Space is just 80 miles away from every one of us. Closer than most people are to their own national capitals. But it feels much further than it should. NASA’s moon landings were meant to be the dawn of an golden age of space travel, lunar bases and missions to Mars. It didn’t happen. And Earth’s dreams of galaxies far, far away faded over the next four decades. In his final public interview, Neil Armstrong lamented what mankind really lost: the belief that anything is possible. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘Film’ Category
Film review: Gravity
On February - 18 - 2014
Quentin Tarantino: Django Unchained
On January - 13 - 2014
One… two… three seconds. It’s the one thing you don’t expect to come out of Quentin Tarantino’s mouth: nothing. The question that’s stopped him in his tracks is the question we always ask. The only question that matters, really.
Tarantino loves movies. He loves watching them. He loves reading about them. He loves making them. And maybe most of all, he loves talking about them. But ask him to explain why – what is it you love about movies? – and the most famous motormouth in movieland has to stop and think. Read the rest of this entry »
DVD review: F For Fake
On August - 16 - 2012
Truth be damned! Emerging from a fug of frozen-peas ads, crappy health and burst projects, Orson Welles’ final film as a director was one last rabbit out of the hat: a definition-defying examination of trickery itself. Derailing a BBC documentary about legendary art forger Elmyr de Hory, Welles shreds it into a subversive, self-indulgent cine-essay on “two world leaders in fakery”: Hory and his biographer/fellow-faker Clifford Irving. Gatecrashing into the edit come Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso and a fascinating dissection of reality, falsehood, bluff and narrative in a ludic comedy of secrets and lies. Read the rest of this entry »Film review: Avengers Assemble
On April - 29 - 2012
What do you get if you cross a Norse god-king with an ego the size of a planet, a nervy science boffin with gigantic anger issues, a WWII super-soldier with a very silly costume and a genius billionaire playboy with flying power-armour? Arguments, that’s what.
With great power comes great banter in writer/director Joss Whedon’s blockbuster multiplier, which isn’t the best superhero movie ever – but might well be the funniest. Read the rest of this entry »
Jennifer Lawrence: The Hunger Games
On March - 24 - 2012
After Jennifer Lawrence’s first audition, talent agents told her mother it was “the best cold-read by a 14 year old they had ever heard”. Six years later, she was scorching down the red carpet at the Academy Awards in a Calvin Klein dress looking hotter than the sun. Oscar-nominated in indie drama Winter’s Bone, blockbuster babe in X-Men: First Class and now starring in her own killer franchise The Hunger Games… Lawrence is raising the temperature in Hollywood. Read the rest of this entry »
Film review: John Carter
On March - 8 - 2012
Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (voted one of the worst movies ever). Mission To Mars (Rolling Stone: “DePalma has never made a dull movie. Until now.”). Red Planet (Variety: “Mission To Mars had style to burn compared to Red Planet”). Ghosts Of Mars (killed John Carpenter’s career for nine years). Doom (one of Time magazine’s 10 Worst Ever Videogame Adaps). Mars Attacks! (Budget: $100m. US box-office: $38m). Mars Needs Moms (the biggest box-office bomb of all time).
If history has taught us one lesson, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie about Mars, it had better star Arnold Schwarzenegger and a lady with three boobies. Read the rest of this entry »
Film review: Khodorkovsky
On March - 5 - 2012
Someone doesn’t want you to see this film – it was stolen, not once but twice, before its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. That adds further dark spice to this elusive, fascinating glimpse at modern Russia through the life of imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Splicing investigative interviews with stylish animated sequences, filmmaker Cyril Tuschi’s involving documentary tries to discover how Khodorkovsky went from being the world’s richest man under 40 to a seemingly indefinite prisoner in Siberia. Edged with cynicism and wit, Tuschi’s film can’t hide its admiration – but real answers lurk tantalisingly out of reach. Read the rest of this entry »
Cronenberg & Mortensen: A Dangerous Method
On March - 3 - 2012
Taking cocaine and sleeping with your patients? Psychoanalysis sure ain’t what it used to be. David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method reveals the fascinating battle of wills between the two great minds – Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung – that invented modern head-shrinking. It’s a movie about ego, intellect and ambition. It’s a movie about spanking Keira Knightley. It’s also Cronenberg’s third film in a row with Viggo Mortensen, concreting one of modern cinema’s most fearless, fascinating partnerships. The two men sit down together on the couch. Let today’s therapy begin. Read the rest of this entry »
DVD review: Drive
On December - 27 - 2011
He has no friends, no past and no name. “I drive,” he says. He does. Opening with its coolest set-piece – an intense, tightly constructed stop/start getaway – Drive immediately shows us how.
Having spun the story of Brit criminal Charles Bronson into a 21st-century Clockwork Orange, hotshot Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn joins forces with Ryan Gosling to take a classic American genre-engine– a girl, a hero, a dark lord, cars, guns, dirty money – and give it a gleaming new Euro-cool chassis. Read the rest of this entry »
