Tom Dawson

Caramel

8 May 2008

DRAMA (PG) 95min Dedicated ‘to my Beirut’, the charming, bitter-sweet debut feature of writer-director Nadine Labaki centres upon the ‘Si Belle’ beauty parlour in the Lebanese capital. The 30-year-old proprietor Layale (Labaki herself) is guiltily…

Manufactured Landscapes

8 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (U) 86min Beginning with a bravura eight-minute lateral tracking shot through a giant Chinese factory, Canadian director Jennifer Baichwal’s thoughtful documentary explores the work of the photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale…

Smart People

8 May 2008

COMEDY DRAMA (15) 94min Another week and another dysfunctional American family comedy. Scripted by novelist Mark Poirier and directed by newcomer Noam Murro, Smart People examines the improbable rejuvenation of widowed, middle-aged English professor…

The Last Mistress

8 May 2008

DRAMA (15) 114min Despite suffering a cerebral haemorrhage in 2004, the French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has returned with her most entertaining and accessible work to date. Based on the 19th century novel by the controversial writer Jules-Amédée…

Under the Bombs

8 May 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 98min This heartfelt road movie from Lebanese writer-director Philippe Aractingi was filmed during Israel’s 33-day bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. It follows a wealthy Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) and a…

Beaufort

24 Apr 2008

WAR/ACTION/DRAMA (15) 125min The Beaufort of the title refers to a castle built by the Crusaders during the 12th century in southern Lebanon. In 2000 this mountaintop fortress is occupied by IDF (Israeli Defence Force) troops, who are preparing to…

Three and Out

24 Apr 2008

COMEDY (15) 106min Heard the one about the suicidal 50-something Irishman Tommy (Colm Meaney) and the London tube driver and aspiring novelist Paul (Mackenzie Crook), who needs somebody to throw themselves under his train in order to collect a…

Assembly

10 Apr 2008

WAR (15) 123min Chinese director Feng Xiaogang delivers an impressive anti-war epic based on a true story from the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950). The story begins in the winter of 1948 in northeastern China, where Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) leads…

Four Minutes

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 115min How about this for an enjoyably overwrought contemporary German melodrama? Traude Kruger (Monica Bleibtreu) suffered the trauma of seeing her female communist lover hung by the Nazis during WWII, and has spent the last 60 years…

Profile - Krisztina Goda

27 Mar 2008

Name Krisztina Goda Born Budapest, 1970 Background Having grown up in Budapest, where both her parents were doctors, Goda studied directing and editing at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, and then won a scholarship to…

You, the Living

27 Mar 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 93min In an unnamed Nordic city a moustachioed tuba-player starts talking about savings and pensions, while making love to his wife who is wearing a military helmet. A dog is dragged along a pavement, attached to the walker of its…

Back To Normandy

13 Mar 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 113min For this quietly compelling, multilayered documentary, French filmmaker Nicholas Philibert (Etre et Avoir) returned to the same Normandy agricultural community where, some 30 years earlier, he had served as an assistant…

Children Of Glory

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 120min Made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the doomed Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 (which cost some 5000 lives including that of the executed prime minister Imre Nagy), director Krisztina Goda’s Children of Glory…

Interview - Céline Sciamma

13 Mar 2008

‘I wrote the screenplay for Water Lilies while I was studying screenwriting at La Femis film school in Paris, and the director Xavier Beauvois, who was on the graduation committee, told me I had to make the film myself. My starting point was that I…

Hotel Harabati

(15) 94min

31 Jan 2008

In a recent article in Sight and Sound, the critic Michael Atkinson described a cinematic micro-genre that had emerged from France in recent years. His term was the ‘absurdist-anxiety thriller’, and he gave the examples of Dominik Moll’s Lemming…

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - interview with Marie-Josée Croze

31 Jan 2008

‘When I first met the director Julian Schnabel to discuss being in his version of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I remember that Julian was wearing these beautiful silk pyjamas. They were the same pyjamas that Bauby…

The Savages

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 114min Nine years after her 1998 feature debut Slums of Beverley Hills, writer-director Tamara Jenkins returns with this richly observed and terrifically acted character study. The Savages of the title are a pair of intellectual…

Lady Godiva

17 Jan 2008

ROMANCE (12A) 95min According to legend, Lady Godiva was the wife of an 11th century nobleman, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in a successful act of protest against her husband’s taxation of his subjects. Here, in her debut…

Laura Linney

17 Jan 2008

Breezing into a Soho hotel room on a sunny autumn morning during the London Film Festival, a smiling Laura Linney exudes a patrician charm and confidence. One of her fingers is encased in a splint, the result of a bathroom accident that very morning…

4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 113min The winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s impressively acted 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days explores a long, dark night of the soul in late 1980s Romania, unfolding towards the end of Nicolae…

Les Chansons d’Amour - profile of Christophe Honoré

13 Dec 2007

PROFILE Name Christophe Honoré Born 10 April 1970, Cahaix, France. Background Having grown up in Brittany, Honoré studied literature and cinema at Rennes university, before moving to Paris in his mid-20s, where he contributed to Cahiers du…

Anna M

15 Nov 2007

French writer/director Michel Spinosa’s Anna M is a psychological thriller which blends the clinical and the mystical in its portrait of a female erotomaniac. A rare book restorer at Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale, who still lives with her mother, the…

I Do

1 Nov 2007

ROMANTIC COMEDY (PG) 90min Meet Louis Costa (Alain Chabat from The Science of Sleep). He’s a 40-something Parisian perfumier, happily content with his bachelor existence. Yet, the women in his family – specifically domineering mother Genevieve…

The Band's Visit

1 Nov 2007

COMEDY/DRAMA (12A) 87min The band in question is the Alexandria Ceremonial Police group, which has come to Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab cultural centre in Petach Tivka, north-east of Tel Aviv. Unfortunately for them there’s no one to…

In their own words

18 Oct 2007

Project Catwalk Filmmaker Rodolphe Marconi discusses his new documentary about the enigmatic fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld ‘For several years I’ve wanted to make an intimate film portrait of someone who I found fascinating and funny, and I thought…