The tale of a quest to return an artwork to the Outer Hebrides after 30 years is unexpectedly compelling
Reviewing Andrew Kötting’s Lek and the Dogs in this paper in 2018, I compared his work to “a steamy midden of ideas”, an earthy concoction into which we are invited to dig deep. His latest offering is more like a dream – or rather a conjunction of dreams, occupying that liminal space between waking and sleep where the land meets the sea, past meets present, and lo-fi home-made cinema brushes against something sublime. As with so many of Kötting’s films, the central conceit involves a journey – a quest apparently undertaken to restore the titular artefact to the place of its making in the Outer Hebrides, and thereby cure an amorphous “unwellness”. I have no idea how much of what is documented here is “true”; suffice to say that it all feels profoundly truthful.
Reviewing Andrew Kötting’s Lek and the Dogs in this paper in 2018, I compared his work to “a steamy midden of ideas”, an earthy concoction into which we are invited to dig deep. His latest offering is more like a dream – or rather a conjunction of dreams, occupying that liminal space between waking and sleep where the land meets the sea, past meets present, and lo-fi home-made cinema brushes against something sublime. As with so many of Kötting’s films, the central conceit involves a journey – a quest apparently undertaken to restore the titular artefact to the place of its making in the Outer Hebrides, and thereby cure an amorphous “unwellness”. I have no idea how much of what is documented here is “true”; suffice to say that it all feels profoundly truthful.
- 4/5/2020
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
Andrew Kötting’s dream-documentary traces a ritual journey in which a mysterious object is returned to a Scottish island
That unique artist, director and psycho-geographic savant Andrew Kötting sculpts another strange film-shamanic happening – intriguing, sometimes baffling, a bit preposterous, but pregnant with ideas. Tonally, his work is complex; humour is a part of it, and the film can’t really function without humour on the audience’s part, but it also requires a setting aside of mockery and irony, demanding instead to be accepted as a kind of higher playfulness, an inspired and transcendental jeu d’ésprit. In his 2012 film Swandown, Kötting included among his cast of characters a cameo from the comedian Stewart Lee, who was permitted to take the mickey a bit. But I sense that this isn’t a response that the film-maker wants to encourage.
Like much of his previous work, this is a dream-documentary road movie,...
That unique artist, director and psycho-geographic savant Andrew Kötting sculpts another strange film-shamanic happening – intriguing, sometimes baffling, a bit preposterous, but pregnant with ideas. Tonally, his work is complex; humour is a part of it, and the film can’t really function without humour on the audience’s part, but it also requires a setting aside of mockery and irony, demanding instead to be accepted as a kind of higher playfulness, an inspired and transcendental jeu d’ésprit. In his 2012 film Swandown, Kötting included among his cast of characters a cameo from the comedian Stewart Lee, who was permitted to take the mickey a bit. But I sense that this isn’t a response that the film-maker wants to encourage.
Like much of his previous work, this is a dream-documentary road movie,...
- 4/1/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Stars: Andrew Kotting, Eden Kotting, MacGillivray, Iain Sinclair | Directed by Andrew Kotting
Andrew Kotting directs this curious experimental film with Anonymous Bosch (Edith Walks) working the cinematography. A reunion, too, between Iain Sinclair and Kotting, who have previously collaborated on the acclaimed Swandown, By Our Selves and Edith Walks. A work of artist, poet, dreamer, photographer, writer, filmmaker and, obviously, curator, The Whalebone Box isn’t something you’ve seen before, it’s… well… elsewhere.
The Whalebone Box introduces us to a box, made from whalebone and washed up on a beach, entangled in the nets of a fisherman. It’s said that the box has the ability to heal or change those who touch it. This curiosity begins a journey, with the box, which was given, over thirty years ago, to Iain Sinclair, a writer and filmmaker, is taken 800 miles from London to the Outer Hebrides, to be returned to sculptor Steve Dilworth,...
Andrew Kotting directs this curious experimental film with Anonymous Bosch (Edith Walks) working the cinematography. A reunion, too, between Iain Sinclair and Kotting, who have previously collaborated on the acclaimed Swandown, By Our Selves and Edith Walks. A work of artist, poet, dreamer, photographer, writer, filmmaker and, obviously, curator, The Whalebone Box isn’t something you’ve seen before, it’s… well… elsewhere.
The Whalebone Box introduces us to a box, made from whalebone and washed up on a beach, entangled in the nets of a fisherman. It’s said that the box has the ability to heal or change those who touch it. This curiosity begins a journey, with the box, which was given, over thirty years ago, to Iain Sinclair, a writer and filmmaker, is taken 800 miles from London to the Outer Hebrides, to be returned to sculptor Steve Dilworth,...
- 3/30/2020
- by Chris Cummings
- Nerdly
Andrew Kötting's The Whalebone Box is receiving its digital premiere exclusively on Mubi in partnership with Home Artist. The film is showing April 3 - May 2, 2020 in the United Kingdom.The Whalebone Box sees artist, filmmaker, and creative whirlwind Andrew Kötting reuniting with Iain Sinclair for yet another remarkable collaboration after their critically acclaimed and ground breaking Journeyworks jaunts comprising Swandown, By Our Selves, and Edith Walks. Kötting’s daughter Eden acts as an angelic presence, transporting us into a world of wonder as we learn the origins and the journey of the titular box as it journeys back to the Outer Hebrides where it was originally discovered. Incorporating elements of archive and pinhole photography all immersed in Kötting’s characteristic dense and dubby sonic soundscape, the film is mainly shot using Super 8 and Super 8 apps and it celebrates the notion of the home-made whilst also acting as an exercise in hauntological madcap.
- 3/30/2020
- MUBI
Sophie Hawkshaw (L) and Zoe Terakes in ‘Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt)’.
Since Zoe Terakes came out, the proudly gay actor has not been offered any screen roles as straight characters – but that has not hindered the 19-year-old’s flourishing career.
There is no such discrimination in the theatre world and Zoe is currently performing in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Ensemble Theatre, directed by Iain Sinclair.
She made her stage debut as Catherine, a college student who is romantically involved with Italian Rodolpho, in the Old Fitz Theatre production of the play while she was studying for the Hsc.
Miller’s play has been a talisman for her as she appeared in the Melbourne Theatre Company production, also directed by Sinclair, earlier this year.
Terakes is determined to overcome the attitude prevalent in sections of the screen industry that gay actors can’t be convincing as straight characters.
Since Zoe Terakes came out, the proudly gay actor has not been offered any screen roles as straight characters – but that has not hindered the 19-year-old’s flourishing career.
There is no such discrimination in the theatre world and Zoe is currently performing in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Ensemble Theatre, directed by Iain Sinclair.
She made her stage debut as Catherine, a college student who is romantically involved with Italian Rodolpho, in the Old Fitz Theatre production of the play while she was studying for the Hsc.
Miller’s play has been a talisman for her as she appeared in the Melbourne Theatre Company production, also directed by Sinclair, earlier this year.
Terakes is determined to overcome the attitude prevalent in sections of the screen industry that gay actors can’t be convincing as straight characters.
- 8/3/2019
- by The IF Team
- IF.com.au
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Andrew Kötting's Edith Walks (2017) is playing June 29 - July 29, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom.The faster we walk, the more ground we lose.—Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the TerritoryIf there's a single date in English history that most of the country's population would know, it's 1066: the Battle of Hastings. They would hazily recall from wooden modular classrooms, stifling on a warm summer's afternoon, as they gazed out at heat rising from the tarmac playground, the tale of King Harold II, his cross-country march to war, and the Norman Conquest of the Anglo-Saxon realm. Perhaps the image of Harold as depicted on the Bayeux tapestry, an arrow protruding from his eye, would emerge from the palimpsest of history and linger on the fringes of their memory. The memories are much more immediate and painful for Edith Swan-Neck,...
- 6/27/2017
- MUBI
Andrew Kötting explores the legacy of King Harold and his wife in this wonderfully eccentric film
There’s something uniquely wonderful about the unfettered pagan spirit of Andrew Kötting. His film-making has an anarchic lawlessness; a refreshing alternative to pictures that are pruned and shaped to fit into a preordained structure. For this project, Kötting and a band of merry troubadours (including writer Alan Moore and historian Iain Sinclair) embark on a journey by foot from Waltham Abbey to St Leonards-on-Sea. Along the way, they explore the mythic legacy of King Harold and his wife, Edith Swan-Neck (embodied for the pilgrimage by Claurdia Barton). The route is as the crow flies, but it’s embellished with glorious curlicues of eccentricity.
Continue reading...
There’s something uniquely wonderful about the unfettered pagan spirit of Andrew Kötting. His film-making has an anarchic lawlessness; a refreshing alternative to pictures that are pruned and shaped to fit into a preordained structure. For this project, Kötting and a band of merry troubadours (including writer Alan Moore and historian Iain Sinclair) embark on a journey by foot from Waltham Abbey to St Leonards-on-Sea. Along the way, they explore the mythic legacy of King Harold and his wife, Edith Swan-Neck (embodied for the pilgrimage by Claurdia Barton). The route is as the crow flies, but it’s embellished with glorious curlicues of eccentricity.
Continue reading...
- 6/25/2017
- by Wendy Ide
- The Guardian - Film News
Andrew Kötting’s psychogeographical journey from Waltham Abbey to Hastings – with contributions from Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair en route – is filled with a wayward integrity
Another eccentric, strange yet weirdly engaging journey along the leyline of Englishness by experimental film-maker Andrew Kötting, flying under the radar of conventional history and conventional production values. This zero-to-no-budget piece is something like a filmed moment of street theatre or Pythonesque subversion of the English past. It is a kind of occult dress-up pilgrimage, tracing in reverse an imaginary journey between Waltham Abbey and Hastings, conceptually reuniting King Harold with Edith Swan-Neck, his secular or “hand-fast” wife, who identified his body after the Battle of Hastings and secured him a Christian burial at Waltham Abbey. Kötting and his company make their journey in costume, pausing to consider and contemplate along the way, with ruminative contributions from Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, who discuss the mythic relativeness of Edith’s identity and the psychogeographical implications of everything else. Moore comments gnomically: “You can always tell an authentic battlefield.” Well, only a pedant or a bore would insist on leading Mr Moore blindfold to three or four fields to test the truth of that. Like everything else in this piece, it has its own wayward integrity.
Continue reading...
Another eccentric, strange yet weirdly engaging journey along the leyline of Englishness by experimental film-maker Andrew Kötting, flying under the radar of conventional history and conventional production values. This zero-to-no-budget piece is something like a filmed moment of street theatre or Pythonesque subversion of the English past. It is a kind of occult dress-up pilgrimage, tracing in reverse an imaginary journey between Waltham Abbey and Hastings, conceptually reuniting King Harold with Edith Swan-Neck, his secular or “hand-fast” wife, who identified his body after the Battle of Hastings and secured him a Christian burial at Waltham Abbey. Kötting and his company make their journey in costume, pausing to consider and contemplate along the way, with ruminative contributions from Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, who discuss the mythic relativeness of Edith’s identity and the psychogeographical implications of everything else. Moore comments gnomically: “You can always tell an authentic battlefield.” Well, only a pedant or a bore would insist on leading Mr Moore blindfold to three or four fields to test the truth of that. Like everything else in this piece, it has its own wayward integrity.
Continue reading...
- 6/22/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Neneh Cherry stars as a grieving academic who wanders Stockholm in a pensive mood
Stockholm, My Love is an intriguing and palate-cleansing work, ruminative and cerebral, with a literary feel, like an elegant European novella in translation. There are some tremendous reportage images created by both Mark Cousins and Christopher Doyle as cinematographers, showing the city’s clear, open, mostly unpopulated spaces. In the city-symphony tradition, it has something of Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital or Cousins’ own previous work, I Am Belfast. This is vernacular cinema, in its way, straightforwardly taking the camera for a walk.
Stockholm, My Love stars singer Neneh Cherry, presented in downbeat, daylit and unglamorised closeup, and the whole film could be seen as a reverse engineered video for her title song, which comes in at the very end. She plays an academic who had come to Stockholm to give a lecture on the city’s architecture,...
Stockholm, My Love is an intriguing and palate-cleansing work, ruminative and cerebral, with a literary feel, like an elegant European novella in translation. There are some tremendous reportage images created by both Mark Cousins and Christopher Doyle as cinematographers, showing the city’s clear, open, mostly unpopulated spaces. In the city-symphony tradition, it has something of Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital or Cousins’ own previous work, I Am Belfast. This is vernacular cinema, in its way, straightforwardly taking the camera for a walk.
Stockholm, My Love stars singer Neneh Cherry, presented in downbeat, daylit and unglamorised closeup, and the whole film could be seen as a reverse engineered video for her title song, which comes in at the very end. She plays an academic who had come to Stockholm to give a lecture on the city’s architecture,...
- 6/16/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.
- 10/11/2016
- MUBI
The actor takes a role also played by his father, Freddie, for an occasionally exasperating drama-documentary
In 1970, Freddie Jones played the part of John Clare (“a minor nature poet who went mad… ”) in a BBC Omnibus broadcast. Forty five years later, his son Toby revisits the role, retreading Clare’s 80-mile walk from an asylum near Epping Forest to his Northborough home in search of lost love Mary Joyce. As Toby wanders, Freddie reads from a collection of Clare’s autobiographical writings, providing a quasi-commentary for this strange odyssey.
Part drama, part documentary, part enthralled (sh)amble, By Our Selves finds director Andrew Kötting and writer/collaborator Iain Sinclair indulging their passion for Clare without necessarily engaging ours. En route, we encounter celebrated graphic novelist Alan Moore, who describes the inescapable Northampton as “a cultural black hole with an incredible mass”, hear from Professor Simon Kövesi (dressed as a prizefighter,...
In 1970, Freddie Jones played the part of John Clare (“a minor nature poet who went mad… ”) in a BBC Omnibus broadcast. Forty five years later, his son Toby revisits the role, retreading Clare’s 80-mile walk from an asylum near Epping Forest to his Northborough home in search of lost love Mary Joyce. As Toby wanders, Freddie reads from a collection of Clare’s autobiographical writings, providing a quasi-commentary for this strange odyssey.
Part drama, part documentary, part enthralled (sh)amble, By Our Selves finds director Andrew Kötting and writer/collaborator Iain Sinclair indulging their passion for Clare without necessarily engaging ours. En route, we encounter celebrated graphic novelist Alan Moore, who describes the inescapable Northampton as “a cultural black hole with an incredible mass”, hear from Professor Simon Kövesi (dressed as a prizefighter,...
- 10/4/2015
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
- The Guardian - Film News
Andrew Kötting recreates scenes of the fascinating and melancholy 90-mile walk undertaken in 1841 by the nature poet John Clare, in a bizarre documentary
Film-maker Andrew Kötting again takes inspiration from that great psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair – with whom he recorded an unclassifiably strange journey by pedalo in the 2012 film Swandown. Now he has been inspired by Sinclair’s book Edge of the Orison, about the fascinating and melancholy 90-mile walk undertaken in 1841 by the nature poet John Clare, from a mental asylum in Epping to Northampton, on a pilgrimage to find Mary Joyce, the woman with whom he believed himself to be in love.
Kötting has Toby Jones recreate the scenes of Clare’s great journey or ordeal, often amid bizarrely alienating and alienated scenes of modern life. Jones recites some of Clare’s work in voiceover, and Kötting also asks Jones’s father Freddie Jones to recreate his performance as Clare from a 1970 Omnibus documentary,...
Film-maker Andrew Kötting again takes inspiration from that great psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair – with whom he recorded an unclassifiably strange journey by pedalo in the 2012 film Swandown. Now he has been inspired by Sinclair’s book Edge of the Orison, about the fascinating and melancholy 90-mile walk undertaken in 1841 by the nature poet John Clare, from a mental asylum in Epping to Northampton, on a pilgrimage to find Mary Joyce, the woman with whom he believed himself to be in love.
Kötting has Toby Jones recreate the scenes of Clare’s great journey or ordeal, often amid bizarrely alienating and alienated scenes of modern life. Jones recites some of Clare’s work in voiceover, and Kötting also asks Jones’s father Freddie Jones to recreate his performance as Clare from a 1970 Omnibus documentary,...
- 10/1/2015
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
British film-maker Grant Gee has got together with Turkey’s Nobel prize-winning novelist, and the result is a mesmerising, original meditation on love and the city
Having cut his teeth on music videos (and then graduated to the cerebral Joy Division documentary, on which he collaborated with Jon Savage), Grant Gee has reinvented himself as a formidable force in the microgenre of literary travelogues, a space hitherto largely occupied by Patrick Keiller, Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair. Gee headed for Suffolk for Patience (After Sebald), a reconstruction and reinvestigation of Wg Sebald’s Rings of Saturn; now he has cast his net much further afield, to Istanbul, and a creative meeting of mind’s with Turkey’s Nobel-prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.
As with his Sebald film, Gee has here carefully assembled a collage of textual fragments, painterly visuals and mysterious voiceovers. The major difference of course, is that Pamuk is...
Having cut his teeth on music videos (and then graduated to the cerebral Joy Division documentary, on which he collaborated with Jon Savage), Grant Gee has reinvented himself as a formidable force in the microgenre of literary travelogues, a space hitherto largely occupied by Patrick Keiller, Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair. Gee headed for Suffolk for Patience (After Sebald), a reconstruction and reinvestigation of Wg Sebald’s Rings of Saturn; now he has cast his net much further afield, to Istanbul, and a creative meeting of mind’s with Turkey’s Nobel-prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.
As with his Sebald film, Gee has here carefully assembled a collage of textual fragments, painterly visuals and mysterious voiceovers. The major difference of course, is that Pamuk is...
- 9/10/2015
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Post-Nearly Press has released two book-length interviews with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Also in today's roundup of news and views: A review of and two excerpts from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasmagorical memoir, Where the Bird Sings Best; the Quietus on Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript; an oral history of Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan at 30; Paul Thomas Anderson's conversation with Jonathan Demme; more interviews with feminist filmmaker Vivienne Dick, Wim Wenders, Errol Morris, Noah Baumbach and David Zellner; the New York Times on cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/29/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Post-Nearly Press has released two book-length interviews with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Also in today's roundup of news and views: A review of and two excerpts from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasmagorical memoir, Where the Bird Sings Best; the Quietus on Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript; an oral history of Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan at 30; Paul Thomas Anderson's conversation with Jonathan Demme; more interviews with feminist filmmaker Vivienne Dick, Wim Wenders, Errol Morris, Noah Baumbach and David Zellner; the New York Times on cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/29/2015
- Keyframe
Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith have won a grant to complete a book on Peter Watkins. More film book news: Miranda July's debut novel, The First Bad Man, will be out on January 13. Iain Sinclair reviews Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin for the Tls. For Slate, Michelle Orange reviews a reissue of MacDonald Harris's 1982 novel Screenplay. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Nette revisits the 1970 novel by Ted Lewis that became Get Carter. And in the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor. » - David Hudson...
- 12/5/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith have won a grant to complete a book on Peter Watkins. More film book news: Miranda July's debut novel, The First Bad Man, will be out on January 13. Iain Sinclair reviews Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin for the Tls. For Slate, Michelle Orange reviews a reissue of MacDonald Harris's 1982 novel Screenplay. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Nette revisits the 1970 novel by Ted Lewis that became Get Carter. And in the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor. » - David Hudson...
- 12/5/2014
- Keyframe
Early imprints of the Bond books increase in value every year. Is this just down to a large readership, or does it say something more fundamental about Ian Fleming's creation?
Funny old thing, that James Bond. Though Ian Fleming died in 1964, his hero has had a charmed existence since, newly incarnated in a variety of actors and films, and in further Bond adventures written by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and, now, William Boyd.
Of these, Boyd seems the best choice. He has a sophisticated interest in the world of espionage, a fluent prose style, and a crisp eye for a Bondish detail. He was pictured, on publication week, in front of one of seven vintage Jensens, each of which was to deliver a copy of Solo, his new Bond novel, to Heathrow, from where they would be flown to various destinations associated with Bond (or...
Funny old thing, that James Bond. Though Ian Fleming died in 1964, his hero has had a charmed existence since, newly incarnated in a variety of actors and films, and in further Bond adventures written by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and, now, William Boyd.
Of these, Boyd seems the best choice. He has a sophisticated interest in the world of espionage, a fluent prose style, and a crisp eye for a Bondish detail. He was pictured, on publication week, in front of one of seven vintage Jensens, each of which was to deliver a copy of Solo, his new Bond novel, to Heathrow, from where they would be flown to various destinations associated with Bond (or...
- 10/17/2013
- by Rick Gekoski
- The Guardian - Film News
Barbican, London
A season of films about London reveals how fog, rain and gloom of all kinds add to the mystique of the capital
I've been told that London's reputation for fog is not only due to the fact that it used to be foggy. It was also because cash-strapped postwar film-makers found it convenient to shroud their scenes in mist because they wouldn't have to build so much of the set – just one or two house fronts instead of a street. If this story is an urban myth, no matter, as it tells a truth about London on film. The city's greatest gift to the movie camera is its atmospherics, its fog, rain and darkness.
In ordinary daylight it is obstinately factual. If cinema likes to make cities into dream versions of themselves, London doesn't join in. The brick terraces, the railings, pavements, bollards and postboxes remain themselves. They...
A season of films about London reveals how fog, rain and gloom of all kinds add to the mystique of the capital
I've been told that London's reputation for fog is not only due to the fact that it used to be foggy. It was also because cash-strapped postwar film-makers found it convenient to shroud their scenes in mist because they wouldn't have to build so much of the set – just one or two house fronts instead of a street. If this story is an urban myth, no matter, as it tells a truth about London on film. The city's greatest gift to the movie camera is its atmospherics, its fog, rain and darkness.
In ordinary daylight it is obstinately factual. If cinema likes to make cities into dream versions of themselves, London doesn't join in. The brick terraces, the railings, pavements, bollards and postboxes remain themselves. They...
- 9/14/2013
- by Rowan Moore
- The Guardian - Film News
My Noir | Urban Wandering: Film And The London Landscape | Cambridge Film Festival | Encounters
My Noir, Manchester
Film noir's hard-boiled loners certainly suit late-night viewing, so what better way to start this celebration of double crosses and femmes fatales than a 24-hour "noirathon". Starting with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (paired with an exhibition), the weekend marathon brings classics old and new, from Out Of The Past to Brick, ending somewhat aptly with The Big Sleep, plus special events such as writer Walter Mosley talking about the adaptation of his Devil In A Blue Dress (16 Oct).
Cornerhouse, Sat to 29 Dec
Urban Wandering: Film And The London Landscape, London
Like the capital itself, this promising season is sprawling, eclectic and difficult to get a handle on. It's a survey of the changes the city has experienced postwar, via a myriad of media, but above all, cinema. The guest list is a...
My Noir, Manchester
Film noir's hard-boiled loners certainly suit late-night viewing, so what better way to start this celebration of double crosses and femmes fatales than a 24-hour "noirathon". Starting with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (paired with an exhibition), the weekend marathon brings classics old and new, from Out Of The Past to Brick, ending somewhat aptly with The Big Sleep, plus special events such as writer Walter Mosley talking about the adaptation of his Devil In A Blue Dress (16 Oct).
Cornerhouse, Sat to 29 Dec
Urban Wandering: Film And The London Landscape, London
Like the capital itself, this promising season is sprawling, eclectic and difficult to get a handle on. It's a survey of the changes the city has experienced postwar, via a myriad of media, but above all, cinema. The guest list is a...
- 9/14/2013
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film
The big story
When Forbes magazine published its list of the film industry's top male earners this week, a collective "Wha?" rose from the planet's movie lovers. Could Robert Downey Jr, that noted human disaster area of 15 years back, really have become shot to the number one spot, with $75m to his name in the last calendar year?
Yes, would be the answer, cementing one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in Hollywood history.
It's having the good sense to have a profit share in The Avengers that appears to be primarily responsible, as well as presiding over the massive success of Iron Man 3. The script for the movie adaptation is writing itself as we speak.
In the news
Fruitvale Station: film based on 2008 killing echoes Trayvon Martin case
Johnny Depp to star in Alice in Wonderland...
The big story
When Forbes magazine published its list of the film industry's top male earners this week, a collective "Wha?" rose from the planet's movie lovers. Could Robert Downey Jr, that noted human disaster area of 15 years back, really have become shot to the number one spot, with $75m to his name in the last calendar year?
Yes, would be the answer, cementing one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in Hollywood history.
It's having the good sense to have a profit share in The Avengers that appears to be primarily responsible, as well as presiding over the massive success of Iron Man 3. The script for the movie adaptation is writing itself as we speak.
In the news
Fruitvale Station: film based on 2008 killing echoes Trayvon Martin case
Johnny Depp to star in Alice in Wonderland...
- 7/18/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
The writer and king of London psychogeography is curating a season of 70 classic and unusual films throughout his 70th birthday year, presented in cinemas and quirky venues across the capital. Here he explains the project's genesis
Approaching a birthday I had no particular desire to record or commemorate, I was seduced by an enticing offer: the opportunity to nominate 70 films, one for each year survived. The man floating this folly across the table of the Little Georgia restaurant on Hackney's Goldsmith's Row was Paul Smith, underground impresario and secret magus of King Mob, Blast First, Disobey, and other shortlived but potent cultural manifestations. We had some previous, through a series of spoken-word CDs involving Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, the Black Panthers, Stewart Home. The CDs existed and I had copies to prove it, but they never really made the transit from warehouse to retail counter. I had performed, under Paul's promotion,...
Approaching a birthday I had no particular desire to record or commemorate, I was seduced by an enticing offer: the opportunity to nominate 70 films, one for each year survived. The man floating this folly across the table of the Little Georgia restaurant on Hackney's Goldsmith's Row was Paul Smith, underground impresario and secret magus of King Mob, Blast First, Disobey, and other shortlived but potent cultural manifestations. We had some previous, through a series of spoken-word CDs involving Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, the Black Panthers, Stewart Home. The CDs existed and I had copies to prove it, but they never really made the transit from warehouse to retail counter. I had performed, under Paul's promotion,...
- 7/16/2013
- by Iain Sinclair
- The Guardian - Film News
Moving Stories | 70 x 70: The Sorcerers + Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore & Chris Petit | Ray Harryhausen | London Indian Film Festival
Moving Stories, Bradford
Should you let the kids slob out with a movie or make them do something vaguely constructive during the summer holiday? This new, free exhibition lets you have it both ways. Using original sketches, models, and even full-scale sets, it shows how children's books are translated to the screen – which means you can see Roald Dahl's illustrated notebook for Fantastic Mr Fox alongside Wes Anderson's models from his movie, for example. There are also activity workshops, and some of the titles are playing in the cinema, too.
National Media Museum, Sat to 6 Oct
70 x 70: The Sorcerers + Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore & Chris Petit, London
Often labelled a "psychogeographer", Iain Sinclair has become chief custodian of a certain esoteric but indispensable strain of English identity, via his writings,...
Moving Stories, Bradford
Should you let the kids slob out with a movie or make them do something vaguely constructive during the summer holiday? This new, free exhibition lets you have it both ways. Using original sketches, models, and even full-scale sets, it shows how children's books are translated to the screen – which means you can see Roald Dahl's illustrated notebook for Fantastic Mr Fox alongside Wes Anderson's models from his movie, for example. There are also activity workshops, and some of the titles are playing in the cinema, too.
National Media Museum, Sat to 6 Oct
70 x 70: The Sorcerers + Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore & Chris Petit, London
Often labelled a "psychogeographer", Iain Sinclair has become chief custodian of a certain esoteric but indispensable strain of English identity, via his writings,...
- 7/13/2013
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Feature Michael Leader 19 Mar 2013 - 07:00
Michael revisits the 1996 incarnation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a magical BBC series that was ahead of its time...
Spoiler warning: While this article is about a 17-year old TV programme, it inevitably discusses plot points that are also present in the currently-broadcasting radio drama remake.
“Let me tell you a story. No, wait, one’s not enough. I’ll begin again...”
So reads the back-cover blurb of Neil Gaiman’s 2006 short story anthology Fragile Things, but it’s as apt a beginning as any for an expedition back through the knotted overgrowths of time to the author’s 1996 foray into television: the six-part miniseries Neverwhere.
Now, let’s get this out of the way first: there is no single, true ‘Neverwhere’. Like its signature setting, a semi-mythological, hidden version of London that exists below the streets of Britain’s capital, Neverwhere is a...
Michael revisits the 1996 incarnation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a magical BBC series that was ahead of its time...
Spoiler warning: While this article is about a 17-year old TV programme, it inevitably discusses plot points that are also present in the currently-broadcasting radio drama remake.
“Let me tell you a story. No, wait, one’s not enough. I’ll begin again...”
So reads the back-cover blurb of Neil Gaiman’s 2006 short story anthology Fragile Things, but it’s as apt a beginning as any for an expedition back through the knotted overgrowths of time to the author’s 1996 foray into television: the six-part miniseries Neverwhere.
Now, let’s get this out of the way first: there is no single, true ‘Neverwhere’. Like its signature setting, a semi-mythological, hidden version of London that exists below the streets of Britain’s capital, Neverwhere is a...
- 3/18/2013
- by louisamellor
- Den of Geek
Paul Bush's debut feature-length film is a fascinating meditation on the cities of the future
There's a sort of refrigerated strangeness to this cine-meditation on the concepts of cities and the future, the debut feature-length piece by established short-film maker Paul Bush. It's about a fictional megacity called Babeldom, glimpsed initially through breaks in an icy fog: the Tower of Babel, as imagined by the elder Bruegel. Fascinatingly, it's not an actual model, or an animation, but something in between, and this image segues into perspectives of actual cities – lonely, dark, eerily untenanted places. Bush's own prose-poetry, decanted into two reading voices, tells us how the archaeological past is compacted underfoot while the future wafts airily overhead. These ideas are juxtaposed with computer-modelled graphics, whose purpose is to simulate, re-enact or anticipate the forms and growth patterns of future worlds and cities. There is something of Iain Sinclair, Jg Ballard and Italo Calvino here,...
There's a sort of refrigerated strangeness to this cine-meditation on the concepts of cities and the future, the debut feature-length piece by established short-film maker Paul Bush. It's about a fictional megacity called Babeldom, glimpsed initially through breaks in an icy fog: the Tower of Babel, as imagined by the elder Bruegel. Fascinatingly, it's not an actual model, or an animation, but something in between, and this image segues into perspectives of actual cities – lonely, dark, eerily untenanted places. Bush's own prose-poetry, decanted into two reading voices, tells us how the archaeological past is compacted underfoot while the future wafts airily overhead. These ideas are juxtaposed with computer-modelled graphics, whose purpose is to simulate, re-enact or anticipate the forms and growth patterns of future worlds and cities. There is something of Iain Sinclair, Jg Ballard and Italo Calvino here,...
- 3/8/2013
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
It's been called the 'dustbin of London' and the 'armpit of the world' – but there are efforts afoot, on TV and in the country's art galleries, to redeem Essex's reputation
We need to talk about Essex. Surely no county has been so systematically defined and reduced. Simon Heffer's now-infamous Daily Telegraph editorial published in 1990 named the vomiting Thatcherites he encountered at Liverpool Street station as examples of "Essex Man". At around the same time, Chigwell provided the setting for the upwardly mobile prison widows in Birds of a Feather. More recently, of course, there has been Buckhurst Hill and Brentwood's "structured reality" pantomime, The Only Way is Essex. And while Channel 4's Educating Essex, filmed in Harlow, was funny and sensitive, its title seemed to imply that to teach an Essex kid anything was a novel idea.
The fact that Essex is maligned is hardly news. "It has...
We need to talk about Essex. Surely no county has been so systematically defined and reduced. Simon Heffer's now-infamous Daily Telegraph editorial published in 1990 named the vomiting Thatcherites he encountered at Liverpool Street station as examples of "Essex Man". At around the same time, Chigwell provided the setting for the upwardly mobile prison widows in Birds of a Feather. More recently, of course, there has been Buckhurst Hill and Brentwood's "structured reality" pantomime, The Only Way is Essex. And while Channel 4's Educating Essex, filmed in Harlow, was funny and sensitive, its title seemed to imply that to teach an Essex kid anything was a novel idea.
The fact that Essex is maligned is hardly news. "It has...
- 1/24/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
From a full programme of film and stage adaptations to a new James Bond novel, unpublished works by Rs Thomas and Wg Sebald and a new prize for women writers, 2013 is set to be a real page-turner
January
10th The Oscar nominations are announced unusually early this year. Keep an eye out for a bumper crop of literary adaptations, including David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the David Nicholls-scripted Great Expectations, as well as Les Miserables, Anna Karenina and The Hobbit.
18th A new stage adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida theatre in London. In the year of the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth, his musical version will also feature around the country in both concert and stage performances.
24th The finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be announced at the Jaipur festival.
January
10th The Oscar nominations are announced unusually early this year. Keep an eye out for a bumper crop of literary adaptations, including David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the David Nicholls-scripted Great Expectations, as well as Les Miserables, Anna Karenina and The Hobbit.
18th A new stage adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida theatre in London. In the year of the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth, his musical version will also feature around the country in both concert and stage performances.
24th The finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be announced at the Jaipur festival.
- 1/5/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
The final offering in our season of British cult classics are two films that take us far into the dark heart of England
The fourth and last of our British cult classics double bills offers two very different, virtually unclassifiable films: Patrick Keiller's London, from 1993, and Christopher Petit's Radio On, released in 1979. Keiller's film, a melancholy homage to the UK capital, resembles a string of animated still photographs, while Petit's is a gloomy, mannered black-and-white road movie that, as its director suggests, is something of a journey into the past as well as across England. Despite their surface dissimilarities, the two films share a dynamic intelligence towards the environment and landscape that surrounds them; both are cinematic pilgrimages through England.
London is perhaps the slightly better known: written and filmed by Keiller, who rather obviously spent considerable amounts of time traipsing around the city with a locked-off camera...
The fourth and last of our British cult classics double bills offers two very different, virtually unclassifiable films: Patrick Keiller's London, from 1993, and Christopher Petit's Radio On, released in 1979. Keiller's film, a melancholy homage to the UK capital, resembles a string of animated still photographs, while Petit's is a gloomy, mannered black-and-white road movie that, as its director suggests, is something of a journey into the past as well as across England. Despite their surface dissimilarities, the two films share a dynamic intelligence towards the environment and landscape that surrounds them; both are cinematic pilgrimages through England.
London is perhaps the slightly better known: written and filmed by Keiller, who rather obviously spent considerable amounts of time traipsing around the city with a locked-off camera...
- 11/30/2012
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★☆☆ British psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair was one of the more vocal opponents to the London 2012 Olympics because, to quote one of the contributors of Andrew Kötting's Swandown (2012), "he [Sinclair] doesn't think anything is allowed to happen in Hackney without his permission". At least that is the opinion put forward by comedian Stewart Lee in the gentle chiding he gives him during a brief stint in an avian pedalo in Kötting's latest visual oddity. The film, born partly of a desire to make an anti-Olympic statement, is a surreal and experimental travelogue through the waterways of southern Britain.
Read more »...
Read more »...
- 11/19/2012
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
This documentary by quirky British film-maker Andrew Kötting and the eccentrically brilliant urban historian and social geographer Iain Sinclair traces a journey they made recently by sea, river and canal from Hastings on the Sussex coast to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Their vessel was a pedalo in the shape of a swan, Kötting wore a dark three-piece suit and Sinclair jeans and a battered baseball cap, and the aim was to draw attention to the antisocial, hubristic stupidity of the Games and their chosen location. Along the way the pair comment on the surrounding countryside and its history, using old newsreel film and quoting from Edward Lear, Conrad, James, Eliot, Edmund Spenser, Edith Sitwell, Pound, Brecht and Werner Herzog, and occasionally they let others do some pedalling.
Like a cross between Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat and Wg Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, this is a...
Like a cross between Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat and Wg Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, this is a...
- 7/21/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
The Dark Knight Rises (12A)
(Christopher Nolan, 2012, Us/UK) Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine. 164 mins
As big and dark and serious as The Avengers was big and light and fun, the climax to Nolan's Batman trilogy ticks most of the boxes it was demanded to – which is quite an achievement. There's an Occupy-style theme to baddy Bane's Gotham City lockdown, which forces Bruce Wayne to consider his 1% financial status and Batman to revive his punching and growling skills (prompted by Hathaway's slinky cat burglar). Some cheesy cliches (and questionable politics) are needed to tie it all together, but it's still the solid, epic finale you'd hoped for.
Something From Nothing: The Art Of Rap (15)
(Ice-t, Andy Baybutt, 2012, UK/Us) 111 mins
The well-connected director calls on the biggest names in rap (Eminem, Q-Tip, Melle Mel, Snoop Dogg, etc), asks them a...
(Christopher Nolan, 2012, Us/UK) Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine. 164 mins
As big and dark and serious as The Avengers was big and light and fun, the climax to Nolan's Batman trilogy ticks most of the boxes it was demanded to – which is quite an achievement. There's an Occupy-style theme to baddy Bane's Gotham City lockdown, which forces Bruce Wayne to consider his 1% financial status and Batman to revive his punching and growling skills (prompted by Hathaway's slinky cat burglar). Some cheesy cliches (and questionable politics) are needed to tie it all together, but it's still the solid, epic finale you'd hoped for.
Something From Nothing: The Art Of Rap (15)
(Ice-t, Andy Baybutt, 2012, UK/Us) 111 mins
The well-connected director calls on the biggest names in rap (Eminem, Q-Tip, Melle Mel, Snoop Dogg, etc), asks them a...
- 7/20/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Cocking a snook at the Olympic torch procession two men have plotted their own epic journey – along the waterways from Hastings to east London in a giant fibreglass swan
'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.
This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...
'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.
This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...
- 7/20/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
It’s perhaps not that surprising that Ice Age 4 shot straight back up to the top of the Box Office chart theatrical release this week, but the sheer volume by which it eclipsed The Amazing Spider Man is really quite something. Spidey took in a still respectable £4mllion but this was dwarfed by Ice Age’s epic £10 million haul. I guess one should never underestimate the all-round family appeal of these Ice Age movies, and it looks set to be one of the highest grossing movies of the year. If the figures keep looking this good, it won’t be much of a surprise when Ice Age 5 : The Neanderthal Strikes Back gets green lit in a few years’ time.
This week of course, that £10million take by Ice Age could appear like pocket change as The Dark Knight Rises finally arrives on the big screen. After months of trailers,...
This week of course, that £10million take by Ice Age could appear like pocket change as The Dark Knight Rises finally arrives on the big screen. After months of trailers,...
- 7/20/2012
- by Rob Keeling
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The writer, Iain Sinclair, spent last October crossing the waterways of Kent and east London in a swan-shaped pedalo, in what he refers to as a "relevant and absurd" protest against the Olympics. He teamed up with the artist and film-maker Andrew Kötting, who recorded their journey from Hastings, where they liberated the pedalo from its seaside berth, sailing it through to east London and ending, with a bump, against the site of the Olympics. Sinclair narrated, pedalled a lot and chatted with riverside walkers. In one scene a man by the docks warns the pair of the perils of trenchfoot and Weil's disease, offering to wash down, and then amputate, Sinclair's foot.
- 7/20/2012
- The Independent - Film
A psychogeographical jaunt in a swan pedalo entertains Peter Bradshaw
Psychogeography-lite is one way of describing this film by Andrew Kötting, the indulgent record of a gloriously daft journey the film-maker took in the company of author Iain Sinclair. They travel from Hastings beach to Hackney, round the coast and then north and east, via various circuitous waterways — in a pedalo shaped like a swan. They were perhaps inspired by the seagoing pedalo scene in Sylvain Chomet's Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003). Kötting never changes his suit and often climbs into the muddy water wearing it. Why? And where do they sleep when night falls? In a tent? Or do they seek out a nice little Premier Inn? Who knows?
Anyway, there they are, pedalling industriously away together. Part of their mission is to bring a defiant message of ambulatory freedom to the grim corporate compound that is the Olympic Park, and...
Psychogeography-lite is one way of describing this film by Andrew Kötting, the indulgent record of a gloriously daft journey the film-maker took in the company of author Iain Sinclair. They travel from Hastings beach to Hackney, round the coast and then north and east, via various circuitous waterways — in a pedalo shaped like a swan. They were perhaps inspired by the seagoing pedalo scene in Sylvain Chomet's Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003). Kötting never changes his suit and often climbs into the muddy water wearing it. Why? And where do they sleep when night falls? In a tent? Or do they seek out a nice little Premier Inn? Who knows?
Anyway, there they are, pedalling industriously away together. Part of their mission is to bring a defiant message of ambulatory freedom to the grim corporate compound that is the Olympic Park, and...
- 7/19/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Swandown
Featuring: Andrew Kötting, Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, Stewart Lee, Marcia Farquhar, Dudley Sutton | Written by Andrew Kötting & Iain Sinclair | Directed by Andrew Kötting
Two men stand waist deep in the ocean, trying to launch a swan-shaped pedalo – the kind you’d find at a local park – on a journey that will take them from Hastings to Hackney via rivers and canals, meeting people of varied experiences and philosophies, a journey that appears to be the very antithesis of the upcoming olympics their final destination – the still-being-built stadium – represents. It takes them more than a day to get the pedalo out there.
The two men are avant-garde filmmaker and performance artist Andrew Kötting and regular partner in crime, writer Iain Sinclair. The film is called Swandown, and the voyage is much more compelling than I just made it sound.
The film is hard to define, even to make a distinction...
Featuring: Andrew Kötting, Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, Stewart Lee, Marcia Farquhar, Dudley Sutton | Written by Andrew Kötting & Iain Sinclair | Directed by Andrew Kötting
Two men stand waist deep in the ocean, trying to launch a swan-shaped pedalo – the kind you’d find at a local park – on a journey that will take them from Hastings to Hackney via rivers and canals, meeting people of varied experiences and philosophies, a journey that appears to be the very antithesis of the upcoming olympics their final destination – the still-being-built stadium – represents. It takes them more than a day to get the pedalo out there.
The two men are avant-garde filmmaker and performance artist Andrew Kötting and regular partner in crime, writer Iain Sinclair. The film is called Swandown, and the voyage is much more compelling than I just made it sound.
The film is hard to define, even to make a distinction...
- 7/19/2012
- by Mark Allen
- Nerdly
Magic Mike (15)
(Steven Soderbergh, 2012, Us) Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey, Olivia Munn. 110 mins
The roles are reversed but the themes are familiar in this rise-and-fall tale of male strippers, making and losing their way in a (sort of) woman's world. It's like a cross between The Full Monty, Boogie Nights and Showgirls, sketching a landscape of exploitation and desperation – even as it participates in it by serving up the barely clad Tatum and other beef products.
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World (15)
(Lorene Scafaria, 2012, Us) Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, Patton Oswalt. 101 mins
Do passion and the apocalypse mix? Or Carell and Knightley? This faltering effort tries anyway.
Detachment (15)
(Tony Kaye, 2011, Us) Adrien Brody, Marcia Gay Harden. 98 mins
No provocation left behind in this scathing schoolroom drama with a starry cast.
Ice Age 4: Continental Drift (U)
(Steve Martino, Mark Thurmeier, 2012, Us) Ray Romano, Denis Leary.
(Steven Soderbergh, 2012, Us) Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey, Olivia Munn. 110 mins
The roles are reversed but the themes are familiar in this rise-and-fall tale of male strippers, making and losing their way in a (sort of) woman's world. It's like a cross between The Full Monty, Boogie Nights and Showgirls, sketching a landscape of exploitation and desperation – even as it participates in it by serving up the barely clad Tatum and other beef products.
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World (15)
(Lorene Scafaria, 2012, Us) Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, Patton Oswalt. 101 mins
Do passion and the apocalypse mix? Or Carell and Knightley? This faltering effort tries anyway.
Detachment (15)
(Tony Kaye, 2011, Us) Adrien Brody, Marcia Gay Harden. 98 mins
No provocation left behind in this scathing schoolroom drama with a starry cast.
Ice Age 4: Continental Drift (U)
(Steve Martino, Mark Thurmeier, 2012, Us) Ray Romano, Denis Leary.
- 7/13/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
The Amazing Spider-Man (12A)
(Marc Webb, 2012, Us) James Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Denis Leary. 136 mins
New, improved-formula Spider-Man: does whatever last decade's Spider-Man couldn't! The world was hardly screaming out for a rejigged "origins" story, but this at least gives you less comic-book primary colour and more teen-drama shading. Plus better special effects, although the rooftop monster-battle climax feels same-old. Yes, it's a brazenly commercial exercise, but Garfield's limber geekiness tips the balance.
God Bless America (15)
(Bobcat Goldthwait, 2011, Us) Joel Murray, Tara Lynne Barr, Mackenzie Brooke Smith. 105 mins
American media idiocy literally comes under fire in this outlandish Falling Down-meets-Natural Born Killers shooting spree.
The Hunter (15)
(Daniel Nettheim, 2011, Aus) Willem Dafoe, Frances O'Connor, Sam Neill. 102 mins
Dafoe's craggy gravitas dominates this scenic tale of a hunt for the extinct (or is it?) Tasmanian Tiger.
Strawberry Fields (15)
(Frances Lea, 2012, UK) Anna Madeley, Christine Bottomley.
(Marc Webb, 2012, Us) James Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Denis Leary. 136 mins
New, improved-formula Spider-Man: does whatever last decade's Spider-Man couldn't! The world was hardly screaming out for a rejigged "origins" story, but this at least gives you less comic-book primary colour and more teen-drama shading. Plus better special effects, although the rooftop monster-battle climax feels same-old. Yes, it's a brazenly commercial exercise, but Garfield's limber geekiness tips the balance.
God Bless America (15)
(Bobcat Goldthwait, 2011, Us) Joel Murray, Tara Lynne Barr, Mackenzie Brooke Smith. 105 mins
American media idiocy literally comes under fire in this outlandish Falling Down-meets-Natural Born Killers shooting spree.
The Hunter (15)
(Daniel Nettheim, 2011, Aus) Willem Dafoe, Frances O'Connor, Sam Neill. 102 mins
Dafoe's craggy gravitas dominates this scenic tale of a hunt for the extinct (or is it?) Tasmanian Tiger.
Strawberry Fields (15)
(Frances Lea, 2012, UK) Anna Madeley, Christine Bottomley.
- 7/6/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Dark Horse (15)
(Todd Solondz, 2011, Us) Selma Blair, Jordan Gelber, Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow, Justin Bartha, Zachary Booth. 86 mins
Trust Todd Solondz to give us the flipside of movie man-childhood. There's nothing funny or adorable about 35-year-old Abe (Gelber), who lives with his parents, collects action figures and has no idea of his own uselessness. He meets his match (sort of) in the virtually comatose Blair, and what ensues is a romcom that's neither romantic nor comical, but beneath the misanthropy lurks some kind of compassion.
Killer Joe (18)
(William Friedkin, 2011, Us) Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple. 102 mins
Curdling Texan noir and melodrama in a bizarre, curiously fascinating thriller.
The King Of Devil's Island (12A)
(Marius Holst, 2010, Nor/Fra/Swe/Pol) Stellan Skarsgård, Benjamin Helstad. 116 mins
Prison thriller set on a 1950s Norwegian borstal island.
Storage 24 (15)
(Johannes Roberts, 2012, UK) Noel Clarke, Colin O'Donoghue. 87 mins
Minimal sci-fi thriller set in a London storage unit.
(Todd Solondz, 2011, Us) Selma Blair, Jordan Gelber, Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow, Justin Bartha, Zachary Booth. 86 mins
Trust Todd Solondz to give us the flipside of movie man-childhood. There's nothing funny or adorable about 35-year-old Abe (Gelber), who lives with his parents, collects action figures and has no idea of his own uselessness. He meets his match (sort of) in the virtually comatose Blair, and what ensues is a romcom that's neither romantic nor comical, but beneath the misanthropy lurks some kind of compassion.
Killer Joe (18)
(William Friedkin, 2011, Us) Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple. 102 mins
Curdling Texan noir and melodrama in a bizarre, curiously fascinating thriller.
The King Of Devil's Island (12A)
(Marius Holst, 2010, Nor/Fra/Swe/Pol) Stellan Skarsgård, Benjamin Helstad. 116 mins
Prison thriller set on a 1950s Norwegian borstal island.
Storage 24 (15)
(Johannes Roberts, 2012, UK) Noel Clarke, Colin O'Donoghue. 87 mins
Minimal sci-fi thriller set in a London storage unit.
- 6/29/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Silent Souls (15)
(Aleksei Fedorchenko, 2010, Rus) Igor Sergeev, Yuriy Tsurilo, Yuliya Aug. 78 mins
Even by Russian standards, this lyrical road movie is a strange world of its own. It's a journey back in time, as much as across a remote landscape, with a friend helping his boss to give his deceased wife her last rites, according to their ancient tribal ways. Along the drive, we're steeped in strange folklore involving vodka, rivers, small birds and ornamental pubic hair. Is it for real? Or an elaborate joke told with a very straight face? Does it matter?
The Five Year Engagement (15)
(Nicholas Stoller, 2012, Us) Emily Blunt, Jason Segel, Chris Pratt. 124 mins
The obstacle to true love is built into the title of this romcom, but it's at least smartly handled, as high-flyer Blunt keeps her fiance in perpetual limbo.
Where Do We Go Now? (12A)
(Nadine Labaki, 2011, Fra/Leb/Egy/Ita) Claude Baz Moussawbaa,...
(Aleksei Fedorchenko, 2010, Rus) Igor Sergeev, Yuriy Tsurilo, Yuliya Aug. 78 mins
Even by Russian standards, this lyrical road movie is a strange world of its own. It's a journey back in time, as much as across a remote landscape, with a friend helping his boss to give his deceased wife her last rites, according to their ancient tribal ways. Along the drive, we're steeped in strange folklore involving vodka, rivers, small birds and ornamental pubic hair. Is it for real? Or an elaborate joke told with a very straight face? Does it matter?
The Five Year Engagement (15)
(Nicholas Stoller, 2012, Us) Emily Blunt, Jason Segel, Chris Pratt. 124 mins
The obstacle to true love is built into the title of this romcom, but it's at least smartly handled, as high-flyer Blunt keeps her fiance in perpetual limbo.
Where Do We Go Now? (12A)
(Nadine Labaki, 2011, Fra/Leb/Egy/Ita) Claude Baz Moussawbaa,...
- 6/22/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Abandon Normal Devices, Manchester
Just as the Olympic torch passes through Manchester this week, so And offers a warm-up of its own before the full-blown festival coinciding with the Olympics proper. Two new films are the main draw. The first is Swandown, in which film-maker Andrew Kötting and urban psychogeographer and writer Iain Sinclair journey via inland waterways on a swan-shaped pedalo to – you guessed it – the Olympic site over in Stratford (Sinclair is not a fan, by the way). The other, a world premiere, is The Creator, a hallucinatory meditation on the second world war codebreaker and posthumously acclaimed artificial intelligence prophet Alan Turing, by the local duo Al and Al. Both films will be accompanied by their makers, and the And festival will then tour the north-west before returning to Manchester on 29 Aug.
Cornerhouse, Fri & 22 Jun
Open City Docs Fest, London
With 132 films packed into four days like commuters on the tube,...
Just as the Olympic torch passes through Manchester this week, so And offers a warm-up of its own before the full-blown festival coinciding with the Olympics proper. Two new films are the main draw. The first is Swandown, in which film-maker Andrew Kötting and urban psychogeographer and writer Iain Sinclair journey via inland waterways on a swan-shaped pedalo to – you guessed it – the Olympic site over in Stratford (Sinclair is not a fan, by the way). The other, a world premiere, is The Creator, a hallucinatory meditation on the second world war codebreaker and posthumously acclaimed artificial intelligence prophet Alan Turing, by the local duo Al and Al. Both films will be accompanied by their makers, and the And festival will then tour the north-west before returning to Manchester on 29 Aug.
Cornerhouse, Fri & 22 Jun
Open City Docs Fest, London
With 132 films packed into four days like commuters on the tube,...
- 6/15/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Acre After Acre, Mile After Mile, London
If you've had the feeling in recent years that British cinema has become a story of steadily eroding national identity, then here's where you need to be looking. The season's subtitle – Tradition, Memory & Journey In British Folk Cinema – tells you what you need to know: that there's a solid, albeit underfunded, core of film-makers still out there looking for the soul of Britain, and many of them crop up here. Like Chris Petit, who this Thursday accompanies his seminal late-70s road trip Radio On. Or Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair, who'll be previewing their pedalo-powered journey to the Olympics later. Or, fresh to their ranks, Ben Rivers, here with his Scottish wilderness film Two Years At Sea. Look out too for more commercial fare such as The Long Good Friday and The Elephant Man.
Sugar House Studios, E15, Thu to 28 Jun
Jean Gabin,...
If you've had the feeling in recent years that British cinema has become a story of steadily eroding national identity, then here's where you need to be looking. The season's subtitle – Tradition, Memory & Journey In British Folk Cinema – tells you what you need to know: that there's a solid, albeit underfunded, core of film-makers still out there looking for the soul of Britain, and many of them crop up here. Like Chris Petit, who this Thursday accompanies his seminal late-70s road trip Radio On. Or Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair, who'll be previewing their pedalo-powered journey to the Olympics later. Or, fresh to their ranks, Ben Rivers, here with his Scottish wilderness film Two Years At Sea. Look out too for more commercial fare such as The Long Good Friday and The Elephant Man.
Sugar House Studios, E15, Thu to 28 Jun
Jean Gabin,...
- 5/4/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
What's new on the app stores on Friday 9 March 2012
A selection of 17 apps for you today:
Zuma's Revenge HD
There are hundreds of mobile games pretending to be ball-popping puzzler Zuma, but this is the real deal, from EA's PopCap division. It includes 60 levels of sphere-firing action, including six boss battles.
iPhone / iPad
Guardian Crosswords
The Guardian's first crosswords app has gone live for Android as a free trial, providing the daily Guardian Cryptic crossword on weekdays, and the Quick crosswords on Mondays to Saturdays. Social features are built in for competitive types. It's free for now, but payment options are coming in the future, as may be an iOS version.
Android
Peter Pan: Disney Classics
Disney's famous animated retelling of Peter Pan has spawned a new book-app, where the classic Neverland story is complemented with mini-games, digital colouring and a virtual Pan flute.
iPhone / iPad
Biologic
Well, this is...
A selection of 17 apps for you today:
Zuma's Revenge HD
There are hundreds of mobile games pretending to be ball-popping puzzler Zuma, but this is the real deal, from EA's PopCap division. It includes 60 levels of sphere-firing action, including six boss battles.
iPhone / iPad
Guardian Crosswords
The Guardian's first crosswords app has gone live for Android as a free trial, providing the daily Guardian Cryptic crossword on weekdays, and the Quick crosswords on Mondays to Saturdays. Social features are built in for competitive types. It's free for now, but payment options are coming in the future, as may be an iOS version.
Android
Peter Pan: Disney Classics
Disney's famous animated retelling of Peter Pan has spawned a new book-app, where the classic Neverland story is complemented with mini-games, digital colouring and a virtual Pan flute.
iPhone / iPad
Biologic
Well, this is...
- 3/9/2012
- by Stuart Dredge
- The Guardian - Film News
This modest, immensely enjoyable documentary is about one of my favourite books, The Rings of Saturn by the German poet and critic Wg Sebald, who was born in 1944, taught for much of his adult life in this country, mainly at the University of East Anglia, and was killed in a motor accident in 2001. It was first published in German in 1995, translated into English three years later and is an account of a walking tour of Suffolk, the people he meets, the places he visits, and the historical and literary reflections prompted by what he sees and senses, taking his mind around the world. Suffolk becomes a sort of palimpsest for his eloquent, precise, lugubrious, often drily witty meditations about war, death, destruction and decay, about memories and continuities and the feeling that nothing entirely disappears.
The film is largely shot in grainy grey-and-white, which matches the photographs, etchings and documents that illustrate the author's text,...
The film is largely shot in grainy grey-and-white, which matches the photographs, etchings and documents that illustrate the author's text,...
- 1/29/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Andrew Kötting will be on hand for a Q&A this evening at the Curzon Renoir in London and he'll be taking his new film, This Our Still Life, to Manchester and Brighton over the coming days as well. The BFI has details. Kötting, notes Sukhdev Sandhu in a profile for the Guardian, "has carved out a singular career encompassing sound art, installation pieces, avant-garde theatre, short films, artists' books and full-length features whose cussedness and often unclassifiable nature has led him to be described as the heir to English dissidents such as Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway."
Jason Wood for Little White Lies: "Evolving as a series of drawings — now collected in a beautiful book — This Our Still Life offers a beguiling and expansive portrait of 'Louyre,' the remote tumbledown Pyrenean hidey-hole that filmmaker Andrew Kötting shares with his partner Leila McMillan and their daughter Eden (the...
Jason Wood for Little White Lies: "Evolving as a series of drawings — now collected in a beautiful book — This Our Still Life offers a beguiling and expansive portrait of 'Louyre,' the remote tumbledown Pyrenean hidey-hole that filmmaker Andrew Kötting shares with his partner Leila McMillan and their daughter Eden (the...
- 11/21/2011
- MUBI
Fifty-one-year-old British painter, performance artist and film-maker Andrew Kötting is best known for an eccentric documentary, Gallivant (1996), about his trip around the coast of Britain with his elderly grandmother and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, a sufferer from Joubert syndrome, a rare condition that affects sight, movement and speech. He's also made This Filthy Earth (2001), a curious transposition of Zola's La Terre to northern England. His latest film, This Our Still Life, is a film poem, collage or meditation about the old remote farmhouse in the Pyrenees in which he and his family have lived off and on since 1989. It's a highly personal, often obscure picture, structured around the four seasons, with poignant images, speeches on the soundtrack and a superimposed, somewhat portentous text in caps. Eden, now 23, figures prominently and is an endearing presence. It's been chosen as the film of the month in December's Sight & Sound, where Iain Sinclair,...
- 11/20/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
On the eve of the release of his most personal film to date, This Our Still Life, the avant garde director talks to Sukhdev Sandhu
"Central heating is my biggest enemy," declares the film-maker Andrew Kötting. "I'm not a big fan of double glazing. Or the Shopping Channel. Or sweet-smelling perfumes. Vanilla living is always something that makes me physically sick." He pauses for thought. "Actually, the biggest enemy is often myself. I get angry with the voices in my head: I want to shut them up."
Coming from any other director, these words could easily sound abrasive or disturbing. From Kötting, they're absolutely normal, almost reassuring. In 2001, he issued a Dogme 95-inspired manifesto entitled eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent that not only urged "All film-makers to have spent time with their arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead", but also that "The film should show signs...
"Central heating is my biggest enemy," declares the film-maker Andrew Kötting. "I'm not a big fan of double glazing. Or the Shopping Channel. Or sweet-smelling perfumes. Vanilla living is always something that makes me physically sick." He pauses for thought. "Actually, the biggest enemy is often myself. I get angry with the voices in my head: I want to shut them up."
Coming from any other director, these words could easily sound abrasive or disturbing. From Kötting, they're absolutely normal, almost reassuring. In 2001, he issued a Dogme 95-inspired manifesto entitled eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent that not only urged "All film-makers to have spent time with their arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead", but also that "The film should show signs...
- 11/19/2011
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
Carol Morley's bold drama-documentary about a young woman whose dead body lay undiscovered in a north London flat for three years is difficult to watch but unforgettable
The BFI London film festival is now in full swing, with a mouthwateringly juicy selection of movies, many of which have been extensively roadtested at other festivals, their reputations burnished and sellout status pretty much guaranteed. This week George Clooney is in town, an old friend of the Lff, to promote his movies The Ides of March and The Descendants, and to gladhand London's Bafta voters.
The Lff is certainly not short of glamorous titles, and yet I find myself broodingly preoccupied and even slightly obsessed with a sombre film from Britain. This is Carol Morley's horrifying, heartbreaking drama-documentary Dreams of a Life.
It has a real-life Eleanor Rigby tale to tell, and it asks powerful questions about community, sexual politics,...
The BFI London film festival is now in full swing, with a mouthwateringly juicy selection of movies, many of which have been extensively roadtested at other festivals, their reputations burnished and sellout status pretty much guaranteed. This week George Clooney is in town, an old friend of the Lff, to promote his movies The Ides of March and The Descendants, and to gladhand London's Bafta voters.
The Lff is certainly not short of glamorous titles, and yet I find myself broodingly preoccupied and even slightly obsessed with a sombre film from Britain. This is Carol Morley's horrifying, heartbreaking drama-documentary Dreams of a Life.
It has a real-life Eleanor Rigby tale to tell, and it asks powerful questions about community, sexual politics,...
- 10/20/2011
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Quadrangle Film Festival, Shoreham
Leave your red carpet gear at home and get out the tent for this rural festival, set in 19th-century farm buildings, with screenings in the stables, discussion in the granary, and camping in the meadows. The mainly documentary programme is filled with curiosities: film-makers in conversation (Iain Sinclair, veteran experimentalist John Smith), special guests introducing their favourite documentaries (Herzog making-of Burden Of Dreams, eccentric family study The Moon And The Sledgehammer, etc), a preview of Afghanistan doc To Hell And Back Again, plus short films, art installations and the great outdoors.
Fri to 4 Sep, quadranglefilmfest.com
Metal On Film, Wolverhampton
As part of the project to reclaim Birmingham and the Black Country's musical heritage, a series of screenings hammering home just how important the genre is. And how ridiculous. The line between the two is often blurry. At one end, Spinal Tap is a compulsory inclusion,...
Leave your red carpet gear at home and get out the tent for this rural festival, set in 19th-century farm buildings, with screenings in the stables, discussion in the granary, and camping in the meadows. The mainly documentary programme is filled with curiosities: film-makers in conversation (Iain Sinclair, veteran experimentalist John Smith), special guests introducing their favourite documentaries (Herzog making-of Burden Of Dreams, eccentric family study The Moon And The Sledgehammer, etc), a preview of Afghanistan doc To Hell And Back Again, plus short films, art installations and the great outdoors.
Fri to 4 Sep, quadranglefilmfest.com
Metal On Film, Wolverhampton
As part of the project to reclaim Birmingham and the Black Country's musical heritage, a series of screenings hammering home just how important the genre is. And how ridiculous. The line between the two is often blurry. At one end, Spinal Tap is a compulsory inclusion,...
- 8/26/2011
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Cyclescreen 2011, a bicycle film festival enjoying a successful second year, showed exciting new and classic cycling films
Cycling and art have a long history. For Toulouse-Lautrec, track racing in 1890's Paris was an essential part of the city's vivid twilight. Duchamp's bicycle wheel is a powerful symbol: like his Fountain (the urinal), it is both everyday and a little bit subversive.
Since its invention, the bike has stoked the passion of diverse artists, some for the circus hustle of the race, others the egalitarian potency of the original and best mass transport. Last week's Cyclescreen 2011, a bicycle film festival enjoying a successful second year at the Watershed in Bristol, presented exciting new work and some of the best classic cycling films.
The best cycling films capture the anarchic buzz of sleepy provincial town transformed into gladiatorial grandstand, and the short films Pour un Maillot Jaune, by Claude Lelouch, and Vive le Tour,...
Cycling and art have a long history. For Toulouse-Lautrec, track racing in 1890's Paris was an essential part of the city's vivid twilight. Duchamp's bicycle wheel is a powerful symbol: like his Fountain (the urinal), it is both everyday and a little bit subversive.
Since its invention, the bike has stoked the passion of diverse artists, some for the circus hustle of the race, others the egalitarian potency of the original and best mass transport. Last week's Cyclescreen 2011, a bicycle film festival enjoying a successful second year at the Watershed in Bristol, presented exciting new work and some of the best classic cycling films.
The best cycling films capture the anarchic buzz of sleepy provincial town transformed into gladiatorial grandstand, and the short films Pour un Maillot Jaune, by Claude Lelouch, and Vive le Tour,...
- 8/26/2011
- by Matthew Wright
- The Guardian - Film News
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