Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2016 i Little White Lies

Directed by AMY BERG Starring JANIS JOPLIN, CAT POWER, SAM ANDREW Released 5 FEBRUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. Amy Berg on Janis Joplin with Alex Gibney producing. Just yes. 4 ENJOYMENT. Archival riches on a real soul poet. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Break another little piece of my heart now, darling. As a young girl, I heard my mother screaming along to a tape recording of Janis Joplin’s ‘Piece of My Heart’. It was shocking confirmation that a parent hadn’t consigned emotions to a neat filing cabinet labeled ‘The Past’. I may as well have heard her having sex for all the yearning those shrill notes revealed. From a child’s perspective it was pure embarrassment. The pain of desire and the release of emoting was central to the singer Janis Joplin until she died from a…

Directed by JEAN-LUC GODARD Starring BRIGITTE BARDOT, JACK PALANCE, MICHEL PICCOLI Released 1 JANUARY 5 ANTICIPATION. Is this Jean-Luc Godard’s greatest film? 5 ENJOYMENT. You know what? It just might be. 5 IN RETROSPECT. A knowing, tragic-comic aria for love and moviemaking. “Is that smile mocking, or tender?” asks bemused screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) of his naked, newish wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as the two pace their half-decorated, newly acquired flat in Rome. They are conducting a premature autopsy of their marriage in Jean-Luc Godard’s multi-lingual French-Italian co-production Le Mépris. Godard’s sixth movie – as good a candidate as any to be named the director’s masterpiece – itself poses a plenitude of such rhetorical questions, cruelly connecting derisive darts and compassionate insights. The film is the director’s reworking of novelist Alberto Moravia’s…

NO.1. Iñárritu’s first job as a fully-fledged writer and director was a Mexican TV movie entitled Detrás del Dinero [roughly translated as “Cashback”] in 1995. The bleached colours, kinetic camera movements and rhythmic editing of his early features are all present in this impressive first missive. NO.2. While location scouting for his debut feature Amores Perros, Iñárritu and his crew were assaulted and robbed by a gang of teenage boys outside the house in which the film’s visceral dog fight scenes were eventually shot, according to an interview with indiewire.com. NO.3. In order to achieve the specific visual grain and texture in Amores Perros, Iñárritu showed his cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto a book of photography by urban demimonde photographer documenter Nan Goldin. NO.4. Director John Cassavetes is a name constantly mentioned…

Directed by MICHEL FRANCO Starring TIM ROTH, RACHEL PICKUP, MICHAEL CRISTOFER Released 19 FEBRUARY 3 ANTICIPATION. Franco is a talented but raw director, this could go either way. 2 ENJOYMENT. A difficult but sensitive and impressive piece of work... until it suddenly isn’t. 2 IN RETROSPECT. That ending leaves a nasty aftertaste. Tim Roth was the president of the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury that awarded its top prize to the film After Lucia in 2012. After the ceremony he sought out its director Michel Franco to tell him how much he admired his film. Chronic is the result of that meeting. It’s Franco’s third feature and one of the most complex and interesting roles that the frequently under-utilised Roth has tackled in recent years. After Lucia was a ceaselessly bleak study of…

Directed by GRANT GEE Released 29 JANUARY There’s a swooning romantic melodrama reminiscent of ’40s Hollywood nestled at the core of this atmospheric portrait of contemporary Istanbul from director Grant Gee. Here, he collaborates with Turkey’s Nobel-prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, adopting his 2008 novel ‘The Museum of Innocence’ as a through-line for a film weaving together music, photography, TV chat show appearances and haunting Steadicam shots of the city at night. The museum itself is an actual place that can be found on a more rarified version of the local touist trail, and this grand undertaking acts as a realworld accompaniment to the book’s sweeping love narrative. The story offers a Turkish riff on ‘The Great Gatsby’, with the debonair Kemal falling desperately for Füsun, his coquettish cousin from lesser stock. Following…

Directed by LUCA GUADAGNINO Starring TILDA SWINTON, RALPH FIENNES, MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS Released 12 FEBRUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. I Am Love was a beautifully decadent outlier on the art-house circuit in 2009. 4 ENJOYMENT. “A trumpets-of-Jericho, white hot fuck.” IN RETROSPECT. A modern cinematic opera – the sun-kissed bacchanal followed by the tempestuous comedown. 4 In an early scene of Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, his follow-up to 2009’s I Am Love, dinner companions admonish Harry (Ralph Fiennes) over his choice of urinal – “Harry, that’s a grave!”. “Yeah, well,” he quips, “Europe’s a grave!” Riffing on Jacques Deray’s 1969 film La Piscine, A Bigger Splash pursues this death-of-Europe narrative with a level of bawdy panache that belies the seriousness lurking beneath its polished veneer. Casting aside Deray’s more brooding eroticism, the picture puts forward…

Directed by JON M CHU Starring AUBREY PEEPLES, STEFANIE SCOTT, JULIETTE LEWIS Released 12 FEBRUARY 2016 3 ANTICIPATION. The director of Step Up 3D tackles a much beloved ’80s cartoon. 3 ENJOYMENT. A highly flawed, occasionally dumb, but fascinating blast of neon, revisionist girl power, and social media wanderlust. IN RETROSPECT. A heartfelt Hollywood oddity that doesn’t deserve its “disaster” label. 3 Jon M Chu’s Jem and the Holograms begins with a series of makeshift musical performances and yearning video confessionals taken from actual YouTube accounts. Together they form a mosaic of virtual expression that connects the film’s ramshackle narrative with our collective identity crisis in the social media age. Blurred lines are important to this neon-hued adaptation of the popular 1980s television cartoon, which depicts the rise and fall story of an…

Directed by TAKESHI KITANO Starring TAKESHI KITANO, KAYOKO KISHIMOTO, REN ÔSUGI 1997 Released 11 JAN Blu-ray There was a point where Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano seemed like he was on the verge of gaining access into the highest echelons of world auteur cinema, a name to be uttered alongside the modern greats. Seeing his latest offering at the 2015 London Film Festival – the pitiful, self-mocking OAP gangster comedy, Ryuzo and his Seven Henchmen – only confirmed that the promise of future greatness has long dissipated. This new film arrives deep into the director’s latter-day wilderness years, which began with wacky (but at least interesting) attempts to deconstruct his own image, and then strayed on to more openly commercial terrain. The highlight of his creative salad days arrived with 1997’s Hana-Bi, translated in…

Directed by EMIR KUSTURICA Starring PREDRAG MANOJLOVIC, LAZAR RISTOVSKI, MIRJANA JOKOVIC 1995 Released 22 FEB Blu-ray Having gone dark since his awful documentary portrait of footballer Maradona in 2008, it’s probably a good time to check back in with Serbian maverick Emir Kusturica, especially as he has a new film in the offing. A one-time darling of the Cannes Film Festival and one of a precious few to have scooped the main prize there on two separate occasions, Kusturica’s hyper-shrill party movies have fallen out of favour somewhat. Yet mere minutes into his 1995 masterpiece, Underground, and you’re reminded that the modern cinema landscape is far less fun without him, particularly as no-one is really making this type of madcap epic any more. Belgrade 1941, and we’re dropped into a firestorm of male…

Directed by MIKE NICHOLS Starring DUSTIN HOFFMAN, ANNE BANCROFT, KATHARINE ROSS 1967 Released 23 FEB Blu-ray This critic is ashamed to admit that, despite having watched a fair few films in his time, Mike Nichols The Graduate had remained long on the “not seen” pile. And yet, through years of cultural osmosis and references in TV shows and other films, it always felt like I had seen it without actually seeing it. Finally sampling this new Blu-ray edition of the beloved sixties sex comedy, the sad realisation arrived that the film amounts to little more than the parodies that it went on to spawn. Dustin Hoffman trials his Rain Man schtick as preppy nebbish Benjamin Braddock, fresh out of college and straight into the maneating sights of friend of the family, Mrs Robinson…

The city of York plays host to one of the UK’s most respected and wide-ranging short film festivals, run in association with Aesthetica magazine. Aside from sampling a variety of the films being programmed, I was asked to attend the festival as a delegate, to present a 45-minute talk on film criticism in the digital age. Not someone who is generally able to reel off this kind of insight from memory, I carefully penned a speech which, through three very specific examples, attempted to explore the cultural gamut of modern writing on film. If I’m being honest, the talk didn’t feel like it was successful. Or at least didn’t provoke an in-the-moment reaction I had hoped for. The spaces left in the text for laughter and wonderment became moments of…

Directed by DAVID O RUSSELL Starring JENNIFER LAWRENCE, ROBERT DE NIRO, BRADLEY COOPER Released 1 JANUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. Russell’s current streak has yielded varying results, but represents an exciting evolution. 4 ENJOYMENT. You never know quite where you’re going, but it’s always fun getting there. 4 IN RETROSPECT. If it’s more about the journey than the destination, then Joy is a smashing success. Few filmmaking careers display a creative transformation as drastic as that of David O Russell’s. There was a smugness to his early work coupled with his infamous on-set outbursts that led to him being rejected by both his industry and his audience. Whatever soul-searching took place between 2004’s I Heart Huckabees and 2010’s The Fighter resulted in a dramatic shift in Russell’s approach to cinema and, seemingly, to life itself.…

Directed by BEN HOPKINS Starring MATTHEW MACFADYEN, MYANNA BURING, NOAH TAYLOR Released 22 JANUARY Ben Hopkins is a funny one. He’s been quietly knocking together movies since the late ’90s, dancing in his own eccentric circle and eluding anything that might be described as mainstream success. But his films are great – jocular and lyrical treatises on globalised economies and cultures. Even though this madcap latest, Lost in Karastan, feels like his largest scale project to date, there is little discernible attempt to make that connection to a big, broad audience. The possibly autobiograpical film allows us into the loopy world of European film festivals, as the fictional backwater of Karastan announces one of their own and programmes a retrospective of work by pompous British short film director Emil Forester (Matthew Macfadyen). When…

Directed by LENNY ABRAHAMSON Starring BRIE LARSON, JACOB TREMBLAY, SEAN BRIDGERS Released 15 JANUARY 3 ANTICIPATION. Abrahamson’s previous, Frank, was more a daffy diversion than modern great. 4 ENJOYMENT. This is the Larson and Tremblay show. Both are stunning. 5 IN RETROSPECT. A film about the infinite complexity of a deceptively simple situation. If a movie depicts a woman and her toddler son held captive in a small, cramped room by a repugnant male sex pervert, it’s only natural to expect some kind of retribution take place. In so often fulfilling that desire, cinema promotes a creed of cyclical violence. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. But it’s okay, because when the bad dude gets his inevitable comeuppance, objective justice has been served and we can skip from the…

Directed by RYAN COOGLER Starring MICHAEL B JORDAN, SYLVESTER STALLONE, TESSA THOMPSON Released 15 JANUARY 3 ANTICIPATION. Coogler impressed with Fruitvale Station, but do we really need another Rocky film? 4 ENJOYMENT. Tough, tender and exhilarating. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Creed indeed. Imagine your life being played out in not just one movie, but a whole series of films released over decades, capturing every setback, every love, every loss and every triumph. French director François Truffaut did just that for his character, Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, in a cycle of films between 1959 and 1979. During those years, audiences saw this man grow up on the screen. American cinema has an equivalent. His name is Rocky Balboa. But rather than witness boy blossoming into man, we’ve seen a doe-eyed, marble-mouthed lunkhead slug…

Directed by TOM MCCARTHY Starring MICHAEL KEATON, MARK RUFFALO, RACHEL MCADAMS Released 29 JANUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. The subject matter may be grim, but the Oscar buzz gives it sparkle. 5 ENJOYMENT. Remarkable control, sensational storytelling. 5 IN RETROSPECT. An extraordinary paean to journalistic endeavour. ‘Do you really wanna hear this shit?’ a sexual abuse survivor asks Mark Ruffalo’s reporter Mike Rezendes in writer/director Tom McCarthy’s disciplined procedural drama Spotlight. The unspooling of hard-to-hear truths is at the heart of this story about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team (called ‘Spotlight’) who exposed child molestation by Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese, ultimately triggering a worldwide scandal. As events unfold, the film makes a compelling case for old-school journalism and its methods. We are introduced to the paper’s team in July 2001, who…

Directed by SEVERIN FIALA, VERONIKA FRANZ Starring SUSANNE WUEST, LUKAS SCHWARZ, ELIAS SCHWARZ Released 12 FEBRUARY Try as we might, we’ll never truly know who our parents are. This amazing, dismaying film by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz plays a child’s need for a nurturing parent against a mother’s ability relate to, and empathise with, her offspring. But what if these two impulses don’t quite meet in the middle? Identical twins Lukas and Elias (played by Lukas and Elias Schwarz) have the run of the countryside, prancing, swimming, playing, exploring – doing all the things that inquisitive pre-teen boys do. Then their mother returns home (a far-flung modernist stack which looks barely lived-in) with bandages covering her face. The fun and freedom are over, and a life of sedate contemplation begins as mother’s…

Directed by DAVID GORDON GREEN Starring SANDRA BULLOCK, BILLY BOB THORNTON, ANTHONY MACKIE Released 22 JANUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. David Gordon Green has been on a low-key roll of late. 3 ENJOYMENT. Plays to the peanut gallery. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Too light, too silly. The misery-sodden entertainment of electioneering is a dismal metaphor for Machiavellian, self-serving corruption in all walks of life in David Gordon Green’s down-the-line political comedy, Our Brand Is Crisis. Even though it’s a film which professes to know all the angles, it’s maybe not delivering as radical a statement as its makers believe. The suggestion that corrupt, patriarchal, business-minded politicians cannot be cleaved from their ingrained beliefs in the name of social democracy and compassion is cynicism 101. But this liberal trump card is laid over and over in a…

Directed by TOBIAS LINDHOLM Starring PILOU ASBAECK, TUVA NOVOTNY, SOREN MALLING Released 8 JANUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. The people who brought you A Hijacking set the controls for the Afghan front line. 3 ENJOYMENT. Surprisingly underwhelming as it gets underway, but certainly clicks into place in the second half. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The movie’s telling overall design impresses the more time you have to think about it. As the title perhaps suggests, at some basic level all wars are the same. Men kill each other, their wives suffer at home, children cry. While this Afghan conflict drama unfolds, giving us a Danish POV on the perils of the frontline and the challenges of the Copenhagen home front, that sense of generic sameyness however, does rather kick in. And not to the film’s advantage either.…

Directed by ELAINE MAY Starring WALTER MATTHAU, ELAINE MAY, JACK WESTON 1971 Out Now Blu-ray It’s nice that there’s no consensus as to which is the best Elaine May movie. Having only been able to direct four feature films to date (though she has been able to spread herself further and wider as a writer), there is admittedly not the biggest selection to chose from. But there is enough material to confirm that she is a comedy director without equal, and that rare example of a person who makes funny films concerning the foibles of both sexes. Her debut feature is a modern screwball on a par with the classics, the tale of a despicable trust-fund jagoff whose psychotic lust for money leaves him severely wanting in the human compassion department. Walter…

Directed by WIM WENDERS Starring DENNIS HOPPER, BRUNO GANZ, LISA KREUZER 1977 Released 12 JAN Blu-ray As journalists understandably lavished hearty praise on Todd Haynes and his two leads, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett, around the release of Carol, mentions of the author upon whose book the film is based, Patricia Highsmith, remained a little lower in the mix. You see, her novel ‘The Price of Salt’, about an inter-generational lesbian romance set in ’50s New York, was deemed atypical of her traditional focus on crime and criminals. Yet watching Wim Wenders’ “straight” noir thriller The American Friend (based on Highsmith’s 1974 thriller ‘Ripley’s Game’) while keeping Carol in mind, you can see that a subtle homoeroticism bubbled through much of her work. At the time of production, Highsmith was completely against the…

Directed by JEAN RENOIR 1945 Released 12 JAN Blu-ray There’s the feel of a religious parable to Jean Renoir’s The Southerner, made in Hollywood with the director having fled from France because of the occupation. Zachary Scott’s Sam Tucker is a paragon of goodness, dirt poor but determined to make something of himself and provide for his family. When Sam’s old uncle, a life-long cotton picker, keels over in the heat of the fields, he advises him to get out while the getting’s good and start his own farm. And so Sam gathers up his kin and packs them into a rickety cabin, seeing only opportunity in the arid land around him. Sam does right by everyone, even his miserly neighbour whose acrimony is the result of years of bad fortune. Yet…

Directed by CHARLIE KAUFMAN, DUKE JOHNSON Starring DAVID THEWLIS, JENNIFER JASON LEIGH, TOM NOONAN Released 11 MARCH 5 ANTICIPATION. Obviously 4 ENJOYMENT. Intricately, brilliantly, tragically solipsistic. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Commitment to mapping a specific type of suffering is never less than absolute. Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel ‘Cat’s Cradle’ is about the fictional religion of Bokonism. In it, he invented a new vocabulary for how we evaluate others. The most profound thing you can say about a person is that they belong to your “karass”. This, Vonnegut defines as “a network or group of people who are somehow affiliated or linked spiritually.” Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., and directed Synecdoche, New York, and I am a member of his karass. We are linked by name and an inward nature, and therefore…

Directed by HOU HSIAO-HSIEN Starring SHU QI, CHANG CHEN, TSUMABUKI SATOSHI Released 22 JANUARY 5 ANTICIPATION. Adored by many when it screened in Cannes, but what do those guys know? 5 ENJOYMENT. A breathtaking work of art revolving around a haunting female lead. 5 IN RETROSPECT. The texture is the story. There is no risk of overstating the alternating manic and woozy pleasure of The Assassin. Like the lavish textiles that help divide the rooms of its Tang Dynasty courts, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s wuxia layers texture upon texture, masterfully obscuring detail to create a one of a kind cinematic experience. Turning Western and Eastern conventions of narrative structure and shot composition on their heads, it conjures feelings that won’t diminish with repeated viewings. There’s still plenty of clanging swords, doubles, double-crosses, supernatural conspiracies, and…

Directed by NICK READ, MARK FRANCHETTI Starring SERGEI FILIN, MARIA ALEXANDROVA, MARIA ALLASH Released 8 JANUARY The Bolshoi Ballet is a byword for consummate artistry and a world leader in classical dance. Behind the red velvet curtain is enough corruption, fierce rivalries and even violence to rival any palace intrigue. A mere 500 metres from the Kremlin, we find the Bolshoi on the verge of meltdown in Nick Read and Mark Franchetti’s documentary. A hint that all wasn’t well in paradise surfaced when a masked man threw acid in artistic director Sergei Filin’s face. It emerged that the assailant was paid by a principle male dancer, angry at Filin for overlooking his girlfriend’s abilities, the incident was chalked up as a case of revenge. Yet the investigation opened a window on a murky…

Directed by GRÍMUR HÁKONARSON Starring SIGURÐUR SIGURJÓNSSON, THEODÓR JÚLÍUSSON, CHARLOTTE BØVING Released 5 FEBRUARY 3 ANTICIPATION. It’s not that often we get to seen an Icelandic film in cinemas. 2 ENJOYMENT. Solid moment to moment, but never feels particularly cohesive. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Lots of stuff happens, but without much charm or insight. Like an oversized beige jumper with ’70s-style criss-cross patterns across the chest, Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams is a bit too woolly for its own good. When the film starts, it announces itself as a dry comedy, introducing the prolonged sibling rivalry between Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson). The brothers live as neighbours, both with mighty, ruff-like beards and both sheep farmers who have managed to pass the last 40 years without uttering a word to one another. Any trivial…

Directed by STEPHEN FINGLETON Starring MARTIN MCCANN, MIA GOTH, OLWEN FOUERE Released 12 FEBRUARY If we keep burning fossil fuels at the rate we’re going, the world will be transformed into a barren wasteland in which the survivors will battle for supremacy with the tools that remain. No, not the first instalment of a new YA sci-fi franchise, but a taciturn art film by director Stephen Fingleton. Paranoia reigns in this bloodthirsty dystopia where human contact is usually accompanied with extreme violence. A lone survivor with swept-back hair played by Martin McCann tends to his crop, fertilising the soil with a rotting human corpse. Seldom without his rifle, this young man waits for people to pay him a visit so he can dispatch them before they sully his rural idyll. One day an…

Directed by ARIEL KLEIMAN Starring VINCENT CASSEL, JEREMY CHABRIEL, FLORENCE MEZZARA Released 8 JANUARY It’s been far too long since Vincent Cassel has been in a great movie. Furthermore, it’s been far too long since Vincent Cassel has been great in a bad movie. In Ariel Kleiman’s underwhelming Partisan, he’s good, but not great as the charismatic Gregori, the Jim Jones-like leader of a curious sect in which he is the only adult male. To his cohorts he is a benign dictator, personally nurturing children from birth, schooling them, feeding them and also turning them into gun-toting soldiers. Kleiman and co-writer Sarah Cyngler leave blanks to be filled in by the imagination, such as the political and economic situation outside of this stone compound, whether Gregori is father to these children, and why…

Directed by RON HOWARD Starring CHRIS HEMSWORTH, CILLIAN MURPHY, BRENDAN GLEESON Released 26 DECEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. ‘Moby Dick’ is incredible! 2 ENJOYMENT. This isn’t based on ‘Moby Dick’. IN RETROSPECT. Oh. 2 Originally scheduled for a March 2015 release before a last-minute promotion into prime awards territory to fill Warner Brothers’ festive season Hobbit-hole, it’s about time Ron Howard finally got his Dick out. A year’s worth of advertising have insisted this isn’t Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, but rather an adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s historical bestseller; a telling of the true [*cough*] events that befell The Essex whaleship in 1820, the very same that would serve as inspiration for The Greatest Novel In The English Language. Truth may be stranger than fiction (especially when you throw a vengeful, super-sentient whale into the equation),…

Directed by JAY ROACH Starring BRYAN CRANSTON, HELEN MIRREN, MICHAEL STUHLBARG Released 5 FEBRUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. Finally, a big screen platform for Bryan Cranston’s abundant talent. 3 ENJOYMENT. Fast, funny, if a little flimsy. IN RETROSPECT. With Cranston this good, all else fades into the background. 3 Hollywood in 1947 was, to paraphrase Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times. The American movie business was deep into its golden age, production was bountiful and cinema attendance was hitting record levels before television began to take its piece of the pie. Perhaps a victim of its success, the film industry stumbled into the sights of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s quest to root out communists. Hollywood became a vipers’ nest, gripped by suspicion and home to an army of backstabbers. Director…

Directed by PETER SOLLETT Starring JULIANNE MOORE, ELLEN PAGE, STEVE CARELL Released 19 FEBRUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. Julianne Moore and Ellen Page in a civil rights drama? Count us in. 2 ENJOYMENT. Another worthy issues movie just in time for Oscar season. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Why does Michael Shannon get the best written part in a lesbian drama? In February 2014 actor Ellen Page gave a rousing, inspirational and moving coming out speech at the inaugural Thrive conference. She spoke of the “pervasive stereotypes about masculinity and femininity that define how we are supposed to act, dress and speak” and how they, “serve no one”. She also talked about the courage it takes to stand up to these norms. So the appeal of this project based on a true story which also takes inspiration…

Directed by PETER YATES Starring ROBERT MITCHUM, PETER BOYLE, RICHARD JORDAN 1973 Released 25 JAN Blu-ray and DVD Imagine being comfortable with your status as a working class stiff, having zero aspiration to rise up the economic ladder and achieve some kind of greatness. In the world of organised crime, such thoughts are pertinent, as it goes without saying that the higher and quicker you rise up the ladder, the harder and faster you fall from it. Peter Yates’ elegiac crime film, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, suggests that it’s actually those who remain at the bottom who suffer the most. Actor Robert Mitchum channels a lifetime of playing bruised loners, crestfallen tough guys and charismatic cads into the character of lovable Irish lug, Eddie ‘Fingers’ Coyle, a low level Boston gun-runner who’s…

Directed by JOSEPH GREEN Starring JASON EVERS, VIRGINIA LEITH, ANTHONY LA PENNA 1962 Out Now Blu-ray Placing regularly on lists of the worst films ever made, Joseph Green’s comically flat-footed sci-fi/horror quickie from 1962, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, is very much worth a visit. It’s no lost classic whose radical message was muffled amid laughable effects work and a cod philosophical script that feels like it was hastily concocted by the on-set catering team. But there’s a misbegotten charm to this silly fable about maverick brain surgeon Dr Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) who saves lives by turning his back on The Rules. Indeed, his questionable methods bring patients back from the cusp of death, but is it wrong to play God, as his colleague asks him after he performs another high-wire…

The variety of issues and voices presented at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival makes it one of the most exciting events on the film calendar. Such is the scope of the programming, it’s also practically impossible to catch everything that’s on during the festival’s 10-day run (the programme itself is the size of a phonebook). Thankfully, the quantity is generally matched by quality, making this a place for discovery. This year was no different, although there was no obvious stand-out in the form of a Citizenfour or The Look of Silence, which took the top prize here in 2014. The 2015 CPH: DOX Award went to Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s God Bless the Child, a charming film about being young, carefree and inquisitive. The film takes us to…

Michael Caine: Movies? I fell in love with movies when I was a little boy. I never went to drama school or anything because I didn’t think in terms of theatre. I never went to the theatre, ever, when I was a little boy because I was working class. You would go to a variety show with comedians and dancers, but you wouldn’t go and see a play, you know? When I became an actor, I had been a soldier. I was in the army in Korea. When I came home I was working in a factory. There was an old man working with me, and he said, “You’re a young, fit man. What do you want to do this job for all your life? We’re just carting things about.”…