Film, Drama and Miles Fielder

Free Men

A Prophet's Tahar Rahim stars in worthy but flawed WWII espionage drama

11 May 2012

Loosely based on real events, this espionage drama set during World War II focuses on the largely overlooked cooperation between Arabic immigrants and the French Resistance. Tahar Rahim (who shot to fame in A Prophet) plays a North African worker named…

Apocalypse archives: Whit Stillman

The Damsels in Distress director picks five films he’d save in an impending apocalypse

17 Apr 2012

That Sinking Feeling (Bill Forsyth, 1980) ‘I wanted to include something Scottish. Aside from how enjoyable Bill Forsyth’s film about kids in rainy Glasgow is, I want to include it for its economy of means. To see how much was done with so little was…

Damsels in Distress

Whit Stillman's return to filmmaking features wordy, droll dialogue but often inept direction

17 Apr 2012

(15) 99min Following a 14-year break from filmmaking, American writer-director Whit Stillman returns to the big screen with another highly idiosyncratic comedy, one that audiences are likely to find either delightfully urbane or else utterly…

Le Havre

Aki Kaurismaki's French language debut is a grimly funny working class drama

19 Mar 2012

(PG) 93min Migrating south to shoot his latest feature in France seems to have lightened the mood of the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, whose brand of deadpan humour has previously proved to be the key in crafting a series of delightfully…

Perfect Sense

Dark yet sentimental romance set in an apocalyptic world

14 Sep 2011

(15) 92min David Mackenzie’s seventh feature is, superficially, his most disturbing yet. That’s saying something given the Scottish filmmaker introduced himself and his penchant for dark psychosexual drama with his grim and gritty adaptation of…

Incendies

Franco-Canadian drama is a deserving award-winner

23 May 2011

(15) 130min This commendable and impressive Franco-Canadian drama arrives fresh from scooping of seven Genies (Canada’s Oscars). Set in the Middle East and dramatising an endless cycle of violence and retribution, it’s an unashamedly didactic piece…

Confessions - Dark drama of murder and revenge in the classroom

Japan’s contender for Best Foreign Language Film at 2011 Oscars

11 Feb 2011

Japan’s contender for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Academy Awards is a real departure for its director, Tetsuya Nakashima, whose candy coloured comedy Kamikaze Girls and musical Memories of Matsuko previously brought him international…

The Passion Within

Period detail and good-looking actors in an unremarkable film

17 Aug 2010

‘You f**k like a boy’, reads the message that an actress leaves smeared in red lipstick across the bedroom mirror of a famous bullfighter in this 1940s Spain-set biopic that focuses on the tempestuous romance between Lupe Sino (Penelope Cruz) and…

The Kreutzer Sonata

18 Mar 2010

(18) 99min Having discarded cumbersome period trappings for his superb, stripped down, contemporary Los Angeles-set Tolstoy adaptation Ivansxtc, writer/director Bernard Rose does the same with another story by the Russian master, the second in a…

The Holly and the Ivy

50s British melodrama

5 Oct 2009

Although it’s by no means a classic, this British melodrama from 1952 provides an interesting snapshot of domestic life in postwar Blighty. Taking place over Christmas in rural Norfolk, it revolves around a family gathering at the vicarage of the…

I Sell the Dead

The horror comedy comes to DVD

2 Oct 2009

First-time writer-director Glenn McQuaid does a pretty good job of invoking the spirit of the camp old Hammer chillers films with this low-budget comedy horror about a pair luckless bodysnatchers. Set in a mist-shrouded backwater of 19th century feckin…

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)

New work from Pedro Almodóvar

21 Aug 2009

Since moving into his mature period of filmmaking Pedro Almodóvar’s films have benefited from both an increasingly dramatic emotional impact and an ever more cinematic sensibility. His latest boasts a little less of the former than its predecessors, but…

The look of love: Pedro Almodóvar interview

We preview the Spanish filmmaker's Broken Embraces

20 Aug 2009

Pedro Almodóvar, the most famous Spanish filmmaker since his Aragónian idol Luis Buñuel, and one of the most acclaimed auteurs in international cinema, once described his relationship to his chosen medium of expression thus: ‘Cinema has become my life.

Capturing the imagination: Terry Gilliam

Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam talks about The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

20 Aug 2009

Terry Gilliam is without doubt a singularly gifted visionary and an irrepressibly maverick filmmaker. However, the 66-year-old American former Monty Python animator also appears to be cursed with dreadfully bad fortune. The debacle with the financiers…

Inglourious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino interview

15 Aug 2009

The sixth film by Quentin Tarantino has been a long time coming. Tarantino began writing his World War II men-on-a-mission adventure Inglourious Basterds more than a decade ago. Unable to finish it, he put the script aside and instead made the two-part…

Moon: interview with director Duncan Jones

9 Jul 2009

Cerebral science fiction thriller Moon heralds the arrival of an impressive new filmmaking talent in Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie. Miles Fielder meets him.

Moon

9 Jul 2009

Cleverly conceived, evenly paced and consistently intriguing, this old-school science fiction thriller is a very welcome repost to the numbing spectacle of what passes for sci-fi these days. Taking his cue from genre classics from the late 1960s through…

Christine Jeffs interview

25 Jun 2009

Kiwi filmmaker Christine Jeffs (pictured centre right) wasn’t the obvious choice to direct the American indie comedy Sunshine Cleaning. Her previous two features, the New Zealand marital breakdown drama Rain and the British dead poet biopic Sylvia…

Meet Danny Wilson

11 Jun 2009

This lesser known 1951 Frank Sinatra film was made at the time his career had stalled, two years after his only role of note at that point, in the Gene Kelly musical On the Town, and two years before he won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity, the film…

Il Grido

28 May 2009

(12) 116min This less well-known Michelangelo Antonioni film from 1957 is evidence of the Italian auteur’s transition from his country’s post-war neo-realist style to the kind of filmmaking with which he established his international reputation.

Mark of an Angel

14 May 2009

THRILLER (12A) 91min It’s partly spoiling the experience of watching this impressively executed French film to reveal that what begins as an engrossing character study transforms into a riveting domestic thriller. But to not make reference to the…

Helen

14 May 2009

(PG) 79min Given that contemporary filmmaking in Britain continues to be comprised largely of stale costume dramas and gangster thrillers, cheap carbon copies of American horror movies and grim social realist stories either made by or made in the…

Everlasting Moments

14 May 2009

DRAMA (15) 131min Given veteran Scandinavian filmmaker Jan Troell’s latest is about a woman discovering her natural ability for photography in early 20th century Sweden, it’s wholly appropriate that the film is a masterclass in visual design.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

30 Apr 2009

WAR/DRAMA For his penultimate American film in 1958, Douglas Sirk, master of Hollywood melodrama, returned to his native Germany to shoot his most personal film. Adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western…

The Small Back Room

16 Apr 2009

THRILLER/DRAMA (PG) 104min This 1949 Powell and Pressburger collaboration has, historically, been overshadowed by the better known and far grander productions by the great director-writer team. Certainly, in comparison with the awesome…