The Place Beyond the Pines stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper — you spoil us, ambassador! — and is a generational feud film about fathers and sons and legacy. Can anyone be born clean? How do past events reverberate? How might one act of violence play out, years later? It is written and directed
Why the sudden spate of movies about classical music quartets and impending death? Early this year, we had Quartet, about four senior singers in a retirement home. Now we have A Late Quartet, about a string ensemble facing the loss of one of its members. The film industry couldn’t possibly be subliminally associating classical music
Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening)
Compliance is a small film that says big things rather than one of those big films that say very little, if anything. It’s written and directed by no one you have ever heard of, and stars no one you have ever heard of (I know!; be brave!) yet takes such a rivetingly clear-eyed look at
Welcome to the Punch is a British crime action thriller and here is why you may wish to see it: it is set in a night-time London so magnificently lit even I wanted to visit, and I live there. And now, ten reasons you can skip it, get on with your life and save 99
Robot & Frank is about a robot, and Frank, and I’d like to say it is as charmingly irresistible as you might suppose from the cute posters all around town, but hand on heart? I cannot. It’s OK, I guess, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, and, in the end,
After a succession of epic films including three hours of watching Cloud Atlas disappear up its own bottom — if you are going to disappear up your own bottom, at least make it snappy — along comes this crisp and confident thriller which demands you only appreciate it for what it is: a crisp and
Cloud Atlas is part-sci-fi, part-thriller, part-romance, part-comedy, part-action flick, part-this, part-that and it all adds up to? A whole lot of not very much. Based on David Mitchell’s novel, this strains, laboriously, to capture that novel’s scope and complexity, but gets nowhere near, and takes three hours to get nowhere near. (If you are going
This is 40. Or perhaps I should say, is this 40? I haven’t yet reached that rounded age myself, so don’t have much of a frame of reference. But a quick spin around Wikipedia reveals that the film’s writer-director Judd Apatow (45) and its two stars, Leslie Mann (40) and Paul Rudd (43), all have
Hitchcock is one of those films which would have been much better off if it had taken a moment to sit down and decide on its own sensibility. Before a camera had even rolled, it should have pulled up a chair and asked itself: am I a film about Hitchcock’s marriage, or am I a
Just as Les Mis was soaringly monotonous, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (3D) is soaringly pointless. No point to it whatsoever. I looked. I looked everywhere for a point, even under my cinema seat. (That’s how desperate I was.) But I came up empty-handed. It’s 90 minutes of sheer, total, utter pointlessness, as written and
I cannot tell you about all the things Steven Spielberg can and cannot do. I cannot tell you, for example, if he can make decent goblets from Quality Street wrappers or funny teeth from orange peel, as I can, but what I am able to say is this: he knows how to tell a story;
Here is a Quentin Tarantino film that, like all Quentin Tarantino films, is a typical Quentin Tarantino film, in the style of Quentin Tarantino, in that he takes a familiar trope, nods at it, toys with it, pokes it about, swills it round his mouth, then blows the whole thing up. I wonder if he
Les Misérables is one of the longest-running, most popular stage musicals in history, having been seen by 60 million people in 42 countries — sit on that, Cats! — and although I can’t comment on the live show, as I’ve never seen it, I can tell you this film, which comes in at around 140
You know how television is becoming like the movies, more expansive and more expensive? Well, what if the movies were to meet television halfway, becoming smaller and more routine? The result, I’m sure, would be something like Quartet, Dustin Hoffman’s first directorial effort since 1978’s Straight Time. If you ran past this film at speed,
The trouble with this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more. If
I once asked Donald Sutherland what it was like filming the famous naked love scene with Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. He said, ‘It was just so horrible.’ I was telling this anecdote over a bacon sandwich to the freckled actor Eddie Redmayne, who, if he is hit by a bus tomorrow, will be
Wow! Just: wow! Life of Pi may be the most ravishingly beautiful film I have ever seen. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. Its visual inventiveness made me want to weep for joy. It is magical realism made magical and realistic. The palette of colours is extraordinary. You will feel you are in the sea and above
Five minutes into You Will Be My Son (or Tu seras mon fils in its original French), I expected a very different film from the one that eventually emerged. The first scene takes place in a crematorium, as a coffin and its occupant are cooked to ashes. A relative of the deceased picks at a
Here’s a fun diversion for all the family: how many ‘high-concept’ film ideas can you think of in a single minute? These are the films with premises that can be summed up — and pitched to expectant, impatient Hollywood producers — in only a few words. ‘Jaws in Space’, say, or ‘Arnie versus Hitler’. Get
