Film, Reviews 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…

The Innkeepers

A genuinely involving and disconcerting chiller that thankfully eschews any trendy post-modernism

11 May 2012

Having established his credentials as a serious genre fan with a spot-on homage to 80s horror movies in The House of the Devil, writer-director Ti West reaches even further back into the past with this slow-burning thriller. Like all good haunted house…

Le Quai des Brumes

Marcel Carné’s 1938 romantic crime drama gets a well deserved restoration

4 May 2012

One of the definitive examples of the ‘poetic realism’ style of French cinema of the pre-war and wartime years, Marcel Carné’s 1938 romantic crime drama has been treated to a well-deserved state-of-the-art restoration. Thanks to the digital dust-off…

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…

The Monk

Vincent Cassel stars in Dominik Moll's visually impressive but otherwise inert thriller

17 Apr 2012

(15) 101min It’s been seven years since Dominik Moll’s last film, but the talented filmmaker who made the blackly comic thrillers Harry, He’s Here to Help and Lemming, is back with his most ambitious film yet. Sadly, Moll’s adaptation of Matthew…

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…

Geoff Dyer - Zona

The multi-talented humourist turns his able hand to film criticism

27 Jan 2012

(Canongate) Having previously mashed-up fiction, journalism, essay, biography and travel writing, polymath and humourist Geoff Dyer once more defies genre with a book that’s one part film criticism, one part autobiography and several parts random…

The Phantom of the Opera

Unmissable HD restoration of 1925 Rupert Julian version starring horror icon Lon Chaney

12 Dec 2011

(PG) 77/114min There have been several adaptations of novelist Gaston Leroux’s classic macabre horror romance, among them the original 1916 silent German version, the 1943 Hollywood version with Claude Rains, the racier 1962 Hammer offering, Brian…

Black Pond

Smartly observed and cleverly constructed British comedy drama is something special

15 Nov 2011

(15) 83min This low budget British comedy drama is something special. Smartly observed and cleverly constructed, it’s at once funny and tragic and lyrical, and the deadpan humour is perfectly pitched with nicely underplayed performances from the…

You’ve Been Trumped

Controversial doc on Donald Trump's Scottish golf course plan a triumph

22 Sep 2011

(12) 95min Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand for the past few years, you’ll no doubt be aware of American tycoon Donald Trump’s controversial plans to build a golf course and hotel complex in an area of outstanding natural beauty and…

Life and Debt

Heartbreaking and pertinent documentary about Jamaica's economic misfortunes

22 Sep 2011

Made the year after the launch of the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel third world debt at the beginning of the new millennium, Stephanie Black’s agitprop documentary looks at the case of Jamaica. In 1977, fifteen years after achieving independence from…

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…

Captain America: The First Avenger

Despite a clumsy second half, the Cap sets the stage well for 2012's Avengers

4 Aug 2011

(12A) 124 min Captain America might be subtitled The First Avenger, but he is, in fact, the last of the Marvel Comics superheroes to receive blockbuster movie treatment before he assembles alongside Hulk, Iron Man and Thor in next year’s superhero…

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

The boy-wizard franchise goes out on a high

18 Jul 2011

(12A) 130min It gives this critic great pleasure to confirm that the final film in the franchise adapted from JK Rowling’s boy wizard publishing phenomenon is among the top three of the eight-part series. Since the series hit the ground running ten…

Green Lantern

Intergalactic special effects spectacle

1 Jul 2011

(12A) 114min So many adaptations of superhero comic books have received the blockbuster treatment it’s now safe to say we have seen the best of them. And its questionable what more or different there is that can be done with the super-powered…

Julia's Eyes

A very well made chiller in the stalk ‘n’ slash tradition

1 Jul 2011

(15) 112min In addition to directing visionary adult horror-fantasies (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) and outstanding Hollywood blockbusters (Hellboy and its sequel), Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is also carving a second career for…

X-Men: First Class

Latest in franchise makes clever use of Cold War-era setting

30 Jun 2011

(12A) 132min The novelty of the Hollywood franchise reboot has worn thin, but this re-launch of the initially excellent adaptations of the Marvel comic book benefits from a canny central concept that takes the mutant superhero team back to their…

Outside The Law (Hors La Loi)

Forceful thriller about 1950s Algerian freedom fighters

29 Jun 2011

(15) 138min Franco-Algerian writer-director Rachid Bouchareb follows his hard-hitting Palme d’Or nominated WWII adventure Days of Glory with this similarly forceful thriller about Algerian freedom fighters in the 1950s. Like its predecessor, this…

Senna

Fast-paced documentary on life and death of Formula One racing driver

28 Jun 2011

(12A) 106min This fast-paced documentary about the life and death of the legendary Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna plays more like a dramatic biopic than a feature-length doc. Taking his lead from and building upon dramatic documentaries such…

Hobo With A Shotgun

Rutger Hauer stars in second feature spawned from Grindhouse homage

21 Jun 2011

(18) 82min This blood-splattered Canadian shlocker is, following Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, the second film to be expanded from one of the handful of tantalising fake trailers inspired by Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation movie homage…

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…

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Not as bad as the second two, but still not a touch on the first

18 May 2011

(12A) tbc mins The fourth instalment of the supernatural swashbuckler originally based on a Disney fairground ride gets underway with a new storyline that throws overboard the sprawling plot of the previous two bloated sequels. It also ditches many…

My Dog Tulip is a witty alternative to the generally mawkish Hollywood 'animal movies'

20 Apr 2011

(PG) 82min In complete contrast to Marley and Me, that miserable master-and-mutt movie which managed to be both cutesy and mawkish and yet still picture life with a pooch as utterly abhorrent, this animated feature is witty, wistful, honest and…

Sucker Punch holds together pretty well under its own crazy internal logic

300 director babes with blades fantasy is a guilty pleasure

29 Mar 2011

(12A) 109min At first glance Sucker Punch might be Zack Snyder’s female-focused flipside of his swords and sandals testosterone workout, 300. The co-writer and director has suggested as much, and, indeed, this babes-with-blades (and higher-tech…

The Insatiable Moon

New Zealand romance with mental illness themes can't quite reach the Cuckoo's Nest

2 Mar 2011

(15) 100min It’s no surprise that this uplifting comic drama from New Zealand, which is set in a home for the mentally ill, features a charismatic but unstable protagonist and mixes social realism with religious parable, has been proclaimed One Flew…