Biopic

The Beaches of Agnes

Playfully eccentric feminist biopic

17 Sep 2009

If this idiosyncratic cinematic self-portrait is indeed Agnes Varda’s final film, it’s an illuminating and poignant adieu. The Belgian-born octogenarian film-maker ‘walks backwards’ through her life, narrating and drawing on clips from her own films and…

The Soloist

True life drama from Atonement director

17 Sep 2009

Having brought a brittle grace to adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, director Joe Wright makes a splashy stateside debut with The Soloist, a true-life drama about an unexpected friendship between world-weary LA journalist Steve Lopez…

Agnès Varda

The considerable career of the ‘grandmother’ of Le Nouvelle Vague

17 Sep 2009

There are rumours that Agnès Varda’s 2008 cinematic autobiography The Beaches of Agnès is her last film. For any octogenarian filmmaker, this might seem like the logical conclusion to a prolific career, but Varda is no ordinary artist. When she…

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

One of the key American films of the 1980s

27 Aug 2009

Paul Schrader’s brilliant overlooked 1985 biopic of the mad life and times of one of Japan’s most brilliant and troubled souls, Poet and novelist Yukio Mishima, gets a very rare outing on a new print in Glasgow while in Edinburgh they are showing the…

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (l’Instinct de Mort)

30 Jul 2009

Tracing a line from Mesrine’s disillusioning military service during the Algerian war to the beginning of his notoriety in 1972 (when he graduated to murder), the first instalment of this epic crime tale is derivative, energetic and hugely…

Film and Fashion - Coco Before Chanel

23 Jul 2009

As enjoyable as Coco Before Chanel – the giddy biopic of the reputed Nazi collaborator couturier starring Audrey Tautou – is, it underlined a hard, learned truth for me. Fashion and films co-exist – there is no symbiosis between the two. If they were…

Coco Before Chanel

23 Jul 2009

Films about great writers rarely work because it’s hard to express their literary output cinematically; a film about a fashion designer offers a much more visual proposition. Anne Fontaine’s sumptuously dressed biopic of the early years of Gabrielle…

Il Divo

19 Mar 2009

BIOPIC/DRAMA With Il Divo, the Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend) has spectacularly reinvented the genre of the political biopic. The subject of this darkly amusing and often exhilarating film is…

Che: Part Two

19 Feb 2009

WAR/BIOPIC (15) 127min Che Guevara’s final fatal campaign in Bolivia gets bold and bleak treatment in the second part of Steven Soderbergh’s extraordinary bio-historical epic about the ultimate revolutionary. It’s 1967 and Guevara (Benecio…

Notorious

5 Feb 2009

BIOPIC Unlike Nick Broomfield’s irascible 2002 documentary expose Biggie and Tupac, this fictionalised account of the fast times of Christopher Wallace/Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious BIG (Jamal Woolard) sheds no new light on the hip hop star’s…

Milk

22 Jan 2009

BIOPIC Gus Van Sant’s fairly conventional biopic of the first openly gay elected politician in the United States succeeds in overcoming genre limitations to create a powerful, compassionate film that’s up there with the director’s best work. We…

Che: Part One

11 Dec 2008

(15) 126min At Cannes, Steven Soderbergh’s diptych of films about Che Guevara were shown consecutively, but British audiences are being asked to spend a month pondering The Argentine (original title) before we see Guerrilla (part two) – a wise move…

W.

30 Oct 2008

The American aphorism that suggests 'any boy can grow up to be president' is blandly dramatised in Oliver Stone's outrageously timed film, the first biopic to consider the life story of a sitting US president. Fresh from his deadly pursuit by Anton…

Cass

31 Jul 2008

CRIME/DRAMA/BIOPIC (18) 108min Films about football hooligans have resulted in some of the worst examples of British filmmaking in the last ten years – Green Street, Rise of the Footsoldier, The Football Factory have all scored own goals. So it comes…

Steal This Movie

1 Nov 2007

Woefully under-distributed on its initial release in 2000 Robert Greenwald’s fascinating biopic of Yippie founder and US political activist Abbie Hoffman will hopefully find an audience on DVD. Constructed as a series of flashbacks, Hoffman (played with…

Man In The Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story

20 Sep 2007

BIOPIC (PG) 87min (Scanbox DVD retail/rental) On the subject of once highly-regarded artists fallen on hard times, this made-for-TV biopic isn’t the finest hour in director Allan Moyle’s career. His first film was the New York-set cult punk classic…

Copying Beethoven

(12A) 104min

16 Aug 2007

BIOPIC ‘He’s deaf, of course . . .’ explains a helpful old woman when Anna Holz (Diane Kruger) comes knocking on the door of Ludwig van Beethoven’s house. It’s an awkward introduction followed by the great composer’s heartfelt explanation of how he…

Klimt

1 Aug 2007

Chilean Raul Ruiz is one of the most remarkable avant-garde filmmakers working today. Having exited Chile after the Allende assassination he found a home in Paris and made a series of films that played with narrative structure and form in a manner…

The Flying Scotsman

19 Jun 2007

BIOPIC Riding your bike fast doesn’t make you a hero, but Graeme Obree’s well-documented battles with the external and internal pressures of professional cycling put him firmly in the Lance Armstrong class. As depicted in Douglas Mackinnon’s…

La Vie en Rose

19 Jun 2007

BIOPIC French singer Edith Piaf’s real life was the stuff of turbulent melodrama: she was abandoned by her mother and spent some of her impoverished childhood in a brothel, and she was discovered singing on the streets by an impresario, whom she was…

Amazing Grace

(PG) 118min

13 Mar 2007

BIOPIC/DRAMA Amazing Grace tells the story of how William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) persuaded the House of Commons after a series of attempts to end the slave trade in the British Empire. Alas, the subject matter is far more interesting than the…

Becoming Jane

(PG) 120min

27 Feb 2007

BIOPIC/DRAMA/ROMANCE As the occasionally inspired Boston Globe film critic Mark Feeney pointed out: ‘Once the implicit aim of biography was to uplift now it is to unveil.’ And so it is that we reach the point where it seems OK to release a film about…

Infamous

Infamous

15 Jan 2007

BIOPIC So how does this new film about Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood compare with Bennett Miller’s Oscar-winning Capote? It’s not as good, but this sentiment comes with a massive caveat as writer/director Douglas McGrath has created an entirely…

Miss Potter

(PG) 92min

20 Dec 2006

BIOPIC The life of Beatrix Potter might sound like a tame proposition, but this self-conscious vanity project for Renee Zellweger plays even less interestingly than any fluffy bunny bedtime story. Casting herself once again in the Bridget…