Cinema

Dead behind the eyes

With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it

Boring Boorman

Queen & County is John Boorman’s follow-up to his 1987 semi-autobiographical film Hope & Glory, although why a sequel now, after 28 years, I don’t know. (We’re not in regular contact.) I can only tell you that if you absolutely loved the first film, as I did — and still do — the news I’m

Stolen goods

Man Up is a British rom-com starring Simon Pegg as Jack and Lake Bell as Nancy. Nancy’s problem, at the outset, is that she is 34 and still single — has yet to ‘man up’ — and is therefore a failure, and if you can buy that as a premise for a film, then that’s

Sexed-up pacifism

Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops at SeaWorld. Super Size Me reduced neither the all-American waistline nor the profit margin of McDonald’s. The Cove did not prevent the Japan whale industry slaughtering dolphins. So what possible chance, more than a decade

To the maddest max

No one goes slack-jawed in wonder at the movies any more. In our cyber-enabled times, kid designers can mega-pixelate any old apocalypse on to the screen of your local Imax. It puts the new Mad Max in a strange relationship with its hoary forebears. Mel Gibson first fired up his turbo-jalopy back in 1979 (two

Rock bottom

The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made a packet out of saying the unsayable about race. Richard Pryor kicked down the door, but it was Rock who stamped a registered trademark on the N-word. He also had a rapper’s sensibility in the

Crowd pleaser

Firstly, a message to all Marvel fanboys: there is nothing for you here. Nothing. No CGI, no endless battles, no superheroines with their boobs on show, no deafening soundtrack and no Andy Serkis popping up for reasons I still can’t fathom, and don’t care to fathom anyhow. So go away and heckle someone else, unless

Superheroic failure

Avengers: Age of Ultron is the second film in the Avengers franchise, as written and directed by Joss Whedon, and stars Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Mark Ruffalo as Dr Bruce Banner, aka

Cold frames

A Little Chaos is a period drama directed by Alan Rickman and starring Kate Winslet as a woman charged to design and build a grand fountain garden for Louis XIV at Versailles. The film is, I noted from the poster, ‘the official film of RHS Gardening Week’, which may or may not be a hotly

All that glitters is not gold

Woman in Gold feels rather like a Jewish version of Philomena as this too is about an older woman seeking justice for what has been stolen from her in the past but, unlike the Jewish version of almost everything, this is not in any way superior, and may even be a dud. It is based

The Voices review: a hateful, repellent, empty film

The Voices is ‘a dark comedy about a serial killer’, which is not an overcrowded genre, and I think we can now plainly see for why. I was up for it, initially. The buzz around the film had been good. ‘Unexpectedly pleasurable’, GQ. ‘Wild and hilarious’, Hollywood Reporter. Which just goes to show: never, ever

Selma review: rich, nuanced, heartbreaking

Selma, the civil rights film that stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, undoubtedly contains the best and most powerful performance of the year as not nominated for an Oscar. Oyelowo has said this is because Hollywood prefers black actors when they play ‘subservient roles’ and aren’t ‘the centre of their own narrative, driving it

Trash, review: trash by name, trash by nature

Trash is the sort of film one desperately wishes to be kind about — heart supremely, if not burstingly, in the right place and all that — but it doesn’t make life easy for itself. Directed by Stephen Daldry, with a script by Richard Curtis, and set amid the kids who work the rubbish dumps