Film Review: Begin Again (2013)

Writer-director John Carney had a surprise hit in 2007 with his lovely, lo-fi romance Once, in which a man and a woman (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) fall in love while composing music together. It was a thoroughly charming and winning story - one that was given extra resonance when the two leads fell in love in real life and toured together as The Swell Season - that felt like a scruffy, raw debut album, the kind that people fall madly in love to. If Once was Carney's "Funeral", then Begin Again is his "Neon Bible"; a slicker, more polished sophomore effort that has much the same romanticism that its predecessor had, but lacks that sense of intimacy.

Film Review: Anna Karenina (2012)

For much of its running time, Joe Wright's adaptation of Tolstoy's classic plays out in an old, crumbling theatre. From the moment that the curtains part to tell the story of Anna (Kiera Knightley) and her impetuous, tragic romance with the young Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the audience is plunged into a world in which the artifice is brought to the fore. Sets are moved around on camera, extras change from bureaucrats to sellers and merchants in a few well-choreographed movements, and Wright's roaming camera glides around the interior of the theatre, moving from one scene before alighting on a totally different one that occupies the same space.