Film Review: Frozen (2013)

Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell) are a pair of princesses who have spent most of their lives living within the walls of their castle in the kingdom of Arendelle. Unlike most cases of princesses being kept hidden, they've been kept there for a very good reason; Elsa has the power to control and manipulate ice, and when they were children, Elsa nearly killed her younger sister while the two were playing. Afraid that she might  hurt her again, Elsa retreated into the castle to protect herself and Anna while the people of Arendelle went about their lives. As Elsa comes of age, the gates of the castle are thrown open for her coronation, to her dread and Anna's palpable delight. Things quickly go awry, and Elsa flees the kingdom, accidentally leaving it frozen in her wake. It falls to Anna, along with the ice trader Kristoff (Johnathan Groff) and his adorable reindeer Sven, to coax Elsa back to civilization before Arandelle is destroyed by the winter, or before the Duke of Weselton's (Alan Tydyk) men find her and seek to end the cold by ending her life.

Film Review: Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)

Inspired by Julie Maroh's graphic novel of the same name, Blue Is the Warmest Colour is the story of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a seventeen year old girl going through those slightly lost days before adulthood truly begins. She loves to read, talks about boys with her friends, attends anti-austerity rallies, and has only a very vague sense of what she wants to do with her life. Whilst walking through town one day, she sees Emma (Léa Seydoux) and falls for her, hard. After meeting properly at a gay bar, Adèle and Emma meet up, have long conversations about literature, love and life, and become lovers. Over several years, their relationship flourishes, even as they are drawn in different directions, as Adèle becomes a teacher and Emma pursues a career as a graphic designer. As the relationship shapes and defines Adèle's personality, and as that relationship begins to fray, Adèle starts to unravel in tandem.

Film Review: Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

For over twenty years, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) denied Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) the rights to her most famous character, Mary Poppins, despite the huge monetary reward she would receive for allowing him to adapt her work into a film. Early on in Saving Mr. Banks, the story of how Disney finally managed to convince Travers to let him make that movie, Travers explains to her agent, for what must be the thousandth time, the reason why she has persisted in her refusal for so long. (Or, at the very least, she provides a reason why she has resisted.) She's afraid that if she signs the rights to Disney, and if he in turn makes a film out of her books, that he will turn Mary Poppins into a cartoon, a creature that is all sparkle and whimsy, with all the rough edges sanded off and darkness removed. While watching John Lee Hancock's film, it's easy to imagine the real Travers tutting ruefully as the corporation that bears Disney's name does to her own life what she feared Walt himself would do to Mary Poppins.

Film Review: Our Nixon (2013)

Between the thousands of articles, books and films, both factual and fictionalised, that have been made about the Richard Nixon's presidency and the Watergate scandal, the subject has been so thoroughly gone over that it would take something very special to offer any new insight into that turbulent period. While Penny Lane's Our Nixon doesn't offer any startling revelations or interpretations on Nixon's actions as President, it at the very least offers a novel perspective on them. Constructed primarily from home movie footage shot by John Erlichman, H.R. Haldeman and Dwight Chapin, three of Nixon's closest aides and key figures in the Watergate cover-up, Our Nixon provides a unique glimpse into life in the Nixon White House, one that contrasts the creeping paranoia at its heart with the sunny, happy images the men captured.

Film Review: Leviathan (2012)

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel's Leviathan achieves something very interesting; it's an abstract, impressionistic work which also manages to be a concrete depiction of reality. Set on an American fishing vessel, the film takes the cinéma vérité approach of The Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman to the nth degree by not only recording the actions of the fishermen with no explanation, but placing miniature cameras on people and objects throughout the ship, capturing life on board from a myriad of intriguing angles. This approach allows the directors to not only give us a first-person perspective of what it is like to work on a trawler, giving an intimate view of what is involved in surviving hundreds of miles away from land, but also to show what life on the trawler looks like from the point of view of the captured fish. This makes for an experience which is, thanks to the amount of blood and guts on display, quite literally visceral, as well as one which at times resembles Hostel for fish.

Film Review: In A World... (2013)

It's strange to think that no one has ever made a comedy set in the world of voice-over artists. In some ways, it's kind of a perfect setting for one. It's a very specific, small community with its own outsized personalities; people like the late Don LaFontaine, who coined the phrase "In a world..." which is synonymous with a certain kind of epic movie trailer, and who was a very successful, acclaimed figure within the voice-over community but whose fame never extended far beyond it. After all, the whole point of being a voice-over artist is to be seen and not heard. Given that milieu, you could easily see someone Christopher Guest having a field day showing the members of this insular world competing against each other, complete with stakes that would mean almost nothing to the average person, but everything to the artists themselves.

Film Review: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013)

In addition to being frightfully prolific, often making three or four documentaries a year, Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) has always struck me as a decidedly measured filmmaker. Even when he tackles a subject that enrages him, such as the Enron scandal or torture, he treats it with a remove that gets his point across without becoming a polemicist. He applies this same approach in We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks to the history of the eponymous website and its founder Julian Assange, as well as that of Chelsea Manning, the US Soldier who leaked thousands of classified documents to the website and was sentenced to 35 years in prison for doing so. This results in an overview of the organisation and these personalities that displays an even tone, and a broad sense of the issues at play regarding leaking, though it doesn't offer a great deal in the way of insight.

Film Review: The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)

For about half its running time, the Belgian musical drama The Broken Circle Breakdown manages to achieve a fine balance between vibrant, sensual romanticism, swooning musical numbers and heartrending drama. In telling the story of Elise (Veerie Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heidenbergh, who also co-wrote the original play upon which the film is based), a couple whose young daughter is battling cancer, director Felix Van Groeningen uses a non-linear approach to cut between different stages of their relationship. This makes for some startling juxtapositions, taking us from their current heartbreak in a hospital to the first time they slept together and everywhere in between, contrasting the hope and lust of their early days to their present circumstances to often devastating effect. The scenes of their blooming relationship are handled with a light touch that is infectious, and makes the scenes of them holding it together for their little girl almost unbearably poignant.

Doctor Who - The Day of The Doctor

Before we get down to the business of saying what happened in this Very Special Episode of Doctor Who, let's stop for just one second and acknowledge how insane it is that not only is Doctor Who fifty years old, but that it is something people are celebrating. When the series returned a mere eight years ago, it's reputation had sunk to an utter low. It was a campy irrelevance that had been all but abandoned by the BBC, destined to be forgotten by all but its most ardent fans. Much like The War Doctor (John Hurt), it was a secret to be hidden away and ignored, at least as far as executives were concerned. Hell, the thirtieth anniversary was marked by one of the most legendarily terrible things to ever air on British television. All credit should be given to Russell T. Davies and his team who, despite a run that was of incredibly variable quality, successfully resurrected an icon of British science fiction and took it to heights of popularity unimaginable in 2005. To go from that to having a global simulcast of an episode on television and in cinemas is truly unprecedented.

Film Review: Frances Ha (2012)

Frances (Greta Gerwig) is a 27 year old woman living in New York who works as an apprentice at a dance studio and spends her days hanging out with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). The two have been inseparable since college, but when Sophie announces that she is going to move out, Frances finds herself drifting from apartment to apartment, and even city to city, as she contemplates her life as a  self-described "undateable" woman with few career prospects.

Film Review: Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Given its constituent parts - based on a true story that centres around a main character struggling with AIDS and featuring an actor who loses a huge amount of weight for the role - it's all too easy to imagine a version of Dallas Buyers Club which is prime awards fodder. In the wrong hands, it could have been maudlin, self-important and capital-I Important. Not merely a film about a Serious subject, but one intensely aware of its own Seriousness, and determined to remind the audience just how very Serious it all is. Everything would seem to be in place to create the epitome of middlebrow Oscar bait.

Film Review: All Is Lost (2013)

Few films can lay claim to a better use of the word "fuck" than the one which occurs roughly halfway through J.C. Chandor's (Margin Call) All Is Lost. This is at least in part because it's the only time that the word is used, which gives it a certain power at a moment of emotional release, but also because it's one of the only words uttered at all. Apart from a brief (though comparatively verbose) bit of narration at the beginning, the film is largely dialogue-free, so based on a ratio of swear words to non-swear words used, it may be one of the most profane films ever made.

Film Review: Enough Said (2013)

Whether or not you like Enough Said, the latest film from Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, Please Give) will probably boil down to what you want from a comedy. Specifically, whether you value structure and plotting over character and performance, or vice versa. The film positively overflows with the latter, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini giving warm, funny and natural performances as a pair of divorcees who embark on a playful romance together, but those very graceful and unforced performances are in service of a plot which at times feels very awkward and contrived. In order to discuss the film in any depth, it's necessary to give away the set-up, which is admittedly established fairly early on, but if you're really spoiler-adverse consider that fair warning.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 44 - TV vs. Film Debate

The question of whether film is better than television or vice versa has raged for decades, but seems to have been revitalised in recent years by the onset of the "Golden Age" of cable dramas, with both sides becoming increasingly louder and more entrenched in their insistence over which is superior. Joe Gastineau and I find the whole debate to be odd and unhelpful, but thought it would be an interesting jumping off point for a discussion of why it's silly to compare the two.

This is one of our shorter, leaner episodes in a while, but don't let that throw you off, there are still plenty of intellectual cul-de-sacs, flights of fancy and masturbation jokes.

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Film Review: Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Even in a shared cinematic universe that features super-soldiers and men who transform into giant green monsters when they get a bit cross, Thor always seemed like a bit of an outsider when it came to becoming an iconic film character; injecting Norse mythology into Marvel's more science fiction orientated world seemed like it would be destined to lead to a work of disastrous camp. While Kenneth Branagh's Thor was a somewhat divisive film, with some saying its goofy sense of humour went too far in deflating the pomposity of its faux-Shakespearean stylings and others, myself included, saying that it struck just the right balance between the two, its main success was in establishing Thor (played with sly wit and bountiful charisma by Chris Hemsworth) as a believable, if larger than life, character, and it took him on an interesting journey from arrogant God to humble, worthy hero.