Category: Film

Looper (2012)

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Looper

★★★½

(directed by Rian Johnson, 2012)

The year is 2044. As the voiceover at the beginning of the film tells us, time-travel hasn’t been invented yet, but in thirty years’ time it will have been. Having been invented, it will immediately be made illegal, with such high penalties that only the largest and most powerful criminal organisations dare to use it. For them, time-travel becomes the most efficient way of getting rid of their victims: they simply bundle them into time-travel capsules and beam them thirty years back in time. No bodies, no mess: the people simply disappear.

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Skyfall (2012)

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Skyfall

★★★★½

(directed by Sam Mendes, 2012)

Sam Mendes isn’t the kind of director you’d expect to see at the helm of a Bond film, but the gamble paid off: for me, this is the most intelligent and thoughtful instalment in the entire franchise. The essence of Bond is still here – the writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have been involved with the series since the Brosnan era – but it follows Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace in distilling that essence into a sleeker and more modern format. That tension between the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative, underpins the entire film.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

★★★½

(directed by Stephen Chbosky, 2012)

I have two particularly busy periods at work each year and this is one of them; but shortly after 5pm yesterday, following a day of IT issues across the company, the program I was using providentially ceased to work. Since there isn’t much I can do without said program, I decided that Fortune had spoken, left the office and went to the cinema instead.

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Ruby Sparks (2012)

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Ruby Sparks

★★★½

(directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2012)

Fresh from high school, Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) wrote a book that was hailed as one of the great American novels, earning its writer comparisons with J.D. Salinger. Ten years later, he’s still trying to write his second novel, lost in a fog of self-pity which is alleviated by weekly visits to his therapist and apathetic walks with his dog Scotty. His therapist suggests that Calvin just tries to write something simple: a scene in which someone stops to admire his dog. In Calvin’s imagination, the girl who admires Scotty turns out to be everything that he, Calvin, desires in a girlfriend. Inspiration flows and the narrative becomes less of a story and more of a wish-fulfilment.

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Beginners (2010)

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Beginners

★★★★

(directed by Mike Mills, 2011)

This deliciously quirky film is all about love, loss and letting go. It manages to be thought-provoking without being pretentious, sweet without being sentimental and moving without being mawkish. Not much happens, but it leaves you with a warm sense of humanity’s capacity for love in all its forms: for parents, children, friends, lovers, girlfriends, boyfriends, pets.

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Brave (2012)

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Brave

★★★★

(directed by Brenda Chapman, 2012)

Despite all the serious musing on books around here, I’m really still a child at heart. I’d been looking forward to Brave since I saw the first teaser posters about six months ago: the animation looked superb. During the last few months, it rapidly became clear from the enthusiastic reaction in the States that this was a different kettle of fish altogether from its Pixar/Disney predecessors.

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A Royal Affair (2012)

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A Royal Affair

★★★★

(directed by Nikolaj Arcel, 2012)

In 2006 I went to a talk at the Oxford Literary Festival, in which Stella Tillyard discussed her book A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings.  The book looked at the fates of George III’s various brothers and sisters, but the most memorable story within it was that of Caroline Mathilde, George’s youngest sister, who was married off to Christian VII of Denmark.  As this film has the same title, I assumed that it must have been based on the book, but there was no credit to Tillyard in the opening titles and there’s no mention of her on the film’s Wikipedia page.

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Moon (2009)

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Moon

★★★★

(directed by Duncan Jones, 2009, now on DVD)

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has been on the dark side of the moon for three years. He is the sole inhabitant of a remote lunar base, cut off from live contact with Earth, supervising the machines which mine helium-3, a vital power-source for an overcrowded and exhausted planet. His sole companion is the base’s computer, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), who simulates moods by displaying a series of text-messaging emoticons. Sam has been sustained throughout his contract by video messages from his wife Tess and daughter Eve, and now he has only two weeks left before his contract ends and he can go home.

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Midnight in Paris (2011)

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Midnight in Paris

★★★

(directed by Woody Allen, 2011)

Several people have told me over the last few months that I had to watch this film.  ‘You’ll really like it,’ they said, friends and colleagues alike, ‘it’s just up your street.’ Clearly my conviction that I should have been born in another age (preferably as Lucy Honeychurch) isn’t as secret as I thought. And it’s little wonder the film has been so popular.  Whimsical and light-hearted, it’s set in one of the world’s most photogenic cities and stars Owen Wilson, on mellow form, as a romantic, vulnerable and misunderstood writer.  The concept is fresh and clever, but at heart it’s  a deeply traditional fable of the kind Hollywood loves, all about finding yourself and realising that happiness is about facing up to your problems rather than running away from them.  It’s the kind of film you watch on a girls’ night in with white wine and chocolate truffles.  It was always going to be a hit.

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Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

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Moonrise Kingdom

★★★★

(directed by Wes Anderson, 2012)

It is summer 1965 and we are in the town of New Penzance, a remote, isolated New England community. Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) lives with her parents and three small brothers in a rambling red house which looks like an oversized dolls’ house, where she spends most of her time silently watching others through her omnipresent binoculars.  Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), also twelve, is an orphan in a foster home and is spending the summer at a scout camp run by the earnest Randy Ward (Edward Norton).  Both stigmatised as ‘problem children’, Suzy and Sam have been penpals for a year, after a chance meeting at a performance of Noye’s Fludde by Benjamin Britten.  The attraction is immediate: finally each of them has someone who understands their inner turmoil.  They decide – as you do – that they are in love, and plan to run away together.

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