Tindersticks
Features
Tindersticks have just released their first album in five years. With typical understatement, they are introducing it with this single British gig, and they have gone to great lengths to make it one to remember. The three remaining members of the original lineup, singer Stuart Staples, keyboardist David Boulter and guitarist Neil Fraser, are augmented tonight by strings, horns and an electric band, enlarging the sparse music until it achieves a crepuscular magnificence.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 15, 2008
Spirit of the beehive
Features
Amy Winehouse (2007) The Supremes (1964)
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 02, 2008
Sam Sparro, Sam Sparro
Features
Gay, Christian, white, soulful - these adjectives all apply to Sam Sparro, an Australian-American whose Black and Gold was recently a deserved No 2 single.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 02, 2008
Athena
Features
You have to feel sorry for Athena Andreadis, as she trudges awkwardly through this boring supper club set.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 02, 2008
Nikola Kodjabashia, The Most of Now
Features
This record slips and slides between categories - but in the best way possible.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 02, 2008
Charlie Bartlett
Features
Taking its cue from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Rushmore, this strives to create an angelic but savvy teen hero for the medication generation, but it lacks the freewheeling charm or acerbic wit of its predecessors. Played by fresh-faced Anton Yelchin, Charlie Bartlett is a troubled, intelligent eccentric from a wealthy, dysfunctional family who's expelled from his elite private school and forced to cope with the commoners. His survival tactic is to acquire prescription drugs from his many psychiatrists and dispense them to students in the toilets, along with preternaturally sage advice. The promising themes peter out as the film loses direction, though, and Bartlett is neither sympathetic enough to root for nor dumb enough to laugh at.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Heartbeat Detector
Features
The nearest equivalent to this cerebral corporate thriller is Michael Clayton, but don't expect an easy ride, or even many thrills. This juggles some heavy themes - the decay of language, the hidden hand of history, the power of music, and several more - and it takes its time to pull them together, regularly wrong-footing the viewer along the way. Mathieu Amalric plays a suave, confident lone wolf - a company psychologist at a German petrochemical giant, who's assigned to subtly monitor the CEO, who has been behaving erratically. Delectably played by Michael Lonsdale, this leonine boss turns out to be cryptically super-sane, like Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. And with good reason, it transpires. As Amalric delves deeper into the company's history, he discovers its chilling Third Reich connections, and realises the equivalence of his own present-day position to those who "just followed orders", often using the same depersonalised language he does. There's no killer revelation, just
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
La Antena (The Aerial)
Features
Esteban Sapir's La Antena, or The Aerial, is a monochrome movie from Argentina, that is silent, or almost silent. It has a deeply weird story that appears to have a number of interpretations, or variations on a theme: the iniquities of media mind-control. The film was much admired when it opened the Rotterdam film festival last year; it wants to challenge the prevailing realist ethic of cinema and it sports with the conventions of the medium. With its comic visions of night-time portents and apparitions in the sky, it alludes, clearly intentionally, to Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune, and its retro-futurist city has something of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Sometimes the characters actually speak, without intertitles, and Sapir might want us to remember the huge impact of Al Jolson doing so in his "You ain't heard nothing yet" moment. The obvious modern influence is the Canadian director and faux-monochrome specialist Guy Maddin.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Outpost
Features
The military themed horror movie is an interesting sub-genre that never quite seems to gel despite offering up such enjoyable curios as Shock Waves and Michael Mann's "lost" film The Keep. The usually all-male cast offering up macho posturing sucks all the sympathy out of their roles as victims of whatever unspeakable horror they're pitted against tending to diffuse the thrills. It's a problem this one certainly falls prey to, despite a decent turn from Rome star Stevenson as the leader of a group of mercenaries on a mission in eastern Europe. There's some great set design and cinematography here, which sufficiently raise the creepiness stakes. Unfortunately, the script fails to bring it all together.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy
Features
We've seen from Oliver Stone's JFK how easy it is to present a persuasive conspiracy theory in the contained environment of a movie. Let's hope he doesn't hear about this documentary, in which Irish journalist Shane O'Sullivan proposes the outlandish theory that Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Kennedy's brother Robert, was a real-life Manchurian Candidate, programmed by the CIA. The assertion gains traction thrillingly as O'Sullivan unearths old witnesses, TV footage, photographs and recordings, and identifies shady CIA operatives at the scene of the 1968 shooting. Or does he? Having opened his can of worms, O'Sullivan is forced to half-close it again in light of contradictory information, which makes for a slightly disappointing conclusion. Still, he plumps for journalistic scepticism over a neat Hollywood ending. Stone would never do that.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Sharkwater
Features
Not just another film about sharks looking beautiful and deadly, Sharkwater is a kind of Inconvenient Truth about a species in danger of reaching its own tipping point. Impassioned director and star Rob Stewart has all the stats - sharks kill five people a year compared to 100 by elephants; shark's fin soup is a $2bn a year industry, with only drugs rivalling it for Far East profit although, this film claims, the fin itself is essentially tasteless; the shark population has declined by 90%.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Shutter
Features
It's a remake of an eastern horror film so it's nowhere near as good as the original. It's the same old story: a subtle, creepy movie gets a blustering, blundering remake that's unable to build any atmosphere, adds a few jump shocks and feels the need to over-explain the scares away. Come on people, is it really so hard to read subtitles? It doesn't help that Joshua Jackson is impossible to like here and the plot relies on clunky expository dialogue. This movie will dispel your belief that 85 minutes isn't a long time. The immeasurably superior 2004 Thai version is out on DVD here, so if you only see one movie called Shutter this week, it doesn't necessarily have to be this one.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Some Came Running
Features
Made in 1958, and set 10 years earlier, this ripe melodrama has certainly dated, but it's as good a record of postwar America's alcohol-fuelled split personality as anyone has made. The amount people drink and smoke here is staggering, particularly Frank Sinatra, who puts in a sullen performance as a soldier-cum-tortured artist returning to his hometown and stirring up diverse troubles. His Jekyll/Hyde relationship with the bottle presents two alternatives: cultured cosiness with buttoned-up schoolmistress Martha Hyer; or a life of whisky, poker and casual sexism with local gambler Dean Martin and garish floozy Shirley MacLaine. It's an intriguing parallel to Sinatra's real-life Rat Pack destiny. Minnelli orchestrates the lurid plot like a symphony, with rich, widescreen compositions, a swooning Elmer Bernstein score and an assured feel for the anxieties beneath the sunny suburban surface.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Features
After a long run of disappointments since his 90s triumphs, it's pleasing to report that Tim Burton's gruesome musical adaptation is a thoroughly satisfying view, gorgeous to look at (you expect that), but also a skillful and wholehearted piece of entertainment. It allows Burton and his regular team to simultaneously wallow in the familiarity of a gothic London while also trying something completely new. This is a musical with actors doing the singing, but I never worried about it as I did with Moulin Rouge! Acting in Baz Luhrmann's film was minimal. Here, Burton gets lovely performances from Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen. Everyone looks as though they're having a great time, it's a bizarrely enjoyable to listen to a Depp/Rickman duet, for instance, and no one seems self-conscious about bursting into song.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Terror's Advocate
Features
Director Barbet Schroeder has given us some memorable monsters in the past, perhaps especially Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bulow in the 1990 Oscar-winner Reversal of Fortune. The real villain of that piece, however, was Alan Dershowitz, Von Bulow's lawyer: a man renowned as the bullish, amoral defender of the indefensible. Maybe it was Dershowitz's reputation that, by a winding road, finally led Schroeder to this documentary subject: controversial French defence lawyer Jacques Vergès, famous for taking instruction from all sorts of dodgy types, including Slobodan Milosevic. When sinister tyrants find themselves in The Hague, sitting behind a bullet-proof screen, it's Vergès's number they've got on redial.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
