Martin Provost’s last film Séraphine (2008) demonstrated the director’s joy of writing a fictional account of Séraphine Louis, a female artist living on the fringe of French society after World War One. Now, in Violette, Provost returns to similar ground to write and direct a graceful, fictional biography of the French counter-culture novelist Violette Leduc Read More
“It’s almost shocking how little films have dealt with architecture”, reflected Wim Wenders when asked about his new collaborative project, Cathedrals of Culture in a recent article of The Independent: “overall, movies used architecture and buildings as backdrops, but failed to enter ‘their souls’, as we are now trying to do”. This is due, one Read More
One might not expect the director of Channel 4’s Big Brother zombie-drama Dead Set, or the drug–dealing crime series Top Boy, to make his debut feature film with a stark look at the subterfuge and brutality of the Irish Troubles. However, in ’71 Yann Demange proves successful in creating a surprisingly apolitical film, focusing Read More
It is rare nowadays to see a contemporary feature film which is entirely devoid of colour. Whilethere has been a renewed interest in filming in monochrome in recent years, including Frances Ha (2012), The Artist (2011), and Tim Burton’s laborious remake of his 1984 short Frankenweenie (2012), the aesthetic is used largely as pastiche, referring Read More
Coming a long way from what is perhaps his best known film, The Fly (1986), David Cronenberg’s new satirical drama Maps to the Stars (2014), as the title implies, centres on a group of Hollywood celebrities that are desperately searching for fame and success. Anxiety, stress, longing for ultimate triumph but also fear of failure seem Read More
Harold Pinter once remarked that silences were revelatory spaces “below the word spoken”. The last essay in Kei Miller’s Writing Down the Vision, “A space between the poems” turns on the word “space”; Miller’s incantatory repetition of the word, turning it around this way and that to pick up nuances of meaning, crafts a perfect Read More
There are certain qualities you expect from A David Fincher film, given his track record. Seven, Zodiac, and even the maligned Girl with the Dragon Tattoo re-adaptation all share stunning cinematography, jet black humour, psychological analysis, explorations and impeccable casting. Gone Girl is no exception. Adapted from her novel, the screenplay by Gillian Flynn is Read More
The UK film industry has a track record of producing clichéd feel-good films about underdogs being pushed around; The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Made in Dagenham and Billy Elliott are key examples here, and Pride now adds itself to the list. Pride could have been quite a serious, emotional drama, but thankfully, and quite rightly, it Read More
Woody Allen’s films have something of a cult following. Like other directors before him, his name has become more than just a signature on his work; it has become a brand. The recognisable combination of white-font-on-black-background and easy jazz music has the ability to greet fans of his work with a sense of spellbinding wonder Read More
With due deference to his two best-known and most lauded films, Chinatown and The Pianist, Roman Polanski has always been at his best when working on a more intimate scale, with small casts in a claustrophobic setting. Indeed, one could already see this in his masterful first film, Knife in the Water, a virtual three-hander Read More