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Cannes Film Festival 2013 review: All Is Lost starring Robert Redford is almost dialogue-free, but exceptionally compelling nevertheless

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:13:11 +0100

JC Chandor’s remarkable second feature (after 2011’s Margin Call) is a story of a man lost at sea. There is only one actor (Robert Redford as the sailor) and no dialogue at all outside the short voice-over at the beginning of the film and the expletive that Redford yells in the depths of his despair.

Cannes Film Festival 2013 review: Only God Forgives review - Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn reunite for this underwhelming revenge thriller

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:03:58 +0100

Watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s lurid, ultra-violent and frequently preposterous Bangkok-set revenge thriller, you can’t quite believe that he once directed an episode of Miss Marple for British television. Only God Forgives is stylised, Grand Guignol filmmaking, as far removed from the world of Agatha Christie as you can imagine.

Cannes Film Festival 2013 review: Behind The Candelabra - Michael Douglas brilliantly captures Liberace's showmanship

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:06:00 +0100

Anyone who knows Michael Douglas best as the predatory, macho Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall St movies will be startled by his transformation in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind The Candelabra.

Cannes Film Festival 2013 review: As I Lay Dying directed by and starring James Franco is a solemn, uneven affair

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:40:46 +0100

The Great Gatsby isn’t the only adaptation of a classic American novel screening in Cannes this year. Also premiering is a film version of William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying directed by and starring the prolific James Franco.

Cannes Film Festival 2013 review: Inside Llewyn Davies starring Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:16:05 +0100

The Coen brothers are in vintage form in their new feature Inside Llewyn Davies. What is most impressive about the film (a premiere in the Cannes competition at the weekend) is the sure-footed way the Coens combine comedy, music and brooding film noir elements. This is ostensibly a film about the Greenwich Village folk music scene in the early 1960s, just before the coming of Bob Dylan, but it is far richer than such a description might suggest.

Jonathan Romney on Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby: Leonardo DiCaprio gets lost in Baz's jazz

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:15:00 +0100

Like it or not, there couldn't be a more appropriate opening attraction for the Cannes Film Festival than Baz Luhrmann's 3D The Great Gatsby. The extravagant Jazz Age festivities that Luhrmann organises embody exactly the glamorous image that Cannes likes to project, while, conversely, the movie's sparkling soirées owe less to actual 1920s America than to a platonic fantasy of an eternal, orgiastic Cannes gala – palm trees, red carpets and all.

Also showing: The Liability, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Deadfall

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:15:00 +0100

The Liability (95 mins, 15)

Film review: Beware of Mr Baker and Fast and Furious 6 - Furious Ginger packs a punch, but Vin Diesel is out of gas

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:15:00 +0100

A documentary about a rock drummer might seem more suited to BBC4 than to your local cinema, but most rock-docs don't open with their subject – in this case, Ginger Baker – cracking the director across the nose with his walking stick. Not a man who has ever needed an excuse to assault someone, Baker is incensed to learn that said director, Jay Bulger, is planning to interview some of his old associates, but in the event he had nothing to worry about.

DVD review: Django Unchained

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Quentin Tarantino is back on top form with this bold, bloody and frequently laugh-out-loud funny "deep southern western", the tale of a freed slave, Jamie Foxx, who teams up with a loquacious bounty hunter, Christoph Waltz, to take on a flamboyantly loathsome plantation owner, Leonardo DiCaprio.

DVD review: Bulhead

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Matthias Schoenaerts, Marion Cotillard's beefy co-star in Rust and Bone, stars in a brooding rural crime saga from Belgium, playing a cattle farmer who deals in illegal growth hormones.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Playing for Keeps (12A)

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:15 +0100

Gerard Butler hits rock bottom – even after the execrable The Ugly Truth – as a Scottish former footballer who is divorced from his soppy wife (Jessica Biel) and longs to connect with his son. So he agrees to coach his child's soccer (it's set in small-town USA) team, whereupon a legion of mothers (Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones) hit on the smirking lunk. Quite possibly the worst film of the decade thus far.

DVD & Blu-ray review: The Unbelievable Truth (15)

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:13 +0100

Back in 1989, Hal Hartley's highly stylised brand of independent US cinema looked and sounded like nothing else. Does this auteur's droll drama hold up now? Unexpectedly, yes.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Trouble with the Curve (12)

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:09 +0100

"Anyone who uses computers doesn't know a damn thing about this game.” Clint Eastwood plays another grouchy octogenarian in this hokey baseball drama.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Django Unchained (18)

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:07 +0100

“His name is Django, he's a free man, and he can ride what he pleases...” Tarantino, like Spielberg and Billy Wilder before him, is in the business of entertainment and this lurid, frequently funny pre-Civil War Western is wildly entertaining. Christoph Waltz bagged the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, but he's a leading man as the empathetic bounty hunter Dr King Schultz.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Billy Liar (PG)

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:03 +0100

“Today is a day of big decisions,” Billy keeps claiming. Except it isn't. The 19-year-old fantasist (Tom Courtenay, perfectly cast) is incapable of making big decisions.

Film review: The Great Gatsby (12A)

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

FScott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is an American masterpiece characterised by its concision, subtlety and undercurrents of meaning. Baz Luhrmann's most decidedly is not. It is characterised by cinematic bombast and digital fireworks; Busby Berkeley choreography and head-on collisions between the aesthetics of the 1920s and the 2010s.

Film review: Beware of Mr Baker (15)

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Drummers are axiomatically the madmen of rock, but there's never been a mad drummer quite like Ginger Baker, subject of this hugely enjoyable documentary profile. It gets off to a magnificent start, with a scene of the 73-year-old Baker attacking the film's director, Jay Bulger, with his walking stick – and just gets better.

Film review: Fast & Furious 6 (12A)

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

More musclebound meatheads in their mean machines: here's a franchise that shows every sign of living forever, or at least of remaining undead. This sixth instalment cares so little about realism that it brings back to life a character who was murdered before our very eyes in the last one.

Film review: The Great Gatsby (12A)

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

The novelist Jay McInerney has observed that, "It's possible we Americans are not entirely rational about The Great Gatsby." Make that Australians, too, if Baz Luhrmann's garish, hyperbolic movie adaptation is anything to go by.

Film review: The Liability (15)

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

There's a wild touch of the Coen brothers in this tale of murder and misadventure, though its north-east England setting would like to encourage memories of a thriller closer to home. Jack O'Connell plays Adam, a teen joyrider who's just crashed the Beamer belonging to his scary stepfather (Peter Mullan).

The Bling Ring review: Emma Watson leaves Hermoine behind in Sofia Coppola's new film

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:49:25 +0100

Director Sofia Coppola delivers a wily critique of celebrity culture in The Bling Ring as she dresses up the true story of Los Angeles teenagers robbing their Hollywood idols’ homes.

Jonathan Romney on Star Trek Into Darkness: Benedict Cumberbatch, a supervillain worlds apart

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:10:00 +0100

Ah, special effects blockbusters! They don't always have me biting my knuckles with excitement, but a good CGI extravaganza can be relied on to bring out the aesthete in me. Because plastic abstraction, rather than slam-bang action, is what these films at their best are really about.

Also showing: Mud and Village at the End of the World

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:10:00 +0100

Mud (130 mins, 12A)

Film review: A Hijacking - Borgen versus the Pirates! Aarrr, 'tis a wondrous tale, me hearties …

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:10:00 +0100

If it were not galling enough to have the Danes teaching us how to make brainy, nailbiting drama on television, now they're doing it in the cinema, too. A Hijacking, which borrows one writer and two actors from Borgen, is a mercilessly taut depiction of what happens when a gang of Kalashnikov-toting Somali pirates commandeers a cargo ship in the Indian ocean.

DVD review: The Sessions

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:30:00 +0100

A 38-year-old poet (John Hawkes), paralysed by childhood polio, employs a patient "sex surrogate" (Helen Hunt) to take his virginity.

DVD review: Les Misérables

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:30:00 +0100

Tom Hooper's quasi-operatic mega-musical is loaded with major historical events, weighty themes, tragic deaths and symbolic rebirths, so it's no wonder that the film version of Les Mis gets so exhausting, especially in the static, unspectacular second half.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Les Misérables (12)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

The arduous Fantine scenes – tooth extractions, hair removal and worse – are like being pummelled with a stale baguette in Tom Hooper's bombastic, sometimes breathtaking adaptation of the stage musical.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Bait (15)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

It's your average day in an Australian shopping mall when a tsunami hits the seaside resort, drowning the populace save for a precious few.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Alex Cross (15)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

A wiry, wild-eyed Matthew Fox tries his best as a deranged serial killer, but nothing can rescue this deeply unpleasant adaptation of James Patterson's crime novel.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror (15)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

Charlie Brooker's three sinister satires, set in the near future and all beautifully shot, are more Tales of the Unexpected than The Twilight Zone.

Film review: Star Trek Into Darkness (12A)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

JJ Abrams's second Star Trek film gets off to an exciting start during an all-action prologue on a colourful planet called Nibiru, overflowing with scarlet flora and volcanic larva.

DVD & Blu-ray review: The Impossible (12)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

Well-heeled Henry (Ewan McGregor) and Maria (Naomi Watts) and their young sons are holidaying in a Thai resort for their Christmas holidays when a deadly wave crashes through their hotel complex.

The Great Gatsby review: Long, gaudy and flawed, but there is much to admire in Baz Luhrmann’s stonking lack of subtlety

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:17:30 +0100

Any great book’s transition to the screen is greeted with a degree of sanctimony, but perhaps none more so than The Great Gatsby, the title most frequently deemed the Great American Novel.

Film review: Star Trek Into Darkness - JJ Abrams' Starfleet return will underwhelm even the most committed Trekkies

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:19:07 +0100

The cheers and whoops that greeted the 2009 relaunch of the Star Trek series contained in them, I thought, a big bass note of relief. For JJ Abrams had taken on the tricky task not only of appeasing a notoriously judgemental fanbase but of winning over a new generation of cinemagoers to whom a 1960s cult TV serial meant virtually squat.

Film review: Our Children (15)

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Based on true events, this sombre Belgian drama begins in a low key that swells sickeningly into tragedy. Murielle (Emilie Dequenne) and Mounir (Tahar Rahim) fall in love and marry, their domestic arrangements quietly controlled by the latter's adoptive father (Niels Arestrup), a well-off family doctor.

Film review: Deadfall (15)

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Hard to know why the Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, who made the haunting Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters, came to helm this mediocre thriller about troubled patrimony.

Film review: A Hijacking (15)

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

This hostage drama from Denmark has the same DNA (Dark National Angst) as its television serials: it is complicated, it is intelligent, it is the very antithesis of Hollywood.

Film review: Journey to Italy (PG)

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Roberto Rossellini's 1954 movie is a cornerstone of Italian neo-realism, and became a key inspiration to the French new wave. On the surface, it's a portrait of a marriage in eclipse.

Film review: Mud (12A)

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

As much a trip into American myth as a coming-of-age tale, Mud initially looks to be a tougher prospect than it proves.

Film review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (15)

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:30:00 +0100

Mira Nair's thoughtful drama takes a different angle from Zero Dark Thirty on the geopolitical fall-out from 9/11. Whereas Kathryn Bigelow's picture described a manhunt, this is more about the search for a man's soul.

Film review: Dead Man Down. Stop right there, lads – we’ve more than enough Scandinavian gloom, thanks

Sat, 04 May 2013 17:30:17 +0100

The original Swedish film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was no masterpiece, but it turned Noomi Rapace into an international star, and it gave its director, Niels Arden Oplev, the pick of every screenplay in Hollywood for his English-language debut. He’s said that the script of Dead Man Down was by far the best of the 250 he read – so one can only imagine how dreary the other 249 were.

Jonathan Romney on I’m So Excited! Just show me the emergency exits, please

Sat, 04 May 2013 17:30:13 +0100

Every film-maker is allowed the occasional lapse. Even in the loftiest pantheons of auteurdom, they’ve all messed up once or twice – Fellini, Bergman, Michael Haneke, Michael Bay …. But Pedro Almodóvar has never made a bad film as such. There have been some that didn’t quite come off, some that were a bit same-old-same-old – Kika, Bad Education – but nothing shameful.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Ultraviolet: The Complete Series (15)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:45 +0100

“I’m not OK, they want to kill me,” pleads Stephen Moyer to his best pal, Michael (Jack Davenport). Who are “they”? Vampires, of course.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Quartet (12)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:42 +0100

Dustin Hoffman’s corny directorial debut is more suited to TV than film, but it does benefit from the poignant performances of Tom Courtenay and the peerless Maggie Smith.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Life of Pi (PG)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:15 +0100

Debutant Suraj Sharma equips himself well as earnest teenager Pi in Ang Lee’s sensational-looking adaptation of Yann Martel’s spiritual heartbreaker.

DVD & Blu-ray review: Louie: The Complete First Season (15)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:11 +0100

“I know too much about life to have any optimism,” is a typically bleak quip from struggling stand-up Louis CK, describing new relationships.

DVD & Blu-ray review: The Long Goodbye (18)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:01 +0100

Robert Altman subverts virtually all noir genre rules in this loose-limbed adaptation, updated to 1973 LA, of Raymond Chandler’s most satisfying Philip Marlowe mystery.

Film review: Gimme the Loot (15)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

This fresh and freewheeling indie debut is a slice-of-life comedy in which we get to hang with Sophia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcom (Ty Hickson), a pair of feisty young graffiti artists from the Bronx, over the course of two hot summer days' worth of small-time hustling: selling and smoking weed, robbing and getting robbed, shooting the breeze and flirting.

Film review: I'm So Excited - There's nothing exciting about Pedro Almodóvar's zany sex comedy

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:17:00 +0100

About what, exactly? Having established himself as one of Europe's leading film-makers, Pedro Almodóvar has gone back to making the sort of zany sex comedy by which he first came to notice in the late 1980s.

Film review: 21 and Over (15)