With Flight, director Robert Zemeckis has made a solid, unshowy character drama, the kind of film cinemagoers of a certain age will tell you the studios don't really make any more. It reminds me a little of an Eastwood movie - specifically, with Eastwood in his capacity as a film director, that is.
Lincoln begins with the Battle of Jenkin’s Ferry in Arkansas in April, 1864, at the height of the American Civil War. It is a messy, close-quarter scrap in the mud between black and Confederate soldiers, with men shooting, stabbing, punching, flailing and gouging at each other. The rest of Spielberg’s film is about conflict, too, but of a less visceral kind: the constitutional battles Lincoln faces on screen, and the tussle off-camera between Spielberg’s ropey tendencies to mythologise and Tony Kushner’s scrupulous screenplay that strives for fact and precision.
Zero Dark Thirty is a companion piece to The Hurt Locker, the previous film from director Kathryn Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal. But while The Hurt Locker viewed the War on Terror in microcosm, focussing on a three-man bomb disposal team during the Iraq war, Zero Dark Thirty tells a bigger story: the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, unfolding across a ten-year period in CIA Black Ops sites, military bases and embassies in destinations as far a field as Pakistan, Gdansk, London and the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
DIRECTOR Jacqui and David Morris
STARRING Don McCullin
Towards the end of last year, war photographer Don McCullin recently travelled to Syria for one last trip to the frontline.
Interviewed on Radio 4 from Aleppo in December 2012, 76 year-old McCullin said, “I’m not important in all this. I’m just a carrier pigeon bringing this back home.” An amazing, humbling reflection on a career spanning close to 50 years, that saw Don McCullin cover Biafra, Vietnam and Northern Ireland, bringing back home photographic proof of the horrific fallout of war on civilians.
Michael Haneke has often meted out cruel and unusual punishments to his characters. You might think of the middle class couple in Funny Games, an oppressed music professor in The Piano Teacher, or an entire town in The White Ribbon. Amour, however, provides a corrective of sorts.
Paul Thomas Anderson begins and ends The Master with the same image: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), lying on a beach in the South Pacific in the closing days of World War II, nestled up close to the figure of a woman carved in the sand. Bent out of shape by the war, he is alcoholic and possibly deranged. In a series of weird, unconnected images, we see Freddie siphoning petrol from the tank of an aircraft, masturbating into the Pacific surf, lying in a hammock on a warship.
The Queen Of Versailles introduces us to David and Jackie Siegel, an American family struggling to cope in the aftermath of the global recession. David, 73, is the founder, CEO and president of Westgate Resorts – “the largest privately owned timeshare company in the world”.
