Film

By Molly Thomas At first glance, Hugo seems to be about little more than a lonely young boy; but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that Martin Scorsese’s ambitions lie much further: the story of the birth of film itself. Based on the 2007 illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, the plot (set in 1930s France) weaves the narrative of the fictional titular character (played by the young though experienced Asa Butterfield) with a surprisingly accurate historical account of early filmmaker Georges Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley). Near the end, the film shifts into a...

The “Iron Lady” movie, out on 6 January, would be a good opportunity to do a meeting about what Thatcher was really like and show a film of the miners’ strike. The trailer is horrendous; the blurb on the website says this: “The Iron Lady tells the compelling story of Margaret Thatcher, a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world. The story concerns power and the price that is paid for power, and is a surprising and intimate portrait of an extraordinary and complex woman.” Critics have called the film Thatcher without Thatcherism. It’s our...

Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help has just been turned into a film. Both are enjoyable, but there are political problems with them and, in the case of the film, these problems are aggravated by conventional Hollywood presentation and story-telling. The Help is set in early 1960s Mississippi, in the semi-apartheid set-up which existed from the late 1870s until the victories of the Civil Rights movement won at least formal legal equality for black Americans. Many of the black women in the small town of Jackson are maids for white women, cleaning their houses and bringing up their children, who...

Drive, the recent Nicolas Winding Refn film that has further catapulted its male star Ryan Gosling into Hollywood’s stratosphere, is a very, very good looking film. Every aspect of it is visually sumptuous; from the distinctive typeface used for the credits to the inspired casting of Ron Perlman (possessed of one of the most intriguing faces in American cinema) as the chief villain. It tells the story of Gosling’s unnamed mechanic, moonlighting as a getaway driver, and his developing relationship with his neighbour (played by Carey Mulligan) and her young son. But it’s hard to pin down exactly...

After London and Barcelona, Paris has become the latest city (outside of his native New York) to get the Woody Allen treatment. Although he has visited the French capital before (in 1996’s Everyone Says I Love You, for example), his latest work, Midnight in Paris, gives it a proper going over. You can always tell when Allen really wants to get stuck into a city if he puts its name in the movie’s title — think Manhattan or, more recently, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The film’s opening montage is a litany of the most clichéd shots of Paris imaginable — the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées, the...

Tim Thomas completes his series of articles inspired by the BFI’s Ken Loach retrospective. Ken Loach is a committed film-maker with 50 years experience of the film business and a prodigious output amounting to nearly a film a year over that period. He is a progressive influence and has struggled hard against TV and film censorship. He demands politics be taken seriously and he invites argument. That is why his turn to Respect has to be challenged because it didn’t just contribute to the demise of the Socialist Alliance, it indicated an adventure. He has also expressed support for the free...

By Emily Muna I had seen the film posters for The Devil’s Double , the new film about Uday Hussein, son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, plastered around the London underground. Looking at the poster, I imagined it some kind of comedy. "Have you heard about the new film coming out, about Uday?" I asked my grandmother, who escaped Saddam’s regime with my mum and uncles in the late seventies. I didn’t need to say his full name. She knew who I was talking about. "They said they had to tone it down. It’s an 18, but they had to tone it down, because the reality was even more violent and disturbing...

Tim Thomas has been attending the Ken Loach retrospective at the British Film Institute marking Loach’s 75th birthday. He begins a series of short reviews. The first film shown was the one Save The Children banned in 1969. “Save The Children”, quoting from the BFI press handout, “were unhappy with the content of the film and were determined not to allow it to be screened, successfully persuading London Weekend Television not to broadcast it. However Loach and Garnett (Loach’s producer) refused to hand over the negative to Save the Children.” The dispute went to court where it was decided that...

Daisy Thomas reviews the final Harry Potter film “The Deathly Hallows — Part 2” As I joined countless others at midnight in packed cinemas for the final instalment of Harry Potter, excitement was in the air. After all, this would be the last time there’d be a midnight screening of Harry Potter, the last time people could dress up like the characters, and the last time there’d be a new Harry Potter movie. The acting was very well done and, as always, the special effects were brilliant. The idea that Thestrals didn’t actually exist, or that flying motorbikes defied gravity, was not important...

For her documentary about the environmental direct action movement the director, Emily James, was given access to the often secretive world of Climate Camp, Plane Stupid and the other loose networks which came together for direct action at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, the London G20 summit and Kingsnorth power station. The nature of the footage inevitably gives it an honest lo-fi feel, overlaid with some impressive animations, and an engaging narrative. But it was all a bit predictable; as one activist watching it with me put it, “it seemed like edited highlights of the last...