First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Here’s one: a heartfelt directorial debut from Mexican actor Diego Luna, about a young boy who has this mental condition where he thinks he’s his dad, so he comes home from the hospital and orders his family about, checks their homework, meets their boyfriends for approval and such like. Sounds funny? It’s all right.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Conviction is a sickly and cynical bit of force-fed fluff, masquerading as serious drama as it squeezes all life out of its once-dignified story, dragging it through the shit heap of Hollywood to exploit its working-class subjects with predictable execution. Not the first, and not the last time this will happen.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
If you’ve happened upon any of the interviews with director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance talking about his 12-year project, Blue Valentine, you’ll notice there’s a through-line to all of them. As wearied as his two main characters become of each other, Cianfrance, in his routine exchanges with the press, generally refers to his film as a ‘duet’. Probably because that’s the perfect way to describe it.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
… in which Danny Boyle gussies up the true story of Aron Ralston, adrenalin fiend and extreme sports enthusiast, who got himself stuck under a rock for 5 and a bit days.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Director Mark Romanek
Country UK
In 1952, the breakthrough came. All disease and illness were cured, all disability wiped out. By the 1960s, age expectancy reached over 100 years.
This is the opener for Never Let Me Go, a love-triangular pseudo-sci-fi-drama in which mankind undergoes the dystopian treatment in an alternative history, where science and technology have made the simultaneous leap to put an end to all (physical) human suffering. This, we are shown, is achieved through harvesting body parts and vital organs, taken from mild-mannered clones, to transplant into and onto the broken bodies of the higher strata of society. By now you could be tempted to think Brave New World or possibly Gattaca, and ponder that we might already be well-acquainted with this plot.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Taking his cues equally from both classic European literature and Continental cinema, Anton Corbijn delivers his latest, The American, a film certain to divide audiences down the middle.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Director Gillian Wearing
Country UK
Gillian Wearing has a history of getting people on camera and making them open up. In the 1990s she did it with a series of videos asking people to “Confess all on video”, people who responded to an advert she placed in Time Out. Now she is doing it with a group of people, the focus still on individuals and their pasts, but in feature length documentary form. The result is an anaemic piece of work, simultaneously annoying and manipulative.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Director Julian Schnabel
Country USA
Julian Schnabel has more than impressed, actually he has excelled in his past features, all biopics of wildly varied personalities and very different nationalities. First there was his contemporary, and fellow New Yorker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, for whom he made 1996’s ebullient Basquiat. He followed up with an Oscar-nominated performance from Javier Bardem in the Cuban-set Reinaldo Arenas biography, Before Night Falls (2000), before picking up more Academy award nominations and the Best Director gong at Cannes with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Recommending this film is not the easiest thing to do. You have those who already know and appreciate the prospect of a new Darren Aronofsky film, granted some of those fans fell off at The Fountain, his most personal and ambitious work, before being pulled back in by The Wrestler.
Then you have those yet to be convinced.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Director Rowan Joffe
Country UK
The Surprise Film at previous London Film Festivals has ensured its hot ticket status, with big films making it worthy of the hype. In 2007 they gave us the Coen brothers’ adaptation of the bleak Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men. In 2008 it was the treat of Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler. And last year it was Capitalism: A Love Story. All right. That was a bit of step down but it wasn’t awful, just disappointing.
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