Reviews
Inside Reviews
Splice, Vincenzo Natali, 104 mins (15)
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Wit, satire and a good dose of Freud permeate this relishable sci-fi horror about two Frankenstein scientists and their eerily expressive hybrid child
The Rebound, Bart Freundlich, 97 mins (15)
City Island, Raymond De Felitta, 100 mins (12A)
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Zeta-Jones's age-gap romcom never gets out of second gear
DVD: Clash of the Titans, For retail & rental (Warner)
Sunday, 25 July 2010
This CGI-heavy remake of the 1981 adventure film has Perseus (Sam Worthington) battling monsters, while the ridiculously wigged and made-up gods of Olympus (Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes) look on.
DVD: Leonard Cohen's Lonesome....For retail & rental (Pride)
Sunday, 25 July 2010
A long and solemn documentary about the creative life and work of the Canadian seducer.
DVD: Shutter Island, For retail & rental (Paramount)
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Martin Scorsese has great fun with this OTT gothic thriller, set in the trench-coated 1950s, in which an unstable detective (Leonardo DeCaprio) investigates a disappearance from an offshore mental hospital.
Ivul (15) (Rated 2/ 5 )
Friday, 23 July 2010
The fourth movie from the Kent-born Andrew Kotting is set in the French Pyrenees, and watches a family blow apart.
DVD: Picnic at Hanging Rock (PG) (Rated 5/ 5 )
Friday, 23 July 2010
Peter Weir's 1975 masterpiece, adapted from Joan Lindsay's Victorian mystery novel, receives the Blu-ray treatment: a director's cut, a 120-minute-long making-of and an interview with Lindsay.
Baarìa (15) (Rated 3/ 5 )
Friday, 23 July 2010
Fans of Cinema Paradiso know what to expect from Giuseppe Tornatore: lovingly evoked scenes of an Italian childhood, domestic intimacy, classroom horseplay, public eccentricity and the early movie-house.
City Island (12A) (Rated 2/ 5 )
Friday, 23 July 2010
The titular island, north of the Bronx, is home to 5,000 fisher-folk and, it seems, America's most dysfunctional family.
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FIVE BEST FILMS
Shrek Forever After
(U, Mike Mitchell, 93mins)
The third and by far the best of the Shrek sequels to the irreverent, Disney-mockingdeconstructs the biggest fairy-tale myth of all – the one about living happily ever after. Married with three young children, Shrek is finding that domesticity ill-suited to an ogre’s nature. Unfortunately, His disillusionment leaves him vulnerable to the treacherous Rumpelstiltskin, with whom he makes a Faustian pact. Basically, it’s a surprisingly moving reworking of It’s a Wonderful Life, with better throwaway gags and extra musical numbers.
Nationwide
Went the Day Well? (PG, Alberto Cavalcanti, 92mins)
This 1942 Ealing thriller is one of the most remarkable slices of wartime propaganda ever filmed. Based on a story by Graham Greene, it tells the story of a unit of German parachutists who, disguised as British soldiers, infiltrate a quiet English village in preparation for a full-scale Nazi invasion. Its very oddness is magnificent, as though ‘Dad’s Army’ had suddenly morphed into a guerilla conflict of kill-or-be-killed.
Limited release
Leaving
(15, Catherine Corsini, 86mins)
Kristin Scott Thomas’s tour-de-force performance, as a woman who abandons her bourgeois family life for a passionate love affair with an immigrant builder, gives what might otherwise seem an over-familiar melodrama real heft and emotional intensity.
Limited release
Please Give
(15, Nicole Holofcener, 90 mins)
In Nicole Holofcener’s latest and best film, Catherine Keener plays Kate, a well-to-do New Yorker who worries herself to distraction about society’s unfortunates and expresses it in compulsive handouts to to street people. Holofcener depends on the lure of character and feeling to keep her audience involved, and her writing is so incisive that it’s no hardship to submit.
Nationwide
Toy Story 3
(U, Lee Unkrich, 108mins)
Its “U” certificate belies the fact that this is a heart-rending meditation on ageing, impermanence and mortality, yet it’s also a dizzyingly funny romp that honours and extends the glorious invention of the first two films. Scriptwriter Michael Arndt (who penned ‘Little Miss Sunshine’) gets full value from the old favourites, and hardly a sequence goes by without something that delights, or exhilarates, or amuses.
Limited release