Here’s the first trailer for Dexter Fletcher’s directorial debut, Wild Bill. The movie stars Will Poulter, Liz White, Andy Serkis and Jaime Winstone. We got to see the movie at the London Film Festival and you can read our review of it here. Fletcher has been on our screens for years and became famous amongst teenagers back in the late 80s – early 90s when he appeared in the TV show Press Gang but this is the first time we’ve seen him behind the camera.

Have a watch of the trailer below and check out Andy Serkis as the bad guy!

Wild Bill is released 30th March.

The film follows Bill Hayward, out on parole after 8 years inside, as he returns home to find his now 11 and 15-year old sons abandoned by their mother and fending for themselves. Unwilling to play Dad, his arrival brings them to the attention of social services.

With the danger of being put into care looming, Dean forces his Dad to stay by threatening to grass him up for dealing. Dean soon connects with Jimmy and through this new bond starts to realize what he’s been missing.

He has a family and a place in the world, but when Jimmy gets into trouble with Bill’s old cohorts, he quickly has to decide what kind of Dad he wants to be. A good one, or a free one.

Source: Yahoo UK

We’ve seen the world end many times in recent years. From rapture-teasing shadow monsters to a scorched Earth thanks to a solar belch from the Sun, we’ve suffered an asteroid apocalypse, Mayan prophecies and death by planetfall – the end of everything has never been so popular.

In Take Shelter there are no crowds of people staring terrified into the sky nor are there alien invasions to finish us all off, instead we see the end of one man’s world as a mental illness begins to take hold and the struggle to weather the storm begins in earnest.

Michael Shannon leads us through this mindbound apocalyptadrama as a stoic, hard-working family man increasingly prone to seeing vast approaching storms in a clear blue sky and suffering vivid nightmares consisting of the most primal of fears. Unable to reach out to his wife and friends about these debilitating happenings Curtis (Shannon’s character)  develops an obsession with restoring and extending a storm shelter in his garden as the imagined storms loom closer and the dreams more intense. The ever wonderful Jessica Chastain is Samantha, Curtis’s wife, whose faith in her husband suffers greatly as his silence and erratic behaviour begins to affect their family, their home and their future.

Less Field of and Dreams more Field of Nightmares writer/director Jeff Nichols has crafted an unflinching meditation on the world we can control, and that which we are the mercy of. Shannon’s compelling performance is among the best you’ll see this year as he cloaks a dignity and vulnerability with a hard-nosed pragmatism, keeping in his growing fears and frustrations to protect himself first and his family second – a duplicity which is borne of good intentions but which Nichols places at the heart of the film to tremendous effect

There’s not a moment wasted here either. The visions and dreams Curtis has are carefully built to keep us guessing if the coming storm is in his head or a real threat, the increasingly fractured dealings with his colleagues and midnight trips to the storm shelter in his garden to read his books on mental illness borrowed from the library engage our sympathy and intrigue. All the time we are wondering if he is protecting his family from an external threat or on the verge of becoming the thing which they should be running from.

What impressed me most was Nichols’ deft handling of the family and their internal collapse. With a number of slow motion Lynchian trawls through the family home in Curtis’s dreams to the struggle to afford a cochlear implants for their daughter the real and the unreal worlds are given equal weight as both fight for dominance in Curtis’s mind. Much is made of the relationships through the performances with, at times, sparse dialogue and a confident hand from Nichols. Their deaf daughter is not merely a device to elicit sympathy for the family as the breakdown occurs. It is a simple mater of fact which evokes, through Shannon’s stunning performance, a primal need to protect his child and her future.

It’s one detail among many which in lesser hands could have been milked and run into the ground but what we have in Take Shelter is a compelling and powerful drama with a triumphant central turn by Michael Shannon.

****~ (4/5)

The death of a young boy at a remote schoolhouse and the supposed ghostly circumstance of the incident draws the attention of Florence Cathcart, a young woman well-known for exposing fraudulent supernatural happenings, to investigate the matter and uncover the true nature of the tragic event.

With The Awakening director Nick Murphy and his co-writer Stephen Volk have crafted something special, a ghost story to get the blood pumping with a chill that lingers beyond the roll of the credits.

Rebecca Hall and Dominic West lead the film as the emotionally constrained skeptic Cathcart and the beleaguered headmaster convinced of the paranormal nature of the boy’s death and the success of the film lies in the ability of the two to immerse themselves in their roles and the writing of the characters to allow them to overcome the challenges of the genre. Defiant in the face of the decaying post-modern scary movie The Awakening evokes the spirit of the classic ghost story, with a genuine understanding of the creation and application of fear which needs no gore-strewn slaughterhouses or operatic disembowelment; this is a welcome return to the grip of death and its effects.

The post First World War setting is a rich foundation for the themes of the story, with a rawness of feeling following the overwhelming scale of death, the new reality of a decimated generation and a shell-shocked homeland making the search for an afterlife a seemingly normal activity. West’s bruised and battered soldier returning to his profession as teacher is wonderfully played with a restrictive sense of duty to his boys (and a necessary return to the normality of teaching) tested by the unnatural death of a boy and the presence of the groundskeeper whose medical reasons for avoiding conscription or volunteering to fight are dubious at best. Death is in the air and the opening scene in which a séance takes place is heavy with the air of accepted and much-needed delusion that there is something more to this world.

Rebecca Hall effortlessly holds the film together as the skeptic whose fearless pragmatism shelters and contains her own personal demons, and it is her awakening above all else which proves the story’s heart. She has an ability to ground a film in the real world that is most useful here, as the boundaries between this world and the next are glimpsed, disproved then begin to blur. Much of the imagery (unexplained presences in photographs, brandished candles seeking out unexplained happenings in darkened corridors etc) is familiar and yet, like Volk’s Ghostwatch, the path we are led down ends up somewhere very different to a place we might expect. Imelda Staunton’s kindly school nurse was never simply going to be virtue and reason, the surly groundskeeper was bound to crop up somewhere towards the end, the secret of Florence Cathcart’s past was never going to be a happy one and yet when the final twist of the knife occurs not only does it feel right and cast the whole film in a new light it also never cheats the audience.

The Awakening is Murphy’s debut feature and it is an assured first film, making the most of the staples of the genre and allowing the script room to breathe. Where I found it worked best was the scene with the dollhouse (and if you’ve seen it you’ll know exactly which bit I mean) where the slow creeping fear is given the most effective treatment, providing a genuinely nasty and memorable moment. There is some CGI that drags a few scenes down, and I can’t help but feel that the decision to go with practical effects would have improved matters, particularly at one point where, if you’re looking in the right place, the unconvincing CGI rids the moment of any potential terror.

But this is a rich and real ghost story, and I don’t mean the ‘classic’ setting or the lack of pretty, screaming teenagers. It understands what scares us and suffuses the air with a sense of dread and unease and stays true to its characters and the tone of the piece. The resolution may initially feel unlikely but it is evident and possible from the early scenes and as the characters are revealed and their motives unearthed everything comes together and the scares, when they come, are all the more effective because of it. Like the ghosts of the film, everything at the end has been with us, unseen, from the beginning.

****~ (4/5)

The Awakening is a welcome return to the big screen for writer Stephen Volk, self proclaimed ‘tub-thumper’ for the horror genre and the man behind the acclaimed small screen horrorshows Afterlife and Ghostwatch.

His new film (out in UK cinemas tomorrow ) was directed by Nick Murphy and is as far from the Death-by-irony gorefests which litter the horror landscape of the last ten years as can be. It is a proper character based ghost story which I enjoyed immensely and has Rebecca Hall and Dominic West investigating the supposed supernatural death of a boy at a remote boarding school.

Our conversation took place on Hallowe’en, nineteen years to the day since his celebrated and controversial TV drama Ghostwatch aired and I couldn’t begin the conversation without talking about the huge impact it has had on the depiction and popularity of the supernatural on TV.

During the conversation we wander into spoiler territory about The Awakening and The Turn of the Screw, so tred with care.

I  watched Ghostwatch again today and was surprised that it still got to me. Since 1992 TV has moved on so much, and I think Ghostwatch paved the way for things like Most Haunted and the Reality Ghosthunting programmes we see…

It is great fun watching it, as I did last night at the Mayhem film festival, with an audience and I always introduce with the proviso that you have to realise that this was made for a small screen and not for a hundred and fifty people watching it on a big screen, and that it was made twenty years ago. But they had a great time watching and I think the passing of time has been kind to it in some ways in that a lot of the people watching it weren’t even born when it was made, and it has a mythology around it. There was laughter but it was kind laughter, because it was getting under their skin a little which is always fun to see.

It quickly became a Hallowe’en tradition for me and a group of friends watching in video and looking in the shadows for any new sightings of Pipes. Nothing has come close to it since, possibly because of the reaction to the programme and no-one has attempted to make anything like it since, I doubt you could make Ghostwatch today.

No, it’s often that someone says, or a producer says to me ‘Would you do it again?’ and I think you wouldn’t. The climate of TV now is that if you were to do it then you’d do it as a reality TV show, you wouldn’t go to the bother of writing the damn thing and getting actors and making it into a drama. If you did do it as a drama what would it be commenting on? It would be like making a parody of something that was beyond parody, I mean Ghosthunting with Coronation Street, or everything with Yvette Fielding in… I was astonished when I saw a lecture by Ciarán O’Keeffe who used to be the resident skeptic on Most Haunted and he gave a talk on how paranormal reality TV started in the 80s and  I was astonished at how many of these show are out there now, people with their metal detectors and night vision cameras. It seems anyone with a camcorder now can make one of these shows, though I would like to think that Ghostwatch was the first to use the night vision camera for sinister effect, before then I’d only seen it in footage from the First Gulf War.

Looking at the Hallowe’en releases in the cinema we’ve got Paranormal Activity 3 and there are some very strong similarities to Ghostwatch with the two young girls about the same age and the shadows in the bedroom on lights out…

I haven’t seen any footage from it but I did get an email from Lesley Manning, the director of Ghostwatch, saying ‘Have you seen this! It’s awfully like Ghostwatch…’ I don’t even know what the premise of the film is…

It’s going back to the 80s to the two sisters as young girls and tells how the haunting began. The advertising plays heavily on the image, very similar to an earlier scene in Ghostwatch with the two girls in their bedroom and an eerie shadow cast on the wall between them.

Well, of course they could have got that imagery from some of the stills from the Enfield poltergeist, and there’s only so many ways you can shoot that to be innocuous and scary. But it’s the innocuous nature of it which makes it scary. I would be interested to see the film, but I keep thinking that the camcorder approach to filming hauntings must be running out of steam but it seems to be that new people come along and breathe new life into it so maybe it’s a sub-genre that’s here to stay?

A horror story has the ability to be told in many ways and from Ghostwatch almost twenty years ago to now when you have people with HD cameras built into their phones so you combine that with the domestic setting then you have something…

When I was doing Ghostwatch I was very conscious that I was trying to find in televisual terms the equivalent of someone saying, as they often do at the start of ghost stories, ‘Please believe me,’ or ‘this really happened…’ and of course it’s the documentary technique. Pointing a camera at someone and asking them questions is the equivalent of what you read in a ghost story on the page, and I think that has become the new language of authenticity. Another benchmark for me, but of the opposite sort, was What Lies Beneath – that ghost story with Harrison Ford, I thought that did almost everything wrong. It had the big stars, immaculate photography and it felt like a big Hollywood blockbuster and all those things mitigated against it being scary. That, for me, was the end of that kind of big budget scarefest. You couldn’t do something with those big stars in it and make it as creepy as these films which come under the radar.

Do you think the audiences are more savvy now?

I think it’s harder work to put George Clooney in a film and say ‘This is going to be a ghost story’ because the ghost story genre demands that you try and reject it. No other genre, comedy, western, war films, demand that you reject it, while supernatural films demand so much of your irrationality and your rationality fights that even though there’s an artifice going on. So at every conceivable moment you want to not get scared, to not get involved. It’s self protection and yet what you’re going in for is the exact opposite of that and maybe it’s the tension between the two which makes the experience so rewarding in the end. There’s a complex and banal kind of psychology going on which is that you have a jump moment, everyone in the cinema laughs as an expulsion of the tension you feel.

In The Awakening Rebecca Hall’s character could be seen as symbolising that rationality as she is initially resistant to being drawn into the mystery of the film.

The character who has doubt is very important in a ghost story. If people accept what’s happening to them then you have not a ghost story but a fantasy so something like Blithe Spirit or Randall and Hopkirk. Yes, there are ghosts there but there’s no threat. You don’t grapple with the nature of what we’re seeing. Because you always want your characters to go on a journey, the person who tries to dismiss the ghost is always the most interesting, especially if they have intelligence and perhaps scientific knowledge and can bring that rational thinking to challenge what’s happening, rather than some dumb eighteen year old kid who wanders into a haunted house, screams and runs out being chased.

The film is a very different type of horror film given the last ten years of Hollywood horror, not least the post First World War setting…

That was something it became, rather than something it began as, but Nick [Murphy] really developed the emotional landscape of that time but at the beginning it was set in the 1880s. I was teaching some screenwriters and a film I discussed was The Innocents and how I loved that there was always this sense of the uncanny because you always questioned the reliability of the narrator , was she neurotic, was it all going on in her head? And what struck me watching was at the end of the second act Flora, the little girl, is sent away and I wondered what happened to Flora when she grows up? So the first version of The Awakening was a sequel to The Turn of the Screw and it was about Flora grown up, who becomes Florence – so there’s still a connection there in the name – and she becomes a ghost-hunter, but a debunking ghost-hunter and she’s blanked out the memory of Quint and Miss Jessell. So, she busts seances because she believes in rationality and science and the process of the story was her returning to Bly, the house in The Turn of the Screw, which is now a school and she confronts the older Miss Jessell.

Why did it change?

The BBC felt we couldn’t do a straight sequel because only people who had read The Turn of the Screw would get it, so I changed the back story, though it had echoes of the idea, to a young girl and a benevolent maid who dies and becomes the ghost which she revisits. It was all about recovered memories, ghosts as recovered of denied memory. I had an image, you know like in The Piano with the bonneted women, I had an image of a bonneted woman floating around the inside of a school. I took a guess at how old Flora would be and set it in the 1880s and as it deals with repressed memory and repressed sexuality there’s a very Freudian element – all buttoned up, their clothes and the way they spoke. It was all about repression and finding the reality. But a lot of things changed, the main thing was that they wanted to update it to the 1920s as they thought it would appeal to the audience and that in setting it post war it made sense  in terms of spiritualism. Certainly the 20s was when Arthur Conan Doyle made his pilgrimages, preaching about spiritualism. So it went through about fifteen or so drafts, from a sequel to The Turn of the Screw to a film about grief and loss post following the war.

And Florence or Flora remains the centre.

It was still this character who was essentially based on Houdini who, as well as being a fantastic escapologist and magician, used to debunk mediums and it was always claimed by the medium community that secretly he was desperate to believe in the afterlife and it always intrigues me about any kind of extremist is whether they’re afraid of the opposite of what their agenda signifies. So there’s that element but also the idea that ghosts can give some kind of closure on the past.

It’s fascinating to think there’s a version of the film linked to The Turn of the Screw, I’m almost sorry you didn’t make that version…

Well, there’s also a version which I set in Paris and had Florence as a nurse and a young Sigmund Freud who is a doctor at Salpêtrière hospital and the story she tells is in a flashback. At that stage I called it The Interpretation of Ghosts which is still a reference in the film. That was the title of the screenplay for most of its life and then when the setting was changed it lost its Freudian repression so it didn’t feel right.

But the characters are still what drives the story forward rather than the mystery.

I really believe that it’s all about the characters – it’s about who sees the ghost rather than the ghost itself. John Carpenter always says that horror is about the internal projecting into the external, that horror visualises what is in the mind. There was a Telegraph interview with Rebecca Hall and the journalists said something along the lines that taking a part in a genre film wasn’t the best career move and I thought ‘Bloody cheek…’ I’m a real tub-thumper for the genre but I’ve never thought that it needs to be less than intelligent and the person who proved that to me many years ago was Nigel Kneale. Two outstanding films which have affected my work are The Stone Tapes and Quatermass and the Pit. The intelligence there is so lively and not po-faced. The way he uses technology in a supernatural story and the way he incorporates characters in a way that they are not dumb but the story is nevertheless exciting.

The Awakening is out in the UK tomorrow. Read our review here.

To round off our coverage of the 55th BFI London Film Festival were taking a look back at one of the most prominent strands of the festival – the French Revolutions programme.

One of the festival’s chief pledges is to bring the best of the world’s cinema to London and Jack Jones leads us through the varied line-up and recommends which films we need to look out for when a theatrical release rolls around.

For all our other coverage of the London Film Festival click here, and read on for Jack’s take on the festival,

The Best Yet? French Cinema Just Keeps on Going

For those who are deeply engrained in cinema, it is often hard to admit that sometimes there are years when we have few films which impress us. For film festivals there is much the same sentiment. It seems as though every year critics hail the incumbent festival – whether it be Cannes, Venice or Toronto – as the best yet, and whenever a journalist ennobles said festival as the “greatest ever” there will inevitably be a great deal of trepidation surrounding such a claim. In the case of the 55th BFI London Film Festival, the overall programme exhibited a wide range of impressive films from debutant filmmakers such as Tinge Krishnan’s Junkhearts to the more accomplished skills of experienced filmmakers such as Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea – Of course there is always occasional stinker thrown in for good measure, Miranda July’s The Future being one of the main culprits. But was the 55th instalment the best ever?

This is almost an impossible question to answer. No one person has the capability to make it round the entire programme of films screening within the two weeks, and only a few of the most well established and long running critics have been to enough festivals over the years to judge. One thing that can be said of this year’s London Film Festival however is the strong presence of new French cinema, in particular the selection of films in the ‘French Revolutions’ programme. French cinema has long had a prominent role in the London Film Festival and is as strong an influence on UK cinema audiences as ever. A view that outgoing Festival Director Sandra Hebron shares; “French Cinema is important to us and it is important to recognise that there is a good audience for French Cinema in the UK”. With a rich blend of comedy, horror, historical and personal dramas, as well as audacious action thrillers, French cinema was on top form in 2011.

Among the main highlights were two refreshing comedies that really put to shame the current dearth of good comic cinema that sails over from across the Atlantic. In some respects both Nobody Else But You and The Fairy were startlingly reminiscent of some of the great comedy that Hollywood and American independent cinema has produced in the past. The Fairy in many ways harked back to the classical silent period of comic performers such as Keaton and Chaplin, whereas Nobody Else But You felt like a direct homage to the Coen Brothers at their quirky and idiosyncratic best. If the French are taking the baton for modern cinematic comedy then Nobody Else But You and The Fairy could be the start of a bright new future.

Some of the more serious and audacious projects screening this year also didn’t disappoint. Vincent Garenq’s Guilty – more accurately represented by its French title Presume Coupable – was one of the most heart wrenching and difficult films to watch across the entire programme at the LFF this year. In the spirit of Christian Bale’s physically transformative role for The Machinist, Philippe Torreton was one of the most overlooked performances this year in the true-life tale of about a shocking and consequently tragic miscarriage of Justice. National film sweetheart Mathieu Kassovitz also returned to the form of his confrontational picture La Haine with Rebellion, a fictionalised account of the clash between Kanak separatists and the French Army during a hostage situation in 1988. At the time the clash threatened to disturb the upcoming presidential election and with extreme pressure from the then government to solve the matter expediently, tragedy was inevitable. Interestingly Rebellion follows in the recent line of French films that are willing to uncover the darker parts of their nation’s history. One could say France is in a current era of politically and socially expressive filmmaking with recent films such as Of Gods and Men, Outside The Law, The Roundup and including both Guilty and Rebellion showing that filmmakers are more than free to question and criticise France’s establishments.

Other highlights included Early One Morning, a more personal and moving take on the style of ‘breaking point’ films such as Falling Down or Straw Dogs, and The Bird, a sad psychological uncovering of a woman who is distanced in her relationship with the rest of the world. Though not utterly spectacular, these films where hardly flops either. Perhaps the most standout film of the ‘French Revolutions’ programme was Mathieu Demy’s Americano, a love letter to his childhood with legendary parents Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda. For a first time director, Americano exhibits all the skill of someone well into his or her directorial career. No doubt Demy has inherited a thing or two from Mum and Dad.

Overall, within the French programming at this year’s Festival was an atmosphere of consummate and self-assured filmmaking, and with hardly any missteps across the board, France was more than just “well represented” at this year’s LFF.

It was one of my favourite films of the London Film Festival and ahead of is UK release on the 25th of November there’s a grand new poster for Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter.

Our good friends over at The Hollywood News got the scoop on this fine new poster, which throws as many star ratings, quotes and other recommendations over the storm strewn landscape and quite right too. It has a fantastic central performance from Michael Shannon and tells the story of a man struggling with the responsibilities of fatherhood and another, less tangible storm on the horizon.

Here’s the poster, which is enlargable by clickifying it,

With the release of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies in 2006 Michel Hazanavicius and the seemingly effortlessly charismatic Jean Dujardin looked set for global domination and a real crossover into the mainstream cinema-goer’s consciousness. Outside of France OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, and the equally smart and entertaining sequel OSS 117 – Lost in Rio (2009), never seemed to really break out in the way that they perhaps should have done though.

Despite some incredibly witty and biting satire and a glorious cinephilic approach to filmmaking, the OSS films seem to have been regarded as little more than Bond parodies in the vein of the dreadful Austin Powers films, a misunderstanding not helped by the lack of awareness outside of France of the original OSS films.

Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin have reunited yet again though and this time their cinematic playground is not the cult Eurospy films of the sixties but the better known, certainly in the US and UK, Hollywood of the twenties. In particular The Artist centres on the dying embers of the silent film period in Hollywood and the birth of the ‘talkies’.

Setting The Artist in twenties Hollywood Hazanavicius again re-creates a period not just within the verisimilitude of everything we see on screen, the costume design and so on, but also in his technical approach. The most obvious signs of this are of course in the academy ratio framing throughout and the absence, for the post part, of synced sound but there are also a number of subtle and expertly applied techniques too.

The period detailing is always present in the composition and also in the way in which the camera moves, or significantly doesn’t, constantly conveying a sense of time and place through stylistic choices. There are allusions to other films too, although these are not always quite so rooted to this exact period in Hollywood’s history, including an amusing nod to the famous breakfast table sequence in Citizen Kane. There is even one sequence in which Hazanavicius cleverly incorporates footage from The Mark of Zorro and the extent to which this appears so naturally part of the film is a testament to Hazanavicius’ technical adherence to the period and Dujardin’s spot on performance, and slight similarity to Fairbanks.

Dujardin and co-star Berenice Bejo are also quite extraordinary in the way in which they so convincingly capture a very particular performance style prevalent in the late Twenties in Hollywood. Aside from the temporal specificity in their physical performances, an expertly placed hand on a hip here or an eyebrow raised there, both manage to convey all that is required wordlessly. Silent film stars’ rather ‘large’ performances have become something that is somewhat mocked in some sectors of popular culture but there is no sense of cruel parody here, this is a loving tribute and an attentive pastiche.

The Artist goes beyond pastiche though, 100 minutes of which could have simply been one gag drawn out too far, and tells a grand and very beautiful story. Whilst the coming of sound and backstage Hollywood machinations provide a framework for the film narratively, and provide an interesting and absorbing context, the meat of the story is in the romance between George Valentin (Dujardin) and Peppy Miller (Bejo) and as this difficult and complicated relationship unfolds over many years one becomes invested in their lives and emotions whilst at the same time gripped by the story of the coming of sound. The Artist is not at its core a cinematic essay piece or simply an indulgent slice of self-reflexism but an intoxicating story told with skill and humour. The final moments in the film blend the two intertwined narratives, the romance and the move of Hollywood to sound, wonderfully in a climatic scene that showcases Dujardin and Bejo’s talents even further and brings to a close this joyous and beautiful tale.

****~ (4/5)

In the 2010 fiction film Kick-Ass the titular character comments, following his defense of an unarmed man being beaten up outside a diner, “…three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what’s wrong with me?”. This apathetic attitude and the desire to do something tangible about it is really at the heart of Superheroes, Mike Barnett’s documentary about real world versions of characters like Kick-Ass.

This is clear early in the documentary when the incredibly tragic story of Kitty Genovese is introduced. Kitty Genovese (real name Catherine Susan Genovese) was a woman murdered in 1964, stabbed to death, reportedly in plain view of many people who did nothing or even closed their windows and ignored the attack and cries for help. Whilst reports of this event vary, the mere suggestion that bystanders stood by and let a woman be stabbed to death without interfering is a potent concept and it is one that has galvanised a number of the superheroes in Barnett’s documentary into action. It’s a common thread throughout with all those interviewed either making reference to this apathy to crime present in modern society or directly commenting on the impact of the story of Kitty Genovese.

This is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Superheroes, the main impetus for these men and women to dress up in costumes and take to the streets is not a love of comic books or superhero films (although this certainly crops up as a motivation and is undoubtedly an inspiration) it is the belief that they can actually help people and do good. This effort to help people takes many forms with some handing out water, food and clothes to the homeless whilst others confront drug dealers or actively bait criminals in an effort to entrap them. The latter activity leads to a particularly unsettling part in the documentary in which a group go out to rough neighbourhoods dressed in what they believe is a provocative way in order to hopefully provoke someone into criminal behaviour. A Police Lieutenant is interviewed by Barnett and is quick to point out that this kind of behaviour is pretty textbook entrapment, and also very dangerous.

This is the unfortunate side of what the superheroes featured here do, they are not trained police officers but they are attempting to do the same kind of work in their local communities. Some are perhaps more of a danger to themselves than anyone else, the pretty innocuous Master Legend for instance is well liked locally but seemingly always drinking and hanging out in bad areas. Not a great mix. There are also those, including the most heavily profiled superhero Mr. Xtreme, who are more than happy to carry weapons and in a montage at the middle point of the film we see quite how extensive many of their weapon collections are. In a country in which gun ownership is pretty common bear mace may not seem like a big deal but in the UK (and probably the US too, to be honest) the idea that an untrained member of the public is walking down the street with a large cannister of that hardly makes me feel safer.

This balance between the more harmless aspects of the superheroes’ approach, helping the homeless, and the hints at something darker, weapons and the sense that some may have serious and quite dangerous delusional mind sets, is something that Barnett manages to deal with quite effectively. Superheroes never feels sensationalist or  exploitative, as it so easily could have been, and for the most part Barnett lets the interviewees tell their own story with only the occasional inter-cut talking head with the aforementioned police lieutenant or a clinical psychologist (Robin Rosenberg), who specialises in the psychology of superheroes.

The information supplied by Rosenberg is interesting but it unfortunately doesn’t go to far beyond the obvious. Like much of the documentary it is simply a surface examination of a much deeper and more fascinating subject. Whilst Barnett ensures that the film never runs out of steam, the addition of some pretty snappy animated sequences break up some of the slightly repetitive footage, he never really gets his teeth into his subjects and the inclusion of Stan Lee, who really has nothing too much to say on the subject. reeks of fan service. Superheroes is enjoyable and quite interesting but never really gets beyond the surface of this interesting phenomenon and the fascinating characters who choose to become superheroes.

***~~ (3/5)

Last week, I got to chat with writer of The The Ides of March, Beau Willimon and one of the cast members, Evan Rachel Wood about playing the role of Molly Stearns in the movie which is released tomorrow, Friday 28th October. I’ve broken the two interviews and if you missed my interview with Beau, you can recap by clicking here to view or the video will play in the player below automatically.

George Clooney directs, co-wrote and stars in the movie alongside a stellar cast which includes Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and Marisa Tomei. If you missed our review, you can have a read here.

In the interview with Evan, I ask her how she got involved in the movie, whether or not she know anything about US politics before taking the role and what it was like being directed by Mr. Clooney.

We’ve just been sent the winners list for The BFI London Film Festival 2011 and massive congrats to We Need to Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay and all her cast and crew for winning the award. I’ll just make this post about the winners but I’m sure we’ll do a reaction post imminently. So watch this space. See see our review of We Need to Talk About Kevin, click here or here for all our LFF 2011 coverage.

Winners in a nutshell

• Best Film: We Need to Talk ABout Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay
• Best British Newcomer: Candese Reid, actress, Junkhearts
• Sutherland Award Winner: Pablo Giorgelli, director of LAS ACACIAS
• Grierson Award for Best Documentary: In the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life directed by Werner Herzog
• BFI Fellowship:  Ralph Fiennes and David Cronenberg (as previously announced)

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2011 AWARD WINNERS

London – 10.30pm, 26 October 2011: The 55^th BFI London Film Festival, in partnership with American Express announced the winners at its high profile awards ceremony, supported by Montblanc at London’s LSO St Luke’s this evening.   Hosted by Marcus Brigstocke, the four awards were presented by some of the most respected figures in the film world.

BEST FILM: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, directed by Lynne Ramsay

Celebrating the most original, intelligent and distinctive filmmaking in the Festival, the Best Film award, presented in partnership with American Express, was chaired by John Madden who presented the award with fellow judge Gillian Anderson.

On behalf of the jury John Madden (Chair) said: “This year’s shortlist for Best Film comprises work that is outstanding in terms of its originality and its stylistic reach. It is an international group, one united by a common sense of unflinching human enquiry and we were struck by the sheer panache displayed by these great storytellers. In the end, we were simply bowled over by one film, a sublime, uncompromising tale of the torment that can stand in the place of love. We Need to Talk About Kevin is made with the kind of singular vision that links great directors across all the traditions of cinema.”

BEST BRITISH NEWCOMER: Candese Reid, actress, Junkhearts

This award is presented in partnership with Swarovski and honours new and emerging film talent, recognising the achievements of a new writer, producer, director, actor or actress.  The award for Best British Newcomer was presented by Edgar Wright and Minnie Driver to Candese Reid, for her acting role in Junkhearts, a sophisticated, social drama about hope and the search for redemption. Starting acting at the age of nine, she joined Nottingham’s prestigious Television Workshop, and her role in Junkhearts, at the age of 18, was her first professional acting role. Candese also received a bursary of £5,000 courtesy of Swarovski

Chair of the Best British Newcomer jury, Andy Harries said, “Candese is a fresh, brilliant and exciting new talent. Every moment she was on screen was compelling.”

SUTHERLAND AWARD WINNER: Pablo Giorgelli, director of LAS ACACIAS

The long-standing Sutherland Award is presented to the director of the most original and imaginative feature debut in the Festival. This year, Argentinian director Pablo Giorgelli took the award for his film Las Acacias, a slow-burning, uplifting and enchanting story of a truck driver and his passengers. The director received his Star of London from film director Terry Gilliam.

The jury commented: “In a lively and thoughtful jury room debate, Las Acacias emerged as a worthy winner, largely because of the originality of its conception. Finely judged performances and a palpable sympathy for his characters makes this a hugely impressive debut for director Pablo Giorgelli.”

GRIERSON AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY: INTO THE ABYSS: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life directed by Werner Herzog

The award is co-presented with the Grierson Trust, in commemoration of John Grierson, the grandfather of British documentary. Recognising outstanding feature length documentaries of integrity, originality, technical excellence or cultural significance, the jury was chaired by Adam Curtis and the award went to Werner Herzog’s coruscating study of the senselessness of violence and its consequences.

BFI FELLOWSHIP:  Ralph Fiennes and David Cronenberg (as previously announced)

Awarded to an individual whose body of work has made an outstanding contribution to film culture, the Fellowship is the highest accolade that the British Film Institute bestows and was awarded to Canadian auteur David Cronenberg whose film A Dangerous Method premiered at the Festival on Monday. The Fellowship was presented by Jeremy Thomas and Michael Fassbender.

Ralph Fiennes, one of Britain’s pre-eminent actors, who has just made a bold and critically well received transition to film directing with his festival film Coriolanus, was also presented with a Fellowship, this time from fellow actor and personal friend Liam Neeson.

Greg Dyke, Chair, BFI said: ‘The BFI London Film Festival Awards pay tribute to outstanding film talent, so we are delighted and honoured that both Ralph Fiennes, one of the world’s finest and most respected actors and David Cronenberg, one of the most original and ground-breaking film directors of contemporary cinema, have both accepted BFI Fellowships – the highest accolade the BFI can bestow. I also want to congratulate all the filmmakers and industry professionals here tonight, not only on their nominations and awards, but also for their vision, skill, passion and creativity.’

The Star of London award was commissioned especially for the Festival and designed by leading sculptor Almuth Tebbenhoff.

Jurors present at the ceremony included: Best Film jurors John Madden, Andrew O’Hagan. Gillian Anderson, Asif Kapadia, Tracey Seaward and Sam Taylor-Wood OBE; Sutherland jurors Tim Robey, Joanna Hogg, Saskia Reeves, Peter Kosminsky, Hugo Grumbar, and the artist Phil Collins. Best British Newcomer jurors Anne-Marie Duff, Tom Hollander, Edith Bowman, Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell; and Grierson Award jurors Mandy Chang of the Grierson Trust, Charlotte Moore, Head of Documentary Commissioning at BBC, Kim Longinotto and Adam Curtis.

Other guests included:  Alfonso Cuarón , Sheharazade Goldsmith, Duncan Kenworthy, Aaron Johnson, Paul Gambaccini, Chair of the BFI Greg Dyke, Chief Executive Amanda Nevill and Festival Director Sandra Hebron.

Last week, I got to chat with writer of The The Ides of March, Beau Willimon and one of the cast members, Evan Rachel Wood about playing the role of Molly Stearns in the movie which is released this Friday 28th October. I’ve broken the two interviews into two posts and today you’ll get to hear from screenwriter and original play-write of Farragut North on which the movie which is directed and starring George Clooney is based.

Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and Marisa Tomei round off the fantastic cast in this fantastic movie. If you missed our review, you can have a read here. In the interview with Beau, I got to speak with him about how George Clooney found out about the movie, what it was like to get the call that it was actually being made, what it was like writing and working with Clooney and the cast in which ended up playing the roles he’d written.

Rivalry in the field of Talmudic studies may not seem like the most compelling premise for a feature film but perhaps the greatest surprise in Joseph Cedar’s Footnote is that the basics of the story, embittered personal politics and family divides amongst Talmudic scholars, is by far the film’s greatest strength.

At the centre of the confusion and resentment that provides the film’s reasonably brisk forward narrative drive are father, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-aba), and son, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi); the former a washed up scholar who clings to a footnote in his past and the latter a successful and dare I say hip young Talmudic professor. Eliezer looks down on his son’s work, believing it to be lacking real substance whilst the son struggles to connect to his curmudgeon father who seems unable to connect with the world around him.

Writer/director Joseph Cedar does a reasonable job of fleshing out these two lead characters and there is even a point at which the focus switches from father to son quite effortlessly, providing the audience with a differing view of the story and at it is also at this point that the film settles into its stride a little more strongly. By this point though far too much damage has already been done by Cedar in his unnecessarily dopey stylistic choices. These are perhaps intended to signpost that Footnote is something of a black comedy rather than a po-faced scholarly drama but there is surely no chance of it being misread in this way and instead the style feels like Cedar over explaining a joke that is only mildly amusing to begin with. Throwing a lot of visual absurdity at the screen in the opening thirty minutes Cedar uses on-screen text, split screens and side wipes that add nothing and strip a lot away, making the whole venture feel more preposterous and flimsy.

The biggest culprit in Footnote’s downfall though is not the visual hooey but the bizarre aural disaster of a score that accompanies the film. Ludicrously invasive throughout the score is so misjudged that it becomes an (unintentionally) hilarious addition to some of the more off the rail sequences. Surely never before has a scene of a man walking down a narrow corridor been scored with such bombastic and excessive grandeur. Things fall apart at crucial moments too, when for instance Eliezer begins to piece together the truth behind an award at the centre of the film’s main conflict. Cut to a whip panning montage of Eliezer putting the pieces together with an increasingly alarmed look on his face, whilst the soundtrack blasts out like an epic sea battle is taking place.

Shlomo Bar-aba as Eliezer is quite wonderful though, despite the often derailing direction, as the gloomy and occasionally vitriolic patriarch and Lior Ashkenazi too impresses as the conflicted son often just trying to do the right thing. What’s so striking though is that two fine actors playing interesting characters in an oddly compelling story is not enough to save Footnote from being a messy film that does little too impress.

**~~~ (2/5)

Footnote is playing as part of the London Film Festival on the 25th and 27th of October.

(This review originally appeared on HeyUGuys as part of our coverage of Cannes 2011.)

As the second week of the LFF draws to a close, a film we’ve been following at HeyUGuys  for quite some time, Wild Bill – the directorial debut of Dexter Fletcher – finally makes its UK debut.

We rather enjoyed the movie, so hot footed it down to Vue in Leicester Square to catch up with the cast and crew.

JASON FLEMYNG

On working with Dexter

Well he’s my greatest, oldest friend, so it was so nice to go full circle and have him directing. Between us we’ve made 150 films now, and it’s just fantastic to get one of us [behind] the camera, and it was always going to be him. He’s a hard worker and a grafter.

The great thing about actors who direct is that they understand about actors very well, so it was great to have another actor direct you. Whatever you say about Dex, he’s a classy actor so if he says it should be this way, it should be happening. Matt Vaughn, who’s sort of the Godfather of all of us, he’s not technical, he couldn’t direct an actor if he tried, so it’s lovely to know Dex.

WILL POULTER

On ‘stealing’ the film from Charlie Creed Miles

Ah no, I didn’t do that. Certainly not. I was just very grateful to be involved. I think everyone did this for the love, the entire cast. To work with a man like Dexter, he’s the most enthusiastic man on the planet, and he just set the tone for the incredible working environment so everyone could do their job, and we all loved it.

On the chance to get away from being described as a ‘child actor’

Yeah, I suppose it is a bit of a transition. I relish the opportunity to play a very mature character, which is a challenge for me, but I loved it. Dean’s a character that really attracted me. He’s a 16 year old who carries responsibilities that most 16 year olds can’t imagine. It was a real wake up call for me to see what real life is like. I’m very lucky, I come from a great family and don’t have to think about those things. It’s a real eye opener, and the character’s fantastic and I enjoyed every minute of it.

DEXTER FLETCHER

On the serious tone of the film

That was striking a balance. The great thing about Danny [King – Fletcher’s co-writer] is that he does have a great comedic bent, and that was something that I completely exploited and wanted to very much be a part of Wild Bill, and why I initially started speaking to him right away, because I knew the subject matter was particularly, or could be particularly dark and bleak, and I didn’t want to make a bleak, dark film. I wanted to make a film that actually had a point, and I felt that this story had that, but at the same time I didn’t want us to come out of it feeling like we’ve just been bashed over the head for 90 minutes. So my way of thinking was, if I got someone involved like Danny King, he was going to elevate that humour in the story, and find the things that were funny. We talked about how someone trying relentlessly and failing is kind of funny, Laurel and Hardy trying to get a piano up the stairs is funny, because they can’t do it, and they don’t stop trying, and they’re beset with obstacles and things that knock them back, and that’s where the humour comes from, and I knew that Danny  had that in spades. He knew the Language, he knew the people, and he knew the world, so that was where that came from.

On having young actors in the film

I was very lucky with the kids that I got. Sammy Williams is phenomenal and Will Poulter is a massive talent emerging and I exploited that. As soon as I met them I knew they were the guys I needed, but also I have a history of being a child actor myself, and I know that world, and I was very comfortable, very confident that I would be able to work with these young actors, and I think they give two of the best performances in the film.

A highlight of the London Film Festival this year was the chance to catch a fine performance from Michael Shannon as a troubled young husband and father dealing with the responsibilities to his family while watching for signs of an encroaching mental illness.

Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter is a mesmerising film and comes to the UK in a month’s time on the 25th of November and there’s a new UK trailer to entice and inspire. I reviewed the film earlier this month and you can read my thoughts here, in short: I loved it and I think you will too. Yes, you.

The Guardian had the trailer first, and they are a quality paper so buy a copy once in a while, eh?

Miss Bala opens on a static shot of a wall, a wall filled with cut out pictures of American female fashion icons – Madonna, Monroe, Audrey Hepburn – and a mirror. Reflected in the mirror we get a glimpse at our protagonist, Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), partially obscured as she busies herself around her room. The symbolic potency of this opening is effective and it aptly sets up the slow and considered approach of director Gerardo Naranjo.

This opening is also perhaps the furthest we ever get from the character of Laura for the entirety of Miss Bala, as newcomer Stephanie Sigman, who is startling good here, is in every scene, Naranjo putting us right alongside her at every moment.

Laura is a young woman living in Mexico and sees a way out of her and her family’s poverty through the Miss Baja California beauty pageant. Unfortunately though, the night before her and her friend are scheduled to go in for training for the competition she witnesses a gunfight in a club and the removal of three bodies in a truck.

Hiding in the toilets of the club she finds herself face to face with the leader of the group of gunmen who lay waste to the club. When she then reports what she saw to a (corrupt) local policeman she finds herself back face to face with him once more. The man is Lino (Noe Hernandez) and he is the leader of a violent group who have a lot of money and a lot of guns. Lino decides that Laura is of great use to him and his men and develops a complex plan that will see her travelling across the country and entering the Miss Baja California competition, the competition is as open to corruption as every institution presented here.

Laura is used in Miss Bala as Lino’s pawn and her exploited position is one that we are forced to both experience and feel complicit in as Naranjo presents the story subjectively from Laura’s point of view but also places us at times in the position of witness to her exploitation. He involves us in Laura’ subjective viewpoint through a number of sequences in which we experience only what Laura experiences, learning new facts about what is occurring only as she does. Coupled with this though Naranjo often places the camera behind her, we slowly follow, almost craning our necks to see what lies beyond.

This sense of craning forward or around corners is constant in Miss Bala and the slow camera movements Naranjo uses make the events all the more gripping, one almost wills the camera to pan more quickly so that we can actually see what’s going on or get an idea of what is about to happen next. This is particularly effective in a shoot out near the middle of the film, which is both exhilarating and scary despite most of the action happening outside of the frame.

The technical approach of Naranjo to Miss Bala throughout is not simply a solitary ‘trick’ though and a variety of techniques are employed to impressive effect. His use of depth of field in particular is varied and incredibly effective. In the early club scene for instance we see armed men silently dropping down into the bathroom, in the background of the frame and beyond the viewpoint of the hiding Laura, who is also visible to us in the foreground. This effective use of a wide depth of field is in direct contrast with later scenes which make great use of extremely shallow depth of field to obscure or to give a sense of the bewildering nature of what is occurring.

Miss Bala is an entirely gripping thriller and riveting from start to finish but it is not simply a thrill ride. Aside from the emotional investment that comes from the slowly developing and entirely compelling story, Naranjo clearly has an axe to grind regarding the drug trade and politics in Mexico and abroad. Miss Bala ends with a grim climax and a depressing series of statistics regarding the drug trade, the message is a bleak one but vital and all delivered within a film that ensures that you really sit up and pay attention.

****~ (4/5)

Last night, London saw the UK Premiere at the London Film Festival for the brand new Geroge Clooney movie, The Ides of March. Clooney not only stars in the movie but co-wrote the screenplay along with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon who I got to sit down with and interview earlier today.

The film sees a stellar cast alongside Clooney including Ryan Gosling, Evan Rachel Wood, (who I also spoke to at today’s junket) Marisa Tomei, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright and Max Minghella.

It’s out in the UK 28th October and you can read our review here.

These interviews were carried out by the fabulous people at Upbeat so scroll down and have a watch.

The release of a inmate from prison and their subsequent reintegration into ‘regular’ society is an area that is filled with potential for interesting drama.

Ulu Grosbard’s under-seen and underrated 1978 film Straight Time (based on the equally excellent book No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker) uses this premise to explore the way in which the released inmate’s, played by Dustin Hoffman, life is defined by the way in which they have been labelled by society.

In his debut film, Wild Bill, Dexter Fletcher treads similar territory with his lead character struggling to adjust to life outside of prison but in addition he introduces an intense family drama to the mix.

The titular Bill (Charlie Creed-Miles) returns home from prison after many years inside and in the interim period his two sons, Jimmy (Sammy Williams) and Dean (Will Poulter), have been abandoned by their mother and left to fend for themselves. In Bill’s absence 15 year-old Dean has taken on the role of the family patriarch and cares for his younger brother whilst trying to hold down an illegal job on a construction site. Rather amusingly, and with a hint of social commentary, the construction site in question is the London 2012 Olympic Velodrome.

Shortly after Bill’s release he is deposited unconscious onto Dean and Jimmy’s sofa, Bill’s old friends do a good job of celebrating his return by helping him get totally inebriated. Dean and Bill instantly clash, Dean clearly blaming his father for, in his eyes, abandoning them. The animosity intensifies when Bill later highlights the boy’s living arrangements to the social services leading to a rather awkward home visit.

Bill is at first a reluctant father, uninterested in taking care of the boys and anxious to get away from his old criminal life, planning to move up north for work and a new start. Dean manages to blackmail him into staying though, at least until the social services are off their backs.

The remainder of the film follows a path that is perhaps not too difficult to predict, with Bill upsetting the apple cart by refusing to get back involved with his old friends’ criminal activities, Dean and Jimmy reconnecting with their father and a slight romantic sub-plot between Bill and local prostitute Roxy (Liz White). The film rests not on dramatic twists and turns though but on a slow and engrossing story that pulls you into the world in which the main protagonists and a number of side characters (populated by very recognisable British actors) live. This is done with expediency and an economy that ensures that a lot of the characters really get under your skin without the film feeling crowded or over-reaching.

The way in which the actors inhabit their roles is also essential to this investment and there are many performances to commend here. Poulter is perhaps most noteworthy, unsurprising to anyone who has seen his impressive debut in Son of Rambow in 2007, but Liz White is also excellent in a role that could have so easily been a simple stereotype. The way her character is drawn has subtlety and she brings a lot of warmth to the role.

Fletcher perhaps lives up to a widely held belief here about the ability of actor turned directors to coax strong performances out of actors but a lot of the groundwork is clearly already there in the script (written by Fletcher and Danny King). Fletcher’s direction is also mostly very competent with the film feeling entirely cinematic, no complaints here about this looking like an ITV drama, but retaining an intimate and small scale approach. Cinematographer George Richmond does excellent work too, helping give the film a look of its own and technically notable shots such as a long tracking shot early on, which weaves through their flat and the corridor outside, belie the low budget roots of the film but are appropriate to the content, not simply grandstanding.

Far removed from the nonsensical and childishly excessive gangster films that have clogged up DVD shelves in the UK, particularly in the wake of Lock, Stock  and Two Smoking Barrels (in which Fletcher starred), Wild Bill is a convincing and absorbing drama and an impressive début feature.

Wild Bill is playing as part of the London Film Festival on the 21st and 23rd of October.

***½~ (3.5/5)

Anyone who has already seen Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 film Harakiri, of which this film is very much a remake, will very quickly realise when watching Miike’s 2011 update that little in the story has been changed but whilst the mechanics of the story are unchanged Miike makes significant changes in the way this story is told.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai begins with Kageyu (Koji Yakusho), the head of the House of Li, telling Hanshiro (Ebizo Ichikawa) the tale of Motome (Eita), a samurai who arrived at the gates of the House of Li asking for the use of their courtyard to commit ritual suicide (Harakiri, or actually more accurately Seppuku).

Hanshiro is requesting this very same thing and it is clear that Kageyu is attempting to offer Hanshiro a warning. Motome had no intention of actually going through with the suicide and was actually attempting a ‘suicide bluff’, a newly popular technique of extracting money from the wealthy houses, who would give the desperate samurai money and send them on their way.

The early seventeenth century in Japan (the beginning of the Edo period), the time at which the film is set, was a period of difficulty for samurai who were largely unneeded. Without a war to fought many found themselves without retainers and therefore penniless. This ‘suicide bluff’ was therefore a way for a desperate masterless samurai to get his hands on some money when he was in direst need. The House of Li are aware of this growing trend and, suspecting that this is exactly what Motome is up to, decide to make an example of this latest chancer. Motome is scared and bullied into committing suicide in the courtyard and has to do so with a bamboo sword, having sold his own sword and replaced it with a bamboo replica, an effort to save face.

This moment of brutality, as Motome repeatedly thrusts the inadequate weapon into his stomach, is the only point in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai in which Miike presents us with gory violence, the kind that many would probably be expecting in this follow-up to his 2010 film 13 Assassins. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is very different film from 13 Assassins and this blood heavy sequence is included in an effort to emotionally confront the viewer, to make it clear what a deeply unpleant act this is. The sequence is much longer and graphic than the equivalent sequence in Kobayashi’s original but it is perhaps necessary here, in order to provoke such a strong reaction in some modern audiences.

Returning to Hanshiro and Kageyu the story then continues with Hanshiro seated in the courtyard, ready to commit seppuku. His final request though is for a particular second (the one who decapitates him following his disembowelment at his own hands) but neither this choice or either of his other two choices are available that day. As messengers are dispatched to find them Hanshiro begins telling his own tale, the story of Motome pre-suicide. Motome was actually his adopted son and ultimately son-in law and the story he tells is a very sad one, told entirely in flashback and with a sensitive touch from writer Kikumi Yamagishi and director Takashi Miike.

The unfolding narrative summarised above, and the subsequent developments in the story, are without doubt the greatest strength in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and they are as compellingly told here as they were by Shinobo Hashimoto and Masaki Kobayashi in 1962. A key difference between the original and this 2011 remake is the visual approach though. One fascinating aspect of Kobayashi’s film was the cinematography, particularly the use of vertical and horizontal lines to divide the characters in the courtyard scenes, and the contrasting approach in the flashback scenes, less harsh delineations and more slow-moving camerawork. Miike takes this same idea in the courtyard scenes, demarcation and visual division, but uses an entirely different technique.

In Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai this is achieved stereoscopically, the characters divided by their position on the positive or negative parallax of the 3D image (mostly using the positive – appearing as if behind the screen). This coupled with a minor use of vertical and horizontal lines in the set design leads to a startlingly effective but relatively subtle result. Aside from being incredibly pleasing to the eye and simple to understand visually, this manipulation of the image enforces the separation between the standing of various characters and, perhaps most effectively, strongly separates Hanshiro from the other characters in the courtyard. He appears alone but, more and more as the story develops, defiant and a lone voice amongst many. Mirrored in the narrative that unfolds this is conveyed visually with his placement in the 3D image, a startling and incredibly impressive example of the capabilities of 3D technology.

This impressive use of 3D continues throughout Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, in particular in the use of extreme depth of field and an interesting type of ‘close ups’ in a number of scenes, notably including interior scenes. One common comment regarding the 3D in Avatar was that the 3D was much ‘better’ in the exterior scenes on Pandora and while this could perhaps be based more on the visual extravagance of the Pandora scenes there are issues in some of the interior scenes, mostly with objects or side characters seemingly incorrectly taking prominence in a scene (stereoscopically speaking). This is not an issue in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai as at any one time one’s eyes are tracking to the ‘correct’ part of the frame, particularly in scenes in which a character is strongly emoting and this their face should be the entire focus of our attention.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is ultimately a film that focuses heavily on the character’s emotions, an investment in their plight is crucial to the twisting and intriguing narrative having the necessary impact, and it is in the aforementioned interesting type of ‘close ups’ that the 3D technology again achieves something quite special. Characters seems to stand out from the backgrounds, their faces coming to the forefront and holding our concentration. Conventionally this would be achieved with a close up but here Miike shoots wider but achieves the same effect with the background appearing far into positive space and the character’s face standing out against it. It is not, it is perhaps important to note, done by placing the character far into negative space. In fact, negative space is used with great restraint and is used more to enhance the extended depth of field and never to make objects or characters fly out at you.

Due to the prominence of characters’ faces within the image and the nature of the story a lot of weight rests on the shoulders of the actors and they all equip themselves adequately, a lot of the work is perhaps done in their casting more than anything else though. That said, Ebizo Ichikawa is excellent as Hanshiro and despite playing the same role made famous by the wonderful Tatsuya Nakadia, Ichikawa is very memorable in this new version of the story, making the role very much his own.

Whilst Miike’s Har-Kiri: Death of a Samurai may be lacking some of the political urgency that Kobayashi brought to the table in 1962, especially in Kobayashi’s use of the film to explore untrustworthy and morally bankrupt leaders and the Japanese concept of honne and tatamae (public perception versus the truth) , Miike has lost none of the classical beauty of this compelling story. Also, with the decision to film Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai in 3D he has employed some stunning visual techniques and found a new and highly effective way to tell this story.

****~ (4/5)

Nick Murphy’s debut film is an old school ghost story in every sense with Rebecca Hall’s journey to invesigate alledged spooky happenings finds her rolling up at a boys school in the middle of nowhere with a murdered pupil and a host of unanswered questions.

I caught the film earlier this month as it plays the London Film Festival in the next couple of weeks and found it to be a well crafted tale with some genuinely terrifying moments. Hall and her co-star Dominic West are perfectly cast and make the most of the script, co-written by Murphy and Stephen Volk. You can read my review on this site shortly but it’s well wrth catching as soon as you can.

In the meantime here’s your poster,

Those impy IMPA bods revealed this to the world. Thanks Be.

Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is 1.68 meters tall and feels very inadequate about it. Despite working in a highly paid job, as a corporate headhunter, having a beautiful house and spending a fortune on luxury gifts for his wife, his tall wife, Diana (Synnove Macody Lund), he believes that he is not enough for her.

Roger is constantly spending more and more on her in an effort to somehow make up for this perceived inadequacy and in doing so he begins spiralling into serious debt. Being a headhunter isn’t his only profession though and he frequently moonlights as a cat burglar, stealing expensive works of art from his clients, using information gleamed in interviews with them, a sideline he keeps a secret from his wife.

At the opening of Diana’s new gallery Roger is introduced to a friend of hers, the former CEO of a high profile GPS company, Clas Greve. Despite being somewhat suspicious of Clas’ relationship with Diana and therefore reluctant to become too friendly with him, Roger’s ears prick up when he hears of Clas’ previous job. Roger is currently looking to headhunt someone for a company named Pathfinder, and Clas’ skills are exactly what he is looking for. Upon returning home Diana also informs Roger that Clas has recently come into possession of an incredibly rare and valuable painting. Things seem to be looking up for Roger but rather than being the solution to all of his problems, meeting Clas is just the beginning of a long and terrifying journey for Roger.

At this point in the story Headhunters begins spinning off into suspenseful and often very unexpected directions. A surprising thriller is something that is rarely successfully executed in a satisfyingly way narratively but Headhunters is an enjoyably slick example of this working exceptionally well. The script is suitably twisting with secrets revealed and shifts in the plot that are genuinely hard to second guess, without anything that happens being too far-fetched or unexpected simply for the sake of being hard to guess. Situations do go in some almost absurd areas at times but they make sense within the film and the slightly tongue in cheek tone that the film has makes these slightly silly moments more fun than distracting.

The pervading style in Headhunters also adds to the sense of fun, with a score that often riffs on the kind of sounds that wouldn’t be out of place in a 60s spy film and an approach to production design that is both luxurious and minimal. The costume design is also very well handled and this is particularly important in portraying Roger’s transformation as things begin to go downhill for him as he goes on the run and desperation sets in.

This transformation is one of the film’s strength, with a fantastic performance from Hennie making his character’s degradation in both the serious and comical scenes incredibly convincing. The change in Roger’s character is both entertaining, engaging and thematically interesting. Beginning the film as wealthy and, at least on the surface, someone who ‘has it all’, the signifiers of his privileged life are slowly stripped away as he is chased across the, beautiful, Norwegian landscape.

The significance of the stripping away of the fineries of Roger’s life is perhaps more narratively important than thematically and these could have been more interestingly dealt with, the film’s ending only partly addresses the change that he has gone through, but for a film that is mostly simply an entertaining romp this minor depth is a welcome addition.

Headhunters certainly isn’t heady but it is thoroughly enjoyable and with perfect pacing, a good sense of escalation and enthralling plotting it’s quite hard not to get caught up in this entertaining thriller.

***½~ (3.5/5)

Headhunters is playing as part of the London Film Festival on the 18th, 19th and 22nd of October.