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4,176 articles
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In the Fog
16 Apr 2013
A stately, austere and richly atmospheric war film from director Sergei Loznitsa
‘I have done nothing wrong,’ insists railway worker Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy), when two local partisans Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) call on his modest family home. We’re in occupied Belarus in 1942, and a group of saboteurs…
Rebellion
16 Apr 2013
A deft portrayal of the French Pacific 1988 Ouvea conflict from actor/director Mathieu Kassovitz
In Rebellion (L'Ordre Et La Morale), Mathieu Kassovitz revisits events on the French Pacific territory of Ouvea in New Caledonia in 1988 when a small local uprising was met by the full force of the French army. Kassovitz's hard-hitting reconstruction…
Watch: trailers for the Richard Fleischer retrospective at EIFF 2013
16 Apr 2013
Edinburgh International Film Festival to screen six of the American director's films
The Edinburgh International Film Festival has started releasing the first few snippets of information about its 2013 programme. As well as featuring Karen Gillian romcom Not Another Happy Ending as its closing film (read what Gillan says about it in our…
Oblivion
10 Apr 2013
Tom Cruise's latest sci-fi outing is visually splendid but features overfamiliar plotting
His first sci-fi since Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, there is a queasy sense of familiarity with Tom Cruise’s new film, Oblivion. It hardly helps that his character, a cocky blue-collar repairman, is named Jack Harper – which sounds uncannily…
Simon Killer
4 Apr 2013
A sinister, smartly shot dramatic thriller starring Brady Corbet and Mati Diop
Antonio Campos follows his striking debut Afterschool with another cinematic punch to the gut. Simon Killer is a film which chills and confounds. Featuring a complex performance from Brady Corbet (Funny Games, Melancholia), it signposts its…
The Host
3 Apr 2013
This Stephenie Meyer-adapted sci-fi has some good ideas let down by dull scripting and wooden acting
Whoever decided to combine the talents of author Stephenie Meyer and writer-director Andrew Niccol should never eat lunch in this town again. Both have form in coming up with intriguing, high concept storylines: an adolescent human falls in love with…
All Things to All Men
28 Mar 2013
Formulaic cops and robbers thriller starring Gabriel Byrne and Rufus Sewell
The opening minutes of All Things to All Men suggest that something interesting could be in the offing. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ says a gun dealer as stony-faced thief Riley (Toby Stephens) concludes their transaction. ‘Just like old times,’ says…
Thursday Till Sunday
28 Mar 2013
A beautifully-crafted but directionless Chilean drama about marital strife
This South American drama depicts a four-day cross-country car journey taken by a family, for reasons kept intentionally vague, from the perspective of 12-year old Lucia (newcomer Santi Ahumada), travelling with her parents and little brother Manuel.
Papadopoulos & Sons
28 Mar 2013
Forgettable, unconvincing Anglo-Greek comedy drama starring Stephen Dillane
Tales of black sheep family members losing the strictures of stuffy respectability have been legion and the forgettable Papadopoulos & Sons has nothing fresh to enliven the familiar formula. Predictable plotting, stilted performances and…
Dark Skies
28 Mar 2013
A sci-fi horror with a few decent scares is let down by derivative plotting
Having previously bombarded us with (post-)apocalyptic scenarios in Doomsday, Legion and Priest, writer-director Scott Stewart now takes on the alien visitation genre with marginally more satisfying results. While Dark Skies exercises more restraint and…
GI Joe: Retaliation (3D)
27 Mar 2013
The Bruce Willis and Dwayne Johnson-starring sequel is a pleasantly surprising improvement
If GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra represented the brain-dead summer blockbuster at its absolute worst, then the marked improvement of belated follow-up GI Joe: Retaliation is a pleasant surprise. Jon M Chu’s sequel abandons the effects-heavy, charisma-free…
Promised Land
26 Mar 2013
Gus Van Sant's eco-drama is fundamentally likeable but shies away from deeper issues
Director Gus Van Sant is no stranger to tackling challenging subject matter, be it school shootings (Elephant), gay rights (Milk) or critically derided remakes (Psycho). His latest effort takes on the controversial gas-mining process fracking, with a…
Evil Dead
26 Mar 2013
Fede Alvarez's horror remake doesn't better the original, but is still satisfyingly gory
Plumping for back-to-basics terror over quips and innovation, Evil Dead transcends its remake status with exuberant displays of blood lust, dousing a largely bland cast in buckets of the stuff. The feature debut of acclaimed shorts director Fede Alvarez…
Stolen
25 Mar 2013
Nicolas Cage's reunion with Con Air director Simon West is disappointingly lacking in tension
What with Nicolas Cage's recent output conforming rigidly to the law of diminishing returns, it was with hopeful optimism that some fans regarded the name Simon West on the poster for Stolen. West's directorial debut was a little film called Con Air…
Reincarnated
25 Mar 2013
This documentary charting Snoop Dogg's Rasta transformation to Snoop Lion is shallow and tenuous
Drug-dealing, guns, jail-time, pimping and bitches – Snoop Dogg’s had enough of the thug life. Freshly re-christened as Snoop Lion, the lanky Californian rapper heads to Jamaica on a physical, musical and spiritual quest to swap hip-hop depravity for…
Trance
22 Mar 2013
Vibrant, genre-subverting thriller contains trio of assured performances
Director Danny Boyle has a flair for making vibrant, zeitgeist-capturing films about characters in extreme situations ultimately overcoming the odds – whether it’s an Edinburgh heroin addict in Trainspotting, a teenaged Mumbai orphan accused of cheating…
Misadventures in Wonderland: All Night Horror Madness
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22 Mar 2013
Our columnist Alice, a self-confessed movie hater, attends a ten-hour horror film marathon
For God’s sake. There are two things I don’t do. One is eat cereal (because pouring milk on things that are crispy is disgusting) and the other is watch films. I’ve never got it. Owning a short attention span but never a DVD player hasn’t…
King of the Travellers
22 Mar 2013
Underwhelming tale of torn loyalty, forbidden love, revenge and betrayal
Writer-director Mark O'Connor ambitiously attempts to draw on elements of Shakespearean drama and tragedy as well as the classic American cinema of the '70s for his latest film, King of The Travellers, with moderate success. For while his film does…
The Odd Life of Timothy Green
22 Mar 2013
Misguided combination of emotionally sensitive adult themes and Disney fairytale coating
Disney's The Odd Life of Timothy Green is a film as peculiar as its name suggests. But while certainly ambitious and well-meaning in concept, its execution feels a little too sentimental and contrived to be taken seriously. The film follows devoted…
Baise-Moi
22 Mar 2013
The low budget, sex and violence-filled movie is available uncut in the UK for the first time
When it comes to splitting opinion straight down the midriff, few films from the last couple of decades have been quite so marmite as Baise-Moi. For some, this low-budget French movie from 2000 was simply a porno with a bit more story than usual. For…
Mission to Lars
22 Mar 2013
Documentary about a Fragile X Syndrome sufferer's obsession with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich
This isn’t really a film about Metallica. Even though the metal behemoth’s shadow looms large over the entire documentary, don’t expect the warts and all melodrama of Some Kind of Monster. However if you do love the mighty ‘tallica you might find even…
Recent documentaries Sound City and Side by Side examine analogue vs digital debate
19 Mar 2013
Films from Dave Grohl and Keanu Reeves are actually about a lot more than music and film technology
Produced and presented by Keanu Reeves, Side By Side provides insight into the attitudes held towards digital technology by some of the most significant figures working in film today. Similarly, the Dave Grohl-directed Sound City, which takes the form…
Matteo Garrone, director of satirical drama Reality - interview
19 Mar 2013
The filmmaker behind astounding Mafia portrait Gomorrah turns his eye to reality TV
It was thanks to his theatre critic father that Italian film director Matteo Garrone first came across the work of the Fortezza theatre company, based at a maximum-security prison in Tuscany. ‘I used to go with my dad to see lots of plays,’ recalls the…
Broken
19 Mar 2013
Wildly melodramatic and stereotypical issue-based drama, starring Cillian Murphy and Tim Roth
Single parent families, sexually aware teenagers, people with mental health issues; they’re all just short-fused firecrackers ready to explode in director Rufus Norris’s frustratingly issue-based drama. Funded by the BBC and the British Film Council…
Flying Blind
19 Mar 2013
A quietly intriguing drama about an English aerospace engineer with a young, Arab boyfriend
Professional reserve crumbles in the face of an overwhelming romance in Flying Blind, a modest but engrossing micro-budget first feature from director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz. Although there is nothing here that would not sit comfortably on the small…
