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The feminist year ahead
3 hours ago
This looks set to be an exciting year for feminism. Here Viv Groskop rounds up the books, films, theatre and marches that will inspire us all in the coming months
This is a big year for feminist anniversaries. It was 40 years ago that the first ever National Women's Liberation conference was held in the UK, that Germaine Greer published her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett published the life-changing work Sexual Politics. The year looks set to include a whole host of celebrations then, one of which is already underway – the Ms Understood exhibition at the Women's Library in London, which traces "the sisterhood and spirit of 1970s feminism" and runs until the end of March.
But this year's feminist calendar isn't solely historical. Three major new feminist books are to be published in Britain, the TV series Mad Men continues to explore the sexual politics of the 1960s, »
- Viv Groskop
DVD review: The Cove
3 hours ago
E1 Entertainment, cert 15, retail
It's about dolphins, but beware, there's nothing cuddly to see here, and anyone with an interest in animals will be angry and sad at the end of this documentary about Taiji, Japan, described as "kind of like the Twilight Zone" in that it has a hidden bay with a shocking secret. Central figure Ric O'Barry is a longtime dolphin trainer who worked on the TV series Flipper, and who managed to penetrate tight security to film - with the help of cameras in rocks - what goes on in a coastal village where sonar is used to disorientate dolphins and herd them up, mostly for slaughter. The final scene is gruesome and nauseating, but this is a story that needs to be told and that has already started to force change. More details at TakePart.com/The Cove.
Rating: 3/5
DVD and video reviewsDocumentaryWildlifeConservationRob Mackie
guardian.co. »
- Rob Mackie
DVD review: Antichrist
3 hours ago
Artificial Eye, cert 18, rental and retail
Lars von Trier's latest shocker is extremely beautiful in places. Its black and white opening, shot with digital cameras at 1,000 frames per second, indelibly records the death of the young son of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, falling out of the window in the snow while his parents are having sex. The rest of the film is in three sections: grief, pain and despair, as the pair move to a cabin in the woods, and have a very Old Testament time of it. Dafoe, playing a therapist, tries to theorise his way through the couple's problems, surrounded by nature in the raw and horror that at times recalls Hieronymus Bosch in its unpitying extremity. Von Trier has given us everything from the risible to the sublime in the past - and there are aspects of both here - but he's never made a boring or ordinary film, »
- Rob Mackie
Film review: It Might Get Loud
3 hours ago
It's a bizarre follow-up to 'An Inconvenient Truth', and one that can be testing on the patience, writes Andrew Pulver
Guitar nerds will no doubt be queuing round the block for this summit of legendary axemen from across the generations: Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge and Jack White of the White Stripes. Page, if you will, represents the "classical" era of unreconstructed rock'n'roll self-indulgence, Edge comes out of the punk era's political commitment and "meaning", while White does a boggle-eyed shaman thing, where guitar-playing has ascended to some kind of mystical, mysterious act. Of the three, Edge comes off as the deepest thinker, and the one with the most interesting things to say about musicianship; White, you feel, is wilfully cryptic, while Page is cheerfully inarticulate as befits a balls-out rocker of the old school. In fact, it's Page who offers the few »
- Andrew Pulver
DVD review: The Hurt Locker
3 hours ago
Lionsgate, cert 15, rental and retail
Kathryn Bigelow's highly impressive, small-scale movie about the Iraq war suggests a best director Oscar battle with ex-husband James Cameron's Avatar. Jeremy Renner is a revelation in the lead and British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd builds unbearable tension, as he did in United 93. The film aims, says Bigelow on a DVD interview, "to replicate the chaos of war and to put the audience in the actors' shoes". Both are pulled off brilliantly, especially in slo-mo scenes such as the earth moving after an explosion, the like of which I've never seen before. Based on the dispatches of a journalist embedded with a bomb disposal squad, there is no speechifying. It's just a cool look at a unit of three guys three guys doing a strong contender for world's worst job.
Rating: 4/5
DVD and video reviewsAction and adventureKathryn BigelowRob Mackie
guardian.co.uk © Guardian »
- Rob Mackie
Film review: Fireball
3 hours ago
Really this is all about glistening pretty boys laying into each other in increasingly elaborate ways, writes Andrew Pulver
Here's a Thai martial-arts thriller based around an (I assume) fictional sport that's not likely to get accepted for the Olympic Games any time soon. "Fireball", or "muay thai dunk" as the subtitle has it, is a sort of homemade kill-or-be-killed version of basketball: one basket wins, but players are allowed to maim or murder opponents at will. There's some hastily thrown together story about a recently released convict looking to avenge his twin brother who has been battered into a coma (Preeti Barameeanat plays both roles), but really this is all about glistening pretty boys laying into each other in increasingly elaborate ways. (There's an unmistakable homoerotic undertow to all the glowering forearm smashes, too, unless I'm imagining things.) BASEketball this isn't.
Rating: 2/5
Action and adventureDramaAndrew Pulver
guardian.co.uk »
- Andrew Pulver
Film review: Exam
3 hours ago
This is a claustrophobic, futuristic drama with an intriguing premise and a nice satirical jab at reality TV, writes Peter Bradshaw
This is a claustrophobic, futuristic drama with an intriguing premise and a nice satirical jab at reality TV. Sadly, there isn't much to follow and the ending is a frustrating let-down. Eight smartly-dressed young business types file obediently into an underground room, about to sit a top-secret examination. This is the final hurdle in the selection process for a hugely well-paid position – an apprenticeship, perhaps – in a powerful, shadowy corporation. They have 80 minutes to answer the question and under the eye of CCTV cameras, the candidates turn over their papers, to discover that this is not an exam, more a chilling, Stanford-type experiment in mental torture. There are interesting ideas and scenes but also a shaggy-dog anti-climax. Still, Hazeldine is a talent to reckon with.
Rating: 2/5
ThrillerPeter Bradshaw
guardian. »
- Peter Bradshaw
Film review: Treeless Mountain
3 hours ago
Korean director Kim So Yong has made a sombre yet touching film about the vulnerability of children, writes Peter Bradshaw
Korean director Kim So Yong has made a sombre yet touching film about the vulnerability and loneliness of children in a world of not-very-benign neglect. Two little sisters of six and four are one day told by their mother that she must leave them for a while – something about needing to track down their father. They are to be sent to their aunt, and given a piggy-bank, and promised that every time they do something good they will get a coin to go in it, and when the piggy-bank is full, the mother will return. Finally the kids get sent to their kindly grandmother, who has holes in her shoes that make the children feel sorry for her – and that piggy-bank, long since full, is to be the centre of »
- Peter Bradshaw
Film review: Daybreakers
4 hours ago
The Spierig brothers reimagine the vampire movie as dystopian sci-fi, creating an inverted world 10 years hence, writes Andrew Pulver
Just when you thought cinema's vampire craze had reached the point of total exhaustion, here comes a surprisingly entertaining twist on the genre. The Spierig brothers – Australian, but setting their film in a vague, non-specific America – have reimagined the vampire movie as dystopian sci-fi, creating a weirdly inverted world 10 years hence, where vampires have established their dominance and humans are an endangered species, hunted down and farmed for their blood.
With supplies running dangerously low, troubled vampire haematologist Ethan Hawke is charged with finding an artificial substitute for human blood, while barely concealing his distaste for the entire nature of vampire society. (The Spierigs have conceived of it in impressive detail, a brutal mirror image of our own, with "respectable" yuppie vampires, and a crazed, blood-starved underclass.)
Hawke allows himself to »
- Andrew Pulver
Know your film product placement
4 hours ago
A vanguard of brands on the frontline of product placement are exposing themselves to negative associations
Product placement used to be simple: just get your superspy burning after the dolly-bird in the appropriate shag-mobile, and watch Aston Martin sales fly. But now advertisers have to be prepared to expose their brands to negative associations in order to grab attention. When George Clooney, playing a corporate troubleshooter in his latest film Up in the Air, wheels his Travelpro® luggage past a barrage of brands – Hilton, Hertz and American Airlines – it looks like traditional placement. But the longer he lingers in antiseptic airport lounges and foyers, the more Up in the Air starts to feel like an attack on the brands it's supposed to be pushing. "We're two people who are turned on by elite status," notes Clooney's hotel hookup after they've been comparing loyalty cards. The comment hangs heavily.
There's definitely »
- Phil Hoad
Film review: Mugabe and the White African
4 hours ago
A documentary about the last stand of Michael Campbell and an unmissable portrait of courage under fire, says Peter Bradshaw
This heart-wrenching, enraging documentary by Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey is about the last stand of Michael Campbell, a 75-year-old white Zimbabwean farmer who dared to stand up to the racist bullying of President Robert Mugabe. The Mugabe government's "land reform" meant evicting white farmers from their properties, using a crescendo of threats and beatings. As his horrendous mismanagement of the country got worse, Mugabe cynically encouraged his desperate people to focus their anxieties on the supposed white villain as a diversionary tactic. He also, cunningly and repeatedly, denounces the quaint bogeyman of "British colonialism" to keep neighbouring African states loyally silent, to keep world opinion and Us opinion off-balance and uncertain, and thus to make sure that there is no appetite for regime change. When it comes to ethnic cleansing and racial injustice, »
- Peter Bradshaw
Film review: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
4 hours ago
Andy Serkis's recreation of Dury gives Peter Bradshaw goosepimples, and his vocals are eerily good
A barnstorming, passionate performance from Andy Serkis brings 1970s music legend Ian Dury stunningly back to life in this gutsy biopic, written by Paul Viragh, directed by Mat Whitecross and produced by Serkis himself. It's obviously a labour of love, but it never looks laborious. Dury was the singer-songwriter and pugnacious polio survivor who in the glorious anyone-can-have-a-go era of punk became a mega-star. Andy Serkis's recreation of Dury gave me goosepimples, and his vocals – Serkis himself sings all the classic tracks with the real band, the Blockheads – are eerily good.
As portrayed by Serkis, Dury is not just a wild man; he's an aesthete and provocateur: the missing link between Oscar Wilde and Morrissey, with a soupçon of Boomtown Rat vintage Bob Geldof. He's also, interestingly, a touch more aspirational socially than you'd think. »
- Peter Bradshaw
David Thomson on Jacques Audiard
4 hours ago
After 15 years as a director, it's about time we recognised the talent of Jacques Audiard – even if he can be a little too entertaining at times
In Cannes last year, Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète did not win the Palme d'Or. Instead, that prize went to Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon – and some observers murmured that it was because the Audiard picture was too gripping, too entertaining, too much like an old-fashioned prison drama. It's a dilemma that might amuse Audiard, the fond son of a seasoned screenwriter who wrote some of the big French movies of the 1950s. But Un Prophète marks 15 years in Jacques Audiard's career as a director, and if he is not exactly established yet, or consistently in character, it's about time we saw fit to place him in the company of such distinguished French directors as Julien Duvivier, Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville. »
- David Thomson
Film review: It's Complicated
5 hours ago
Meryl Streep stars in an oddly addictive drama of adultery among the moneyed classes. By Peter Bradshaw
Writer-director Nancy Meyers has now surely established herself as the world's foremost purveyor of crack-cocaine-strength gastro-lifestyle fantasy porn to the menopausal classes. It really is horribly effective. All around me in the cinema, women and men of a certain age – my age, in fact – were jabbing Ms Meyers's feelgood-needle into their veins, and slumping into their plush seats with the classic smackhead sigh of submission while their jaws slackened and their eyeballs rolled back into their heads. And I must now shamefacedly admit her new escapist romcom is expertly put together, like a screenplay masterclass from Satan, and the lead performance from Alec Baldwin is very good.
As ever, we are very firmly in a world of moneyed folk who don't think of themselves as such. F Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich »
- Peter Bradshaw
Film review: The Road
5 hours ago
This respectful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale loses some of its power by swerving the novel's more shocking aspects, says Peter Bradshaw
Cormac McCarthy's almost unbearably disturbing 2006 novel about the post-apocalyptic journey of a father and son across a desolate America has now been adapted for the screen and, for this eminently respectful version, director John Hillcoat has effected a guarded change of emphasis. Like an orchestra conductor dampening down the ominous blasts of timpani and brass, while urging more from his emotion-twisting string section, Hillcoat has intensified the heartrending poignancy, while deflecting our attention from the horror.
Readers of McCarthy's book know that it is the depictions of cannibalism in this lawless future-world which provide its deepest shocks. The man and his boy chance upon a secluded country home containing a locked basement horrifically packed with naked prisoners being "farmed" as food for their captors. Later, »
- Peter Bradshaw
The Bollywood conundrum
5 hours ago
India's latest blockbuster, 3 Idiots, has broken box-office records around the world – but it won't even make a dent in the British mainstream. Former Bollywood fan Nirpal Dhaliwal has a fair idea why
Bollywood films have always felt like a test of my identity, one I've consistently failed. Despite my family ties, love of India and fascination with it, my inability to enjoy Bollywood has highlighted just how unIndian I am. My taste in films, like most else about me, has been shaped by the UK. I am a "Britisher", as a friend in Delhi likes to say and, like the bulk of other Britishers, I enjoy Bollywood – with its music routines involving beautiful people, light-hearted songs and cleverly choreographed dancing – only in small doses. The typical three-hour Bollywood experience, with its cliched plots, dialogue, hammy acting and confusion of unrelated narratives baffles me.
I haven't liked it since I was a child, »
- Nirpal Dhaliwal
Donal Donnelly obituary
8 hours ago
A talented Irish actor on stage and in films for Ford and Huston
For an actor who worked with two of the greatest movie directors of the last century and appeared in the world premieres of plays by Brian Friel, Ireland's leading contemporary dramatist, Donal Donnelly, who has died after a long illness, aged 78, was curiously unrecognised. Like so many prominent Irish actors in the diasporas of Hollywood, British television, the West End and Broadway – all areas he conquered – Donnelly was a great talent and a private citizen, happily married for many years, and always seemed youthful.
There was something mischievous, something larkish, about him, too. He twinkled. And he had a big nose. He had long lived in New York, although he died in Chicago, and had started out in Dublin, although born in England.
In John Huston's swansong movie The Dead (1987), the best screen transcription of a James Joyce fiction, »
- Michael Coveney
The Barbican has shut the portcullis on cinephiles
10 hours ago
The Barbican's decision to shut two of its three screens to placate luxury-flat owners is a slap in the face for everyone who cares about cinema
What's the best way for an arts centre to celebrate a year of record ticket sales and an unexpected 13% increase in visitors to its hallowed space? Experiment with cutting-edge programming? Fill the foyer with bunting? Taunt the competition?
Well, if you're the Barbican, you put the party hats away and, instead, close down two of your three cinema screens with the hope that punters will be too distracted by the rumours of a swanky new caff to notice.
The Barbican, London's beloved concrete Rubik's cube of an arts complex, spent millions in 2007 to refurbish its three cinemas, nicing up the lighting and putting in quality digital projectors – that kind of thing. Now, two of those very busy screening rooms are set to close in »
- Nosheen Iqbal
China jails Tibetan filmmaker
10 hours ago
Dhongdup Wangchen sentenced to six years after making documentary highlighting Tibetan anger with Beijing policies
A Chinese court has jailed a Tibetan filmmaker for six years after he made a documentary critical of Beijing's policies, friends and campaigners said today.
Dhongdup Wangchen and his friend Golog Jigme, a monk, were detained shortly after completing Leaving Fear Behind, which highlighted Tibetan anger with Chinese policies before the Olympics. The tapes had already been smuggled out of the country.
The films featured interviews with ordinary Tibetans who expressed their love for the Dalai Lama, their exiled spiritual leader, and said the Olympics would do little to improve their lives. "The Chinese say they have made improvements in Tibet. But we don't see any improvement at all," Wangchen said in the documentary. "The truth is that Tibetans are not free to speak of their suffering."
A statement placed on a website promoting the »
- Tania Branigan
Blockbusters and 3D films boost Cineworld
11 hours ago
Cineworld said the upcoming release of the next Harry Potter film, Shrek 4, Toy Story 3 and Sex and the City 2 would be highlights of 2010
Slumdog Millionaire Harry Potter and the surging popularity of 3D films helped offset dwindling advertising revenues for cinema chain Cineworld last year and it is relishing more blockbusters in 2010.
The company today highlighted the upcoming release of Shrek 4, Toy Story 3 and Sex and the City 2 as reasons to be confident going into the new year.
It said it was well placed to capitalise on more 3D films, which allow cinemas to charge a premium on tickets to standard 2D offerings.
"The UK and Ireland cinema industry enjoyed another good year in 2009," Cineworld said in a trading update. "This box office growth was underpinned by a strong release schedule, which included Slumdog Millionaire, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen »
- Katie Allen
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