct her: "Heaven.")
As befits Lanthimos's decidedly absurdist worldview, such dashes of mordant humor are
never far from the film's severe surfaces. In an early scene, the nurse tries to cheer up a
comatose car-crash victim (Maria Kirozi) by tying a racket to her hand, propping her up
on the hospital bed, and lobbing tennis balls at her—a deadpan bit of near-slapstick that
also, as she becomes secretly involved with the girl's family, marks the beginning of the
character's disobedience of her group's rules and boundaries. Assigning roles and doling
out punishment to the other members of "Alps," Servetalis's Mont Blanc alternately
suggests a theatrical troupe's particularly strict director, the pimp in a ring of emotional
prostitution, and, most evocatively, a younger version of the father from Dogtooth. Like
that earlier film, Alps depicts the deforming effects of repression and substitution, with
the avoidance of the reality of a loved one's death being akin to the avoidance of the
world beyond the gates of an isolated house. Where the family unit there was a
cloistered horror garden, however, here it becomes an elusive, falsely idealized
sanctuary in a world of desolate interactions. It's no accident that Papoulia plays
rebellious protagonists in both films, trying to break out of a home in one and trying to
break into a home in the other.
Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of Dogtooth, Alps finds
Lanthimos building on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and
identity without diluting its singularity or concentration. Working with cinematographer
Christos Voudouris, he composes his images (with characters frequently decapitated by
off-center framing or liquefied into out-of-focus background forms) to conjure up an
atmosphere of dread that hangs over even the most deceptively tranquil scenes. By
swathing every relationship in layers of hierarchical pretense and distortion, Lanthimos
envisions social order itself as a continuous performance, an existential variation of
Shakespeare's dictum about the human race as players on the world's stage. For him,
the roles people assign each other can weigh as much as the stone masks of ancient
Greek theater. In that sense, it's telling that the nurse's crack-up scene (where she
desperately spouts the lines she had previously memorized while being forcibly dragged
into the street) is immediately followed by the gymnast's flawless big number: the former
is frantic improvisation while the latter is perfectly rehearsed choreography, and the
subtly devastating closing image asks which is more oppressive. - Fernando F. Croce,
Slant Magazine
Antiviral
Dir: Brandon Cronenberg
2012
Canada
103 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Malcolm McDowell, Douglas Smith,
Joe Pingue, Nicholas Campbell
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L9xponczos
Brandon Cronenberg's striking body-horror debut is a prescient and chilling vision of our
cultural obsession with celebrity. In a dystopian future world, Syd March (Caleb Landry
Jones) works at the Lucas Clinic, which has an unusual and highly profitable line of
business: deliberately infecting paying customers with diseases harvested from top
celebrities, thus providing a "biological communion" between stars and fans.
Though his work environment is tightly monitored, Syd manages to sneak viruses out of
the office and retool them on his personal console for his lucrative sideline supplying the
black-market disease trade. When Syd is tasked by his employer to collect a virus from
starlet Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), he is unable to resist the temptation to get closer to
one of his own personal celebrity obsessions. Injecting the virus into his own
bloodstream, Syd is launched down a dangerous path — and the stakes are raised even
higher when he learns that Hannah's illness is potentially fatal.
Coolly stylized and laced with dark comedy, Antiviral immerses us in the contrasting
textures of its vividly realized future, from the blindingly white, clinical spaces of the
laboratory and Syd's apartment, to the baroque decadence of Hannah's luxurious world,
to the grimy and sinister underworld of the black market. Cronenberg lets his imagination
run riot as he takes his sardonic vision to its logically extreme end. In this literally sick,
fame-fixated world, everything from celebrity infections to celebrity steaks (prime cuts of
human beef grown from the cells of stars) are on the market.
Cronenberg has found ideal specimens for this baleful experiment in his two leads:
Jones, steadily deteriorating throughout the film as the disease eats its way through
Syd's frail body, gives a vividly physical performance, while the porcelain-skinned Gadon
is the quintessential Hitchcockian icy blond as Hannah, who takes the term "object of
desire" to its commodified extreme. Gruesomely absurd and incisive, Antiviral is a
visceral satire on our contemporary society of the spectacle. – Toronto International Film
Festival 2012
Apples of The Golan
Dir: Keith Walsh, Jill Beardsworth 2012
Language: Arabic/Hebrew
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/40601394
Syria/Ireland
80 mins Cert: CLUB
Apples of the Golan, Keith Walsh and Jill Beardsworth’s absorbing documentary,
attempts to tell part of the complex story of the village of Majdal Shams in the Israelioccupied Golan Heights. The opening narrative tells us that before the 1967 Six Day
War, there were 139 Arab villages in the Golan Heights region. Israel seized the Golan
Heights from Syria during that war – and now only five villages remain. All of the others
were destroyed. Over 138,000 Syrian Arabs were forced from their homes. The
documentary tells the tale of those that remain in one of those five remaining villages,
Majdal Shams. They are a proud people and stood firm against Israeli national identity
being forced upon them in 1982. They are not recognised as being Syrian and refuse to
be Israeli – as a result their status is classified as ’undefined’.
A heartbreaking aspect of the film is that all the people we meet in the village have
family in Syria. Family they cannot visit as they are not allowed cross the ‘ceasefire line’,
providing for some moving scenes of families separated from each other. Only students,
pilgrims and brides can cross over from the Golan Heights into Syria – and apples. The
apples from the Golan Heights are transported and sold in Syria for better prices than
they get in Israel. The apples are essential for the villagers as a source of income as well
as a metaphor for survival. ‘The apples are like the soul of the Golan people,’ one
villager explains, ‘how they cling to life.’
The documentary also points out how the area supplies Israel with one-third of its water,
which, along with its strategic vantage point overlooking southern Syria, was one of the
main reasons why Israel occupied the Golan Heights.
In a brief Q&A after the screening Keith Walsh and Jill Beardsworth explained how the
film was born out of a chance encounter with Gearóid O Cúinn, the film’s executive
producer, who had been doing some human rights research in the Golan Heights. This
set the ball rolling for the idea for the film. After getting backing for half the film from the
Film Board and securing matching funding elsewhere, Walsh and Beardsworth spent 8
months over and back filming the documentary.
A well-structured documentary that tells part of a complex story with skill and craft,
Apples of the Golan is a striking tale of the strength and spirit of a people determined not
to lose their identity and the land that it is tied to. – Steven Galvin, Film Ireland Magazine
Aurora
Dir: Cristi Puiu
2010
Romania
181 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Cristi Puiu, Valeria Seciu, Luminiţa Gheorghiu, Gelu Colceag, Valentin
Popescu, Catrinel Dumitrescu, Gheorghe Ifrim, Ileana Puiu, Clara Voda
Language: Romanian
Available to programme: Mid April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiXrSA9i9eg
Viorel negotiates daily life in bleak wintertime Bucharest with dispassion and an obscure
anger. But when it becomes apparent he is planning a shooting, his stale and
predictable world gets recast in a new and mysterious light.
Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu destroys all notions of crime as entertainment in this
painstakingly realistic anatomy of a murder, delivering a chilling character study of an
ordinary person driven to kill. At the heart of Viorel’s discontent lie a failed marriage and
his increasingly distant relationship with his two daughters. Playing Viorel himself, Puiu
presents an intelligent, literate and penetrating reinvention of the traditional murder
drama. Meanwhile, as in his acclaimed The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), black
comedy creeps into unlikely places: Intending to clean and test his gun, Viorel instead
weathers a crew of redecorators, a neighbouring dysfunctional family and the
unannounced intrusion of his own mother and her new partner, a man Viorel despises. A
onetime student of classic film noir, Puiu’s realist noir subtracts the romance and keeps
the doom. The result is an unflinching and haunting investigation of what compels a
person to commit the ultimate act. - Gustavus Kundahl, San Francisco International Film
Festival
Beasts of The Southern Wild
Dir: Benh Zeitlin
2012
USA
91 mins
Starring: Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTjfRqFP__A
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 83% from 25 responses
Cert: 12A
One of the most striking films ever to debut at the Sundance Film Festival, Beasts of the
Southern Wild is a poetic evocation of an endangered way of life and a surging paean to
human resilience and self-reliance. Shot along the southernmost fringes of Louisiana,
cast with nonactors and absolutely teeming with creativity in every aspect of its being,
Benh Zeitlin’s directorial debut could serve as a poster child for everything American
independent cinema aspires to be but so seldom is. A handcrafted look at the struggles
of some of the poorest people in the United States is no prescription for commercial
success, but the presence of a dynamite little girl at the center of things could, along with
critical praise and enlightened handling, push this most unlikely but entirely elating
drama into a successful specialized theatrical release.
The first few minutes alone establish Zeitlin as some kind of heir to Terrence Malick in
the way he makes nature register onscreen. The images of thick green flora and fauna,
the wetness, the wildlife that is always “feedin’ and squirtin,’ ” in the words of young
heroine, the proximity of water and land and sense of the area’s precariousness, stuck
out on its own away from the mainland but within sight of a hulking industrial area, all
back up 6-year-old Hushpuppy’s contention that she and her dad live in “the prettiest
place on Earth.”
At the same time, the area, called The Bathtub, is also grimly depressing. Hushpuppy
(Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) live in filthy, jerryrigged
quarters propped up on precarious stilts, and Wink’s boat consists of the rear end of a
rusty pickup truck set atop oil barrels. The locals, who run the racial gamut, love to party
and dance and are always drinking. But they possess the fierce pride of outcasts,
holdouts and mavericks, determined to survive as they always have in a place where
nature is partial to playing its whimsical games.
The tough-minded local schoolteacher instructs the kids about how they’re all simply
meat, just like all the other creatures that surround them, and while Hushpuppy firmly
believes that everything in life is interconnected, she’s warned by the teacher that, “Any
day now, the fabric of the universe is coming unraveled.” While this sort of statement
might suggest an imminent big ecological lesson, the forecast seems entirely organic to
a place that was so recently ripped apart by Katrina and where outlying areas are
diminishing in size at an astonishing rate.
More important, the characters here are not intellectuals, scientists or politicians. To the
contrary, they live more in accord with the ways of the animal world, a notion fostered
not only by the constant scenes of fish, crabs, birds and even alligator being harvested,
cooked and consumed but by the occasional sight of a few animals that resemble giant
wild boars and are called aurochs thawing out from prehistoric ice and eventually
merging with the world of The Bathtub. Major CGI-reliant scenes are not what one
expects in a defiantly independent film like this, but they are very nicely rendered and
are all of a piece with what surrounds them.
At home, life is not so harmonious. Having been told that her mother just “swam away,”
Hushpuppy has to contend with a father who, when not off hunting or fishing, is often
drunk, angry and not above striking her. But he’s all she’s got, and he does teach her
how to be tough in the face of horrific adversities. It’s part of the wonder of Wallis’
amazing performance that her tenacity and fortitude seem absolutely real, not posed or
artificially induced. Like Wallis, who was selected from among a reported 4,000
applicants for the role, Henry had never acted before and registers powerfully as both a
caring and quite scary character.
Things go from bad to worse after a big storm and the subsequent dynamiting of a levee
by Wink, his daughter and some cronies, upon which The Bathtub is declared a
mandatory evacuation area. An inadvertent visit by Hushpuppy to a “Floating Catfish
Shack” filled with friendly prostitutes possesses a magical fantasy element that is as
entrancing as it is entirely unexpected.
Undetectably based on a play, by co-scenarist Lucy Alibar, Beasts unequivocally casts a
spell, one that emanates from the strange world it inhabits and evokes, as well as from
the extraordinarily sensitive and expressive way Zeitlin and his colleagues have
rendered it. The director, who made a short film called Glory at Sea in 2006, assembled
a sort of collective of artisans to collaborate on this feature, and what has come of it, in
the way the exquisite images, fleet cutting, exotic music, vivid naturescapes, native
people and local language merge so seamlessly, is a movie that pulsates with the stuff
of life. It’s very much an art piece, to be sure, but it feels like a genuine one that, while
meditated, speaks fluently and truly for the place, people and culture it so indelibly
depicts. - Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter
Winner - FIPRESCI Award, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Winner – Camera D’Or, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Boxing Day
Dir: Bernard Rose
2012
USA
94 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Danny Huston, Jo Farkas, Julie Marcus, Lisa Enos, Matthew Jacobs
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN6j_HyVRfs
This minimalist, fascinatingly acted film is the latest in the ongoing "Tolstoy project" of
director Bernard Rose. Now he has adapted Tolstoy's mysterious tale Master and
Man, from 1895, about a greedy landowner who journeys to a remote town on business
in a terrible blizzard, taking with him a loyal peasant.
The story has been turned by Rose into an intimate slow-burner, a cleverly judged and
satisfying piece of work. The landowner has now become Basil, played by Danny
Huston, a haughty and supercilious property speculator. The day after Christmas, he
neglects his wife and family to chase deals in Colorado, excited by mouthwatering
mortgage-repo bargains and gets an incompetent local taxi driver, Nick, played by
Matthew Jacobs, to ferry him around. Basil becomes greedily obsessed with closing the
deal quickly, while his competitors are on their Yuletide break, but driving in the snow
becomes more and more dangerous.
What gives the story its bite is that Nick is quite as unsympathetic, in his way, as Basil.
But fate confronts each man with the reality of life and the nearness of death. Jacobs's
performance as Nick is very believable: whiney and needling, childish and childlike.
Huston's Basil is compelling in his final panic and self-doubt. Perhaps no movie version
could find an equivalent for the original's final lines, but this is another arresting
adaptation from Rose. – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Dollhouse
Dir: Kirsten Sheridan
2012
Ireland
94 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Seana Kerslake, Jonny Ward, Ciaran McCabe, Kate Brennan, Shane
Curry, Jack Reynor
Available to programme: Mid April
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/42099312
Kirsten Sheridan’s third feature film is her finest to date, taking the viewer on a wild ride
as a quartet of teenage miscreants break into a palatial Dublin chateau (the picture was
lensed in Dalkey) and proceed to gleefully trash the gaff in a wanton orgy of childish
abandon and hedonistic excess. Safe to say, all is most certainly not as it seems, and
matters take a turn for the curiouser as playtime is disturbed by the arrival of the
mysterious boy next door.
From the outset, this fractured fairytale remains both indefinable and audaciously
unpredictable, given a kinetic, improvisational energy by its young cast (take note of
future star Kate Brennan, for starters), and an eclectic, immersive soundscape that
perfectly underscores its twists and turns.
In the wake of her underappreciated Hollywood debut August Rush, this whip-smart
chamber piece marks a vivid back-to-basics exercise of sorts for Sheridan. Dollhouse
was produced under the auspices of The Factory, a new filmmaking collective driven by
some of the most exciting filmmaking talent working in Ireland today. As statements of
intent go, it’s a pretty formidable one.
- Derek O’Connor, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2012
Elena
Dir: Andrei Zvyagintsev
2011 Russia
109 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Andrey Smirnov, Nadezhda Markina, Elena Lyadova, Alexey Rozin
Language: Russian
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe3T7B-nAWw
Elena's opening embodies a certain stylization of stillness that one tends to associate
with Russian cinema—an aesthetic that favors an amplification of small ambient sounds
at the expense of more chaotic, realistic everyday noise, which imbues everyday
moments with implications of looming disruption, buried resentment, and longing.
Director Andrei Zvyagintsev is able to get most of the necessary exposition out of the
way in the first five evocative minutes. A crow lands on the barren tree outside of an
expensive and expansive residence. A middle-aged woman (the unforgettably wonderful
Nadezhda Markina) awakes to the sound of an alarm clock. Tellingly, she's sleeping on
a couch. She takes a few deep breaths, resigns herself to the approaching day in a
fashion that's familiar to the deeply unhappy, and begins to comb her hair. She starts the
breakfast tea and coffee and, more tellingly, proceeds to a bedroom to nudge an older
man (Andrei Smirnov) awake who's soon revealed through body language to be, at the
least, a live-in lover. Eventually the couple sit down to breakfast and exchange a few
pregnant not-quite-pleasantries that reveal that they're somewhat recently married and
that they mutually disapprove of how the other handles their adult child from prior
relationships. We're soon told that the woman is Elena and the gentleman is her
husband, Vladmir, and it's no accident that their association follows a series of rituals
that are more characteristic of servant/master than wife/husband.
Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude—
which is somehow simultaneously empathetic yet critical to the point of occasional
resentment—toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.
Zvyagintsev employs a clever misdirection. You're initially led to assume that the film will
be a carefully composed study of a sympathetic woman imprisoned by a financial need
that's constantly exasperated by handouts to an unemployed loaf of a son, but the theme
gradually reveals itself to be tougher and less easily resolved than that. Elena takes an
unexpected stab at liberation only to immediately plunge herself into another arguably
even worse domestic trap—a plot development that testifies to hell as being largely selfimposed.
Zvyagintsev employs a few of the broadest tropes associated with American film noir—
the woman in dire straights, the cold man making her life miserable—in the service of an
ultimately savage and distinctly Russian critique of family life as a series of inescapable
negotiations and manipulations. Zvyagintsev has mentioned Woody Allen's Match Point
as an influence, and while there are a number of thematic similarities between the two
films, Zvyagintsev is selling Elena short with the comparison. Allen never got inside of
Match Point's characters; his film was compelling but off-putting in its contempt for
virtually everything. Elena, though, which puts you in the mind of an unexpected killer
with an immediacy that recalls A Simple Plan, both the book and the film, as well as
Donald E. Westlake's scathing novel The Ax, is tough, haunting, and eventually even
casually heartbreaking. – Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine
Winner – Special Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2011
Everyday
Dir: Michael Winterbottom
2012 UK
106 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: John Simm, Shirley Henderson, Shaun Kirk, Robert Kirk, Katrina Kirk,
Stephanie Kirk, Darren Tighe, Valerie Lilley
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u0VpoO44bI
Michael Winterbottom (‘24 Hour Party People’, ‘A Mighty Heart’) spent five years, on and
off, filming this fictional portrait of a mother of four, Karen (Shirley Henderson), coping
with the imprisonment of her husband, Ian (John Simm), for a minor crime of which we
never hear the details. But this isn’t a crime story or a sketch of life in jail: it’s a tender
study of a fractured family adapting to new circumstances and is not so dissimilar in
temperament and rhythm to ‘Wonderland’ and ‘Genova’ – Winterbottom’s previous
collaborations with the writer Laurence Coriat. ‘Wonderland’, especially, is evoked by the
presence of another poignant score by Michael Nyman, although both those earlier films
offered a similar – and similarly affecting – cycle of fracture and renewal as the one we
experience here.
As each of the main characters in ‘Everyday’ subtly ages (or not so subtly in the case of
the children), we watch as Karen occasionally visits her husband in prison with the kids
in tow – meetings loaded with tension and sadness. Back at home, everyday events
(meals, going to school, shifts at the pub) are coloured by absence and strain. The
unusually extended shooting period and Winterbottom’s decision to cast siblings as the
kids make for a strangely intimate and powerful depiction of time passing and the peaks
and troughs of childhood. Winterbottom keeps things quietly observational and in-themoment: we don’t know, for example, how long Ian’s sentence is, and, at one point, his
apparent release turns out to be just for a few hours. This fragmentary and unimposing
style of storytelling – coupled with exemplary performances of bottled-up fear, anger and
sorrow from Henderson and Simm – means that it’s all the more powerful when the film’s
climax turns out to be so moving and affecting. - Dave Calhoun / Time Out London
False Trail
Dir: Kjell Sundvall
2011
Sweden
129 mins
Jägarna 2
Cert: 16
Starring: Eero Milonoff, Elina Knihtilä, Johan Paulsen, Peter Stormare, Rolf
Lassgård
Language: Swedish
Available to Programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19sL0Cep6KE
Erik, an interrogator, is forced to return to his home village to solve a murder mystery in
which everyone seems to be involved. Soon, Erik is in conflict with Torsten, the local
policeman. Torsten is not very supportive of Erik and his job and has, for some personal
reasons, already arrested a suspect. Eric takes great risks when he starts digging where
he is not wanted. - Newport Beach Film Film Festival 2012
False Trail, the sequel to the massive Swedish box office hit Hunters, is a taut, moody
and complex murder thriller filmed in the harsh and unforgiving wilds of northern
Sweden. Fifteen years have passed since Eric was hastily forced to leave the police
service. He now lives in Stockholm, having befriended the homicide interrogators who
were previously his mortal enemies.
However, a brutal murder forces him to return to his old neighbourhood where he
discovers events are far more complicated than previously thought. As the hunters, the
local police and Erik all become increasingly intertwined in the murder investigation, the
entire situation develops into a more extreme nightmare than Erik could ever have
imagined. – Corona Cork Film Festival 2012
Happy, Happy
Dir: Anne Sewitsky
2011
Norway
85 mins
Starring: Agnes Kittelsen, Henrik Rafaelsen, Joachim Rafaelsen
Language: Norwegian
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm9MQSIDhN4
Sykt lykkelig
Cert: CLUB
If two unhappy couples are isolated together in a film, it can be pretty much assumed
that at least one affair will be the result. That’s certainly the case in Happy, Happy, a
Norwegian feature with a laser-focus on the clash between two young families that have
been quietly falling apart. Of course most stories have been told before countless times;
the question at hand is whether Happy, Happy succeeds in drawing out new
observations. And while there are plenty of recognizable moments here, the film isn’t an
exercise in melodrama, instead it’s an almost existential search for why these people are
hurting each other.
It’s good that there are deeper concerns, because the maneuverings of these two
couples are obvious almost from the moment we meet them: The first is a merry middle
school teacher with her recalcitrant husband, the second an equally cheerful husband
and his stoic wife who we soon learn cheated on him. The two more outgoing members
of the couples begin sleeping with each other, but the film isn’t particularly about that, it’s
far more concerned with why they made this choice when they will certainly be caught;
it’s obvious that they’re driven less out of love for each other than for a need to
communicate with their spouses. In both cases the couples have stayed together for
their children and the sake of personal stability. When one pair is asked what they
initially saw for each other, they’re at a complete loss.
This primary story is counterpointed by a small but memorably disturbing subplot
between the two couples’ children. One child begins bullying the other due to his lack of
connection with his own parents and a need to find a way to take control of his own life.
This takes the form of a game he invents: pretending the other child, who is black and
adopted, is a slave and he’s his master. Without his own parental guidance to turn to or
any positive black role models available, the black child assents and their “games” grow
increasingly dark as the film continues.
Happy, Happy is ultimately less about the fraternization between these couples than it is
about a crisis in the families. It’s one of relatively few dramas in which the action is in
fact too lean, such that every scene is there for thematic and story purposes with an
absolute minimum of excess. Usually this would be a blessing, but the film is so
engrossing that it could use some more sprawl and mess—it’s one of the tightest stories
of family dissolution ever screened. The universally good performances and naturalistic
directing are counterbalanced a bit by the screenplay’s exactitude. No family falls apart
this neatly, especially no pair of them, but what we see is still powerful and at times
difficult to watch in the best possible way.
In less deft hands Happy, Happy would feel calculated and cold. You can see the gears
turning in the background, moving characters around with precision for maximal impact.
But director Anne Sewitsky has too much compassion for all of her characters, no matter
how irredeemable they may at times seem to be, and she’s unwilling to let them be
subsumed by the swiftly moving plot. While the film is limited by its ambition and its
overall story may not be the most original, Happy, Happy’s mature concern for its
characters makes it one of those few films in theaters that are really and truly adult.
- Sean Gandert, Paste Magazine
Hunt, The
Jagten
Dir: Thomas Vinterberg
2012
Denmark
111 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Annika Wedderkopp, Lasse
Fogelstrom, Susse Wold, Anne Louise Hassing, Lars Ranthe, Alexandra Rapaport
Language: Danish
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgJpS6mQi0
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 88% from 38 responses
It is 14 years since Thomas Vinterberg burst into view with his excoriating family drama
Festen, which launched the minimalist Dogme movement and became a much-talkedabout cultural phenomenon on its own account. After that, he appeared to lose his touch,
and his admirers wondered if he could recover that early mastery (although I was a fan
of his 2010 film Submarino).
Well, Vinterberg really has come storming back with this new movie, easily his best
since Festen, and a reminder of his superb gift for unsettling collective drama: it is
forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet
capable of great subtlety and nuance. The theme is admittedly familiar, and so is the
implied analysis of what is going on, and yet Vinterberg endows it with such urgency and
his superbly constructed script, co-written with Tobias Lindholm, is a screenplay
masterclass, completely upending your expectations as how the climactic scene is going
to play out.
The lead performance from Mads Mikkelsen is outstanding: he is Lucas, a teacher who's
having to work temporarily as a kindergarten assistant due to a school closure, recently
divorced, but with many good friends in a close-knit community, and a cheerful
participant in all the local traditions, chiefly an annual deer hunt. But things go horribly
wrong for Lucas when an accusation is made against him by a child, and the situation
escalates out of control.
The Hunt has hints of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Von Trier's Dogville in its portrayal of
group hysteria, with its remorseless anti-logic. But of course it returns to the themes of
Festen: how family and community, supposedly the bulwarks against chaos and
unhappiness, can turn in on themselves. Mikkelsen's performance is entirely convincing
and all too plausible; and with him at its centre, The Hunt becomes an unbearably tense
drama-thriller. A scene in a supermarket is gripping, and so is Lucas's appearance at the
Christmas Eve church service, which can really only be watched through your fingers.
That hunt, and the weaponry used, call to mind Chekhov's dictum about what must
happen to a gun which is produced in the first act: but actually, what happens is much
more interesting and complex; Lucas's final encounter with his accuser, and the final
moments of the film, really are gripping. The film is perhaps open to some plausibility
niggles: would not Lucas have engaged a lawyer, or been advised to do so, at some
stage? Well perhaps not. Someone in his situation might simply be too stunned to
defend his interests, or he could suspect that any such action would be an admission of
guilt.
There really isn't ounce of fat on this picture, and the cinematography by Charlotte Bruus
Cristensen is ravishingly good. Mikkelsen, an actor still perhaps best known as the Bond
villain in Casino Royale, shows just how excellent a performer he is. - Peter Bradshaw,
The Guardian
Winner - Best Actor, Cannes Film Festival 2012
I, Anna
Dir: Barnaby Southcombe
2012
UK, France
93 mins Cert: 15A
Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Gabriel Byrne, Hayley Atwell, Eddie Marsan
Language: English
Available to programme: Late March
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_1I6YNX4SI
I, Anna is very much a Rampling family vehicle. The psychological film noir not only stars
veteran actor Charlotte Rampling, but is the directorial debut of her son, Barnaby
Southcombe. Given the Rampling family pedigree there are certain expectations of
quality, and Southcombe largely lives up to the promise with this sharply stylish crime
mystery that gives plenty of space for Rampling to flex her acting muscles. It's not
perfect, but as a debut it is not a bad way to make a first impression.
Charlotte Rampling plays divorcee and mother Anna Welles, whom we see is eking out
a comfortably middle-class life in a tiny apartment in London following the departure of
her husband. Encouraged by her daughter Emmy (Hayley Atwell), she is trying her hand
at singles party events in town. One night she meets the flamboyant and wealthy George
Stone (Ralph Brown) and goes home with him.
When we next see her, Anna is leaving his apartment block in the Barbican, and heading
back up the opposite way is weary night-owl Detective Bernie Reid (Gabriel Byrne). Reid
isnt there on a visiting trip though - he has been called to the scene of a brutal murder
that took place in the very apartment that Anna has left. Something clearly happened in
that apartment, something that left Stone dead. But it's not clear what went down, and
how Anna is involved.
Bernie notices Anna leaving, and curious, he tracks her down and follows her to a
singles party night where finally they meet, Bernie concealing at first that he sees her as
being connected to the case. The mutual attraction is instant, perhaps unsurprising given
their similar, lonely existences. Anna seems not to remember or acknowledge that she
was ever at Stone's apartment. But as clues start to point towards Anna’s involvement in
the murder Bernie finds himself more and more compromised, and Anna's deeply buried
memories start to surface and overwhelm her. The fragmented shards of remembrance
inside Anna's mind begin to coalesce, allowing the viewer to piece together - alongside
Bernie - not only what happened that night but exactly what else Anna might be hiding,
or hiding from.
Southcombe’s screenplay is based on the novel I, Anna by Elsa Lewin. The story was
designed to pay homage to film noirs where ambiguous and obsessive relationships are
more of the concern than more technical procedural aspects. Southcombe has certainly
done his noir homework. This is a film drenched in the essence of the genre and the
result is, perhaps deliberately, a certain timeless flavour to the setting and story despite
the cell phones and speed dating. Note the familiar elements - the ambigious femme
fatale (Rampling frequently wears a trenchcoat, too), the night-owl detective banished to
a hotel room following a divorce, the unsolvable murder thatinvolved a nearby heavy
blunt art object. The motifs are all present and correct.
Noir stories tend to need cities as their playgrounds, and London is as much as star in
Southcombe's film as Byrne and Rampling. His camera movements, lighting and framing
treat the city as if it were a neon-lit femme fatale too, coldly beautiful as the lens glides
over her at night in glorious high definition. The colour pallette, costumes and set
dressings paint a blue and gunmetal grey canvas, almost as if the sun casts only
metallic light.
Characters are frequently shot in chiarascuro against windows or lights, the camera
framing them through windows or gaps in walls, gliding like an interloper around corners
to find them. The tower blocks of the Barbican and Canary Wharf are boldly framed to
loom over the characters and scenes like watchtowers. Southcombe has a sharp eye for
intriguing locations that sometimes borders on the outright gothic or expressionistic whether it is the Barbican's bizarre Brutalist architecture or the strange bank vault of an
office that Bernie resides in. It's all so stylish it is almost distracting - this experiment
might not work for some.
Possibly over-stylised for some tastes it, but films such as Drive have shown that a clear
directorial vision guiding a talented cast can allow a visually striking film to sidestep the
'style over substance' trap. Southcombe's film at times feels as though it would have
worked better as a short film or TV movie, and like many crime films has at its heart a
slight story upon which a constructed mood can be hung. But it is, by and large, an
immersive, atmospheric homage/pastiche that benefits from having Byrne and
Rampling, two veterans who can make reading the phone book look interesting, playing
at old noir stereotypes. - Owen Van Spall, Eye For Film
Jackpot
Arme Riddere
Dir: Magnus Martens
2011
Norway
85 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Kyrre Hellum, Mads Ousdal, Henrik Mestad, Arthur Berning, Andreas
Capellen, Peter Andersson
Language: Norwegian
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X85Z2PZeRBI
The usual caricature of Nordic crime drama involves some grey middle-aged man (or
sombre woman in a jumper) moping unhappily about a snow-covered park while
attempting to piece together an awful conspiracy concerning child abuse and sex
trafficking. Norwegian scribe Jo Nesbo returns to confirm that there is another way.
Jackpot is not set in the jolliest of locales: drab sex clubs, squalid front rooms,
unattractive factory floors. Nobody much enjoys themselves. But the tone is more
relentlessly zany than a typical episode of Yo Gabba Gabba! What we have here is a
contemporaneous version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre projected through filters
shaded by Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie. It’s great fun, if a little muddled in its later
stages.
Kyrre Hellum plays the consistently puzzled, frequently punched protagonist. Jackpot
begins with him waking up at the bottom of a heap of bodies in a strip club. Given that he
is clutching a shotgun, the police not unreasonably assume that he has figurative as well
as literal blood on his hands.
The story Kyrre tells is violent and twisty. It seems as if he and a bunch of pals recently
won a fortune after placing an accumulator bet on domestic football. The whistle had
hardly blown before murderous squabbles broke out between the newly wealthy
layabouts. Triple-cross follows double-cross as the former friends fight for survival and a
bigger slice of the pie.
For most of its duration, Jackpot survives on breathless plotting and an enthusiasm for
hilariously bloodthirsty mayhem. Hellum constantly wears the face of a man who has just
looked up from the sofa to see a 10-ton truck crashing through his picture window.
How can they keep the pace going? The truth is they can’t. In the last act, a jarringly
unconvincing piece of plot misdirection leads us toward a final twist that asks more
questions than it answers. Pretty zippy, nonetheless. – Donald Clarke, The Irish Times
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Dir: David Gelb
Language: Japanese
2011
Japan
83 mins
Cert: G
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbV6knbeUFE
An appetizing documentary in every sense, Jiro Dreams of Sushi follows 85-year old
master sushi chef Jiro Ono, owner of the esteemed 10 seat, $300 – a – plate
Sukiyabashi Jiro restaurant in Tokyo. From the ins and outs of the tuna auction to the
proper way to massage an octopus director David Gelb dynamically profiles all aspects
of the craft in mouth watering style and detail, paying lushly photographed homages to
the process of preparing the artisan sushi that earned Jiro and elite three Michelin stars.
Beyond its cinematic celebration of the art of sushi, Jiro is also a film fundamentally
about family, tradition, and the value of hard work. The complicated relationship between
the master and Yoshikazu, his son and heir apparent, is a story of legacy, succession,
and intergenerational tension – universal themes that transcend the specificity of their
epicurean world. This emotionally resonant study of a son living in his father’s shadow is
couched in an operatic spectacle of some of the world’s preeminent chefs at work,
making Jiro a tasty treat that will satisfy all viewers’ cinematic cravings. -Tribeca Film
Festival 2011
Joy of Six, The
Dirs: Douglas Hart, Will Jewell, Dan Sully, Romola Garai, Chris Foggin, Matthew
Holness
2012
UK
78 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Judi Dench, Peter Mullan, Luke Treadaway, Tom Hiddleston
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T43hKDvwGcQ
New British Cinema Quarterly presents a perfect package of award-winning short films,
showcasing the best of British screen and directing talent.
This may be the only time you get to encounter Dame Judi Dench on Facebook, as a
woman attempting to woo her local choirmaster through social media, see Peter Mullan
give a screen masterclass on how to smoke a cigarette (without the ash falling), or watch
the rather handsome Luke Treadaway, run...a lot.
The Joy Of Six includes the directorial debut of Romola Garai and the first short from
Dan Sully while Matthew Holness brings the pulp fiction of Terry Finch to the big screen.
The Joy Of Six full programme: Long Distance Information (Douglas Hart), Man in Fear
(Will Jewell), A Gun for George (Matthew Holness), Scrubber (Romola Garai), The
Ellington Kid (Dan Sully) and Friend Request Pending (Chris Foggin). – Distributor’s
synopsis
Keyhole
Dir: Guy Maddin
2011
Canada
94 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier, Louis Negin, Brooke Palsson,
David Wontner, Kevin McDonald, Johnny W. Chang
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4bDFK51yrA
On a dark and stormy night, a group of motley gangsters on the run from both the police
and a creaky old house inhabited by a family of dreamlike phantoms leads to a domestic
reinvention of Homer’s epic “The Odyssey.” Yes, we are once again in the world of
master experimentalist Guy Maddin, whose feature films (My Winnipeg, The Saddest
Music in the World) are a celebration of cinematic antiquity mixed with his truly original
sense of humor, melodrama, and surrealism.
Keyhole is Maddin’s most original and uncompromising film to date—an atmospheric
phantasmagoria of the mind, set in a house filled with cobwebs, secret passageways,
and dusty genitalia sprouting from the walls.
Stepping straight out of a classic film noir, hoodlum Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric)
discovers that this ramshackle hideout holds many elusive and effusive secrets,
including his long-suffering and vengeful wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), who has
been awaiting his return. Overseeing it all is an elderly, naked, vitriolic puppet master
(Louis Negin), who is chained to Hyacinth's bed and reveling in the schadenfreude. Seattle International Film Festival 2012
King of Pigs, The
Dwae-ji-ui wang
Dir: Sang-ho Yeon
2011
South Korea
97 mins
Cert: CLUB
Featuring the voices of: Hye-na Kim, Ik-Joon Yang, Jung-se Oh, Kim Hye-na,
Kkobbi Kim, Oh Jung-se, Yang Ik-joon
Language: Korean
Available to programme: June
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfr4hnfBvVw
It's class warfare in the schoolyard with this ultra violent and super stylish animated
parable from director Yeun Sang-ho.
A searing, savage parable about the brutal consequences of non-conformity, Yeun
Sang-ho's animated drama The King Of Pigs owes as much to the bleak social
commentary of William Golding and George Orwell as it does to directors like Satoshi
Kon. It's a cruel, gruelling rhapsody of violence with a sturdy heart and moral fibre to
spare.
Not for the faint-hearted, perhaps, but those brave enough to dip their toes into Yeun's
blood red waters will find much to appreciate in his ugly and unflinching yarn. The
elegance of the animation belies the ferocity of the bloodshed – this is serious, grown-up
stuff, twisted and intelligent. The film's angry critique of Korean society doesn't just
bubble gently below the surface, it seethes.
At the film's centre are two friends, novelist Jung Jong-suk (Yang Ik-june) and failed
businessman Hwang Kyung-min (Oh Jeong-se), who reunite for the first time in fifteen
years after Kyung-min dispatches his wife in an apparently unplanned and capricious
murder. The wistful duo, unaware of the other's indiscretions and secrets, go to dinner
and reminisce about their childhood years.
Their nostalgia, however, soon turns to memories of the agonising beatings suffered at
the hands of 'The Dogs', an elite club of affluent students who use their privilege and
power to lord over the weaker, more indigent section of the school, known as 'The Pigs'.
Obsequious and desperate, Jong-suk and Kyung-min form an alliance with the fearless
Chul (Kim Hye-na) and initiate a tentative resistance against the bourgeois tormentors.
Yeun's middle-school tableau is a society in microcosm, a masculine, kill-or-be-killed
world in which those who refuse to play by the rules, or even wear the right kind of jeans,
are subjected to a torrent of barbarity and humiliation. Truth be told, it's about as subtle
as a brick to the knees but the film is so stylish, pugnacious and beguiling that it gets
away with such polemic belligerence.
It helps that the violence here is anything but casual. The film is awash with cuts, bruises
and scrapes. Every skirmish, every melee matters. When Chul defends himself by
unbuckling his belt and swiping it across his assailant's face with cavalier abandon, the
camera freezes for just a second before the impact, amplifying the full force of the
collision.
At another key moment, Chul challenges Kyung-min and Jong-Suk to prove their worth
by mercilessly beating a stray cat into a bloody, helpless pulp. Repulsive, sure, but it's a
necessary act of bravado. Yeun challenges his characters to prove their social worth by
showing just how far they're willing to go in order to assume control.
It's only when a knife is introduced to the fray later in the film that a tentative peace
breaks out between the gangs. Blades drop like atom bombs. Mutually assured
destruction in the playground. – Little White Lies Magazine
Winner - NETPAC Award, Busan International Film Festival
Laurence Anyways
Dir: Xavier Dolan
Canada/France
2011
168 mins
Cert: TBC
Starring: Melvil Poupaud, Suzanne Clément, Nathalie Baye, Monia Chokri
Language: French
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwDzRzqFaIE
An epic romance about an untenable love affair, Xavier Dolan’s third feature, Laurence
Anyways, is his most stylish and mature work to date. The film centres on the tortured,
on-again, off-again relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), a writer and
teacher, and his girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément), a line producer on film productions.
As the film opens, they’re ensconced in one of their favourite places: the car wash, a
fitting emblem for their claustrophobic relationship. Devout bohemians who have little
interest in conventional mores, they lead a charmed existence buoyed by their contempt
for virtually everyone else on the planet. That is, it’s a charmed existence until Laurence
breaks down in tears and confesses that he believes he’s a woman trapped in a man’s
body. Initially shocked, Fred soon decides to carry on as if nothing has happened. But as
family pressures and her own doubts begin to mount, the couple drifts apart.
Shot in a kind of hyper-florid style to capture the extreme vicissitudes of the love affair,
Laurence Anyways feels like Wuthering Heights relocated to the wilds of Montreal, with a
transgender Heathcliff and a punked-out Catherine. There are countless breathtaking
visual flourishes: the wind and water seem to be attuned to the lovers’ emotions; a
chance encounter with another transgendered person leads Laurence to a squad of
aging cross-dressers who congregate in an unused but perfectly preserved ballroom,
which functions as both a symbol of repressed desires and suggests a world of
possibilities. The crux of the film is this: how can Fred and Laurence stay together when
biology — and society — are lined up against them? Can they survive being apart? For
Laurence, it’s a non-issue: he’s still the same person. Fred, however, isn’t so sure.
Driven by exceptional and gutsy performances by Poupad, Nathalie Baye (as Laurence’s
mother), and especially Clément, Laurence Anyways emerges as possibly the most
audacious and searing meditation on love and sexuality ever made in this country.
- Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Liar’s Autobiography, A: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman
Dir: Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, Ben Timlet 2012 UK
85 mins Cert: CLUB
Featuring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Carol Cleveland, Cameron Diaz, Terry
Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbW842eMNtI
Ready for something completely different? In the spirit of the late Graham Chapman’s
five-author, highly fictionalized autobiography, this carnivalesque adaptation combines
the talents of three directors—Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson—and 15
animation studios, each employing a different stylistic approach to the source material.
Chapman’s characteristically wry audio recordings of his memoir give voice to his myriad
avatars as they guide us through the seminal moments of his always colourful,
occasionally debauched life. Furthermore, former Monty Python compatriots John
Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam band together for the first time in a
decade to lend their vocal talents and pay irreverent tribute to "the dead one."
And while the veracity of some of the facts presented here are certainly open to debate,
there’s no questioning the sensibility that guides this deliriously absurd affair. When
delivering the eulogy at Chapman’s funeral in 1989, Cleese cheekily derided him as a
"freeloading bastard" before explaining, "The reason I feel I should say this is he would
never forgive me if I didn’t… If I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on
his behalf. Anything for him, but mindless good taste."
Well, rest assured… Chapman will undoubtedly be looking on from the great beyond—
through 3D glasses no doubt—and taking perverse delight at the show-stopping, eyepopping rendition of "Sit on My Face" that’s unveiled here… - Vancouver International
Film Festival 2012
Lore
Dir: Cate Shortland
2012
Germany
109 mins
Starring: Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina, Ursina Lardi, Nele Trebs
Language: German
Available to programme: June
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCTQJZIrwJM
Cert: 15A
The long-awaited follow-up to her exquisite Somersault, Australian director Cate
Shortland’s adaptation of the novel The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert is a sensual and
complex story that explores the tribulations faced by the young in the aftermath of World
War II.
When their Nazi SS parents are taken into Allied custody, five siblings are left to fend for
themselves. Teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) takes charge, and the children set out to
join their grandmother in Hamburg, some 900 km away. Along the arduous journey, the
children encounter a populace suffering from post-war denial and deprivation, and for
the first time are exposed to the reality and consequences of their parents’ actions. With
food hard to come by, and the journey becoming ever more dangerous, the children
meet Thomas (Kai-Peter Malina), a young Jewish survivor who helps them negotiate
their way through tricky situations. Lore is both repulsed by and attracted to Thomas. All
that she has been taught leads her to believe that he is the enemy, but his
industriousness, generosity and physicality prove alluring. A coming-of-age tale set
against the backdrop of a changing world, Lore shows new life emerging out of darkness
with great intelligence and subtlety. - Sydney Film Festival 2012
Winner – Audience Award, Locarno International Film Festival 2012
Love
Amour
Dir: Michael Haneke 2012 France, Germany, Austria 127 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Alexandre
Tharaud, William Shimell
Language: French
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCDa2ffdC-w
Old age remains the great taboo of cinema, with only a very few films daring to tackle
the topic seriously ‹ among them, some true classics such as Tokyo Story and Make
Way For Tomorrow. Amour is a more than worthy addition. As one expects from Michael
Haneke, it is a sober, rigorous piece, and a magnificent collaboration with two veteran
actors, Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant. It is true to say the pair give the
performances of a lifetime, in that no other roles could possibly require them so directly
to work with their own mortality and physical fragility. They rise formidably to the
challenge.
Haneke’s absolute control makes the film intensely involving and quietly moving, rather
than harrowing. Even so, getting audiences to see it will depend very much on Haneke s
auteur prestige, and on the presence of Isabelle Huppert, here in very much a back-up
capacity. But viewers will get an intensely rewarding masterpiece about a topic that
ultimately concerns everyone.
Haneke begins with a forceful and unsettling prelude that tells us how the story will end,
but that also wrongfoots us, since the tone of what follows is much gentler. The main
characters, as ever in Haneke’s films, are named George (Trintignant) and Anne (Riva).
They are elderly musicians first seen attending a concert by pianist Alexandre Tharaud,
who appears later apparently playing himself as Anne’s former pupil.
Returning home, the couple find there has been an attempted break-in at their flat - one
of those small disturbances that carry powerful repercussions in Haneke’s world. The
next morning, Anne goes into a trance over breakfast - a quietly troubling scene that
Haneke brilliantly hang on the seeming distraction of a tap left running. This is the start
of her physical and mental decline, a passage Haneke sketches elliptically an effectively
in a series of episodes. First, it is mentioned casually that Anne has had an unsuccessful
operation. Then she is seen in a wheelchair, andsoon we realise she is paralysed on the
right side of her body.
Much of what happens is not dramatised directly, but Haneke pulls no punches in
depicting Anne s condition: increased immobility, dementia, incontinence and so on.
Throughout, it is clear the couple s long-standing love is unshakeable, but the final
stakes of that devotion are revealed in a powerful outcome, brilliantly handled by
Trintignant.
More than in any of his other films, Haneke’s theatrical background is visible in the
measured, controlled staging - in that, rather than dramatise the couple s experience, he
shows it to us, for this is a hyper-lucid demonstration of his theme. But this is also a
magnificently directed actors’ film in which the two leads are challenged to confront their
own mortality and follow its implications to the very limit. Riva in particular exposes
herself fearlessly, recreating Anne s increasing lack of physical control; while Trintignant
hints at the inner stresses that wrack George. The two actors create a marvellous sense
of complicity and intimacy.
There is no trace of overstatement or sentiment. Huppert, as the couple s daughter Eva,
lends typically strong support, and the film is shot with superbly understated spatial
precision by Darius Khondji. This is a film of delicacy and immense force, and while it
may well move you to tears, it is a hugely intelligent drama that tells it like it is about a
subject most of us cannot bear to think about, especially on screen. It takes a director
like Haneke to make us grateful we did. - Jonathan Romney, Screen International
Winner – Palme D’Or, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Love Crime
Crime d'amour
Dir: Alain Corneau
France
2010 106 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Ludivine Sagnier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillaume
Marquet, Gérald Laroche, Julien Rochefort, Olivier Rabourdin
Language: English, French
Available to programme: Mid April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCfBTlNWDlo
At first glance, Love Crime — the last film directed by Alain Corneau, who died in 2010
— looks like a corporate All About Eve in reverse. An innocent, eager young woman
named Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) is manipulated and preyed upon by her mentor,
Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas), a high-ranking executive whose affection seems to be
an especially insidious form of sadism.
Christine showers her protégée with encouragement, gifts and kisses that land in a gray
area between collegial affection and something riskier. Isabelle, for her part, accepts
plum work assignments and tries at once to please her boss and to imitate her.
Dispatched to Cairo at the last minute along with Philippe (Patrick Mille), a business
associate who is also Christine’s lover, Isabelle negotiates an important deal. She also
sleeps with Philippe, which may have been part of Christine’s plan.
But Isabelle is angry when Christine takes credit for her work, and tries, with the help of
a loyal co-worker named Daniel (Guillaume Marquet), to get some revenge. She and
Christine wage a stealthy war, each trying to undermine the other while maintaining at
least a minimum of professional decorum. But things quickly escalate, and icy looks and
poisonous whispers give way to forged memos, brutal humiliations and, finally, outright
violence.
Through it all, Mr. Corneau makes witty use of the contrasting faces and temperaments
of the two main actresses. Ms. Thomas, her manner as impeccable and dry as her
French, is all angles and edges, most terrifying when she seems most at ease. Ms.
Sagnier, soft and skittish and visibly struggling to maintain her composure, turns out to
be even scarier.
At a certain point, though — to say exactly when would ruin a fairly stunning surprise —
the cat-and-mouse psychology is jettisoned in favor of something more procedural. The
two halves of Love Crime divide according to the words of the title: the first explores the
knotty, feverish, ambiguous bond between Christine and Isabelle, while the second is all
about guilt, innocence, evidence and motive. It is interesting and ingenious, even if some
of the kinky, queasy fascination that had been so intoxicating in the earlier scenes ebbs
away.
But Love Crime also works — like some of the later films of Claude Chabrol — as a
devilish satire on power and eros in the executive suite. Christine and Isabelle work in
the Paris office of an American-based multinational company, and their moneyed world
is sleek, attractive and also absurd. It becomes hilariously so whenever the American
bosses show up, either for quick on-scene meetings or video conferences. Then the
dialogue switches to English, and to an idiom of upbeat management boilerplate
captured with devastating accuracy.
This is not the first time that Mr. Corneau explored the sado-masochistic elements of
relations between women in the modern global workplace. In his 2003 film, Fear and
Trembling, Sylvie Testud played a young Belgian woman living in Tokyo, squirming
under the stiletto heel of her supervisor. And in that film, as in Love Crime, sympathy for
the underdog was balanced, or perhaps undermined, by detached, amused prurience.
You can’t help rooting for Isabelle, but at the same time you are hoping for things to get
really nasty. - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
McCullin
Dir: David and Jacqui Morris
2012
UK
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWjo5XUIfw
95 mins
Cert: CLUB
A kind of sentimental glamour still hangs on the role of war photographer. One thinks of
combat-jacketed snappers downing the last gin before hopping on the final chopper out
of Saigon.
Don McCullin, arguably the most distinguished Englishman to have plied the trade, has
as much working-class London suavity as his contemporary David Bailey. But this
superb documentary reveals McCullin also to be a clear,compassionate thinker who long
ago shook off any silly illusions about the job – or lofty notions about art. Featuring
lengthy contributions from its subject, the film answers most of the questions you want
asked.
Did McCullin ever assist the victims in his photographs? (Yes.) Was he ever seriously
frightened? (Eventually.) Were the authorities angered by his snaps? (Frequently.)
Inevitably, the film ends up offering us a primer in warfare from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Catastrophe in Cyprus leads on to bloodshed in the Congo and seemingly endless
conflict in Vietnam. McCullin’s photographs from Biafra – notably those of a starving
albino child – are still so chilling that it proves hard to look at their blown-up dimensions
on the larger screen.
It is hardly surprising that he experiences horrific daytime flashbacks and symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder to this day. After slaughter on the scale of central Africa,
his stories from Northern Ireland seem, for all the suffering of that place, like dispatches
from a schoolyard brawl.
McCullin, the biographical portrait, does boast a slightly odd structure. The film features
occasional contributions from Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times, but, for
the most part, it runs as an augmented monologue. Happily, Don is such a compelling
talker that the picture doesn’t drag for an instant. And for all the horror he has seen,
McCullin emerges as a man largely untainted by bitterness.
Mind you, his final meditations on the way war reporting has changed do chill the blood
somewhat. With increased control from the military in conflicts such as Afghanistan, we
may never see his like again. A flak jacket just doesn’t look right on an embedded
reporter. – Tara Brady, The Irish Times
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in The House of God
Dir: Alex Gibney
2012
USA
108 mins
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjzuVy_KmIg
Cert: 15A
Public revulsion over the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is already so
widespread that a film-maker bold enough to retell this tragedy had better be purposeful
about it – and Alex Gibney (Taxi To The Dark Side) definitely is that.
Mea Maxima Culpa is a fire-breathing set of theses nailed on the Vatican’s door. Gibney
structures the film with care, beginning with the depredations of Father Lawrence
Murphy at St John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. The priest abused the men in the
film when they were schoolboys, favouring with horrendous cunning the ones whose
parents couldn’t speak to their sons in sign language. As the boys grew into men they
began to communicate with one another, and eventually became some of the first to go
public, in the 1970s, with accusations against a priest.
From this group Gibney spirals outward, to those who tried – and failed – to get Murphy
away from the school, to the higher-ups who protected the church’s image but not the
victims, and finally to the Vatican itself. In the end, decades of such crimes going
undetected speaks for itself. And the extraordinary perseverance and courage of the
men from St John’s speaks louder still. - Farran Smith Nehme, New York Post
Winner – George Morrison Feature Documentary Award, IFTAs 2013
Men at Lunch
Dir: Sean O’ Cualain
2012
Ireland/USA
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWb5ffxhD3Q
70 mins
Lón sa Spéir
Cert: G
New York City, 1932. The country is in the throes of the Great Depression, the previous
decade's boom of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants has led to unprecedented urban
expansion, and in the midst of an unseasonably warm autumn, steelworkers risk life and
limb building skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan. In Men at Lunch, director
Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story of Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic photograph taken
during the construction of the GE Building that depicts eleven workmen taking their lunch
break while casually perched along a steel girder, 850 feet above the ground. For
decades, this image has captivated imaginations the world over. But who are these
men? And where did they come from?
Ever since the photograph was published anonymously in the New York Herald Tribune
on October 2, 1932, the men's identities have been a mystery. Many of those who have
been fascinated by the photo throughout the years have shared the conviction that one
of the workers is a distant relative; others, meanwhile, have questioned the photo's
authenticity outright. Accessing the vast photography archives at Rockefeller Center and
the Iron Mountain storage facility in Pennsylvania, Ó Cualáin follows the clues in an
attempt to discover the photo's long-held secrets. With the meticulous, painstaking
precision of a detective, Ó Cualáin tracks down the original glass-plate negative, and
then reconstructs the photograph as a digital projection with actors recreating the
workers' poses, allowing the minutiae of the image to be studied from every possible
perspective. Interviews with archivists, photographers, and historians eventually uncover
compelling evidence that a few of the photo's subjects may have roots in the small
village of Shanaglish, Ireland.
Yet no matter the secrets that Ó Cualáin uncovers in his dogged search, he is by no
means seeking to dilute or demystify the magnetic power of the iconic image. Taken at a
time when the utopian dreams of the previous decade had run up against desperate
economic reality, the photograph speaks to the enduring fortitude of a nation of
immigrants resolutely soldiering on, shrugging off their astonishing accomplishments as
merely another day's honest work. As Men at Lunch eloquently demonstrates, the
satisfaction of answers is perhaps dwarfed by the evocative power of the questions.
- Michèle Maheux, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
My Brother The Devil
Dir: Sally El Hosaini
2011
UK
111 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: James Floyd, Fady Elsayed, Said Taghmaoui, Aymen Hamdouchi, Ashley
Thomas, Letitia Wright
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtX-q4SPPMc
In My Brother The Devil, Sally El Hosaini takes to the streets – the London streets – in
her portrait of two Egyptian brothers from an immigrant family who fall into the
neighborhood gang culture.
Egyptian kids in a London youth gang thriller offer a novel twist on an urban growing
pains formula that’s been almost everywhere. Welsh-Egyptian El Hosaini turns unlikely
ingredients into luminous cinema which will take the film to festivals worldwide and pile
up awards. Still, clever marketing will be needed to bring kids from the illegal download
culture into cinemas, where this film should be savoured. The debut is a promising
career start for the director and the two appealing leads in the cast.
The two brothers in the title are older Rashid (James Floyd) and Mohammed - or Mo (Fady Elsayed), who have adopted the street talk and street style of their London peers.
As their bus conductor father talks about the Arab Spring, Rashid earns drug money,
which he sneaks into his mother’s purse. When Mo discovers the allure of street life,
girls, and competing gangs, he yearns to imitate his brother, and things get violent.
In a debut film whose subject is volatility, El Hosaini avoids the kind of overdramatisation that’s usually unavoidable in this genre. James Floyd is cocksure as the
handsome Rashid, who gets sidetracked from street rackets into a job and a gay
relationship, but not before a bloody brawl sets him up for a revenge match with a rival
gangster. Fady Elsayed plays a kid growing up fast on the street as Mo, ambitious for a
reputation among his peers. Nonprofessionals in the cast keep realism from turning into
melodrama.
Yet El Hosaini’s special achievement in My Brother The Devil is the stunning look of the
film. Cinematographer David Raedeker was forced by circumstances at the time of
filming - the Hackney riots last summer - into shooting much of the film in interior
spaces. His closeups in cinemascope give tight shots an extraordinary radiance and a
visual depth in minimal light, an effect that’s entirely unexpected in this kind of movie.
It’s rare to find a first-time film with such an elegance that’s still true to its gritty locations
in cramped apartments and nondescript streets. The contrast of the young cast’s faces
against the greyness of Hackney adds to the film’s subtle textures.
The radiance of My Brother The Devil should also work as an audition tape for Letitia
Wright, who plays Aisha, a Muslim girl who tries to set Mo straight. Wright’s face is one
of many that make El Hosaini’s debut a luminous event. - David D’Arcy, Screen
International
Winner - Europa Cinemas label, Berlin Film Festival 2012
Our Children
À perdre la raison
Dir: Joachim Lafosse
2012
France
110 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Emilie Dequenne, Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Stephane Bissot, Mounia
Raoui, Redouane Behache, Baya Belal, Nathalie Boutefeu
Language: French
Available to programme: June
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NahXt2OhS3Y
An arresting portrait of one woman’s gradual slide, Our Children (À Perdre la Raison)
represents another tightly wound study of domestic malaise from Belgian auteur
Joachim Lafosse (Private Property). Featuring a riveting lead turn from Emilie Dequenne
as a young mother caught between two men (A Prophet stars Tahar Rahim and Niels
Arestrup) in a claustrophobic nightmare, it’s a gloomy and penetrating psychological
drama.
The story of Belgian schoolteacher, Murielle (Dequenne), and Moroccan immigrant,
Mounir (Rahim), starts off on a rather upbeat note with them falling madly in love and
deciding to live together in the home of Mounir’s surrogate father, Doctor Pinget
(Arestrup). But as Murielle quickly learns, the physician casts a paralyzing shadow over
his young ward. When Murielle gives birth to a third child, the burden it places on the two
parents is exacerbated by the doctor’s increasingly guru-like sway over Mounir. And as
Murielle gets further sucked into the oppressive homestead, her escape routes slowly
dry up. - Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
Winner - Emilie Dequenne, Best Actress, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Pilgrim Hill
Dir: Garard Barrett
2011
Ireland
80 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Joe Mullins, Muiris Crowley, Corina Gough, Kevin McCormack
Language: English
Available to programme: Mid April
Trailer: Not available yet
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 73% from 12 responses
With all this urban mayhem and supernatural jiggery-pokery afoot, one could be forgiven
for suspecting that Irish film-makers had finally abandoned interest in the quieter affairs
of rural Ireland. Happily, young Gerard Barrett was on hand with his masterful debut
feature, Pilgrim Hill.
At the premiere, Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan compared the picture to Michael
Haneke’s upcoming Amour. This splendid picture almost lives up to that billing.
Joe Mullins plays a farmer living a lonely life on the outskirts of a small town. He takes
occasional trips to the pub. He pathetically contemplates the life he might have lived. He
cares for his father – never seen by the audience – who has recently had a stroke.
Barrett demonstrates some admirably original thinking: the piece has some straight-tocamera sequences; it offers no nondiegetic music until a final, appalling catastrophe.
We nominate this brilliantly played film, with an apologetic nod to Citadel, as the best we
saw at this year’s event. - Donald Clarke, Irish Times, Galway Film Fleadh, 2012
Winner - Bingham Ray New Talent Award, Galway Film Fleadh, 2012
Winner – Gerard Barrett, Irish Film Board Rising Star, IFTA 2013
Room 237
Dir: Rodney Archer
2011
USA
102 mins
Language: English
Available to programme: Mid March
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAknjtMN0QI
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 62% from 17 responses
Cert: 15A
The fastidiousness, intellectual obsessiveness and attention to minute detail for which
Stanley Kubrick was known is matched by some devoted acolytes in Room 237, a
fanatical, sometimes hilarious analysis and deconstruction of hidden meanings to be
found in the director’s controversial 1980 horror film The Shining. Nutty, arcane and jawdropping in equal measure, this is a head-first plunge down the rabbit hole of
Kubrickiana from which, for some, there is evidently no return.
This clever homemade curio actually more closely resembles the kind of highly personal
reworkings of and reflections on movies that one can easily find online than it does more
conventional documentaries or academic inquiries into art works. Technically quite
accomplished, the film consists mostly of sequences from Kubrick’s adaptation of
Stephen King’s novel (the author famously despises the result), along with behind-thescenes footage from his daughter’s documentary about its making, related clips from his
films and others, and a few amusingly staged bits involving mock audiences.
Director Rodney Ascher divides his “inquiry” into nine parts, the first of which builds a
case, based on the prominent display of Calumet baking soda can in the film and the
fact that the Timberline Lodge was built on Indian burial grounds, that The Shining is
actually about the genocide of Native Americans and, in a broader sense, the Holocaust.
The latter speculation stems from the fact that the typewriter Jack Nicholson uses is a
German brand and because a prominently featured sports jersey bears the number 42,
the year the final solution was implemented.
Throughout, various voices are heard expounding on this sort of esoterica. It’s
impossible to tell who’s doing the talking at various moments and it doesn’t really matter;
they’ve all seen the film many times, run it backwards and forward (one amusingly
illustrated sequence argues that The Shining is in many ways 2001: A Space Odyssey in
reverse), magnified images, found and rationalized continuity errors and identified
subliminal messages. One of the more edifying portions has an architecture expert
analyze the layout of Ken Adam’s fantastic hotel set and point out the “impossible”
window in the office of the general manager played by Barry Nelson.
One speaker insists that Kubrick busied himself with such matters because, after Barry
Lyndon, he was “a bored filmmaker” looking for new ways to make films. Rather too
much time is given over to one commentator’s resurrection of the shibboleth that Kubrick
staged the Apollo moon landing using the front screen projection technique of 2001.
Shot through with wit, wayward intelligence and ample evidence that some people just
have too much time on their hands, Room 237 is one of the more idiosyncratic blocks in
the ever-growing temple devoted to Kubrick’s unique talent and legacy. There will be
more. - Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter
Rust and Bone
De rouille et d'os
Dir: Jacques Audiard
2012
France
120 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Armand Verdure, Celine Sallette,
Corinne Masiero, Bouli Lanners, Jean-Michael Correia
Language: French
Available to programme: From now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u74RX6o-8I
What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly
absorbing love story; Rust and Bone is a tale of a miraculous friendship which evolves
into an enthralling and moving romance, wonderfully acted by Marion Cotillard and
Matthias Schoenaerts. Jacques Audiard directs, and his screenplay, co-written with
Thomas Bidegain, is freely adapted from characters in the short story collection of the
same title, by the American author Craig Davidson. This is early days in the festival, but
Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to
vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.
She plays Stephanie, a young woman who trains huge orca whales at the Marineland
park; in response to theatrical gestures from Stephanie, the mighty beasts loom out of
the chlorinated water to perform undignified tricks for the crowd. At a club one night, she
runs into Ali (Schoenaerts), a Belgian guy working as a bouncer, involved in bareknuckle
fights, but with dreams of making it big in kickboxing. Feckless and shiftless about his
family responsibilities, Ali is staying with his long-suffering sister Anna (Corinne Masiero)
and is more than content to let her and her neighbours look after his six-year-old son
Sam (Armand Verdure) from a previous relationship. Ali takes Stephanie home from the
club after she gets into a drunken fight, and clearly hopes for sex, but nothing happens,
Cotillard shows how Stephanie is touched by the consideration and even delicacy which
Ali shows for her.
Catastrophe strikes at Marineland early on: Stephanie is horrifically injured when one of
the whales turns on her. She awakens in hospital to find that both her legs have been
amputated, and her response is not a thousand miles from that of Ronald Reagan in
Kings Row. Stifled by the pity and nervous condescension about her condition from her
family and colleagues, Stephanie finds that the only person she can talk to is Ali — who
is utterly unafraid and unembarrassed, and even suggests that they sleep together, just
to see if she is still capable of sex. Proud, vulnerable, sad Stephanie begins to fall in love
with Ali, but discovers that he still wants one-night stands elsewhere, and that it was
after all precisely this casual, no-strings appetite for sex which gave birth to the miracle
of their relationship – if a relationship is what it is.
The metaphor of the whale might have dragged the movie down, but doesn't: it could
have been seen as the force of nature and destiny which makes short work of humans
and their puny plans for the future. Ali could have been seen as the second mighty beast
which Stephanie fails to tame. And in fact both these ideas are present somewhere in
the film's fabric. But it is remarkable how matter-of-factly Stephanie's job and her terrible
fate is presented to us by Audiard; it is not freighted with significance, nor with
ostentatiously affectless, post-modern irony. As for Ali, what is impressive about the
movie and his performance is the fact that his evolving relationship with his sister and his
son is so convincing and real, and at least as important as this love affair with Stephanie.
I have rather uneasy memories of Bryan Forbes's interesting but excruciatingly wellintentioned movie The Raging Moon, from 1971, about two wheelchair users who fall in
love. Rust and Bone is a very different proposition, and its candour and force are
matched by the commitment and intelligence of its two leading players. These factors,
linked with the glowing sunlit images captured by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine
and emotion-grabbing music from Alexandre Desplat make for a powerful spectacle. It is
a passionate and moving love story which surges out of the screen like a flood tide.
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Sessions, The
Dir: Ben Lewin
2012
USA
94 mins
Starring: John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy
Language: English
Available to programme: June
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T7vqxwuWEM
Cert: 16
Mark O'Brien's body was contorted by polio, and he spent most of his hours confined to
an iron lung. His severe physical limitations did not prevent him, however, from
becoming a poet and journalist — he learned to write by tapping keys with a stick held in
his mouth — nor did they keep him from longing for one of life's most treasured
experiences: sexual fulfillment. Featuring outstanding performances from a first-rate cast
— John Hawkes, riveting as O'Brien, opposite Academy Award®–winner Helen Hunt
and William H. Macy — The Sessions relates O'Brien's quest to finally lose his virginity
in his late thirties. A warm, heartfelt study in generosity and desire, it is also a rare film
that acknowledges the erotic lives of people with disabilities.
O'Brien is a religious man, and the first person that he confides in regarding his erotic
needs is a priest, Father Brendan (Macy). Neither condemning nor condescending,
Brendan assures O'Brien that God will look the other way. O'Brien resolutely sets out to
find a professional sex surrogate, and has the remarkable good fortune to find Cheryl
(Hunt), an articulate, mature and patient woman who gently coaches him in his arduous
struggle toward greater bodily awareness. With time, they will negotiate the possibility of
actual intercourse. Along the way, each discovers hidden resources within themselves,
and more common ground than either would have expected.
A film like The Sessions relies on strong performances, and it's hard to imagine a finer
cast than that assembled by director Ben Lewin. Acclaimed for his sterling character
work in Me and You and Everyone We Know, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Winter's
Bone (for which he received an Academy Award® nomination) and Deadwood, Hawkes
brings tremendous expressiveness to O'Brien, despite being unable to use most of his
body. Macy is wonderfully droll as the permissive priest, and Hunt is radiant,
compassionate and thoroughly no-nonsense.
The Sessions reminds us what can be achieved when we strive to overcome
preconceptions. Sensual but never lewd, this is one of the year's most authentic and
unlikely feel-good movies. - Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Side By Side
Dir: Christopher Kenneally
USA
2012
99 mins
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DdhYNvKL3U
Cert: CLUB
Keanu Reeves wouldn't be everybody’s choice to front a documentary about the relative
merits of film and digital cinema.
Then again, having played both time-travelling history student and virtual-reality saviour
on screen, he makes a strangely apt guide for Christopher Kenneally’s comprehensive
exploration of the medium’s past, present and future.
Reeves brings passion and experience to ask the right questions on an issue that has
polarised Hollywood, and his stardom grants him access to an enviable cast of expert
witnesses.
Practically every major talent of recent times is here, from digital pioneers and converts
(James Cameron, Danny Boyle) to hold-off sceptics like Christopher Nolan and his
regular DoP Wally Pfister, who huffs, “I’m not going to trade my oil paints for a set of
crayons.”
As the title suggests it’s an even-handed affair, and part of the pleasure is guessing
which format these legends prefer - and why. David Fincher gleefully recalls how Robert
Downey Jr., caught short by digital technology’s longer shooting lengths, found a radical
solution to relieving himself on the Zodiac set.
Tech-heavy discussions admittedly make for a niche affair, but it’s a geekgasm for those
fascinated by such behind-the-scenes exotica as colour timing or dynamic range. It’s
also an exhilarating history of the tumultuous decade-and-a-half from Dogme 95 to
Avatar.
What’s most palpable is the rapid acceleration of picture quality. As the film lists
cameras used to shoot a host of recent releases, it’s obvious that digital now passes the
‘taste test’ to all but the most eagle-eyed. As Reeves asks his final, killer question - “Is
film dead?” - he admits to pangs of regret at the loss of cinema’s communal vibe to the
Netflix/iPhone generation.
Even so, the film can’t help but take the future’s side by itself being shot digitally.
As Steven Soderbergh puts it: “I feel I should call film and say, ‘I’ve met someone.’”
– Simon Kinnear, Total Film Magazine
Sightseers
Dir: Ben Wheatley
2012
UK
95 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, Eileen Davies, Richard Glover, Jonathan Aris,
Monica Dolan
Lanuage: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWJ7XNqRSz4
Ben Wheatley is the outstanding young British film-maker who got himself talked about
with his smart debut Down Terrace; then he scared the daylights out of everyone, as
well as amusing and baffling them, with his inspired and ambiguous chiller Kill List. His
talent and signature are vividly present in every frame of this new movie, Sightseers, a
grisly and Ortonesque black comedy about a lonely couple who go on a caravanning
holiday in Yorkshire: Chris and Tina, played by co-writers Steve Oram and Alice Lowe.
Sightseers is funny and well made, but Wheatley could be suffering from difficult third
album syndrome: this is not as mysterious and interesting as Kill List; its effects are
more obvious and the encounters between the naturalistically conceived antiheroes and
the incidental, sketch-comedy posh characters is a little uneasy. By the end, I got the
sense that in terms of character and narrative the film was running out of ideas – just a
bit.
That isn't to say there aren't brilliant touches, especially at the beginning. The
relationship between the pair and Tina's ferociously needy and disapproving mother is a
bit like Victoria Wood, Duncan Preston and Thora Hird in the classic TV play Pat &
Margaret. In fact, if Wood or Alan Bennett wanted to make a serial-killer gorefest with
some readers'-wives porn, it might look an awful lot like this.
It is clear that the holiday marks a decisive break between Tina and her cantankerous
mother. The older woman is in mourning for the loss of her pet dog and resents Tina
leaving her at this stressful time. She particularly and very candidly dislikes Tina's new
boyfriend Chris, a cheery bloke with ginger hair and a beard. As they drive off with the
caravan in tow, Wheatley shows how the mother is literally fuming with displeasure at
the window, breathing heavily, her nostrils producing twin flumes of condensation.
The trip unlocks Tina's sensuality and the couple enjoy vibrant lovemaking in the
caravan and Wheatley creates a bizarre atmosphere of misjudged daring in their erotic
life: at a restaurant, Tina's naughty whispered confession that she is not wearing
knickers is somewhat spoiled by the admission that she is nonetheless wearing tights.
But it is gradually clear that something is amiss with easygoing Chris, as he rhapsodises
about the innocence of the countryside: "That tree won't involve itself in low-level
bullying so you'll have to leave work," he says, thoughtfully. Chris is highly displeased by
the antisocial behaviour of people he meets along the way; he converts his displeasure
into action and Tina is supportive.
Again, Wheatley is adept at summoning an eerie atmosphere of Wicker Man disquiet;
the glorious natural surroundings are endowed with a golden sunlit glow and the trips to
quaint venues of local interest are well observed: particularly Tina's heartbroken solo
excursion to the Pencil Museum, and her heartwrenching attempt to express herself with
a big novelty pencil. All this makes an ineffably strange combination with the fear and the
violence and the bizarre sociopathy. The problem is that the combination can only go so
far: it doesn't seem to develop into anything else.
These reservations are offset by the absolute confidence and visual style that Wheatley
always shows. From the very first, as Tina's mother keens and growls with grief and
despair at the departure of her beloved Puppy, he creates a weird world, entirely of itself.
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Sister
L'enfant d'en haut
Dir: Ursula Meier
2012
French
100 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Lea Seydoux, Kacey Mottet Klein, Gillian Anderson, Martin Compston,
Yann Tregouet, Johan Libereau, Gabin Lefebvre, Jean-Francois Stevenin
Language: French
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIw2ARdPGmw
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 68% from 22 responses
French-Swiss director Ursula Meier burst on the international film scene with her 2008
feature debut Home, about a peculiar family living next to a highway. Her follow-up,
Sister, lacks the same conceptual ambition but consolidates her skill with a tightly
assembled narrative that brings supreme clarity to the mindset of a disgruntled young
boy. Evoking a lost childhood with bittersweet intent, "Sister" bears the mark of a
filmmaker with supreme control over her material.
That's not meant to overstate the movie's appeal; it navigates a basic scenario without
breaking new ground. However, Meier never loses her grasp on the basic story
elements; her patient formalism calls to mind Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, which also
involves a pair of impoverished siblings using unreliable means to make ends meet.
In Sister, scheming 12-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) wastes his days at a posh
ski resort in the Alps, where he regularly pilfers skis and other supplies and pawns them
off to the world down below. He spends the rest of his time keeping restless sister
Louise (rising star Léa Seydoux) at bay, as she drifts through an aimless life of
unemployment and promiscuity. Their days in the valley form a tame, insipid routine that
Simon only manages to tune out with his inevitably risky business, which reaches new
heights when he partners with an older employee at the ski resort (Martin Compston) to
complicate the endeavor.
Meier initially follows Simon with a simple, uncomplicated linearity before delving further
into the details of his situation with a naturalism that recalls the Dardenne brothers
(particularly their latest effort, The Kid with a Bike). Rather than aping the same
approach, however, Meier applies it in a distinctly engaging fashion by avoiding tricky
camerawork and simply observing Simon's life until the cracks in his confidence slowly
grow clear.
The barren, expansive landscape keeps the focus on the small cast, with only a few
other minor characters around to eke out the existing tension between Simon and
Louise. Meier's minimalist atmsophere reflects Simon's point of view without endorsing
it; he's a sympathetic victim of a world largely ignorant to his existence.
That positions him as a survivor whose immorality emerges from pragmatic necessity.
Once busted for his crimes, an occupational hazard he faces more than once, an older
man asks him why he steals. Simon doesn't hesitate: "To buy things," he replies. But
that answer is an excuse, rather than an explanation; by following Simon's aggressive
need to maintain balance in his life, "Sister" makes it clear that he doesn't overthink it.
Rather than longing to change his impoverished circumstances, he simply works in
congress with them using the resources at his disposal.
Eventually, forces rise up to complicate Simon's endeavor, but Meier takes the emphasis
off repurcussions for his thievery and instead explores his reasons for acting out in the
first place. At this point, Louis' cold, distant interactions with Simon start to make sense,
and her struggle becomes as central as Simon's.
Without revealing too much, it's safe to say that a late twist alters the way we perceive
the two characters' relationship while avoiding the possibility of cheapening it; Meier
uses it as a transitional point rather than a surprise finish. The final, wordless minutes,
when all the story elements are firmly in place, practically stand alone as a separate
work. Sister may not arrive at a happy ending, but the lack of resolution -- capped off by
the powerful last image --completes its journey to a place of rousing emotional clarity.
- Eric Kohn, Indie Wire
Winner - Silver Bear, Berlin Film Festival 2012
Starbuck
Dir: Ken Scott
2011
Canada
109 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Patrick Huard, Antoine Bertrand, Julie le Breton, David Michael, Patrick
Martin
Language: French
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfQIJaGON1M
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 68% from 17 responses
A massive box office success in Québec, Ken Scott’s comedic Starbuck tracks a likeable
middle-aged loser as he wrestles with regret and responsibility.
Hapless deliveryman David Wozniak gets parking tickets at every single stop along his
route, has thugs on his tail for massive overdue loans, and his girlfriend announced that
she was pregnant just before dumping him. These, however, are the least of David’s
concerns when he returns home to find a lawyer in his kitchen.
The past is back to haunt him in the form of a class-action lawsuit, launched by 142 of
the 533 children who resulted from the 648 sperm donations he deposited over 20 years
ago.
David turns to his best friend Paul, a lawyer and father of an unruly brood, who is eager
to defend David’s right to privacy in this landmark case. But a package of photos of
David’s progeny arrives, inspiring a clandestine search for his children and a poignant
attempt at anonymous fatherhood. - Seattle International Film Festival, 2012
Turn Me On, Goddammit!
Få meg på, for faen
Dir: Jannicke Systad Jacobsen
2011
Norway
75 mins Cert: CLUB
Starring: Helene Bergsholm, Matias Myren, Henriette Steenstrup, Malin Bjørhovde,
Beate Støfring
Language: Norwegian
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRsvZkEESps
The feature debut of Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, Turn Me On, Goddammit! chronicles
the sexual awakening of Alma (Helene Bergsholm), a 15-year-old girl who is consumed
by her out-of-control hormones and fantasies that range from sweetly romantic images
of Artur, the boyfriend she yearns for, to down-and-dirty daydreams about practically
everybody she lays eyes on.
Alma and her best friend Sara live in an insufferably boring little town in the hinterlands
of Norway called Skoddeheimen, a place they loathe so much that every time their
school bus passes the sign that names it, they routinely flip it off. After Alma has a
stimulating yet awkward encounter with Artur, she makes the mistake of telling her
incredulous friends, who ostracize her at school, until Sara can’t even be seen with her.
At home, Alma’s single mother is overwhelmed and embarrassed by her daughter’s
extravagant phone sex bills and wears earplugs to muffle Alma’s round-the-clock acts of
self-gratification.
Laced with warmth and quirky humor, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a lighthearted take on a
story that is told so often about boys and so rarely about teenage girls.
- Calgary Underground Film Festival 2012
Winner - Best Screenplay, Tribeca Film Festival 2011
Untouchable
Dir: Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache
2011 France 112 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: François Cluzet, Omar Sy, Anne Le Ny, Audrey Fleurot, Clotilde Mollet,
Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Cyril Mendy and Christian Americ.
Language: French
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqNmiv85E8
He only wants a signature to keep social welfare off his back. Senegalese émigré Driss
(Omar Sy) has no intention of getting hired when he applies to be a live-in carer for
millionaire paraplegic Philippe (François Cluzet). Following a disastrous interview –
during which Driss flirts with the Parisian aristocrat’s foxy secretary and robs a Fabergé
egg – no one is more surprised than he when the older man takes him on for a trial.
Slowly but surely, the two become friends. Driss introduces Philippe to marijuana,
massage and Earth, Wind and Fire; Philippe, in turn, introduces art, classical music and
paragliding.
By now you’ve likely heard of Untouchable, the biggest French success of 2011 and the
biggest grossing non-English-language title of all time. Last year the culture clash
comedy was voted the arts event of 2011 in France. It won by a landslide margin and will
represent France at next year’s Oscars.
Anglophone territories have waited as Intouchables, to use its birth name, smashed
records around the world, snaffling up $364.6 million and topping charts in Germany,
Poland, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Belgium and Italy.
Commentators have scratched their heads. How does a lightly comic buddy picture
about an infirm poshie and his ghetto ex-con assistant, aided by minimal marketing,
result in so many bottoms on seats? And with subtitles? And relatively unknown actors
and directors? And with so many familiar hip-hop-goes-uptown moments? What sorcery
is this?
The answer: old-fashioned word of mouth and irresistible dollops of smaltz.
Based on A Second Wind, Philippe Pozzo Di Borg’s chronicle of friendship with his
former carer Abdel Sellou, Untouchable’s generally cheery trajectory unfolds as a series
of big, punch-the-air, inspirational set pieces and earnest Shawshank Redemption-brand
sentimentality.
The grain of the picture says urban drama but the lighting stays bouncy and bright. It’s
not subtle. It’s not innovative. But it guarantees good humour, pranks, japes and wellingup for two hours. - Tara Brady, The Irish Times
Winner - Grand Prix, Tokyo International Film Festival 2011
Winner - Audience Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 2012
Winner - Audience Award, Nashville Film Festival 2012
West of Memphis
Dir: Amy Berg
USA
2012
147 mins
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYsQYkAOdLs
Cert: CLUB
The 1994 conviction of three disaffected teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, for
killing a trio of eight-year-old boys raised strong public emotions at the trial, and a
lengthy campaign afterwards claimed that hysteria over ‘satanic rituals’, rather than
genuine evidence, put the accused behind bars.
Documentary makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky devoted their acclaimed
Paradise Lost trilogy to exposing what many believed a major miscarriage of justice,
inspiring an Internet campaign supported by numerous celebrities including Eddie
Vedder, Johnny Depp and director Peter Jackson. After all that exposure, then, is there
really any need for this expansive doc covering the 18-year span since the murders?
Those who’ve seen the Paradise Lost material will certainly encounter an overlap. But
Amy Berg’s film makes a compelling case for itself as a patient, methodical summation
of the complex issues involved. Rooted in a precise sense of place, the extensive
interview testimony and archive footage build up a troubling fresco of police
incompetence, enterprising advocacy for the prisoners and a blinkered judicial system
puzzlingly slow to confront escalating doubts.
Since the film’s producer, Peter Jackson, was also a significant backer of the private
investigation key to generating the appeal process, Berg’s unfettered access creates a
riveting sense of new evidence being uncovered before our eyes. There’s justifiable
outrage here, but it’s lucid and focused, and if the celeb cameos and emphasis on
crowd-funding seem over-insistent at times, it’s a viable point to make – public
contributions really did keep the fight for justice alive. – Trevor Johnston, Time Out
London
Army of Saviours
Unter Bauern
Dir: Ludi Boeken
2009
96 mins Germany/France
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Veronica Ferres, Armin Rohde, Lia Hoensbroech, Martin Horn, Margarita
Broich
Language: German
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xre979_army-of-saviours-dvdtrailer_shortfilms#.Ubb0u679Vuo
Unter Bauern –Army of Saviours, adapted from Marga Spiegel’s memoirs, tells her story
and that of the courageous Westphalian farmers who hid her, her husband, and her
daughter from 1943 to 1945. This Jewish family was thus saved from deportation by a
man who, although a member of the Nazi party with a son fighting on the Russian front,
did not hesitate to risk his own life to protect them for three years.
Unter Bauern –Army of Saviours, starring Veronica Ferres and Martin Horn, loudly
contradicts the legendary claim that opposition to Hitler’s regime was impossible,
highlighting courage and dignity in the struggle against barbarity.
Never lapsing into sentimentality, Ludi Boeken delivers a highly humanistic film in which
the characters, be they heroes or cowards, and all their dilemmas are portrayed with
fairness and without artifice. - Locarno Film Festival 2009
Beyond The Hills
Dupa dealuri
Dir: Cristian Mungiu
2012
Romania
150 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuţă, Dana Tapalaga
Language: Romanian
Available to programme: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0t2bBjMlIg
A cerebral melodrama of the most steely, bare and brutal kind, Beyond the Hills is the
third feature from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and his first since winning the
Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
Alina (Cristina Flutur) and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) are old friends who reunite over a
weekend. Alina has come back to Romania from Germany and wants Voichita to return
with her. But Voichita is reluctant to leave the monastery where she lives with a dozen
other women and a lone priest (Valeriu Andriuta), believing she’s found a cure for
crippling loneliness: God.
Mungiu embeds us in the world of her frugal, barren monastery over a few days, with
Alina’s presence forcing her to confront her beliefs. Meanwhile, her colleagues react with
increasing hostility to the threat Alina poses to their way of life. Mungiu’s style of
storytelling in Beyond the Hills is more elongated and less frenetic than in 4 Months.
Together, the two films make fascinating companion pieces as studies of freedom or a
lack of it and, on a wider level, suggest a lingering sickness and sorrow at the heart of
Romanian society. - Dave Calhoun, Time Out London
Winner – Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Beware of Mr Baker
Dir: Jay Bulger
USA
2012
92 mins
Language: English
Available to programme from: August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG3r1eH81k0
Cert: 15A
Legendary drummer Ginger Baker was as well known for his monstrous rock ’n’ roll
behaviour as he was for his skin-pounding in the supergroups Cream and Blind Faith.
But the "world’s greatest drummer" didn’t really hit his stride as a musician until 1972,
when he travelled to Nigeria and discovered Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. Setting up shop in
Lagos, Baker built a recording studio, sat in on records recorded by Kuti and became
one of the first proponents of World music, especially African-influenced examples. After
leaving Nigeria, Baker returned to his pattern of drug-induced self-destruction before
settling in South Africa a little over a decade ago. The 73-year-old now lives in seclusion
with his young bride and 39 polo ponies…
For his Rolling Stone article “In Search of Ginger Baker," Jay Bulger spent three months
living with the rock legend, recording numerous hours of interview footage. The result is
a rollicking and frequently hilarious encounter with one crazy drummer, enhanced by
interviews with Stewart Copeland, Charlie Watts, Johnny Rotten, Neil Peart, Mickey
Hart, Lars Ulrich and others who comment on Baker’s legacy and persona. Beware of
Mr. Baker, indeed—in the first scene of the film, Baker cracks a cane across the bridge
of Bulger’s nose, showing that Baker’s ferocity has not dimmed one bit.
- Vancouver International Film Festival 2013
Blessed
Dir: Ana Kokkinos
Australia
2009
111 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Frances O’Connor, Miranda Otto, Deborra-Lee Furness, Victoria
Haralabidou, William McInnes, Sophie Lowe
Language: English
Available to programme from: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ikikJyl1E
May Screening Day Rating: 78% from 9 responses
Blessed is a dark, relentless and intensely serious study of errant teenagers and their
preoccupied mothers. Finely acted by a large cast led by a jagged, desperate Frances
O’Connor, four thematically linked stories are played out on the mean streets of western
Melbourne: unhappy mothers mistrust their children, drifting children mistrust their
mothers.
Director Kokkinos, known for her sexy, stylised Head On (1998) and The Book of
Revelation (2006), works close to documentary realism here, with much hand-held
camerawork and a street-weary look.
Experienced performers such as O’Conner, Miranda Otto, Deborra-Lee Furness and
William McInnes share the screen with a range of impressively natural youngster.
The children steal, swear, swig bourbon, masturbate; the mothers fret, mourn their lives,
ignore their families.
The action happens over a single day with the kids first telling their stories and then the
mothers adding theirs, an intriguing device which adds much needed complexity to
otherwise simple narratives. - Frank Hatherley, ScreenDaily
Broken
Dir: Rufus Norris
2012
UK
90 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Tim Roth, Cillian Murphy, Eloise Laurence, Zana Marjanovic, Robert
Emms, Rory Kinnear
Language: English
Available to programme: mid-July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfQlRks4fuo
Award-winning theatre director Rufus Norris makes his feature debut with Broken, a
delicately structured story that has at its core the tale of 11-year-old Skunk (newcomer
Eloise Laurence), an innocent young girl who finds herself amidst a group of complex,
fractured and often broken people.
Sweet-natured Skunk is friendly with all of her neighbours. As her summer holiday starts,
so Skunk’s innocence starts to be chipped away. Her brother Jed (Bill Milner) warns her
how dreadful her new school will be; her au pair Kasia (Zana Marjanovic) breaks off her
relationship with the genial Mike (Cillian Murphy), while her father Archie (Tim Roth) is
attentive and kind, but always busy with work. As a return to school beckons, the warmth
of childhood gives way as she finds out her father is having a relationship with Kasia.
Broken spirals into some delightfully staged scenes of darkness as Skunk is placed in a
terrible situation and subconsciously has to make a real life-or-death decision.
Shot at times with a sense of magical realism, the film is charmingly off-kilter though its
eventual lapse into drama lacks the shock value one might expect. It is, though, a bold
and nicely sustained debut. - Mark Adams, Screen International
Bullhead
Dir: Michaël R Roskam
2011
Denmark
124 mins
Starring: Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeroen Perceval, Jeanne Dandoy
Language: Dutch
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DlaFR-nrGs
Rundskop
Cert: 15A
Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a player in the Belgian illegal hormone market and a
simmering mess of rage, steroids and paranoia. Ordinarily, he has no trouble with the
shady deals and heavy-handed interactions demanded by his cattle-dealing family.
A new merger, however, with the West Flemish beef mafia sets the bulky antihero of
Bullhead on edge. He doesn’t like that these new business partners are cop-killers and
he likes it even less that the arrangement will see him working with a former childhood
friend.
A series of flashbacks soon reveal an eye-watering act of violence and the key to
Jacky’s brutish behaviour and physique.
As the police close in on the hormone racket, a steady drip-feed of historical details
points inexorably to a violent conclusion.
If you’ve longed for a lower class of drug peddling than Breaking Bad’s crystal-meth
scam or for a more volatile kingpin than Breaking Bad’s Heisenberg, then writer-director
Michaël R Roskam’s debut film is for you.
As with Raging Bull and Bronson, this is very much a hulking one-man showcase.
Schoenaerts’s physicality dominated last year’s Rust and Bone; in Bullhead he’s more
animalistic still, all coursing veins and gristle. In his mouth, Roskam’s dialogue –
composed mostly in Limburgish – is frequently reduced to a series of snorts and grunts.
Jacky literally butts heads with those who displease him; he bellows at family members;
alone, he paces and crumples into helpless bovine shapes. The larger narrative about
mutant meat and the mafia is soon completely eclipsed by Schoenaerts’s brooding,
compelling performance and his character’s ongoing psychodrama.
The cinematography exaggerates the actor’s already exaggerated frame with dramatic
shadow play. Darkened backroom deals reference Caravaggio paintings; outdoor
tableaux are rough and ruddy.
This fine first feature from Roskam was deservedly shortlisted for an Academy Award
last year. But be fair warned: gentlemen viewers are advised to look away around 40
minutes in. – Tara Brady, The Irish Times
Caesar Must Die
Cesare deve morire
Dir: Paola & Vittorio Taviani
2012
Italy
76 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Salvatore Striano, Giovanni Arcuri, Cosimo Rega, Antonio Frasca
Language: Italian
Available to programme: September (TBC)
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaZGPa3u6IM
Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die
deftly melds narrative and documentary in a transcendently powerful drama-within-adrama.
The film was made in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison, where the prisoners are preparing to
stage Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. After a competitive casting process, the roles are
eventually allocated, and the prisoners begin exploring the text, finding in its tale of
fraternity, power and betrayal parallels to their own lives and stories. Hardened
criminals, many with links to organised crime, these actors find great motivation in
performing the play. As we witness the rehearsals, beautifully photographed in various
nooks and crannies within the prison, we see the inmates also work through their own
conflicts, both internal and between each other.
The Tavianis (Padre Padrone) break the boundary between reality and fiction in startling
ways – amongst the inmates, they insert an actor who was once a prisoner himself;
some of the conversations are ad-libbed, others carefully scripted – and the result is
thoughtful, engaging and a triumphant celebration of art’s ability to impact lives.
- Sydney Film Festival 2012
Winner – Golden Bear, Berlin Film Festival 2012
Winner – Audience Award, European Film Awards 2012
Come As You Are
Hasta La Vista
Dir: Geoffrey Enthoven
2011
Belgium
115 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Robrecht Vanden Thoren, Gilles De Schryver, Tom Audenaert, Isabelle
De Hertogh
Language: Dutch, French
Available to programme: Mid October
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS0St2NMk1Q
May Screening Day Rating: 86% from 14 responses
Three young special-needs men go on a road trip to lose their virginity in Belgian helmer
Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come as You Are, a likable if somewhat formulaic-feeling
seriocomedy loosely inspired by Asta Philpot, the U.S.-born Brit advocate for
handicapped persons’ sexuality. A Montreal fest hit — pic won the Grand Prize of the
Americas and the audience award, and shared the Fipresci ecumenical prize — it may
fall between mainstream and arthouse brackets in some territories. But it could prove a
sleeper if given a chance by distribs, who would do well to use the pic’s superior original
title, Hasta la vista.
The protags are friends in a well-heeled suburb, brought together (and isolated from
other peers) by their different disabilities. Genial Jozef (Tom Audenaert) is almost
completely blind. Often childishly petulant prankster Philip (Robrecht Vanden Thoren) is
a paraplegic. Likewise wheelchair-bound, Lars (Gilles De Schryver) has a degenerative
terminal illness that is causing paralysis and occasional fits. All still live with their
parents, from whom they require considerable assistance. But dreams of independence
take flight when Philip hears about a Spanish brothel catering to people “like us.” He
announces they must go there on vacation, alone — well, aside from a hired caretaker.
Their families are not at all excited about this idea, though they reluctantly agree once a
reassuringly experienced van driver/nurse is recruited. All plans are scotched, however,
when Lars’ prognosis takes a turn for the worse. Without much time left, he determines
he’ll live it to the hilt — so the threesome sneak away on their trip after all, parental
concern be damned.
With the first nurse/driver having declined the job, the three are stuck with a seemingly
far less desirable chaperone: Claude (Isabelle de Hertogh), a gruff, heavyset woman
who speaks only French. They resent her presence at first; Philip is particularly rude, as
is his wont. But after she saves the day in an emergency or two, the collective mood
lightens. Slapstick mishaps happen, life lessons are duly learned, tragedy is confronted
and so forth.
Fictitiously elaborating on Philpot’s real-life trips to a wheelchair-accessible Spanish
brothel and his advocacy of prostitution as one sexual-expression option for the
disabled, Pierre De Clercq’s episodic script runs a familiar gamut from laughter to tears.
But it’s never condescending, and Enthoven’s assured direction likewise resists
overplaying the obvious emotional cues. - Dennia Harvey, Variety
Winner - Best Film, Audience Award, Montreal World Film Festival 2012
Winner - Audience Award, Karlovy Vary, 2012
Compliance
Dir: Craig Zobel
2012
USA
90 mins
Cert: 18
Starring: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp, Philip Ettinger, James
McCafrey
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDat96UyT5A
Compliance, which drew strong reactions at its 2012 Sundance premiere, doesn’t just
want to play with your emotions but wants you to question why you allow that to happen
in the first place.
The setup could hardly be more banal. It's Friday night at ChickWich, a nondescript fastfood outlet in a nondescript middle-American town. Like any group stuck in less-thanfulfilling work, the employees have their little cliques and conflicts. Shift supervisor
Sandra (Ann Dowd) is already on edge because the freezer door was left open the night
before, resulting in expensive spoilage, and no one is admitting fault. Once customers
start rolling in, however, Sandra and crew have enough to deal with just filling orders.
Awkwardly, a call demands her attention, followed by that of the others. An employee
has been accused of stealing from a patron’s purse. A police detective, already familiar
with this ChickWich branch's staff and management, demands the suspect be
interrogated and searched—by Sandra—immediately.
What ensues is an insidious, harrowing, disturbing exercise in the power of persuasion,
in which gullible law-abiders are made to break the law, believing they're dutifully
“following orders.” If we'd all like to think we could never be manipulated so far or so
easily, Compliance queasily makes us question that certainty—not least because it is
inspired by real events. - Dennis Harvey, San Francisco International Film Festival
Everybody Has A Plan
Todos tenemos un plan
Dir: Ana Piterberg
Argentina
2012
118 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Soledad Villamil, Daniel Fanego, Javier Godino, Sofía Gala Castaglione,
Viggo Mortensen
Language: Spanish
Available to programme: September TBC
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8RZUFrLzqU
Second chances are hard-won at the best of times, but in Ana Piterbarg's gritty thriller
the lengths taken to achieve them are as incomparable as they are chilling. The premise
of Everybody Has a Plan is grounded in this potent archetypal conflict. In his third foray
into Spanish-language film, Viggo Mortensen plays twin brothers whose deadly pact
plunges them into the sordid depths of the Argentine underworld.
A married doctor living in a posh Buenos Aires apartment, Agustín feels increasingly
trapped by his comfortable yet unfulfilling lifestyle, his restlessness and depression
made all the more acute when his wife sets out to adopt a baby. Agustín's quiet
desperation is suddenly alleviated when his identical twin brother Pedro pays an
unexpected visit and discloses news of his terminal illness — along with a startling final
request. Seizing what may be his last opportunity to reinvent himself and return to a life
he had left behind, Agustín adopts Pedro's identity and travels to the Tigre Delta, a
labyrinthine tangle of islands and rivers where the brothers spent their youth. Once a
secluded weekend paradise for the wealthy of Buenos Aires, it now plays host to a
criminal underworld, brimming with outcasts, refugees, and ex-convicts. In this murky
backwater, the unwitting Agustín becomes embroiled in Pedro's criminal past, and finds
himself inheriting the vendettas of old, murderous acquaintances. Caught in a far less
tender trap than the affluent domesticity of his former life, his violent fight for survival
begins.
Mortensen, in all his rugged, four-fisted glory, gives a tour-de-force performance as two
deeply complex men, each beset with their own demons, while first-time feature
filmmaker Piterbarg offers a fascinating, immersive portrait of the delta's isolated
community, a strange mirror-world with its own inverted code of conduct and draconian
laws. Vividly realized and punctuated with sudden, startling twists, Everybody Has a
Plan is a gripping and suspenseful study of the costs of freedom. - Diana Sanchez,
Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Fire in The Blood
Dir: Dylan Mohan Gray
USA
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/59087955
2012
84 mins
Cert: CLUB
In 1996, the development of antiretroviral drug therapies may not have cured AIDS, but
the breakthrough made the disease treatable—if patients could afford the hefty price tag.
For millions in the developing world, the cost kept essential medicines out of reach and
meant they would continue to die. Hope came in the form of low-cost generic drugs
manufactured in India and elsewhere, but pharmaceutical companies—favoring patents
over patients and profits over the prevention of unnecessary deaths—threatened legal
action against any company that dared circumvent their control of the market. The
struggle to overcome this inconceivably greedy blockade—with literally life or death
stakes—is at the heart of Dylan Mohan Gray’s absorbing documentary.
Gray uses the response to the AIDS crisis in Africa to reveal the power of the drug
companies and the impact of their lobby on the federal government. The implications of
their ability to effectively deny critical treatment based on economic inequities are more
far reaching than any single disease. – Sundance Film Festival 2012
First Position
Dir: Bess Kargman
Language: English
USA
2011
90 mins
Cert: CLUB
Available to programme: June
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmiBXdBNIXE
In ballet, "first position" refers to a dancer's starting pose: arms bent, hands just above
the navel. It's the point from which countless permutations spin out, each blossoming
into variations upon variations. It's a fitting title for Bess Kargman's documentary, which
traces the variances and vicissitudes of a half-dozen young dancers as they swirl
through their own budding careers, converging at New York City's hyper-competitive
Youth American Grand Prix, a sort of draft for aspiring classical dancers. The judges
there represent the finest professional companies and academies in the world,
commingling en masse to scout the prospects of younger dancers and dispensing
esteemed scholarships to those in their mid-teens.
In its opening moments, First Position seems giddily filtered through the POV of one of
its young subjects. Kargman's camera hyperactively jitters, the edges of the frame cut off
adults' heads. It's invigorating, briefly, before its settles into conventionality, crosscutting
between its subjects and their roundabout routes to the Grand Prix's dimmed stage.
There's Aran from Naples, where his naval dad is stationed; Michaela, adopted out of a
Sierra Leone orphanage with her sister; siblings Jules and Miko, who come from a selfproclaimed "ballet family"; Joan, who left his family in Colombia to train for London's
Royal Ballet School; and Rebecca, an outwardly ordinary middle-American cheerleader
gifted with enormous talent. ("I think I lead a pretty normal life," she says, driving a
Honda with steering wheel gilded in downy pink fur.)
The doc bops along, passing between these dancers. It feels almost unbidden in places;
a shot of a Jules and Miko eating dinner bleeds into crosscut scenes that analyze the
dancers' diets, then back to Joan fretting over his family back in Colombia. Like most
backstage dramas and sports pictures, First Position is obsessed with ritual and detail,
with the laundry room of aspirant prima ballerinas stretching against washer-dryers and
with Aran's wooden "foot-stretcher," a Spartan piece of sculpted wood that looks like it
survived the Inquisition. "There're no people like show people," someone backstage
offers later in the film. Kargman presents it as a sort of knowing platitude, set in relief
against the film's preceding scenes of preparative banality.
Post-Black Swan, there may be a tendency to offer a manic, wrenched portrait of ballet,
one which traces all the psychological and social strain, in addition to the blistered heels
and bruised Achilles' tendons. There's a bit of this, mostly relegated to a dinner
conversation where Rebecca's father loosely tallies the money he's spent on his
daughter's "career," and the expectation that there be some kind of return on his
investment. But it's to the film's credit that it doesn't get hung up on its fleeting elements
of Toddlers & Tiaras-styled kiddie exploitation.
First Position opens itself to a critique of the pseudo-mystical thinking that shapes
conceptions of ballet and ballerinas. Coaches, parents, judges, and the Grand Priz
hopefuls themselves talk about "gut," "passion," "hunger," and all those other irreducible,
frustratingly abstract qualities that apparently define the potential of a young classical
dancer. It's classical exceptionalist mumbo jumbo, and Kargman doesn't bother to
complicate it. But then this never seems like her project. Instead, First Position twists out
its six narrative threads with measured compassion and even-handedness, winding back
into its at-ready starting pose with its modest intentions left safely intact. - John Semley,
Slant magazine
Winner - DOCNYC Audience Award 2011
Winner - San Francisco Documentary Festival Jury Prize 2011
For Ellen
Dir: So Yong Kim
2012
USA
94 mins
Starring: Paul Dano, Jon Heder, Shaylena Mandigo
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO01g_ZkbPY
Cert: CLUB
With a directorial voice as consistent as that of any current American independent
filmmaker, So Yong Kim takes what could have been routine story elements and
transforms them into something deeply sad and touching in For Ellen. As a struggling
rocker making a last-ditch attempt to gain shared custody of his daughter, Paul Dano
delivers a beautifully wrought performance in a different key from any of his previous
roles.
The separation of parents from children, through choice and circumstance, is a driving
theme in Kim's increasingly fascinating filmography, and here, she reverses the kids'
perspective offered in Treeless Mountain to observe that of a parent trying to restore the
connection. It's also her third film set in firmly in as many countries, from Canada in In
Between Days to South Korea in Treeless to a thoroughly American wintry landscape in
For Ellen.
That setting is vivid from the film's first moments, as Joby (Dano) drives through the
night to a meeting of lawyers and ex-wife Claire (Margarita Leveiva). Joby is unnerved
that he can't speak to Claire directly, but rather has to go through his attorney Fred (Jon
Heder). Above all, he's unwilling to sign the final divorce papers until he can gain some
shared custody of little daughter Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo).
As Kim demonstrated in her previous work, written and improvised dialogue function
side-by-side throughout; this is apparent in this initial meeting and in a subsequent
parking-lot confrontation between a desperate Joby and an impervious Claire, who then
effectively vanishes from the film. Within the pic's first 15 minutes, Dano's intense
commitment to the role, combined with the partially improvised dialogue, establishes the
kind of spontaneity that marks the strong lead performances in several of Robert
Altman's best films.
Joby is his own worst enemy, drinking himself into a stupor at nights and being a
generally unreliable lead singer-guitarist in his East Coast-based band. Kim's script
provides enough information in a single embattled phone call between Joby and a
bandmate to provide all we need to know about the lousy state of his professional
career.
More confidently than in her earlier films, Kim shows a real sense of humor in For Ellen,
with the smart casting of Napoleon Dynamite's Heder as the super-straight Fred, who
still lives at home with his mom, and invites Joby over for an awkwardly managed dinner.
The sequence spins into a memorable scene in a local bar where a startled Fred
watches Joby drunkenly prance and cavort through an air-guitar performance.
The emotional payoff arrives in a 28-minute sequence in which Joby is finally granted a
two-hour visit with Ellen. Dano and Mandigo interact with each other over a span of
activities that begin awkwardly and feel so real as to blur the line between actors getting
a sense of each other and characters striving for a connection; Kim's always patient
regard for her thesps yields great rewards.
The surprise entrance of someone from Joby's present is in line with the pic's view of life
as a train of unexpected events, as is Joby's last impulsive decision, ending this elegy on
a pitch-perfect note.
Supporting Dano, Heder is so far from the studied nerdiness of Napoleon that he seems
like a different actor, while child thesp Mandigo has a keen instinct for being in the
moment. The cast takes advantage of the many wordless spaces that Kim allows.
Working as always with her husband and fellow filmmaker Bradley Rust Gray as coeditor, Kim keeps the pacing slow and steady, marred only by a few mannered music
cues. Reed Morano's widescreen 35 mm cinematography conveys the deep-winter chill
as a quiet counterpoint to Joby's jangled state of mind. Location work in off-the-beatenpath East Coast sites is superb. - Variety
Gatekeepers, The
Dir: Dror Moreh
Israel
2012
95 mins
Language: English, Hebrew
Available to programme: September TBC
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bcnBGCWIMY
Shomerei Ha’Saf
Cert: CLUB
The brutal recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rivetingly recounted by some
of its most prominent players in The Gatekeepers. Granted an extraordinary level of
access to six former heads of Israel’s Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency, first-time
documaker Dror Moreh achieves a powerful and remarkably clear-eyed assessment of
how state-sanctioned violence, whether pre-emptive or retaliatory, has exacted a
crippling moral toll on the region and its pursuit of peace.
Moreh’s coup lies in not only lining up the six men who oversaw Israel’s internal
intelligence-gathering operations at various intervals from 1980 to the present, but in
getting them to speak with such unprecedented and seemingly unguarded candour
about their activities. While no film from the narrow perspective of Israeli intelligence
could purport to offer a thorough view of the conflict, what makes The Gatekeepers
ultimately so compelling is its pervasive sense of moral ambiguity. Although the men
were interviewed separately, their voices ultimately coalesce into a sustained chorus of
despair, decrying the futility of violence as a political imperative and the cruelty and
corruption of Israel since the late ’60s. - Justin Chang, Variety
Gimme The Loot
Dir: Adam Leon
USA
2012
79 mins
Cert: CLUB TBC
Starring: Tashiana Washington, Ty Hickson, Meeko Gattuso, Zoë Lescaze, Joshua
Rivera
Language: English
Available to programme: September
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/46041028
Led by his two charismatic young lead actors, Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot is an
almost compulsively endearing film about two tough-talking teenagers in the Bronx. Set
over two swelteringly hot summer days during which they plan to make their names by
pulling off New York’s most daring graffiti-writing heist, Gimme The Loot’s fast-talking
Malcolm (Hickson) and Sofia (Washington) are expertly-written and performed
characters who neatly skewer some stereotypes.
Already set for US distribution through Sundance Selects and winner of the Grand Jury
prize at this year’s SXSW, Gimme The Loot is instantly a classic New York film, which
stands to be just as - if not more - popular in international arthouse play. Leon marks his
card as a director, writer, and authentic observer (some of his dialogue is markedly
astute and very funny), but it’s Hickson and Washington who dominate as two teenage
graffiti artists and small-scale scammers.
Using handheld (of the blissfully smooth variety), Jonathan Miller’s lens manages to
capture the breadth of the city in sun-bleached summer while also narrowing in the focus
to the limited part of it occupied by platonic friends Malcolm and Sofia. This is clearly
low-budget film-making, but the constraints manage to make make it feel all the more
authentic.
Captured at the onset raiding a local store for spray cans, Malcolm and Sofia tag another
gang’s turf and return the next day to find their artwork blitzed over with Mets logos.
This is thankfully no cue for a knife fight, however, with the pair instead hatching a
harebrained revenge scheme to “bomb the apple” - spray graffiti all over the giant apple
which appears at Shea Stadium every time the Mets score. To pull off this never-beforeachieved coup, they need to raise $500 to pay off a security guard, which is an almost
unimaginable sum to them.
Chock full of braggando but equally as inept as they are mouthy, Malcolm and Sofia
manage to lose more than they gain. Sofia takes a pair of trainers in lieu of a debt, for
example, but when she comes outside, two kids have stolen her bicycle. She gives
chase and snatches one of the thieves’ mobile phones, but she’s also scammed out of
the proceeds of that.
Malcolm, meanwhile, cons his pot dealer Donnie out of five baggies of weed and sells
them to rich kid Ginnie (Lescaze). Visiting her tony apartment may as well be a trip to
another planet for Malcolm, and when he searches there for something to steal, he
pathetically ends up grabbing from the penny jar. The key she wears on a chain around
her neck to the family’s jewelry box could be the answer to Malcolm and Sofia’s prayers,
however, and they enlist their tattooed pal Champion (Meeker) to help rob the
apartment.
Gimme The Loot is fresh and good-humoured, light on its feet (which, in Malcolm’s case,
end up being shoeless) and full of unexpected moments. Even the score, which might
normally be expected to crash around in a film like this, is asturely applied and infused
with older numbers, the proceeds playing out to Marion Williams’ version of I Shall Be
Released. Careers could start here - apart from Leon, both lead actors are making their
debut, as is Zoe Lescase, having fun as the spoilt rich kid. It would be a surprise, and
indeed a disappointment, not to see more of them. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen Daily
Good Vibrations
Dir: Glenn Leyburn, Lisa Barros D’Sa
2012 UK, Ireland 102 mins Cert: 15A
Starring: Richard Dormer, Jodie Whittaker, Karl Johnson, Liam Cunningham,
Adrian Dunbar, Dylan Moran
Language: English
Available to programme: September
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/65055920
VIEWING:SESSIONS Rating: 87.5% from 54 responses
A chronicle of Terri Hooley’s life, Good Vibrations is the tale of how one chancer/recordshop owner was an instrumental player in bringing the punk movement to Belfast. Terri
(with one eye) grew up in Belfast and decided to open his shop, Good Vibrations, in
Victoria Street, one of the most bombed streets in Belfast, during the height of the
Troubles .
As well as being a hub for music buffs, Good Vibrations was also home to a record label
which was for responsible for launching the career of bands such as The Undertones,
Rudi, and The Outcasts. As Terri’s obsession with music grew his relationship with his
remarkably tolerant wife started to fall apart, and he ended up in quite a bit of trouble.
After the credits rolled the real-life, and certainly larger than life, man himself graced the
stage. Terri Hooley wowed us with a rowdy and touching speech, in which he included
the fact at one point he had leave the cinema to have a cry –and of course a pint.
Another thing his appearance definitely established was what an utterly fantastic job
Richard Dormer did at portraying him on screen. His accent and mannerisms were eerily
accurate. His charm and warmth on screen was a massive contrast to his performance
in Jump, which graced the same screen the evening before.
A charming, uplifting alternative to the usual bleak portrayal of ’70s Belfast, Good
Vibrations is a skillfully assembled film that really showcased a fantastic cast. The music
is utilised perfectly and gives an exciting lift to the film, to the point where you’ll be
bopping in your seat. For the most part the plot avoids the Cinematic Underdog clichés
and just works perfectly as a warm tribute to an extraordinary man. - Gemma Creagh,
Film Ireland Magazine
Winner – Best Irish Film, Galway Film Fleadh 2012
Hijacking, A
Dir: Tobias Lindholm
2012
Denmark
103 mins
Starring: Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim
Language: Danish
Available to programme: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyMegiVnYwM
Kapringen
Cert: 15A
A tense and intricately shot drama, writer/director Tobias Lindholm’s solo debut is a
powerful and intensely watchable film as it tackles the high-pressure negotiations over a
hijacked ship. Lindholm wrote for the award-winning Danish TV series Borgen, as well
as scripting Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, while with Michael Noer he co-directed the
tough prison drama R.
The film opens with simple sequences of the ship’s cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) going
about his work, but never actually shows the hijacking of the Rozen, a cargo ship in the
Indian Ocean, instead skipping two days forward to see CEO Peter (Søren Malling) first
discover his company’s vessel has been hijacked. Over the coming weeks Peter has to
haggle with translator Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), while on board the Rozen, Mikkel and
his fellow shipmates are locked below decks and start to lose hope that they will ever
escape alive.
Pilou Asbæk (who starred in R) is moving and memorable as the genial chef whose
sanity starts to crack, while equally fine is Søren Malling as the shrewd, calm and
professional businessman who feels he must take responsibility for the situation, but is
not fully prepared for haggling over men’s lives. - Mark Adams, Screen International
Winner – Best Film, Thessaloniki Film Festival 2012
I Wish
Dir: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
2011
Japan
127 mins
Starring: Koki Maeda, Oshiro Maeda, Kirin Kiki, Joe Odagiri
Language: Japanese
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7EH84rQ0SE
Kiseki
Cert: CLUB
One of the year's best films has arrived quietly, unnoticed by the awards-season
cheerleaders, but with its delicacy and complexity, it puts the Oscar-bait to shame.
Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish has taken two years to come to the UK. It has been more
than worth the wait.
Like his earlier movie Still Walking, this is a deeply considered Japanese family drama in
the tradition of Ozu, with echoes of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang – moving,
sometimes heartbreakingly sad, often mysterious. The film is about the powerful
imperative of family unity, but also about the inevitability, and even desirability, of
families finally disintegrating and allowing everyone involved a painful kind of freedom.
The original title is Kiseki, or “Miracle", and a miracle is being longed for by two brothers,
around nine or 10 years old: they are Koichi and Ryu, played by real-life brothers Koki
and Ohshirô Maeda, from whom the director gets terrifically natural and relaxed
performances. Their mum and dad have broken up; Nozomi (Nene Ohtsuka) has
returned to live with her parents and taken a demeaning supermarket job in her
hometown of Kagoshima, within sight of the Sakura-jima volcano, which, with eerie calm,
like a figure in a painting, is in a state of silent eruption on the distant skyline. It deposits
a fine film of ash over everything, which the city-dwellers must continually clean away.
Koreeda does not belabour the metaphorical quality of this volcano, or the Pompeisnapshot of ordinariness he himself records. Meanwhile the father, Kenji, (Jô Odagiri)
stays in Osaka, where he pursues the laid-back slacker lifestyle that so infuriated
Nozomi, failing to hold down day jobs while in the evenings trying to be a guitarist in a
band.
The difficult and upsetting thing about this arrangement – never fully discussed by
anyone, adult or child – is that the warring parents have taken a child each: withdrawn,
thoughtful Koichi has gone to his mother and grandparents; easygoing and smiley Ryu
has gone to live with his dad. Clearly, this setup is a way the couple have found of
signalling to others and to each other that the breakup is temporary; they are taking a
break and sharing the childcare burden equally, though without fully considering how the
children will feel about it. But as the days and months go by, Koichi can feel the situation
hardening into permanence and, talking with his brother on his mobile, hatches a
strange and poignant new plan: he has heard that the two newly built bullet train lines
create a supernatural energy at the point where the trains whoosh past each other. If the
boys can just contrive to skive off school and make a wish at this focal point, their
happiness can be restored.
Much of the richness and fascination consists in showing how everyone's lives are just
rolling along – and in showing how there are other lives and other stories developing in
parallel to the main event and beginning to mean just as much. One of Koichi's friends
has developed a crush on his teacher and steals her bicycle bell; Koichi's grandfather,
who is trying to market his own brand of sweets, finds a new ally in Koichi himself, who
is willing to taste them and share his opinions. One of Ryu's friends is a child actor
getting work on ads and TV shows, and we see her mother, a failed actress, becoming
restive and resentful. These narratives are branching out unobtrusively, but with quiet
purpose and definition.
How much weight should we attach to each detail? Who is behaving badly – or behaving
significantly? What ought and ought not to be happening? Part of the film's wisdom
resides in declining to take a view. As the boys' dad says: "There's room in this world for
wasteful things. Imagine if everything had meaning. You'd choke." It's a credo that
colours the montage of still images that Koreeda produces just before the end. And
when the boys finally meet, the encounter is not as intimate or climactic as Koichi had
wanted; or, for them, as significant. Yet there is a resolution, of sorts. Perhaps their mum
and dad's split is temporary after all. But then, so is everything.
Since his fascinating feature breakthrough, Afterlife, in 1998, Koreeda has established
himself as a supremely intelligent and valuable film-maker: I Wish is the moving and
deeply satisfying work of a director who just keeps on getting better. – Peter Bradshaw,
The Guardian
I’m So Excited
Los amantes pasajeros
Dir: Pedro Almodovar
2013
Spain
90 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Javier Camara, Cecilia Roth, Lola Duenas, Raul Arevalo, Carlos Areces,
Antonio de la Torre, Hugo Silva
Language: Spanish
Available to programme: TBC
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av28lWMCgHg
The Skin I Live In, the last film from Pedro Almodóvar, looked to be backing away from
the grown-up nuance that has characterised so much of his work over the past decade.
That sleek, gripping body horror made no effort to impress the neighbours with any
suburban respectability. Still, it had an icy seriousness to it that placed it firmly in arthouse territory.
I’m So Excited is something else altogether. Almodóvar has confirmed that he is seeking
to rekindle the naughty hedonistic energy of his very earliest films. Decades before he
became a suitable subject for PhD theses, he was wrapping camp in brightly coloured
paper and plastering the gayest bows on the resulting package.
The film begins with charming dual cameos from Pedro’s old chums, Penélope Cruz and
Antonio Banderas, as romantically involved ground staff at a Spanish airport. Distracted
by some happy news, they neglect their work and trigger a catastrophe that results in the
crippling of an aircraft’s undercarriage.
The plane is stranded in the atmosphere and –with security tightened due to a UN
conference on the ground – no airport is able to offer runway space for an emergency
landing. Surely they can’t be serious? They aren’t (and stop calling me Shirley).
From brash start to breezy end, I’m So Excited exploits the situation for farce, both high
and low. The flight attendants, each as camp as the next, set out to distract from the
crisis with an orgy of intoxication and aberration. The economy passengers are all
sedated into comas. Jugs of champagne cocktail are passed around business class.
Yes, the attendants really do stage an interpretation of I’m So Excited by The Pointer
Sisters.
On the surface, the film appears to be plumbing new heights (or depths) of bold triviality.
If ITV presented Christopher Biggins with a similar sitcom in the 1970s, he might very
well have rejected the project as too aggressively camp and inconsequential.
Squint at the screen, however, and it becomes clear that Almodóvar has a serious
purpose in mind. The film works as a rigorous metaphor for the current malaise in
Spanish society. Riddled with debt, paralysed by political indecision, the country circles
endlessly in a class of stratospheric limbo. The sedated economy-class passengers
stand in for the excluded proletariat. The squabbling, self-absorbed business travellers
represent various aspects of the ruling elite.
Cecilia Roth, an Almodóvar regular, plays a self-obsessed dominatrix who, while plying
her trade, has picked up reams of damaging information on the great and good. A newly
married couple are travelling with a lower-intestine’s worth of illegal narcotics. The most
suave and well-dressed of the bunch turns out to be a hitman.
Almodóvar may be seeking to bring us back to the 1980s. But the combination of cold
metaphor and hot farce – played almost entirely in one set – also suggests the livelier
schools of British agit-prop theatre from a decade earlier. The comedy is broad, the
metaphors explicit. The trick with such beasts is to lure you in with the easy-to-swallow
coating and then, as you suck off the sugar, invite you to ponder the more complex
flavours within.
It’s hard to fault Almodóvar’s political motivations: his film takes swipes at all the right
targets; the atmosphere of panic is well maintained. Unfortunately, I’m so Excited
doesn’t quite work well enough as a straight-up comedy. The director draws highpowered, theatrical performances from his energetic cast. The production design has a
nice plasticky quality to it. But the jokes fly so frantically that the viewer never really gets
the chance to absorb the structure (if there is any).
For all the high intentions, I’m So Excited comes across as minor Almodóvar. There are,
of course, far worse things than that. – Donald Clarke, The Irish Times
In The House
Dans La Maison
Dir: Francois Ozon
2012
France
105 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner, Denis
Menochet, Ernst Umhauer, Bastien Ughetto, Jean-Francois Balmer, Yolande
Moreau, Catherine Davenier
Language: French
Available to programme: August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CJQo0NF7uY
François Ozon’s seductive new film is perhaps his strongest work since Swimming Pool;
a delicious, teasing reflection on mentoring, the creative process and the very nature of
fiction, charged with the same flavourful air of dangerous sensuality and subversive
humour that first put its French writer-director on the map.
Literature teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is beyond despair over his students’ refusal
to engage. So when, as a written assignment, Claude (Ernst Umhauer) turns in a
meticulously detailed account of his weekend that’s as psychologically intriguing as it is
ethically troubling, Germain is hooked. Claude’s serialized soap opera revolves around
the ‘normal’ middle-class family of his fellow student Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), a source
of envy and desire. But the real object he covets is Rapha’s exquisitely bored mother
Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner). As we watch each new episode unfold, Germain shares
the chapters with his frustrated wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas, in fine acerbic form).
Doing a complete switch from his more comic roles and his obnoxious character in
Ozon’s Potiche, Luchini plays a richly contradictory figure here. Part poignant sad sack,
part uptight prig and part exploitative predator, his participation in Claude’s story
becoming almost maniacally voyeuristic. - David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
Winner - Golden Shell, San Sebastián International Film Festival
Kuma
Dir: Umut Dag
Austria
2011
93 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Nihal Koldas, Begüm Akkaya, Vedat Erincin, Murathan Muslu, Alev Irmak
Language: German, Turkish
Available to programme: November
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH8EDfGPQxA
Every family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy famously noted, though the
unhappiness of the Turkish immigrant family in Kuma seems to suggest that some
fictional clans suffer from narrative conventions that are far from unique. Debuting
Kurdish-Austrian director Umut Dag does find moments of grace in quite a few individual
scenes, and the acting from the femme-dominated cast is strong, turning this into an
intermittently fascinating picture about an extended household undergoing a litany of
assorted immigrant-family ills.
Initially and intentionally somewhat messy and vague, the script (by tyro scribe Petra
Ladinigg) throws audiences straight into the traditional Turkish wedding of fair, 19-yearold country lass Ayse (Begum Akkaya) and her handsome hubby, Hasan (Murathan
Muslu). After a teary goodbye, Hasan and his family, led by his kind father, Mustafa
(Vedat Erincin), take the timid Ayse back to Austria, where they live.
It slowly emerges that Hasan was a stand-in for the aging Mustafa, who, at the
insistence of his cancer-ridden wife, Fatma (Nihal Koldas), has taken a second spouse
to be her substitute, should she not survive chemotherapy. Hasan seems to accept the
solution for reasons telegraphed too obviously early on, but the two eldest of his five
siblings find it harder to accept a potential surrogate mother from the Turkish countryside
who speaks no German and is still a teenager herself.
Like many first features, the pic tries to cover far too much ground, giving the impression
that all the potential ills that could befall a family -- life-threatening illnesses, death,
extramarital affairs, homosexuality -- have conspired to jointly visit Mustafa's brood in the
space of year or so.
Dag's surehanded direction of individual scenes and elliptical storytelling, with numerous
fade-to-blacks and temporal jumps, ensure that Kuma rarely feels like a soap opera,
even though each new narrative twist distracts from the overarching theme: the constant
tug of war between the older generation and its offspring, and the difference in values
between a family's native country and the country they live in. These tensions most
clearly come to the fore in the pic's most successful element: the close, increasingly
complex relationship between Fatima and Ayse, convincingly limned by Koldas and
Akkaya, respectively.
Alev Irmak and Dilara Karabayir, as the bickering eldest sisters of the family, also
impress, while Muslu, from Dag's short Papa, gets one strong confessional scene in the
family bathroom. Turkish-German vet Erincin (Shahada, Almanya) is a benign presence
as the hard-working father.
Lenser Carsten Thiele allows a little too much light into his lens, flattening colors and
sacrificing depth of field, while direct light sources occasionally still pose a problem the
digital camera can't quite handle. That said, the widescreen images feel entirely natural
in they way they follow the characters in the cramped quarters of the family home or the
Turkish supermarket where Ayse is forced to take a job.
Costumes do a good job of conveying the sense of living between two cultures, while Iva
Zabkar's score gently supports the proceedings. - Boyd Van Hoeij, Variety
Love is All You Need
Den skaldede frisør
Dir: Susanne Bier
2012
Denmark
116 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Trine Dyrholm, Pierce Brosnan, Molly Blixt Egelind, Sebastien Jensen,
Paprika Steen, Kim Bodnia, Christiane Schaumburg-Muller, Micky Skeel Hansen
Language: Danish, English
Available to programme: mid September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhAsiJ8iOHU
Pierce Brosnan stars in the innocuously-titled but gloriously enjoyable Love is All You
Need, the latest film from the Danish director Susanne Bier, whose In A Better World
won the foreign language Oscar in 2011.
Brosnan plays Philip, a widower and big noise on the Copenhagen fruit and vegetable
wholesale scene who is hosting his son’s wedding at his villa in Sorrento. Also in
attendance is the mother of the bride, Ida (Trine Dyrholm – A Royal Affair), a cancer
survivor who has just completed a course of chemotherapy but is still awaiting the final
all-clear. Ida’s tubby husband has absconded with the girl from accounts, so she, like
Philip, is without a date. As they make the final preparations for their offspring’s nuptials,
the flames of love start to catch.
Anders Thomas Jensen’s script, which is just about equal parts English and Danish, is
packed with humour that springs from recognisable human foibles, and Brosnan and
Dyrholm have fizzingly good chemistry together. Love is All You Need has been made
for an audience rarely catered for by the film industry: intelligent adults who enjoy
perceptive and good-hearted drama. - Robbie Collin, The Daily Telegraph
Me and You
Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci
2012
Italy
103 mins
Starring: Jacopo Olmo Antinori, Tea Falco, Sonia Bergamasco
Language: Italian
Available to programme: mid July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwXIAUl1hXs
Io e Te
Cert: CLUB
It has been almost a decade since Bernardo Bertolucci’s last film, but Me and You
shows that the great Italian auteur has lost none of his mastery. Youth has been a
particular fascination for Bertolucci in the latter part of his career, whether examined
through Stealing Beauty’s intergenerational clash or The Dreamers’ nostalgic portrait of
a trio of young adults intertwined in the thrills of sex and politics during the events of May
’68 in Paris. While politics and sex are virtually absent from Me and You, generational
tensions are still clearly present in this powerful examination of two troubled siblings.
Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) is a fourteen-year-old wrestling with his selfconsciousness through sessions with his therapist and mother. In a striking show of
independence, he decides to skip a week-long class ski trip and hole up alone in the
family’s storage basement. However, Lorenzo’s dream of a week of solitary escape is
interrupted by the unexpected appearance of his twentysomething half-sister Olivia (Tea
Falco), who discovers his hideout while rummaging around in the cellar. Though Olivia
vows to keep Lorenzo’s secret safe, she also brings a new set of complications into this
strange situation: she is a junkie who has decided it’s time to go cold turkey. As Olivia
struggles with her demons, she and Lorenzo are forced to confront the complex history
that has riven their family and their relationship.
Working with two newcomers, Bertolucci crafts a marvelously moving tale of young
people grappling with the weight of their family legacy — a subject that has been a lifelong obsession of Bertolucci’s, from Before the Revolution to The Spider’s Stratagem to
The Last Emperor. If Me and You calls to mind Bertolucci’s earlier work, it is no accident.
Technically masterful and in full control of his medium, he has returned with a film of
high distinction. - Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival
Midnight’s Children
Dir: Deepa Mehta
2012
India/UK
146 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Shabana Azmi
Language: English, Hindi
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11ki68cKdoM
You wait a year for a film version of a Booker prize-winning magical realist novel largely
concerned with people from the Indian subcontinent and widely considered to be
unfilmable. Then suddenly two come along: Life of Pi and Midnight's Children. The
lesser of the two, though a movie of ambition and distinction, Midnight's Children was
published in 1981 and is adapted for the screen by its author Salman Rushdie, who also
delivers the eloquent narration, a reworking of the book's framing device.
As a film and novel, Midnight's Children is a great baggy work covering over 60 years in
the turbulent history of India and Pakistan from the end of the second world war up to
Indira Gandhi's repressive "Emergency" of the late 1970s, as they affect five generations
of a well-off Muslim clan and their associates in Kashmir, Agra, Mumbai, Karachi. It
brings together Dickens, Kipling and Shakespeare, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam,
comedy, tragedy and farce, and has as its moral and dramatic fulcrum the year 1947
when the misjudged partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was insisted
upon by the Muslims and acquiesced in by the departing British.
Rushdie's brilliant insight was to bring together the private and public lives of those
involved by inventing a mystical bond between the children born around the midnight
hour of 17 August 1947. The narrator and central character famously remarks: "I had
been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of
my country." He and his peers are given special powers (prophecy, magic,
metamorphosis) in exchange for terrible responsibilities, and they become the
embodiment of the best hope of the two nations during a period of bad faith, violence
and the betrayal of democracy. At the centre is a variation of Mark Twain's tale The
Prince and the Pauper: a rich boy and the son of a street musician are swapped at birth
in the early seconds of 18 August by a misguided midwife, who (following the political
dictates of her communist lover) believes she is exercising benign social engineering. So
the central characters have divided identities, a situation made even more complex by
the concealed paternity (from a European source) of one of them. The lesser of these
charismatic children suffers most through the dropping of sub-plots and the trimming of
character and loss of nuance demanded by reducing the film to some 150 minutes.
In the first post-Partition episode of Midnight's Children, we're briefly shown a poster of
the 1957 film Mother India, the most popular and revered of all Bollywood movies. It
features the monstre sacré, Nargis, the country's biggest postwar star, as a suffering
peasant mother, a symbolic Mother Courage figure of independent India. This is a clear
hint that the makers consider Midnight's Children a sophisticated urban riposte to Mother
India's sentimental rural story. Deepa Mehta, born and educated in India, is an
established film-maker living in Canada. Salman Rushdie, born in Mumbai and educated
in Britain, is the subcontinent's most visible cosmopolitan exile. They are united by this
film in both sorrow and anger for what their homeland is, and drawn together in hopeful
anticipation of what it still might be. – Philip French, The Observer
Neighbouring Sounds
O Som Ao Redor
Dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho
2012
Brazil
131 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Gustavo Jahn, Irandhir Santos, Irma Brown, Maeve Jinkings, Sebastião
Formiga, Yuri Holanda
Language: Portuguese
Available to programme: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s0vCB0i1ts
A dazzling ensemble drama, Neighbouring Sounds is set among a handful of residents
in a middle-class street in the northern Brazilian city of Recife. Focusing on the
appearance of a gang of private security guards who offer householders the promise of
protection, writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho offers revealing fragments of a society
frayed by paranoia.
A young man wakes up to find his girlfriend’s car has been broken into. A mother
struggles to sleep, disturbed by the barking of guard dogs next door. An ageing patriarch
seeks refuge from the tumult of the ever-changing city in the rural peace of his one-time
plantation hideaway.
The results thrillingly defy categorisation, but what emerges under Filho’s precise, quietly
virtuoso direction is a film of novelistic richness and sly provocation; a kind of urban
horror story about the fear of violence that ripples under the fragile poise of everyday
middle-class life in Brazil. This is a directorial debut of astonishing assurance.
- Edward Lawrenson, BFI London Film Festival
Winner – FIPRESCI Award, Rotterdam Film Festival 2012
No
Dir: Pablo Larrain
2012
Chile
117 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Luis Gnecco, Antonia Zegers,
Marcial Tagle, Nestor Cantillana, Jaime Vadell, Pascal Montero
Language: Spanish
Available to programme: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMPNQzJF49E
Completing a loose trilogy on the Pinochet dictatorship that he began with Tony Manero
and Post Mortem, Chilean director Pablo Larrain delves deep into the behind-the-scenes
machinations of political marketing in No, a dense chronicle of the 1988 plebiscite that
led to Chile’s first democratically elected government in 17 years. Anchored by an
admirably measured performance from Gael Garcia Bernal as the maverick advertising
ace who spearheaded the winning campaign, the quietly impassioned film seems a
natural for intelligent arthouse audiences. But it faces a considerable central challenge.
That obstacle is the decision by Larrain, working with cinematographer Sergio
Armstrong, to shoot the entire film using a period-appropriate U-matic video camera from
the early ‘80s. The choice makes aesthetic sense in terms of evoking the era and
allowing for dramatic scenes to be smoothly integrated with extensive archival footage,
including large chunks from referendum TV spots for both Yes and No sides.
Adapted by Pedro Peirano (The Maid) from Antonio Skarmeta’s play Referendum, the
story centers on René Saavedra (Bernal), a composite of the two men most instrumental
in the anti-regime No campaign. (They make cameo appearances here, ironically as
Pinochet flunkies.)
Like a latter-day Don Draper, René is amusingly introduced presenting a cheesy
American-style commercial for Free cola to clients, its zesty message selling a spirit of
youthful rebellion meant to represent the new Chile. Approached to work on the No
campaign by Urrutia (Luis Gnecco), a veteran Socialist with connections to his family,
René is initially ambivalent. The referendum is viewed as a charade with a foregone
conclusion – a concession to mounting international pressure to legitimize the Pinochet
government. René’s estranged wife Veronica (Antonia Zegers), a leftist radical, is
especially dismissive of the exercise. But driven in part by the legacy of his politicaldissident father, René gets on board with Urrutia’s conviction that the No vote could
actually pass.
His involvement is complicated by the fact that his oily ad agency boss, Lucho Guzman
(Alfredo Castro), is firmly in the Pinochet camp. He reports to a smug minister (Jaime
Vadell) and steps up his consultancy when the Yes think tank gets nervous that public
support is shifting to a No vote.
Following a model not unlike that of Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay for Milk, Peraino
has René assemble a group of trusted collaborators. That includes his former mentor
(Nestor Cantillana), who nervously insists on remaining behind the scenes for fear of
repercussions, and a prickly cameraman-director (Marcial Tagle). But the opportunities
for character development and inter-personal conflict are under-explored, instead
favoring painstakingly detailed accounts of the rival campaigns. More attention could
also have been given to a mildly suspenseful thread running through, as regime scare
tactics unsettle the No team, causing René to fear for the safety of his young son
(Pascal Montero).
But while the film’s human drama – including René’s melancholy attempts to reunite his
family – is a little low on emotional impact, the nitty-gritty of the campaign’s evolution
provides an engrossing narrative.
Raising the hackles of hardliners who feel the scant 15-minute nightly allocation of
national airtime should go to evidence of violence, exiles, desaparecidos and other
human rights violations under Pinochet, René instead turns to the same strategies used
to sell sodas and microwaves. He reasons that middle-class complacency and fear of a
return to poverty will limit voter turnout, so remolds the spots to focus on the promise of
happiness. A rainbow logo is slapped on the campaign, with footage of sunny meadows
and exultant dancers backed by an upbeat anthem. A tad more economy here might
have helped pump tension in the run-up to the vote, but given the fascination with
advertising driven by Mad Men, there are worse areas in which to dawdle.
A welcome strain of sly humor accompanies the use of hokey marketing tricks and
simplistic messages to bring down a dictatorship. That element is enhanced when the
Yes side, aided by Guzman, modifies its campaign accordingly. The film also ends on a
note of droll cynicism. Via Bernal’s subdued intensity and the look of skepticism with
which he acknowledges his victory, Larrain hints that René’s methods are part of a
somewhat Faustian pact, and that newly democratic Chile would continue to be a
country divided along lines of wealth and power. - David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Our Children
À perdre la raison
Dir: Joachim Lafosse
2012
France
110 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Emilie Dequenne, Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Stephane Bissot, Mounia
Raoui, Redouane Behache, Baya Belal, Nathalie Boutefeu
Language: French
Available to programme: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NahXt2OhS3Y
An arresting portrait of one woman’s gradual slide, Our Children (À Perdre la Raison)
represents another tightly wound study of domestic malaise from Belgian auteur
Joachim Lafosse (Private Property). Featuring a riveting lead turn from Emilie Dequenne
as a young mother caught between two men (A Prophet stars Tahar Rahim and Niels
Arestrup) in a claustrophobic nightmare, it’s a gloomy and penetrating psychological
drama.
The story of Belgian schoolteacher, Murielle (Dequenne), and Moroccan immigrant,
Mounir (Rahim), starts off on a rather upbeat note with them falling madly in love and
deciding to live together in the home of Mounir’s surrogate father, Doctor Pinget
(Arestrup). But as Murielle quickly learns, the physician casts a paralyzing shadow over
his young ward. When Murielle gives birth to a third child, the burden it places on the two
parents is exacerbated by the doctor’s increasingly guru-like sway over Mounir. And as
Murielle gets further sucked into the oppressive homestead, her escape routes slowly
dry up. - Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
Winner - Emilie Dequenne, Best Actress, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Outside Satan
Hors Satan
Dir: Bruno Dumont
2011
France
110 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre, Juliette Brouton, Christophe Bon
Language: French
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_unNX1UmpRs
The latest from Bruno Dumont is a stark, enigmatic drama about the relationship
between a woman and a mysterious outsider on Northern France's Opal Coast.
Following his provocative, politically charged Hadewijch (LFF 2009), Bruno Dumont
gives us a spare, parable-like drama that, while seemingly metaphysical, is situated very
firmly in the contemporary real. In a film that sees the director stripping his style to the
bare bones, the narrative is set along a sparsely vegetated strip of Northern France's
'Opal Coast', where a ragged, nameless outsider (David Dewaele) camps out on a
deserted beach. He has a close but chastely detached bond with a young local woman
(Alexandra Lematre), a bond sealed in a dramatic act of violence. The man's remedies
for her troubles are surprisingly drastic, but all methods seem legitimate when you are
seemingly beyond good and evil. It's up to the viewer to interpret the title. Is the outsider
safeguarding this enclosed world against Satan? Is he himself good and evil combined
in one form?
The saturnine Dewaele and Lematre, with her quasi-Goth pallor, make a strikingly
against-the-grain duo, while Yves Cape's 'Scope camerawork explores landscapes in
downbeat, deglamourised fashion, with some heightened visual effects lending this
ostensible real world an arresting touch of the apocalyptic. – Jonathan Romney, The
Times BFI London Film Festival 2012
Play
Dir: Ruben Östlund
Sweden
2012
118 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Anas Abdirahman, Sebastian Blyckert, Yannick Diakite, Sebastian
Hegmar, Abdiaziz Hilowle, Nana Manu, John Ortiz, Kevin Vaz
Language: Swedish
Available to programme from: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsE80g0qeE
Ruben Ostlund’s thoughtful and occasionally harrowing film Play, about youngsters in
Sweden being harassed and robbed of their mobile phones and wallets by a gang of
other youths, is a fascinating exercise in psychology in a specific social environment,
and makes and interesting companion piece to the director’s last film Involuntary, that
screened in official section in Cannes in 2008.
Set against the inner city backdrop of central Gothenburg, the film details an elaborate
scheme known as the “little brother number,” involving role-play and gang rhetoric rather
than pure physical violence. Based on a series of real-life incidents recorded by Swedish
police, the scheme relies on subtle and implied menace rather than brute force.
With its young cast, languid pace and lack of the dynamism and quirky humour that
defined Involuntary, the film could appeal to purveyors of high end art house cinema, but
will be a tough film to break into mainstream screens. Thoughtful newspapers articles
could accompany, but reviews are likely to be respectful rather than passionate.
Festivals will be a likely route.
In a shopping mall in downtown Gothenburg, five youths (all black, with ages ranging
from eight or nine to mid-teens) pursue a group of three clearly relatively well-to-do
young boys and ask them the time. When one pulls out his mobile phone to look at the
time, he is accused of having stolen the phone from the first boy’s “little brother”.
The five youths then suggest that the other boys accompany them a short distance away
to show the phone to its supposed rightful owner to clear matters up. Soon the
threesome find themselves walking to a series of different locations, never allowed to
leave and forming a relationship similar to kidnapper and kidnapped.
Eventually the five boys arrange a running race, with the winner to get all - with both
groups pooling their wallets, phones etc - but naturally the five scammers cheat and the
others become their reluctant but consenting victims.
The young non-professional actors are all pretty impressive, but while their psychological
manipulation is intriguing it is ultimately never clear why the three harassed youngsters
don’t just runaway. Yes they feel ‘threatened’, but all have moments when they could
escape…plus it feels inconsistent that they would fall for such a scam in the first place,
despite the issue that the story is based on fact.
Play is elegantly shot - entirely filmed in static shots using a Red 4K camera - and while
languid at times, it is punctuated by unlikely moments of humour. There are two
incongruous shots of a band of Native American Indians in full traditional dress playing
music and then having lunch, while there is also a running sub-plot about staff on a train
worrying about a wooden baby’s cradle that is blocking exits.
It is certainly a watchable and provocative film, though perhaps feels more of a social
exercise rather than a drama. But Ruben Ostlund remains a challenging and thoughtful
filmmaker and the film offers plenty of food for thought. - Mark Adams, Screen
International
Winner - Dublin Film Critics Special Jury Prize, JDIFF 2012
Winner - Audience Award, Tromsø International Film Festival 2012
Populaire
Dir: Regis Roinsard
2012
France
111 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Romain Duris, Deborah Francois, Berenice Bejo, Shaun Benson
Language: French
Available to programme: November TBC
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCcof6WWP7Y
May Screening Day Rating: 74% from 18 responses
Surely the first period rom-com to centre on the speed-typing competitions that were all
the rage in the 1950s, Régis Roinsard’s first feature delivers a sparkling Gallic take on
what feels like a vintage Hollywood love story. Though the romance between the
ambitious trainer-boss played by Romain Duris and Déborah François’ gifted typist
follows a well-trodden narrative path, the chemistry between the two leads is positively
nuclear, and the film’s effervescent, spot-on evocation of the period is a joy to absorb.
Déborah François (The Page Turner) is a revelation as Rose Pamphyle, the girl from the
sticks who rises to become a French speed-typing champion thanks in part to the
tutelage of boss Louis Echard (Duris). Louis is a cocky insurance agent battling with a
fear of commitment that has already lost him the hand of his childhood sweetheart Marie
(The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo).
Packed with period colour this is a film that, like Mad Men, delights us with the detail of
an era that still had an uncomplicated appetite for modernity. And the neo-retro
soundtrack, with its bursts of Duane Eddy-style guitar or Platters-like vocal harmonies,
seals a package that thrives on rhythm and dexterity. - Lee Marshall, Screen
International
Post Tenebras Lux
Dir: Carlos Reygadas
2012
Mexico
115 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Nathalia Acevedo, Willebaldo Torres, Rut
Reygadas, Eleazar Reygadas
Language: Spanish
Available to programme: August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-HgLj0iepo
Carlos Reygadas’ (Battle in Heaven, Silent Light) latest won Best Director in Cannes this
year. It’s a gorgeous allusive masterpiece examining marriage, poverty, class, gender,
our place in nature and how evil lives with us in the most intimate and ordinary of places.
It’s a wonder.
Although largely non-linear in its structure, preferring instead to show a series of striking
images from the past, present and possible futures, there is a clear centre to the film.
Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) is a wealthy industrialist who has chosen to live with his
wife and two children away from the trappings of wealth and the city. Yet isolation in this
superficially idyllic rural landscape seems to have brought little peace to his world.
Juan’s marriage to Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) is suffering under the strain of sexual
ennui, the banal rigors of bringing up young children and living in a community where he
is clearly an outsider.
There is a density to this film which truly repays repeat viewings allowing its myriad
ideas to slowly rise to the fore and coalesce into perhaps Reygadas’ most personal and
complex work to-date. Its central theme, signposted quite literally in an audacious
manner very early on, is Juan’s struggle to morally navigate the welter of everyday
decisions we are all forced to make in life. The morality of family life is further
complicated by Juan’s post-colonial Mexican ethnicity and position as an employer and
elite landowner in a country with an increasingly divergent wealth divide.
But what lingers long after this dense mood piece is not only the more striking images
much discussed since its unveiling in May, but also the subtler aspects of family life, the
tender fragility of childhood and marriage, and some of the most beautiful haunting
representations of nature ever committed to film. – Independent Cinema Office
Winner – Best Director, Cannes Film Festival 2012
Reality
Dir: Matteo Garrone
2012
Italy
116 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Aniello Arena, Loredana Simioli, Nando Paone, Graziella Mariana, Nello
Iorio, Nunzia Schiano, Rosaria D’Urso
Language: Italian
Available to programme: August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42aqBouAxz8
Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah was undoubtedly a tough act to follow. Few outside of Italy
knew his earlier work (though his 2002 foray into the underworld with The Embalmer did
play the festival circuit a little). But Garrone’s sharp if sprawling account of organised
crime at work in the Neapolitan suburbs not only won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes
but enjoyed widespread box office success. So Reality had a lot to live up to.
And in many respects, it certainly succeeds in doing so. Its striking opening sequence –
shot from a helicopter as a horse-drawn golden coach makes its way through the traffic
of the suburbs beneath Vesuvius, finally arriving at a wedding of ostentatious opulence
and vulgarity – sets everything in place: the preference for long, sinuous sequence
shots, the painstaking attention to mood and detail, an impressive, almost epic sense of
scale. But it’s that last quality, carried over from Gomorrah, which is at once the film’s
strength and its shortcoming. As the narrative focuses increasingly on Luciano, a Naples
fishmonger supplementing his family’s income with scams involving kitchen goods,
who’s persuaded to seek fame and fortune by auditioning for a series of ‘Big Brother’, so
the film turns from amusing, faintly absurd satire towards ever ‘bigger’ themes. These
are concerned with the destructive role played in modern life by our obsession with
celebrity and appearance. In short, the movie becomes a little too long and heavyhanded for the more intimate and immediately plausible aspects of its subject.
That said, while the film is seldom as funny as it probably wants to be, and drags here
and there towards the end, it nevertheless has more than its fair share of strong scenes
suggestive of a latter-day La Dolce Vita. (Here it’s not a statue of Christ that hovers over
the city of Rome but a brash TV celeb, flying over a Neapolitan rave packed with tacky
revellers.) As Luciano gradually loses his grasp on reality, changing his ways in the hope
that charitable acts might gain him access to TV heaven, Garrone just about keeps
things under control long enough to make the surprisingly quiet coda emotionally
satisfying and resonant. En route, by the way, he’s helped no end by a splendid cast,
some of whom will be familiar from Gomorrah. – Geoff Andrew, Time Out London
Rebellion
L'ordre et la morale
Dir: Mathieu Kassovitz
2012
France
135 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Mathieu Kassovitz, Iabe Lapacas, Malik Zidi
Language: French
Available to programme: late September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2PvnpVfYD8
France’s maverick film-maker Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine) returns in full form as the
star, director and co-writer for this major production about a botched uprising attempt by
a handful of New Caledonian separatists who asked for their independence in April
1988, just as presidential elections were about to take place in France.
As socialist President François Mitterand faced right-wing Prime Minister Jacques Chirac
in the race for the presidency, the New Caledonia crisis turned into just one more
weapon for them to wave against each other. The media threw oil on the fire and mixed
messages were sent to the forces dispatched to restore order, all of which lead to a
brutal military response and many unnecessary victims among the native Kanaks.
Based on the memoirs of Captain Philippe Legorjus (played by Kassovitz himself), who
led the police unit in the field, Rebellion looks for all purposes like a tightly made action
drama, with effective top notch camera work, nervous editing to pump energy in every
scene, and a cast driven to perform at full steam. - Dan Fainaru, Screen International
Shell
Dir: Scott Graham
UK
2012
91 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Chloe Pirrie, Joseph Mawle, Michael Smiley, Kate Dickie, Iain de
Caestecker, Paul Hickey
Language: English
Available to programme: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpSCJA38ORY
‘Shell like the petrol station?’ asks a man of the eponymous heroine of Scott Graham’s
debut feature. ‘Shell like the beautiful thing you get in the sea,’ the affection-starved 17year-old replies.
Manning a practically disused service station in the remotest highlands of Scotland,
Shell lives with only her broken-down mechanic father Pete (Joseph Mawle) for
company. All is clearly not right in Shell’s world, but she’s intrinsically a bright soul who
has an effect on everyone she encounters. Pete, meanwhile, is taciturn, damaged, an
epileptic who is terrified of physical warmth, perhaps for good reason. This leaves Shell
alone to deal with the attentions of local loners (Graham again draws strong
performances from Michael Smiley and young Iain de Caestecker) when all she really
wants is her dad.
Graham’s shorts – Shell, and in particular Native Son – have provided a strong sense of
where this young director’s preoccupations lie. As a feature debut, Shell fulfils these
expectations while holding out the promise of more to come. Right from the opening
moments, where he plays with proportions and perspective from the window of a truck,
Graham has his say in Shell and he should find viewers who are eager to listen.
- Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International
Skin In The Game, The
Dir: Donald Taylor Black Ireland
2012
Language: English
Format: Digibeta / DVD
Available to programme from: September
Trailer: None available
May Screening Day Rating: 85% from 5 responses
74 mins
Cert: CLUB
Donald Taylor Black’s new documentary, funded by Bord Scannán na hÉireann/The Irish
Film Board, examines the current recession/financial crisis through a number of artists,
who are using it as subject matter for their work.
Participants include: Christy Moore (musician); Seán Hillen (photographer); Rita Ann
Higgins (poet); Brian Maguire (painter); David Quin (animator); Anthony Haughey
(photographer); Nicky Gogan (film-maker); David Bolger (choreographer); Gerald Dawe
(poet); and David Monahan (photographer) as they look at emigration, ghost estates and
the legacy of politicians and bankers.
Roddy Doyle has written texts for the film that are voiced by actors including Lorcan
Cranitch and Hilda Fay. - Cork Film Festival 2012
Something in The Air
Après mai
Dir: Olivier Assayas
France
2012
122 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Clement Metayer, Lola Creton, Felix Armand, India Menuez, Carole
Combes
Language: French
Available to programme: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1gI716u1IE
Made with the bittersweet clarity of hindsight and the assurance of a director in peak
form, Après Mai is Olivier Assayas’ wise and wistful memory piece on the revolutionary
fervour that suffused his young adulthood. Conjuring the mood and attitudes of 1970s
counter-culture with pinpoint detail and nary a shred of naive romanticism, this tender
but dispassionate semi-autobiographical drama offers a gentle rebuke to the celebratory
spirit of many post-68 movies.
A moody, dark-haired teen with a talent for drawing and painting, Gilles (Clément
Metayer) has been profoundly shaped by the tumult of May 1968. Gilles and his friends
mobilize themselves, covering their school with graffiti slogans by night. But when a
guard is injured during a Molotov-cocktail assault gone awry, several of them seek to
avoid suspicion by heading abroad for the summer. Gilles takes up with Christine (Lola
Créton, last seen in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Goodbye, First Love), who shares his filmmaking aspirations but has very different ideas about how to fulfil them.
Après Mai quietly demystifies its subject. The tone of the piece is wryly affectionate but
never indulgent; the experiences depicted feel emotionally true and lived-in without ever
catching the viewer up in a rush of intoxication or excitement. - Justin Chang, Variety
Thursday Till Sunday
De jueves a domingo
Dir: Dominga Sotomayor Castillo
Chile 2012 96 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Santi Ahumada, Emiliano Freifeld, Francisco Pérez-Bannen, Paola
Giannini, Jorge Becker
Language: Spanish
Available to programme from: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3YNxgvaogs
This Chilean study of the death throws of a middle class marriage introduces a
significant new talent in director Dominga Sotomayor. Ana (Paola Giannini), her
unnamed husband (Francisco Pérez-Bannen) together with their two young children
Lucia (Santi Ahumada) and Manuel (Emiliano Freifeld) set off in their car for a long
weekend camping holiday. Unknown to their children, their parents each have an
agenda for the trip. Ana hopes that this journey will be one of reconciliation and that
perhaps her husband will stay with them. Her husband however sees it as a last
goodbye, a dignified exit. The film is a finely judged balancing act rendered heartbreaking as the children slowly piece together what is going on between their parents.
Much of the film is set within the claustrophobic confines of the family car, all the more
emphasized by the rolling open landscapes of Chile outside the pressure cooker cabin.
Obliquely observed, with careful, nuanced, attention to behavioural detail, this film feels
like a close kin of Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s work. Sotomayor uses a
strikingly similar aesthetic approach with sensitive observational camerawork which is
less interested in clear compositional framing than directing our attention to the smallest
observations of its cast, not to mention the use of a child’s point of view (similarly to
Martel’s La Nina Santa) and a sensitivity to environment and landscape. The film is also
shot by Bárbara Álvarez, the DP on Martel’s The Headless Woman.
Yet while these two South American filmmakers clearly share interests both in terms of
setting and stylistic approach, Sotomayor is perhaps more interested in the emotional
inner workings of her characters and less engaged with the social politics of her country
than Martel. It’s easy to see why this film picked up the prestigious Tiger Award at this
year’s Rotterdam Film Festival as well as the Grand Prize at Poland’s New Horizons
Film Festival. - Independent Cinema Office
To The Wonder
Dir: Terrence Malick
USA
2012
112 mins
Starring: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTAzcTZTY1g
Cert: 12A
Never, even when he was starting out in the 1970s, has Terrence Malick released two
films in such quick succession. Usually the wait for his followers is long. Sometimes, as
in the twenty-year span between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, it can be
unbearable.
Now, just over a year after The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, comes a
cinematic blessing: To the Wonder, a new film from this American master and mystic
that continues his exploration of the vagaries of desire and regret that shape our time on
this planet.
Ben Affleck plays a Midwesterner who meets a woman (Olga Kurylenko) in Paris. She
returns with him to Oklahoma to be his wife, but the relationship soon falters. He finds
himself drifting towards a childhood love, played by Rachel McAdams. But, as always
with Malick, what appear to be simple motivations open up to reveal enduring truths.
Malick studied philosophy at Harvard, and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; before he
became a filmmaker, he translated Martin Heidegger. For all its visual poetry, his work
shows a passionate interest in ideas. Where The New World and The Tree of Life open
themselves to analysis of spirituality and ethics, To the Wonder continues that
intellectual investigation into the realm of politics and faith. It is also, like The Tree of
Life, gloriously engaged with cinematic form itself.
As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative
and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious
responses from his viewers. It is gratifying to note that the same man who long ago
wrote an uncredited draft of Dirty Harry now finds freedom in the transcendental.
– Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Village at The End of The World
Dir: Sarah Gavron UK-Denmark-Greenland
2012
Language: North American Indian
Available to programme from: August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql6kWqa76nQ
76 mins
Cert: CLUB
There a gentle sweetness and charm to this documentary by film-maker Sarah Gavron,
her first film since the adaptation of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane six years ago. It
follows a year in the life of Niaqornat, a remote village in north-western Greenland; it's an
Inuit fishing community of around 60 people who are desperately worried by the
imminent closure of the local fish-processing factory, and wondering if they can stage a
buy-out to run it as a co-operative.
They are also worried about climate change, and the effect that is having on fishing
waters, but it isn't clear what they can do about that. The place has an eerie beauty: the
nearest comparison I can suggest is the Scottish Highlands, and with its houses each
painted a different vivid colour, it reminded me a little of Tobermory on the Isle of Mull,
but it is unique.
The elders are worried about the young leaving, and the community suffering a slow
death: symbolic of this youth flight is cheerful 18-year-old Lars, very much in touch with
the world via the internet, and keen to get out as soon as he can. The quiet sadness of
his grandmother, who has raised him, is poignant. Gavron gets an amazing shot when a
pregnant whale is brought in by fishermen: a tiny whale foetus is cut out of it and laid
wonderingly on the shore. – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Where The Sea Used To Be
Dir: Paul Farren
Ireland
2012
80 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Stephen Walsh, Paul Farren, Laureen Leslie, Karl Argue, Julia Wakeham,
AJ Kennedy, Gary Nolan, Paul Kennedy, Pat Larkin
Language: English
Available to programme from: September
Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi2462819865/
Paul Farren’s feature debut Where the Sea Used to Be was screened at a couple of
festivals in Ireland even before it completed its production.
Produced by Sean Cuthbert, Stephen Walsh joins in as the co-star and co-writer of this
film, who previously co-scripted the Colm Meaney film How Harry Became a Tree.
This 80 minutes feature discloses story about two brothers - James and Patrick, who see
each other exactly once a year, on Christmas Eve. They meet each other, swig a drink,
say goodbye and part their ways. This time too they meet and celebrate their annual
routine. Patrick has to catch his train; the last one on Christmas Eve, or so he claims.
After sometimes James realizes that Patrick had left his laptop in the pub and rushes to
him to the railway station, but there’s no sign of Patrick. Patrick is back in the pub,
having missed his train, apparently. So James and Patrick decide to spend the day
together. James takes him to the town where they both grew up and he (James) still
lives. Both the brothers walk down the memory lane, out along the coast road, into the
sea air, where memories wait in ambush and the past is waiting patiently.
Where The Sea Used To Be fetched The Van Gogh Award for Best Debut Director at
Amsterdam Film Festival 2012 and Best Feature Film at Fingal Film Festival, Dublin
2012. – All Lights Film Magazine
Winner - Van Gogh Award for Best Debut Director, Amsterdam Film Festival 2012
White Elephant
Elefante Blanco
Dir: Pablo Trapero
Argentina
2012
110 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Riccardo Darin, Jérémie Renier, Martina Gusman
Language: Spanish
Available to programme: mid August
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/56085786
By taking an insider perspective on the slums of Buenos Aires, Pablo Trapero returns to
the social concerns established in earlier films such as Leonera (which bedded down in
a womens’ prison). White Elephant, a well-made and involving - if not dramatically
revolutionary - drama, brings a gritty immediacy to the Hidden City where priests Julian
(Ricardo Darin) and Nicolas (Dardennes brothers mainstay Jeremie Renier) wage a
futile battle for its inhabitants’ salvation.
Trapero also starts White Elephant with a bang - a raid in the jungle that slowly leads to
the shantytown.
Unlike its Brazilian counterparts such as City Of God or Carandiru, White Elephant
follows a conventional narrative line which should help it connect well with international
audiences (arthouse darling Darin will also be an asset here). Trapero presents us with
two priests - the patient, persuasive Fr Julian, who realises his time may be limited, and
the taciturn, impetuous Fr Nicolas. They are our entre to a world that feels entirely
authentic, a slum that is framed by Argentina’s troubled relationship with the Catholic
Church and the tradition of activism by religious orders.
Fr Julian approaches his mission in the “villa” through social programmes - mainly the
construction of a hospital on the site of an abandoned “white elephant” building which is
now occupied by teeming families, its environs a network of corrugated tin shacks where
rival drug dealers violently ply their trade. Fr Nicolas, meanwhile, is a troubled soul,
attracted to social worker Luciana (Gusman) and scarred by the violent failure of his
mission in the Amazon jungle. They are at once at odds with each other and with the
more conservative “official” arm of the church, which has mired the building project in red
tape.
After the action of Carancho, Trapero also starts White Elephant with a bang - a raid in
the jungle that slowly leads to the shantytown. Julian has brought his old compadre
Nicolas here to, he hopes, one day take over his life’s work. It’s a 15-minute intro before
the camera pulls back to reveal the Hidden City and its 30,000 inhabitants with an
involving tracking shot from Fr Julian’s quarters through the slum.
White Elephant works best tackling these surrounds, with a clear-eyed, seemingly
authentic take on the villa and its problems, and the priests feel real as well - from
Darin’s middle-class social activist to Reinier’s “gringo” traveller, a man who cannot take
the long view. Their faith is sorely tested, and the film makes heavy reference to the
“martyred” Father Mujica, killed in the 1970s, as if to signpost the way. Once Fr Julian
makes a fatal mis-step of meeting with the drug kingpins, White Elephant is set on a
dramatically inevitable course, but Trapero plays out his points to the closing frame. –
Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International
White Tiger
Belyy Tigr
Dir: Karen Sharkhnazarov Russia
2012
104 minutes
Cert: CLUB
Cast: Aleksey Vertkov, Vitaliy Kishchenko, Vilmar Bieri
Language: Russian
Available: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1NOtvzG4sk (no Subtitles)
Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov never ceases to experiment, with both subject
matter and style. WWII-set White Tiger is his first war film, a weird, wondrous tale of an
eerie white fascist tank that appears, attacks and vanishes, leaving smouldering Russian
tanks and cremated corpses in its wake.
Russian soldiers, happening upon a destroyed tank division, discover a blackened tank
driver with burns on 90% of his body; he not only survives but miraculously heals in
three weeks, unscarred. Born of war, remembering nothing of his former life, the
renamed Ivan Naydenov (Aleksey Vertkov) claims to have gained the mystical ability to
communicate with armoured vehicles and to have been assigned the mission of
destroying the White Tiger.
As head of Mosfilm, Shakhnazarov commandeers the studio’s huge fleet of vintage, fully
functional WWII tanks, and deploys them brilliantly. The battles are masterful,
culminating in a spooky game of hide-and-seek in a European ghost town that qualifies
as an unmitigated tour de force. Vertkov completely convinces as the wacko communing
with a higher being, while Vitaliy Kishchenko’s Mayor Fedotov perfectly mirrors the
audience’s conflicted belief. - Ronnie Scheib, Variety
Additional titles
Killing Them Softly
Dir: Andrew Dominik
20012
USA
97 mins
Cert: 18
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins, James
Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Vincent Caratola, Slaine, Max Casella, Trevor Long, Sam
Shepard
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwTgyEAVSFY
Killing Them Softly is an adaptation of George V Higgins's 1970s crime novel that drags
forward its down-and-dirty story of poker games, petty criminals and the mob to 2008,
but keeps that decade's crumbling, end-of-the-world look in its near-apocalyptic New
Orleans setting and in its commitment to serious, entertaining American cinema. It pulls
off the clever trick of operating as a gangster movie – featuring characters with missions
to complete and people to kill – while at the same time sarkily undermining these same
folk, attributing them with a heavy dose of incompetence.
The story finds little fish swimming with sharks. Two dreamy, penniless young crims,
Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), shoot up a backroom poker
game run by Markie (Ray Liotta). Soon they have a cool and calm mob fixer, Jackie
(Brad Pitt), on their tail, who in turn hires an assassin, Mickey (James Gandolfini); his
handler is a backroom suit, Driver (Richard Jenkins).
It's all defiantly male, and the only woman who speaks is a prostitute, but it's also
pleasingly anti-macho and presents the world of gangsters as a chaotic shit-show
forever undermined by failure and human fallibility. The film's occasional bursts of
extreme violence are tempered by moments like one in which a character cries and
vomits after being beaten up. Another’s marriage crisis and drinking problem make him
criminally impotent.
Writer-director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford, Chopper) lays on a little thick both the state-of-the-nation nods – with
ample TV clips of Barack Obama and George W Bush playing in the background – and
the idea that this grimy noir is a metaphor for sickness and stupidity in the financial
sector. But put that aside, and Killing Them Softly is a cracking piece of storytelling, with
a restrained balance of laidback chat and canny visual outbursts, and a delicious thread
of gallows humour running through it.
Dominik plays his hand as a stylist just enough, memorably in a scene where a
character is trying to talk through a fog of heroin, and another, in which a man is
assassinated in super-slo-mo. It's also a terrific actors' movie, with each and every actor
putting in some of their best work, from Mendelsohn's cocky and comic petty slimeball
act to Gandolfini's turn as a past-it, booze-soaked killer with a sharp tongue. Massively
pleasurable and just smart enough. - Dave Calhoun, Time Out London
Lawless
Dir: John Hillcoat
2012
USA
115 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Jason
Clarke, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, Dane DeHaan, Noah Taylor, Chris McGarry, Tim
Tolin, Lew Temple, Marcus Hester, Bill Camp
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiv2ucdkpb4
After proving to be a problematic fit for the grim post-apocalyptic existentialism of The
Road, director John Hillcoat is back on more fertile turf with Lawless, a muscular slice of
grisly Americana rooted in flavorful Prohibition-era outlaw legend. While a touch
overlong and not as distinctive as his last collaboration with screenwriter Nick Cave, the
Australian Western The Proposition, the new film is more commercially accessible,
fueled by a brooding sense of dread, visceral bursts of violence, potent atmosphere and
some juicy character portraits from a robust cast.
The nominal lead figure in the dark ensemble drama is Jack Bondurant, probably the
most standard role but one that yields more accomplished work than pretty much
anything Shia LaBoeuf has done to date. However, it’s the characters around Jack that
supply much of the texture, notably his brothers, the taciturn, philosophizing Forrest
(Tom Hardy) and hooch-swilling punisher Howard (Jason Clarke). No less vital
contributions come from Guy Pearce as a corrupt, dandified lawman, who has no
qualms about spilling blood so long as it doesn’t splash his bespoke suits, and Gary
Oldman in a brief but lip-smacking turn as Chicago bobster Floyd Banner.
Adding welcome softer notes are gifted up-and-comer Dane DeHaan as Cricket, a
crippled kid whose magic touch produces superior moonshine; Mia Wasikowska as
Bertha, a strict preacher’s daughter with a rebellious streak; and Jessica Chastain as
Maggie, an emotionally bruised burlesque dancer looking for a quiet life away from the
mean city and stumbling instead on a whole other kettle of brutality in the backwoods.
Inspired by The Wettest County in the World, Matt Bondurant’s 2008 fictionalized
account of his bootlegging ancestors’ exploits in 1930s Franklin, Va., the story puts Cave
right smack in his element. An artist who has always been drawn to the romance of
bloodshed, crime and death, the goth troubadour might just as easily have plucked this
tale from his brilliant 1996 album of distilled narratives, Murder Ballads.
The main action begins in 1931. The now-grown Bondurant brothers run a thriving
bootlegging operation in the mountains, one of many outfits supplying quality hooch to
the county -- whites, blacks, civilians and lawmen alike. But up north in gangster-land, a
crime wave is sweeping the nation, its tentacles inevitably reaching Virginia.
Wanting a slice of the moonshine profits, the crooked commonwealth attorney
dispatches Special Deputy Charlie Rakes (Pearce), a vicious, perfumed snake who
makes no effort to hide his disdain for these hicks. But Forrest makes it clear the
Bondurants won’t lie down for anybody, delivering his message with a persuasive
combination of knuckleduster and contempt. That sets up he and Rakes as instant
nemeses. Forrest also resists overtures from other local bootleggers to comply with the
new “law,” insisting on staying solo. That stance combined with Cricket’s high-grade
brew helps the brothers prosper.
Running parallel to the encroaching friction with Rakes is the more prosaic strand of
Jack’s efforts to earn his big brothers’ respect and become a legitimate player in their
operation. His opportunity comes while Forrest is laid up with a fresh Frankenstein scar
across his throat from where Rakes’ goons sliced him open. Jack gets a lucky break in a
near-fatal encounter with Floyd Banner’s men, among them a nasty stooge played by
Noah Taylor. Jack’s cut of the deal allows him to purchase a snazzy auto and sharp
threads to help him court the pious and pretty Bertha. Meanwhile, lovely Maggie works
the bar at the boys’ Blackwater Station, as she and Forrest shoot each other smoldering
glances.
Aided by fluid work from editor Dylan Tichenor, Hillcoat punches the action along at an
unhurried yet steady pace, expertly sustaining tension and a mood of impending
menace. The inevitable showdown, after Jack’s carelessness leads Rakes to their secret
distillery location, is a little too protracted, and the coda 10 years on lingers unduly. But
the film maintains its suspense and compelling character engagement throughout.
Without exactly glorifying their outlaw heroes, Hillcoat and Cave definitely keep us in
their corner, showing even their most violent actions to be driven by self-protection or
payback, never merely by malice. The most memorable of them is somber Forrest,
whose dialogue is delivered from somewhere way back in Hardy’s throat, often as barely
more than an inarticulate rumble. But from in amongst those animal growls spout
occasional pearls of outlaw wisdom, such as “It is not the violence that sets a man apart,
it’s the distance he is prepared to go’.
If Lawless doesn’t achieve the mythic dimensions of the truly great outlaw and gangster
movies, it is a highly entertaining tale set in a vivid milieu, told with style and populated
by a terrific ensemble. For those of us who are suckers for blood-soaked American crime
sagas from that era, those merits will be plenty. - David Rooney, The Hollywood
Reporter
Liberal Arts
Dir: Josh Radnor
USA
2012
97 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Josh Radnor, Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney,
Elizabeth Reaser, John Magaro, Kate Burton, Ali Ahn, Zac Efron
Language: English
Available to programme: March
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aXeTuROZUE
Writer-director Josh Radnor transcends 2010's HappyThankYouMorePlease with Liberal
Arts, a literate, college-set flick whose themes of aging are paired with discourse on
cultural discernment. A 35-year-old admissions counselor, Jesse (Radnor) leaves New
York to visit his alma mater, Ohio's Kenyon College, where he strikes up a courtship with
old-souled Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a sophomore whose urbane cultural cache is
padded with vampire romance novels. Having bonded with his barely legal crush over
the likes of Beethoven, Jesse tells Zibby her current guilty pleasure is "the worst book
ever written in English," and that a lot of what's wrong with our country is due to people
liking these "very bad things." "It's not Tolstoy, but it's not television, and it makes me
happy," Zibby retorts. The dangling question, of course, is where Radnor's effort falls on
the trash-to-treasure meter. As it weaves the romanticism of academia with the
disappointments of growing up and growing old, Liberal Arts initially takes an objective
look at how refinement can shape one's happiness, offering arguments for and against a
certain educated elitism. But as the scale slowly tips toward embracing the escape of the
lowbrow, there's a slight sense the movie is writing its own get-out-of-jail-free card.
Which isn't to say it needs to account for a whole lot of wrongdoing. There's a clichéd
redundancy to the assessment of discontent, which spreads from Jesse to a retiring
professor (Richard Jenkins) to a bitter cougar (Allison Janney) to a suicidal student
(John Magro), and an aside with Zac Efron's new-age stereotype feels far too indiecomic-diversion. But Liberal Arts is, in many ways, a lovely little film, boasting wellscripted passages, enveloping compositions, and a palpable enthusiasm for cherished
things past. Anyone who loved college will find kindred joy in Jesse's journey back to
school, a rural life detour that's lushly filmed to juxtapose Manhattan's bustle, and nimbly
scored with chimes and strings to boost that rediscovery spark. Unremarkable but solid,
Radnor's performance is nicely matched with what he gets from Olsen, who continues to
prove herself an invaluable on-screen asset. In a movie highly focused on the stress of
gracefully graduating from one life stage to the next, Zibby embodies the lowest and
freest tier of open-mindedness, and Olsen amply imbues her with smart, effortless zest.
The character's college career includes acting in an improv group, and her explanation
of its M.O. of "saying yes" introduces a motif, wherein "yes" is seen as a privilege of the
young.
Along with Janney, Radnor is himself a Kenyon College alum, and the personal
connection surely aids in the film's air of genuineness, in specific regard to cultural
consumption and an innate collegiate spirit. More than seven whole seasons of How I
Met Your Mother, Liberal Arts provides a peek into what makes Radnor tick, and what he
cares about outside his mainstream-targeted sitcom. It's conceivable that, just like
Jesse, he has soft spots for books, handwritten letters, and Massenet, and he gets to
vent a bit of that with his latest project. It's not Tolstoy, but it'll do. - R. Kurt Osenlund,
Slant Magazine
Master, The
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson 2012
USA
132 mins
Cert: 16
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Jesse Plemons,
Laura Dern, Jillian Bell, Rami Malek, Kevin J. O'Connor, W. Earl Brown, Ambyr
Childers, Fiona Dourif and Lena Endre
Language: English
Available to programme: April
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfrx8YpfB2k
Paul Thomas Anderson's epic tale of postwar America offers catnip for the senses and
succour for the soul, riffing lightly off the life of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard to
conjure up a film that is both expansive and intimate, confident and self-questioning. The
themes may be contentious, but the handling is perfect. If there were ever a movie to
cause the lame to walk and the blind to see, The Master may just be it.
Joaquin Phoenix gives a startlingly intense, almost simian performance as Freddie
Quell; his back hunched and shoulders sloping, looking for all the world as if he's only
just learned to walk on his hind legs. Quell is home from the war, wild and wonky and set
to explode. He can't hold down a job and his homemade moonshine – largely concocted
from soap suds and paint thinner – tends to poison those who drink it. The future looks
black for poor Freddie Quell. Then one night, strolling on the wharf, he spies a fairytale
yacht, strung with light bulbs, the stars and stripes flapping. On deck stands the man
who will prove his salvation.
Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is rumpled, playful, effortlessly charismatic. A
self-styled scholar of the human condition, Dodd comes trailing a gaggle of ex-wives and
points the way to the path of enlightenment. When Quell dares to fart in his presence,
Dodd scolds the new arrival as a "silly animal" and yet a moment later he joins in with
the laughter. Best of all, he can't get enough of Quell's toxic hooch. "I'm a connoisseur,"
he explains: an early clue that Dodd could turn out to be the greatest snake-oil salesman
of them all.
The master's big idea is that science is wrong and the Earth is actually trillions of years
old. All those who live on it are like Russian dolls, containing a multitude of past lives
and old traumas carried over from previous millennia. Unlock those lives and tend those
wounds and the sky's the limit; you can cure cancer and bring world peace.
Quell believes in the master and has little truck with those who don't. When a sceptic
takes issue with Dodd at a swish New York function, he hurls a piece of fruit at the man,
like an ill-trained monkey roused to rage.
What a ravishing, unashamedly old-school American classic this is. The Master is lush
and strange, conducted at a leisurely pace and yet with barely an ounce of fat on its
bones. In the course of a tantalising first hour, Anderson gently establishes the
relationship between Dodd and Quell as that of the artist and his clay, the genius and the
mascot. Dodd clearly senses that in taming this rude, anguished roustabout he might
produce his masterpiece, thereby proving the truth of all his theories.
Quell, for his part, seems entirely happy to play the role of Caliban to Dodd's Prospero –
at least until the moment he steps on to the porch and catches Dodd's son dozing in the
shade. "He's making all this up as he goes along," the young man tells him. "You don't
see that?"
This, reportedly, was the line that enraged Tom Cruise (who appeared in Anderson's
1999 film Magnolia) at a private screening in LA and the one that looks likely to be
seized upon: Anderson's tacit unmasking of the master's "cause" – and, by implication,
Scientology itself – as a giant fraud, lapped up by the gullible. And yes, no doubt there is
some traction to this argument. But it really risks missing the wood for the trees.
Instead of setting out to mount an exposé of Scientology, Anderson uses it as the
springboard to a wider inquiry. Beautifully textured, richly nuanced, The Master probes at
the shadows cast by the spotlight of American supremacy. It identifies a strain of selfdoubt in an otherwise triumphant 1950s and paints a compelling picture of a postwar
prosperity built on the backs of a confused and traumatised people.
Dodd's followers hunger for healing, for answers, for a messiah to lead them. They know
there must be more to life than the abundant, wealthy continent they have somehow
inherited.
In the end Anderson takes no obvious moral stance on Lancaster Dodd – a pedlar of
ideas in an America that was always as much of an idea as it was a physical nation. Of
course the master is making it up as he goes along. He's bluffing and experimenting,
contradicting himself and making it pay. It is these qualities that link the great thinkers to
the great charlatans of history. It's how the west was won. - Xan Brooks, The Guardian
Ruby Sparks
Dir: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
2012 USA 103 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Chris Messina, Elliott Gould, Antonio Banderas,
Steve Coogan, Deborah Ann Woll, Annette Bening
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acwm-UAZ3OQ
Ruby Sparks succeeds as a satirical fantasy about writerly self-involvement (and the
many things, good and bad, the quirk can unexpectedly manifest), but it's worth
celebrating as a testament to self-made greatness, particularly in regard to the efforts of
writer/star Zoe Kazan. An indie darling largely known for peripheral parts in films like
Meek's Cutoff (not to mention for her ties to grandfather Elia), the 28-year-old soars past
all her prior work with a showcase she shrewdly, yet endearingly, penned for herself. As
the title character, a capricious free spirit who springs from the mind of novelist Calvin
Weir-Fields (the actress's real-life beau, Paul Dano), Kazan unleashes one of this year's
better female performances, an evolving turn that's rich and surprisingly torrential. At
once a strong-willed woman and a slave to whatever spools out of Calvin's typewriter,
Ruby intensely embodies a string of emotional developments, letting Kazan's acting and
material ride a rollercoaster of interdependence, each serving the other before careening
to a superbly histrionic climax. The gifts of this inherent symbiosis free Ruby Sparks from
the kitsch of its conceit and the trappings of its genre. It's a mad passion project about
mad passion projects, nestled comfortably in the padded room of a romantic comedy.
It's also, of course, a couple's movie born of multiple couples, as Kazan didn't just
develop something in which she and Dano could co-star, she sought collaboration with
co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the husband-and-wife team that helmed
Dano's breakout film, Little Miss Sunshine. The dual-sweetheart pedigree may be
partially to blame for a slight excess of sentiment, but it's also a likely booster of romantic
genuineness. Calvin's starry-eyed bewilderment over his Pygmalion-esque breakthrough
has an unforced vintage charm, and Dano and Kazan share a rapport that's knowing and
complementary, with tree-side canoodling just as earnest as boiling-point spats. "It's
love, it's magical!" Calvin says to his rightfully shocked, guy's-guy brother (Chris
Messina), and from Dano's mouth, the words sound like the honest surrender of a
bewitched neurotic. For Dayton and Faris, the achievement is as much in the aesthetics
as the spirit, for Ruby Sparks boasts a visual language that Little Miss Sunshine lacked.
Lensed by Matthew Libatique, the new film has a mise-en-scène of palatably deliberate
symbolism, with Calvin's sterile, stark-white apartment serving as both blank page and
test-rat's pen, its sharp angles and geometric shapes lending themselves to Libatique's
framing. Nearly all else vibrantly juxtaposes the home base, from Ruby's girlish outfits
and the couple's strobe-lit night spots to Calvin's colorful hippie mom (a sidelined
Annette Bening). While it doesn't break ground, the look throughout firmly supports the
film's themes of writerly obsession, right down to the cliché of the ticking typewriter,
shown frequently in frantic close-up.
The movie begins with a very familiar device, introducing Calvin, a stalled-out former
prodigy still milking the success of his decade-old debut, as he spills his troubles to a
shrink (Elliot Gould). The setup gives Calvin a logical excuse to dole out exposition, but it
chiefly and aptly establishes the film as one interested in psychology, beyond the mere
service of plot. Ruby Sparks always has something deeper brewing beneath its
superficial tropes, especially when it comes to Calvin's complicated ego. Though surely
geekish in a classically lovable way, this controlling scribe is hardly shaped for typical
audience approval, and as a creative type, he's much more than the J.D. Salinger and
Jonathan Franzen books that pepper his apartment. In another film, an encounter with
an old girlfriend might have cut her down to build up his personal progress, but here,
Calvin's meeting with ex Lila (Deborah Ann Woll) startlingly puts you on her side,
cementing the lead as more antihero than nebbish underdog. When tempers finally flare
and the cat inevitably ekes its way out of the bag, Calvin and Ruby find themselves in a
dark dance of creator versus creation, and as Ruby writhes and rants like a
malfunctioning Stepford Wife, her repeated cry of "You're a genius!" leaves Calvin
blissfully satisfied. In an ostensibly frothy comedy, it's a moment of murky morality, and it
dares to suggest that, rather than having created a monster, Calvin may just have one
inside. R. Kurt Osenlund, Slant Magazine
What Richard Did
Dir: Lenny Abrahamson
2012
Ireland
87 mins
Starring: Jack Reynor, Róisín Murphy, Sam Keeley, Lars Mikkelsen
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXTcSCp8R6E
Cert: 15A
It’s the last summer before buckling down for college in the fall — time to let loose and
have a little fun with some friends. But for eighteen-year-old Richard Karlsen (Jack
Reynor), the days of carefree leisure and drunken carousing are about to come to an
abrupt end. Based on Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock, the Dublin-set What
Richard Did relates the tragic outcome of a senseless mistake, and the secrets and lies
that go along with it.
Handsome, charismatic, and wildly popular, Richard is the star player of his school’s
senior rugby team. He and his teammates are determined to make the most of their last
summer together, spending hazy days in the countryside, rabble-rousing at local pubs
and crashing parties. Richard is a natural-born leader, always ready to jump to a friend’s
defense or welcome newcomers into the flock. But when he starts a sweet summer
romance with the lovely Lara (Róisín Murphy), jealously soon rears its ugly head, as
Lara’s burgeoning friendship with his moody teammate Conor (Sam Keeley) rouses his
suspicions. When a dust-up at an overcrowded house party leads to an act of mindless
violence, Richard is plunged into a downward spiral of shame and crippling guilt.
As Richard, Reynor is the heart and soul of What Richard Did, delivering an astounding
performance as a young man coping with unimaginable remorse. Lars Mikkelsen is
equally remarkable as Richard’s father Peter, who finds himself faced with a difficult
question: can a parent still love their child unconditionally, even after losing all respect
for him?
Director Lenny Abrahamson’s languid style is a perfect match for this story, rendering an
almost impossibly tranquil Dublin summer in gorgeous, sun-kissed tones — a beauty
that conceals an ominous, creeping violence that threatens to shatter this idyllic world. Michèle Maheux, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Arbitrage
Dir: Nicholas Jarecki
2012
USA
106 mins
Starring: Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling, Tim Roth
Language: English
Available to programme: Late July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waORywYAG7Q
Cert: 15A
Nicholas Jarecki makes an auspicious directorial debut with this taut and alluring
suspense thriller about love, loyalty, and high finance. Arbitrage – buying low and selling
high – depends on a person’s ability to determine the true value of any given market. It’s
a talent that has made billionaire hedge fund magnate Robert Miller (Richard Gere) the
very portrait of success in American business. But on the eve of his sixtieth birthday,
Miller finds himself desperately trying to sell his trading empire to a major bank before
the extent of his fraud is discovered. When an unexpected, bloody error challenges his
perception of what things are worth, Miller finds that his business is not the only thing
hanging in the balance.
Building on the chemistry and charisma of an outstanding cast, including Richard Gere,
Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling, Tim Roth, and Nate Parker, Jarecki leads us through the
slick and duplicitous limits of impunity and composes an anatomy of the way asset
bubbles can burst. - Shari Frilot, Sundance Film Festival
Bernie
Dir: Richard Linklater
USA
2011
99 mins
Starring: Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew McConaughey
Language: English
Available to programme: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v28jbTg0NME
Cert: 12A
You just don't know what to expect from a Richard Linklater film. He can veer from the
slacker indie classics (Dazed and Confused and, er, Slacker) to more mainstream family
friendly ventures (School of Rock, a Bad News Bears remake) to hip romance (Before
Sunrise) by way of druggie sci-fi (A Scanner Darkly). So sitting down in front of Bernie
you've no idea what to expect, which is exactly what Bernie needs for it to work its
magic. A lot of online reviews are giving away too much - don't make the mistake of
researching it.
Bernie has an odd presentation. Told for the most part in flashback, these dramatic
moments are intercut with to-camera interviews that set the story up. We're in a small
town in Texas, a community that either congregates at church or the bake sale and
everyone knows each other by first name. All the interviews are about one man mortician assistant Bernie Tiede (Black), a God-fearing Dudley Do-Right. But what's
this? They're all talking about him in the past tense: he was a good Christian, always
went out of his way to help you, never said boo to a ghost, etc. Something has gone
down, something everyone in town has an opinion on, and over the next ninety-nine
minutes or so Linklater is going to slowly tease out what happened and the effect it has
had on the community.
It's been called a character study but it's more a study of a town's character, a la
Christopher Guest's Waiting For Guffman, and its reaction when life is turned upside
down. Black hasn't been better as the effeminate Bernie. He doesn't exactly turn on the
serious, like Robin Williams does every time he's asked not to be Robin Williams, but
he's not the hell-raising, guitar-slinging motormouth he usually is. A surly MacLaine is a
lot of fun too as one of the elderly women Bernie ‘comforts' when a loved one passes on
and McConaughey makes with the laughs as the tanned District Attorney Danny Buck.
While Linklater can play the interviews a little too straight at times - sometimes Bernie
forgets that it's a black comedy - the oddball nature of it all helps things along. Oh, and
stick around for the end credits. There's a wow moment that colours everything you've
seen with a different hue. - Gavin Burke, entertainment.ie
Earthbound
Dir: Alan Brennan
Ireland
2012
97 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Rafe Spall, Jenn Murray, David Morrissey, Stephen Hogan
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYx-2oI2zc4
Earthbound is the story of a young man convinced he’s a space alien. Fifteen years after
his father’s death, Joe (Rafe Spall) is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Just before
dad (David Morrissey) died, he told Joe they were both aliens, members of a race that
inhabited the faraway planet Zalaxon. Until the rebellion there is successful, Joe must
hide out, work in a comic book store and somehow perpetuate their race.
Spall is terrifically deadpan, his Joe a true believer and budding paranoid, but not
immune to love; when he discovers the lovely Maria (Jenn Murray), he confides
everything to her, at which point she thinks he’s nuts. She brings in her old psychology
teacher to counsel Joe, and his entire worldview begins to collapse.
Brennan’s tour de force is the way he dismantles Joe’s elaborate Zalaxon scenario.
Earthbound acquires a pathos that places it outside the realm of comedy or sci-fi, turning
it into a psychological drama that probes self-delusion and even psychosis. Murray and
Spall play this all with wonderfully straight faces, allowing the comedy to arise from
circumstances that might well evolve around any stranger in a strange land, or even one
who just thinks he is. - John Anderson, Variety
Eye of The Storm, The
Dir: Fred Schepisi
Australia
2012
119 mins
Cert: CLUB
Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis, Charlotte Rampling, Robyn Nevin, Colin
Friels, Helen Morse, Alexander Schepisi
Language: English
Available to programme from: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKC07l5cVJM
Prodigal son Fred Schepisi corrals a collection of top-shelf talent for The Eye of the
Storm, an intelligent, visually sumptuous drama that embraces the grandeur of the
Australian literary classic upon which it’s based.
Stately as the magnificent Sydney mansion in which Charlotte Rampling’s aging socialite
lies theatrically dying while her spoiled children (Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush and Judy
Davis) pick over their inheritance, Schepisi’s first local feature since 1988’s Evil Angels
(known as A Cry in the Dark in other territories) largely manages to transcend its
disagreeable subject matter.
It’s a tricky proposition at times. But superb performances by the central trio anchor the
caustic social observations and dark yet incandescent wit of Nobel laureate Patrick
White’s acclaimed 1973 novel.
All the money in the world can’t buy you a happy childhood, and the petulant,
domineering Elizabeth Hunter (Rampling) ensured her two children had a particularly
loveless upbringing.
Now they’ve come home and Basil (Rush), an expatriate stage actor with a knighthood
and a narcissistic bent, and his awkward, bird-like sister, Dorothy (Davis), whose failed
marriage into the French nobility has left her with the title Princess de Lascabanes, still
bear the scars.
On her deathbed, Elizabeth remains a destructive force, tormenting her cash-strapped
offspring by continuing to live extravagantly and handing out jewels and prized
possessions to the nurses and attentive household staff who orbit her fading star.
Patrick White’s novel, the first of his to be adapted for the screen, underwent shifts in
time and perspective as it explored the life of this feared and revered woman through her
various relationships. The screenplay, by Judy Morris (Happy Feet, Babe: Pig in the
City), brings the two adult children into sharper focus, while maintaining the intricate
dance between past and present, aided by Schepisi’s interplay of light and shadow as
Elizabeth drifts in and out of lucidity. Morris does a fine job preserving the cadences of
White’s sharp-edged dialogue.
Less successful is the translation to the screen of the spiritual epiphany Elizabeth once
experienced during a violent tropical storm on a Queensland island. This seems central
to the layering of Elizabeth’s character and feeds into the complex stumble towards
redemption experienced by this dysfunctional family. But the film wobbles a bit in
conveying its impact.
It’s a flaw easily overlooked when you’ve got national treasure Davis in one of her finest,
most affecting performances, Rush deftly weighing aging playboy against damaged little
boy and a gimlet-eyed Rampling, entrancing still beneath wigs and ageing makeup.
Even the minor roles are solidly filled by a terrific Australian cast, which includes Robyn
Nevin, Colin Friels and Helen Morse (Picnic at Hanging Rock), almost unrecognizable as
Elizabeth’s housekeeper Lotte, a Holocaust survivor who desperately strives to entertain
her incapacitated employer with extravagant performances of Weimar cabaret.
Schepisi’s daughter, Alexandra, holds her own as an attractive young nurse named
Flora, one of a handful of characters who ultimately reflect the Hunter family’s bourgeois
silliness back at them.
Melinda Doring’s production design evokes a world of chauffeured Bentleys and
kangaroo-fur stoles inhabited by a wannabe colonial aristocracy, while Ian Baker’s rich
cinematography lends a lustrous sheen. Paul Grabowsky’s score is just what the doctor
ordered. – The Hollywood Reporter
Hitchcock
Dir: Sacha Gervasi
UK/USA
2013
98 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, Toni
Collette
Language: English
Available to programme: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRaUkayit98
"What if someone good made a horror picture?" asks Alfred Hitchcock of his wife Alma
Reville early on in Sacha Gervasi's clever and witty drama about the making of Psycho.
Psycho was itself the film that so emphatically answered that question in 1960 and the
story of its creation – based on Stephen Rebello's enthralling 1990 account, Alfred
Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and scripted by John McLaughlin – is at heart the
story of a marriage, between a fat, ugly genius and the "tiny, birdlike woman" who was
invigilator, confidante and touchstone to his talent.
Played here by Anthony Hopkins, in facial prosthesis and fake belly, and the neither tiny
nor particularly birdlike Helen Mirren, Hitch and Alma appear as an indissoluble
partnership in art and life, suddenly threatened by pressures from without (no budget)
but more from within, particularly by Alfred's tendency, now tiresome to the red-haired
Alma, to become obsessed with his leading blondes.
The film opens with Hitchcock speaking directly to us, Alfred Hitchcock Presents …
style. He's just enjoyed the huge success of North by Northwest and is at a loose end for
projects. Offered Cary Grant in Casino Royale, he reminds his assistant Peggy
Robertson (Toni Collette): "I just made that movie." His ears prick up, however, when he
encounters Robert Bloch's Freudian gore-transvestite-incest-necrophilia shocker
Psycho, which horrifies everyone he shows it to, but which might give him the edge he
needs in his private war with French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose Les
Diaboliques has critics talking of "French Hitchcocks" and similar rot.
But Paramount won't back it, and the Hitchcocks are driven back on their own resources,
and into one another's company. We see them in domestic harmony, 34 years married,
Alfred in the bath reading the Times, and Alma clad in the same white bra and slip that
Janet Leigh will wear in Psycho's opening sequence. Alma has the epicurean Hitchcock
on a diet and one senses trouble in paradise. The film essentially tells us how their
marriage suffers until she, in a magisterial, bark-stripping tirade, finally reminds him of
her indispensable role in his success: "I was once your boss!"
The device that speeds along the estrangement of the partnership is the movie's
weakest invention, a screenwriting project with another writer (Danny Huston), a fool and
a hack in Hitch's eyes. But one should treat that like a McGuffin – a plot engine – forget
that the middle section sags a little, and enjoy the ride. The making of Psycho is
depicted in detail without our seeing one frame of the completed movie. The closest we
come is when Hitchcock stands in the lobby outside the premiere, faux-conducting
Bernard Hermann's slashing violins; he has a combination of a maestro's manual
flourishes and a murderer's manic stabbing motions as the audience inside wails and
howls its way through the shower scene. It's a magnificent moment for anyone who can
blink-sync their way through those infamous 45 seconds, and beautifully brought off by
Hopkins, who hasn't had this much fun in years.
All the smaller roles are neatly filled, particularly Scarlett Johansson's Leigh and James
Darcy's Tony Perkins, the latter almost eerily resembling the original; plus Kurtwood
Smith as the fuming head of the censor's office and Ralph Macchio as screenwriter
Joseph Stephano. But it lives and breathes through Hopkins and Mirren. Unlike Toby
Jones's Hitch in The Girl, which physically and vocally evoked the director very
convincingly, Hopkins relies, as with his Nixon, on a few tics, some prosthetic fakery,
and just lives the man, pink, pale, blinking and blimpish, held up by iron certainty in his
own talents.
Mirren matches him, though, despite a slightly thankless and less rounded role to which
she brings all her heft and leverage; finally, however, she is the film's – hell, both films' –
secret heroine. Forget all those blondes – count on the redhead. - John Patterson, The
Guardian
King of The Travellers
Dir: Mark O'Connor
Ireland
2012
79 mins
Starring: John Connors, Michael Collins, Peter Coonan
Language: English
Available to programme from: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8qeiYQ7pb4
Cert: 15A
This is the first movie for Mark O'Connor since his impressive Between the Canals. Out
of the traps after the reading of his manifesto for new Irish cinema on the steps of the
Town Hall at 2012's Galway Film Fleadh, here he does just enough to show that he may
be on to something.
Traveller John Paul Moorehouse (Connors) is still smarting from the shooting of his
father ten years ago, a murder he blames on rival travelling family, the Powers. Pushed
by his uncle Francis (Collins) into bare-knuckle bouts with the Powers, the hulky John
Paul works out some of that pent up aggression. However, when John Paul's love for
Winnie Power (McGlynn) flowers and the violence escalates beyond boxing, things turn
nasty.
The last few years has seen a rise in interest in the travelling community. 2005 gave us
Pavee Lackeen, 2007's Strength And Honour dipped into the world of bare-knuckle
boxing and the 2011's Knuckle was a fascinating documentary. Channel 4's Big Fat
Gypsy Wedding is proving to be popular viewing too.
The opening sequence displays O'Connor's ambition. A sit-down between travellers,
police and a politician over the dispute of land has the director swirl his camera
Scorsese-like around the shadowy backroom until it rests on Michael Collins's Francis,
who sees himself as the Don of the family. The director then, using one shot, moves
proceedings to a hallway and then into a lavish wedding reception. The entire first five
minutes is a mixture of Scorsese, Coppola and Cimino and there's no harm in that.
Giddy, the sequence also showcases the future problems the drama would fall prey to
however: an overreliance on influences with Romeo & Juliet's star-crossed lovers and a
speech that brings to mind On The Waterfront among them. It's when O'Connor delves
into the authentic side of things that the movie really shines.
King of the Travellers has verve and, with the likes of the energetic Peter Coonan
(Love/Hate, Between The Canals) in the cast, bounces past the more shakier moments.
- Gavin Burke, Entertainment.ie
Late Quartet, A
Dir: Yaron Zilberman
2012
USA
105 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Mark
Ivanir, Imogen Poots
Language: English
Available to programme: mid July
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/61283985
Grace notes abound in A Late Quartet, a small, shining gem of a movie that works its
way into your heart with insinuating potency of music. The Fugue, a New York-based
chamber quartet, is facing a crisis. At the start of their 26th season together, cellist Peter
Mitchell (Christopher Walken) breaks the news that he has been diagnosed with
Parkinson's disease. Proper sympathy is offered by his colleagues: First violinist Daniel
Lerner (Mark Ivanir) thinks Peter should continue to play as long as he can. But second
violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) lets slip his desire to play first chair, an
ambition that appalls his violinist wife, Juliette Gelbart (Catherine Keener), who sees
Peter as her mentor. When Juliette learns that Robert has cheated on her and that
Daniel is screwing her and Robert's student daughter, Alexandra (Imogen Poots),
tensions within the group begin to pound.
OK, it sounds like the plot of a daytime soap, and sometimes it is. But director Yaron
Zilberman and co-writer Seth Grossman have tuned their film with the skill of the quartet
at the heart of their story. Chamber music, which features few if any solos, requires a
close partnership among its players. As the Fugue rehearses Beethoven's String Quartet
No. 14 in C-sharp Minor – the Opus 131, which the composer insisted must be played
without a pause – we watch a dysfunctional family of artists begin to implode. We also
hear music, mostly performed by the Brentano String Quartet, that seems to be heaven
sent.
It's paradise to watch this quartet of actors, who learned to play short phrases on their
instruments, make their own kind of music. Hoffman and Keener, who co-starred in
Capote, play off each other with artful intensity and pure feeling. Ivanir is the spark that
ignites their conflict. And Walken shines in a subtle, nuanced display of banked fires.
Approaching the cello with hands trembling, he's like a lover who's lost his assurance.
The performance is heartbreaking, and a master class in the craft of acting. – Peter
Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine
Man on The Train
Dir: Mary McGuckian
2011
Canada/Ireland
99 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Larry Mullen Jr., Paula Boudreau, Greg Bryk
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87NJhYiMKvY
Released back in 2002, L’homme du train (translated as The Man On The Train) was an
award-winning Gallic crime-drama by Patrice Leconte, which went down a storm at that
year’s Venice Film Festival. It told of the chance encounter between a retired poetry
professor and a bank robber, who develop a strong bond over a short period of time,
despite being polar opposites to each other.
Veteran French actor Jean Rochefort starred as former academic Manesquier, alongside
Johnny Hallyday as criminal Milan. Despite having a number of acting credits to his
name before the film, the casting of Parisian native Hallyday was seen as a curious
choice, as he is best known internationally for his prowess as a rock ‘n’ roll singer,
leading to him being described as the ‘French Elvis Presley’.
However, the triumvriate of Leconte, Rochefort and Hallyday proved to be a successful
one, as the film performed extremely well in the foreign market, grossing more than $7.5
million off a budget of $5 million.
Fast forward 11 years, and we are treated to an English language remake from Northern
Irish director Mary McGuckian, which is now being screened exclusively in IFI Cinemas.
Taking on the role of the elderly professor is legendary screen actor Donald Sutherland
and, repeating the trick of L’homme du train, in the role of the thief we have Larry Mullen
Jr, U2′s drummer and founding member.
With the action transferred to a quiet Canadian town, Mullen Jr’s Thief pulls into the local
railway station hoping to pull of a heist in the nearby bank, a task that he anticipates will
go off with a hitch.
With the town’s hotel closed upon his arrival, he is welcomed to the home of
Sutherland’s septuagenarian, who is set to have heart surgery on the same day that
Mullen Jr and his crew are set to stage their bank robbery.
As the days go by leading up to their respective events, the two men develop an
unexpected friendship, and though the precise nature of his house guest eventually
becomes clear to Sutherland, it doesn’t prevent both parties from yearning for each
other’s lives.
Given McGuckian’s status as an independent filmmaker, it comes as no surprise that the
small, intimate nature of the original is maintained, and in many ways the new
incarnation is even more ambiguous and enigmatic than its French counterpart (the
characters of Sutherland and Mullen Jr are listed simply as ‘The Professor’ and ‘The
Thief’).
However, the biggest problem the film faces is the lack of spectacle that you would
usually associate with English language remakes, because at a running time of 100
minutes (which is 10 minutes longer than the Leconte version) its pace is far too leisurely
to keep audiences actively involved in the drama.
The main interest of the film, though, will undoubtedly be the big-screen debut of Mullen
Jr, and despite having an understandably limited range and a soft voice that doesn’t
entirely compliment his muscular presence, Mullen Jr. acquits himself reasonably well,
and any faults that the film has doesn’t lie at his door.
As the more experienced of the two, it is no surprise that Sutherland offers a more
nuanced performance, and after a series of films (The Hunger Games, The Eagle, The
Mechanic, Horrible Bosses) where he was taking minor parts that didn’t stretch his
considerable range to an enormous degree, it is refreshing to see him given a leading
role that has genuine substance and emotional depth attached to it.
Aside from acting in the film, Mullen Jr also worked on the score along with Simon
Clime, and together they have conjured up an efficient, if somewhat repetitive, beat that
kicks in during vital stages in the film’s development. Having attracted plenty of criticism
for her experimental multi-camera approach on 2005′s Rag Tale, McGuckian and
cinematographer Stefan von Bjorn wisely opt to keep things simple here, and what they
produce is quite often pleasing on the eye.
Ultimately, the film will mainly be of interest to avid fans of Sutherland and Mullen Jr, and
those who are intrigued by the set-up would be better served checking out the original.
With A Thousand Times Good Night due for release later this year, Mullen Jr’s acting
career is set to have some sort of longevity, but despite the best of intentions, Man on
the Train will more than likely be remembered as a stepping stone rather than a true
game changer. – Daire Walsh, Film Ireland Magazine
Much Ado About Nothing
Dir: Joss Whedon
USA
2012
107 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Fran Kranz, Jillian Morgese,
Sean Maher, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond
Language: English
Available to programme from: Mid-October
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bvva_cplAs
In the world of drama, nothing is quite as distinct or lovely as the prose of William
Shakespeare. His vocabulary, his rhythm, rhymes and descriptions, all established a
standard against which others are still measured. Modern day dramatist Joss Whedon
also has a distinct style, characterized by wit, humor, and cultural authority. Surely it’s
not in the same league as the Bard’s. But with the writer/director’s modern adaptation of
Much Ado About Nothing, Whedon has found an enjoyable and surprising balance
between the two.
The story of Much Ado About Nothing is famous, and often copied. Benedick (Angel’s
Alexis Denisof) and Claudio (The Cabin In The Woods‘ Fran Kranz) return from war and
find themselves in the company of Leonato (The Avengers‘ Clark Gregg) and his family.
The extended relations include Leonato’s daughter Hero (Jillian Morgese) and cousin
Beatrice (Angel‘s Amy Acker).
Both men have returned from their trials set on remaining bachelors, but each fall for the
girls. Claudio does so in a grand, head over heels manner, while the silver-tongued
Benedick is a bit more averse to his feelings. A series of comedic follies ensue, resulting
in heartbreak, betrayal and ultimately, lots of love. Rounding out the cast are other
Whedon regulars such as Firefly‘s Nathan Fillion and Sean Maher, The Avengers‘
Ashley Johnson and others.
Whedon wisely doesn’t mess with a story that has resonated for several centuries. He
give audiences pretty much exactly that original text, only in a modern California setting.
What he does, however, with both his adapted screenplay and direction, is
simultaneously accentuate the timelessness of that story while interpreting the prose
through his own humor. He throws in lots of physical performances, funny cutaways and
out there settings that make the film funnier and feel like his own. How often do you see
Shakespeare characters give monologues while exercising? Whedon’s actors own their
performances in a way that feels current despite the the centuries-old text in which
they’re based.
The tone remains light and humorous throughout, which should help help audiences
slowly acclimate to the language of the film. What it doesn’t help are the narrative
reaches Shakespeare used so regularly. Things such as marriages that come seemingly
out of nowhere, and characters literally dropping dead. In this modern setting, many
pieces of plot elicit a eye-rolls.
But if you’re a fan of Shakespeare, Whedon or just a good old-fashioned romantic
comedy, Much Ado About Nothing delivers. It’s not quite the cultural revolution Baz
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet was, but it certainly feels like the successful blending of two
distinct voices. - Slash Film
Mud
Dir: Jeff Nichols
2012
USA
130 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Sam Shepard
Language: English
Available to programme: Mid-September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooyflxGjU9A
Screening right at the end of the festival, Jeff Nichols's film Mud made an urgent late bid
for the Palme d'Or. An atmospheric thriller and coming-of-age tale set on a slow bend in
the Mississippi river, Mud has the look and feel of an American indie classic. It is a
surefire best picture nominee at next year's Oscars and likely to win some kind of award
at Cannes, receiving the warmest applause of the festival at its morning press screening.
Mud takes its name from its lead character, played by Matthew McConaughey,
delivering the best performance of his career (and his second at the festival, after The
Paperboy) as a fugitive holed up on an island in the Mississippi after murdering a rival
for his lover Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). Mud is wanted by the police and bounty
hunters hired by the murdered man's family. He is discovered, however, by two 14-yearold boys, Ellis and Neckbone, who live in houseboats along one of the river's swampy
tributaries. They fall under Mud's charismatic spell and are talked into helping him
rebuild an old motor boat stranded in a treetop – dumped there, one assumes, years
before by a flood or a tornado.
The boys are beautifully played by Tye Sheridan (who starred as one of Brad Pitt's sons
in last year's Palme d'Or winner, The Tree of Life) and Jacob Lofland. The teenagers'
thrill and adventure in secretly aiding Mud gives the film a Huckleberry Finn-ish flavour
that blends with something akin to Rob Reiner's 1986 classic Stand By Me and Charles
Laughton's The Night of the Hunter. For such an American film, there are also clear
echoes of British classics such as Great Expectations and Whistle Down the Wind.
As the net tightens around Mud, Ellis also becomes a go-between, ferrying messages to
Juniper as she takes shelter in a motel. Meanwhile, Ellis is also developing a crush on
an older girl from his high school, heading for some harsh lessons about the nature of
romance.
Writer-director Nichols, working with cinematographer Adam Stone, succeeds in
capturing the life and the geography of his locale, its beauty and its dangers, as
venomous snakes crawl in the swirling, brown water and local divers fish for oysters and
crabs in their own nets. Mud, which also stars Sam Shepard and Michael Shannon, is a
very fine film about innocence, father figures and love, a work that manages to be
thrilling, unsentimental and emotionally rewarding. This is, sadly, an all too rare
combination in so many films, particularly the other American ones that showed in this
year's Cannes competition, making Mud all the more worth the wait. – Jason Solomons,
The Observer
Place Beyond The Pines, The
Dir: Derek Cianfrance
2012
USA
140 mins
Cert: 15A
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Mahershala Ali, Ben
Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Bruce Greenwood, Rose Byrne
Language: English
Available to programme: Mid August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KepnbJT5nBw
Nothing at the Toronto film festival – not even Paul Thomas Anderson’s fascinating The
Master, which came straight here from Venice – started more punchily or sustained such
swaggering visual allure as The Place Beyond the Pines, a tough, elaborate thrillerdrama which reunites Ryan Gosling with his Blue Valentine director, Derek Cianfrance.
The camera starts tight on a tattooed, muscular torso, reveals it to be Gosling’s, and
then follows the back of his head as he strides through a fairground, snaking his way
towards an arena for stunt bikes. Never cutting, we watch him mount a bike and roar into
a dome globe, where he and two other riders charge about doing loop-the-loops in
tandem. It’s a wow of an opening shot, a splashy and unforgettable display of macho
showmanship both before and behind the camera. The movie never quite tops it, but
then again it’s hard to imagine how it possibly could.
With his red leather jacket and biker gloves, Gosling seems at first to be spinning a
variation on the coiled cool of his Drive performance, but the differences are telling: it’s
hard to imagine that character throwing up from the stress of a high-speed getaway.
Gosling’s Luke discovers from an ex (Eva Mendes) that he has a son he never knew
about. In a doomed attempt to make a go of things, he’s talked into committing a series
of bank jobs by a scuzzy new acquaintance (Ben Mendelsohn), which we’re pretty sure
is not going to turn out to be a wizard plan. Their first heist is another memorable coup,
this time of editing and sound, and of pumping up our blood pressure. The music, a
distinctive element right the way through, is boldly atonal and slides around the place, as
if we were watching a nervy French chamber piece, which we decidedly are not.
The initial puzzle of the movie is wondering when Bradley Cooper is going to show up –
he and Gosling share the main acting credit side by side, but only co-exist, otherwise,
during a single sequence. It becomes clear that we’re dealing with a story in three
distinct parts, and that Cianfrance will widen it out to say things about fathers and sons,
and the sins of both.
The second part, in which Cooper’s rookie cop takes over the mantle of protagonist, dips
a toe into the murky waters of police corruption, with Ray Liotta in his especially terrific
Cop Land zone as the sort of officer you wouldn’t feel safe following into the woods at
night, especially if you were a suspected goody two shoes.
Then there’s the third section, hinging on a questionable set of contrivances that let the
movie down, certainly a little, but not so very much. Dense and enthralling, it was one
definite highlight of the festival for me, and my admiration for Cianfrance is all the greater
for the melodramatic risks he’s willing to take, whether or not every last one of them
pays off. – Tim Robey, The Daily Telegraph
Reluctant Fundamentalist, The
Dir: Mira Nair
2012
UK/USA
128 mins:
Cert: 15A
Starring: Riz Ahmed, Live Schreiber, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Om Puri,
Shabana Azmi, Martin Donovan, Nelsan Ellis, Haluk Bilginer, Meesha Shafi, Imaad
Shah
Language: English
Available to programme: Mid September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouXWUenv5_Y
Director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay; Monsoon Wedding) returns to the Festival with her
intense adaption of Moshin Hamid’s bestseller. It tells of Changez, an ambitious young
man whose identity pivots between a glittering stockbroker career in the Big Apple and
his home culture thousands of miles away in Lahore, Pakistan.
Aggressive young gun Changez sums up everything his poet father detests about the
West, as he lands a prize job at a firm specialising in the ruthless takeovers of ailing
companies. Changez soon catches the eye of troubled trophy WASP princess Erica,
who is intrigued by this ‘exotic’ man. Then, out of the blue, the World Trade Centre is
destroyed, and suddenly Changez’s Pakistani background and face suddenly don’t fit.
Being strip-searched at US Customs is the first of his humiliations; and disenchantment
with his new home, which forces Changez to reconsider who he is, draws him back to
Pakistan and headlong into the unfolding conflict between the US military and Pakistani
extremists.
Nair astutely treads the delicate faultlines between Western and Islamic worlds,
supported by an impressive cast led by Riz Ahmed, with Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson
and Shabana Azmi. - Cary Sawhney, BFI London Film Festival 2012
Robot & Frank
Dir: Jake Schreier
2012
USA
89 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, Jeremy
Strong
Language: English
Available to programme: August
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obgNpc6Ff-U
Like the best movies, the ones that work their way into your head and heart, Robot &
Frank has a deceptive simplicity. It also helps to have Frank Langella, a stellar actor at
his magnificent best, in the starring role. Langella’s Frank is a retired burglar, a secondstory man ready to hang it up at 70. His children, Hunter (James Marsden) and Madison
(Liv Tyler), don’t know what to do with him. His parental neglect extended to two prison
stints.
Enter Robot (voiced with droll wit by Peter Sarsgaard), a talking machine that will keep
the old-timer in line. Or so Frank’s kids think. After a few days of Robot’s lectures on diet
and exercise, Frank gets his own idea to enlist Robot in a new robbery scheme. There’s
bracing humour here, and a dash of heartbreak – don’t expect to be wrapped up in a
warm and fuzzy cinematic blanket. Robot & Frank, crisply directed by newcomer Jake
Schreier, is made of tougher stuff. Just like Frank’s flirtation with a librarian (Susan
Sarandon), the movie keeps springing surprises. - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Sessions, The
Dir: Ben Lewin
2012
USA
94 mins
Starring: John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy
Language: English
Available to programme: Now
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T7vqxwuWEM
Cert: 16
Mark O'Brien's body was contorted by polio, and he spent most of his hours confined to
an iron lung. His severe physical limitations did not prevent him, however, from
becoming a poet and journalist — he learned to write by tapping keys with a stick held in
his mouth — nor did they keep him from longing for one of life's most treasured
experiences: sexual fulfillment. Featuring outstanding performances from a first-rate cast
— John Hawkes, riveting as O'Brien, opposite Academy Award®–winner Helen Hunt
and William H. Macy — The Sessions relates O'Brien's quest to finally lose his virginity
in his late thirties. A warm, heartfelt study in generosity and desire, it is also a rare film
that acknowledges the erotic lives of people with disabilities.
O'Brien is a religious man, and the first person that he confides in regarding his erotic
needs is a priest, Father Brendan (Macy). Neither condemning nor condescending,
Brendan assures O'Brien that God will look the other way. O'Brien resolutely sets out to
find a professional sex surrogate, and has the remarkable good fortune to find Cheryl
(Hunt), an articulate, mature and patient woman who gently coaches him in his arduous
struggle toward greater bodily awareness. With time, they will negotiate the possibility of
actual intercourse. Along the way, each discovers hidden resources within themselves,
and more common ground than either would have expected.
A film like The Sessions relies on strong performances, and it's hard to imagine a finer
cast than that assembled by director Ben Lewin. Acclaimed for his sterling character
work in Me and You and Everyone We Know, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Winter's
Bone (for which he received an Academy Award® nomination) and Deadwood, Hawkes
brings tremendous expressiveness to O'Brien, despite being unable to use most of his
body. Macy is wonderfully droll as the permissive priest, and Hunt is radiant,
compassionate and thoroughly no-nonsense.
The Sessions reminds us what can be achieved when we strive to overcome
preconceptions. Sensual but never lewd, this is one of the year's most authentic and
unlikely feel-good movies. - Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Song For Marion
Dir: Paul Andrew Williams
UK
2012
93 mins
Cert: 12A
Starring: Terence Stamp, Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Arterton, Christopher
Eccleston
Language: English
Available to programme: July
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHgz_eurVnE
Less sentimental than it sounds but not by much, Paul Andrew Williams's Song for
Marion presents Terence Stamp as a senior citizen convinced to sing with a choir in
tribute to his dearly-departed wife. Some very fine actors manage to keep their dignity
here, in a film whose conceit and execution will appeal to a large percentage of the older
moviegoing public.
Stamp's Arthur is a husband whose gruffness, though a challenge for others, has never
kept wife Marion (Vanessa Redgrave) from understanding his love for her. If he
grumbles about her participation in a choir for the elderly it's largely because it taxes her
stamina, and only secondarily because having retirees sing harmony on Gnarls Barkley's
"Crazy" or do ersatz rap on "Let's Talk About Sex" seems to invite public mockery.
But the group, led by volunteer conductor Elizabeth (Gemma Arterton), is clearly a
source of camaraderie and joy for Marion, and when she is diagnosed with terminal
cancer, he grudgingly helps her spend her final months helping the choir qualify for the
finals of a nearby competition. He also attempts to make peace with his son (Christopher
Eccleston, eloquently showing the emotional toll lifelong paternal disdain has taken),
though this is a more complicated job than simply taking Marion to rehearsals and
apologizing when he snaps at her friends.
Redgrave and Stamp have a touching, mismatched chemistry, and in their hands the
marriage described in Williams's script feels lived-in and real. When she dies, Arthur's
impulse to become a recluse is overcome by the idea of finishing what she started:
Opening up emotionally to the choral cheerleader he's been so skeptical of, he agrees to
sing a solo at Elizabeth's group's competition.
The musical repertoire seems chosen solely so trailers can offer a quirky Full Montystyle gimmick, as opposed to being something this group of English oldsters might
actually choose. (Why aren't they singing one of the soulful '60s tunes on the film's
soundtrack, which might actually mean something to them?) But Song for Marion doesn't
abuse these characters too much: Sure, one octogenarian winds up in an ambulance
after trying to dance The Robot, but all of them are in on the joke, and some viewers will
find it absolutely hilarious to see them in heavy-metal mode for "Ace of Spades."
Williams's only grievous misstep is in the film's climax, where he introduces an
unforgivably contrived obstacle to the choir's final concert. Stamp saves the day to an
extent, but what might have been a truly moving performance is thoroughly
contaminated by a script that doesn't trust its lead character to bring us to tears on his
own. – John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
Spring Breakers
Dir: Harmony Korine
USA
2013
93 mins
Cert: 18
Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson,
Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane, Heather Morris
Language: English
Available to programme from: September
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QxxKunCKRs
How far will these girls go for an unforgettable Spring Break? In hypnotic visual style and
with a riotous soundtrack, former Disney Girls go wild, white-trash gangster James
Franco provides quite a sensation and youthful impetuosity goes right off the tracks.
What a trip.
The most mainstream film of perennial enfant terrible Harmony Korine (Gummo, 1997;
Mister Lonely, 2007) is the most extreme for his protagonists: certainly for fresh Disney
stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens and to some extent also for James Franco,
who plays a violent drug dealer, but then hilariously over the top, as he takes the stillnaive bikini girls in Florida under his wing.
With virtuosity, Korine films the gradual derailing of their pursuit of sex, alcohol and
drugs, which forms the hollow core of the American 'spring break' tradition, in glossy,
sexy, always undulating images (supported by Skrillex's dubstep soundtrack). The only
similarity with his previous feature, Trash Humpers (2009), shot on scratchy VHS tapes,
is that the form again seamlessly matches the content. At the Venice festival, Korine
called this a ‘liquid narrative’. ‘It's meant to be about surfaces. The culture is about
surfaces.' - Rotterdam International Film Festival 2013
Summer in February
Dir: Christopher Menaul
UK
2012
100 mins
Starring: Dan Stevens, Dominic Cooper, Emily Browning
Language: English
Available to programme from: October
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtkNxnS6rGs
Cert: 15A
Directed by Christopher Menaul and starring Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey), Dominic
Cooper (The Devil’s Double), Emily Browning (Sucker Punch), Summer in February is
set in the years running up to the First World War and focuses on the wild and bohemian
Lamorna Group of the Newlyn artist’s colony, dominated by the charismatic Alfred
Munnings. The incendiary anti-Modernist Munnings, now one of Britain’s most soughtafter artists, is at the heart of a complex love triangle, also involving aspiring young
painter Florence Carter-Wood and Gilbert Evans, the land agent in charge of the
Lamorna estate.
Inspired by the true diaries of Evans, Summer in February, reveals the tragic
consequences of this ill-fated love affair and casts light on the Newlyn colony which
fuelled Cornwall’s international reputation for art. - Cornwall Film Festival 2013