I walked into Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead not knowing much about National Lampoon beyond seeing their name displayed above films like Animal Farm, Vacation and, uh, Loaded Weapon 1. I left the documentary with newfound respect and admiration for a seminal comedy institution: a magazine (and, eventually, radio shows, movies et al) that’s the clear…
Maybe I’m not the audience for Entourage. I’ve seen very little of the show – snippets here and there of the later seasons that my wife forced herself to sit through, presumably out of completist compulsion. So I had no sense of good will towards movie star Vince (Adrian Grenier), his agent Ari Gold (Jeremy…
The word ‘naturalistic’ has very particular connotations when used to describe cinema. Handheld camera, loose compositions, deliberately-muddled foley; that sort of thing. However May in the Summer’s naturalism bears none of these characteristics. When May (Cherien Dabas, writer and director besides) returns to her home country of Jordan shortly before her wedding, the conversations she…
I must confess I know essentially nothing about Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. What I do know is gleaned pretty much entirely from this film, in which elderly baker Martin (Fabrice Luchini) becomes convinced that his new neighbour, Gemma (Gemma Arterton), is reliving Madame Bovary’s tragic character arc (specifically: sleeping with some dudes and then committing…
Why shouldn’t James Bond be played by Melissa McCarthy? Walking out of Spy, the latest film from Paul Feig – of Bridesmaids and The Heat – I couldn’t think of a convincing reason why not. The film is an uneven but enjoyable comedy. After a flabby opening act – weighed down both by an insistence…
The Salvation reminded me of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Not, I should hasten to add, because it approaches the mastery of Leone’s films, but rather in the way a foreign filmmaker (director Kristian Levring is Danish) approaches an acutely American genre from a unique perspective. There are some Leone similarities in how Levring’s screenplay (co-written…
The story told in Dinosaur 13 is perfectly suited to a feature-length documentary, featuring enough dramatic twists and turns to sustain 90-plus minutes with little padding. A complete T-Rex skeleton – “the most important paleontological find of all time” – is discovered by a group of scientists, but initial euphoria is overwhelmed when the skeleton…
Brett Morgen, the director of documentary Cobain: Montage of Heck, possesses two advantages few documentarians have. The first is that his subject – Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain – has become such a cultural icon that there’s no need for him to rehash the broad details of his life story. The second is his unprecedented…
The Zellner brothers’ latest feature owes a considerable debt to the Coen brothers’ Fargo. That film primarily serves as narrative impetus; discovered (somewhat improbably) as a waterlogged VHS relic, it stirs the fantasist impulses of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) and sends her on a journey in search of ‘hidden treasure’ – the cash-laden suitcase buried by…
The opening scene of the Oscar-nominated Argentinian anthology film Wild Tales – in which a pilot deliberately crashes a plane occupied with all those who wronged him – plays decidedly uncomfortably in the wake of the Germanwings plane crash. But while that scene might make audiences uncomfortably shift in their seats, that sort of discomfort…
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