Archive
THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG – Howard Shore
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The second film in Peter Jackson’s new Middle Earth trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is The Desolation of Smaug; it picks up immediately where the first film in the trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, left off last year, with the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) journeying to the ancient dwarf stronghold of Erebor in the company of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), dwarfish king-in-waiting Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), and his band of adventurers, to take back their homeland from the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). Along way, however, the heroic company must traverse any number of dangers, including vicious orcs, unfriendly elves, a treacherous forest, and the inhabitants of an impoverished lake town in the shadow of the lonely mountain. Meanwhile, much to Gandalf’s consternation, the shadowy threat of a mysterious necromancer continues to grow, looming large over all of Middle Earth, and threatening its long-lasting peace. The film is a significant improvement over the first installment, eschewing some of its comic action material and embracing a more serious tone that befits a story that touches on much more adult themes involving obsession and corruption. It’s visually spectacular, of course (although the orc leader Azog still looks like a bad video game rendering), has a wonderful supporting cast that includes Stephen Fry, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans and a returning Orlando Bloom as Legolas, and – most importantly from this website’s point of view – sees Howard Shore returning to Middle Earth for the fifth time as composer. Read more…
SAVING MR. BANKS – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The much-loved Disney feature Mary Poppins celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2014. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long since the world first learned the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or were first able to hear the worst Cockney accent in cinematic history courtesy of Dick Van Dyke, but it’s true, and the legacy and popularity of the film remains as strong today as it was in 1964. The new film Saving Mr. Banks, directed by John Lee Hancock, tells two parallel stories. Firstly, it charts how the film Mary Poppins was made, with the irascible English spinster P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) traveling from her home in London to Los Angeles, where she is wooed mercilessly by no lesser figure that Walt Disney himself (Tom Hanks), in an attempt to secure the rights to her book, which she is loathe to give up. Secondly, and possibly most importantly, it explores in flashback Travers’ childhood in rural Australia, and how her relationship with her loving, caring, but hopelessly drunk and irresponsible father (Colin Farrell) helped inspired her work, and her famous umbrella-wielding nanny. Read more…
THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Catching Fire is the second film based on the bestselling Hunger Games trilogy of novels by Suzanne Collins, following on from the smash hit Hunger Games movie last year. Jennifer Lawrence returns to the starring role as Katniss Everdeen, a young woman from a post-apocalyptic America who, along with her compatriot Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), survived their participation in the eponymous games – a gladiatorial-style combat tournament involving children from various impoverished ‘districts’, who fight to the death for the entertainment of the wealthy and decadent inhabitants of the Capital, organized as penance for a popular uprising generations previously. In Catching Fire, Katniss and Peeta have drawn the ire of the corrupt and sadistic President Snow (Donald Sutherland) for defying the Government and for possibly inciting a potential second uprising within the districts; in response, Snow orders a second, special games called the “quarter quell” in which former winners of the games must compete again, in a nightmarish new battle arena designed to look like the jungle. Read more…
FROZEN – Christophe Beck, Robert Lopez, Kristen Anderson-Lopez
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Frozen is the 53rd official animated feature in the Walt Disney canon. Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, Disney veterans who previously worked on The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas and Tarzan, the film is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale The Snow Queen, albeit significantly ‘Disneyfied” and turned into a full-fledged musical. The story involves two princess sisters from the kingdom of Arendelle, Elsa and Anna, voiced by Kristin Bell and Idina Menzel. As she grows up, Elsa begins to manifest powers that allow her to manipulate snow and ice, culminating in an incident at her coronation as Queen that leaves Arendelle under a blanket of eternal winter. Elsa flees from her home, distraught, but Anna resolves to reconcile with her sister. Teaming up with Kristoff (voiced by Jonathan Groff), a gruff mountain man, and Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad), an anthropomorphic snowman, Anna sets off into the frozen wilderness to find the Snow Queen with the fate of the kingdom in her hands. Read more…
PHILOMENA – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 2009 former BBC journalist and British Labour party political advisor Martin Sixsmith wrote the non-fiction book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, about the forcible separation of a mother and child by the nuns of an Irish convent, and the subsequent attempts of the mother and child to contact one another. This book has now been adapted by director Stephen Frears and writer Steve Coogan into the film Philomena, which charts the odd-couple relationship between Sixsmith and Lee as they journey to the United States to try to track down her son, and provides an interesting and damning look at the topic of the forced adoptions practiced by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s. The film stars writer Coogan as Sixsmith, Dame Judi Dench as Philomena, and has an original score by Alexandre Desplat, who previously worked with director Frears on the films The Queen, Cheri and Tamara Drewe. Read more…
NO SE ACEPTAN DEVOLUCIONES/INSTRUCTIONS NOT INCLUDED – Carlo Siliotto
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Instructions Not Included – or, to give it its correct Spanish title, No Se Aceptan Devoluciones – is a Mexican comedy-drama film directed by and starring Eugenio Derbez which, contrary to all expectations, became an enormous box office success when it first hit cinemas in August 2013. At the time of writing is the fourth highest-grossing foreign language film of all time at the US Box Office with almost $45 million, just behind such acclaimed works as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Life is Beautiful and Hero. Derbez, who is an enormous star in his native Mexico, plays Valentín, an Acapulco playboy whose freewheeling lifestyle is thrown into turmoil when a one-night stand shows up on his doorstep, and leaves their baby – Maggie – behind. Valentín and Maggie travel to Los Angeles to try to find the baby’s mother, but as the years go by the pair develop an unexpectedly strong bond, as fatherhood forces Valentín to abandon his reckless ways and become a responsible parent. However, as is always the case in these sorts of films, circumstances threaten to break father and daughter apart… Read more…
THE BOOK THIEF – John Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Book Thief, based on the popular novel by Markus Zusak, is a World War II drama set in Germany about the power of the written word. Young Sophie Nélisse stars as the lead character, Liesel, who is sent to live with foster parents (Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson), just as the specter of war looms over the country and Nazism begins to take hold. Through her innocent eyes Liesel begins to witness the first months of what would be eventually become the Holocaust, but through the compassion of her new parents, their imparted love of books and literature, and her friendship with of a young Jewish man named Max, she finds a way to deal with the atrocities that are starting to take place in her community. The film is directed by Brian Percival, best known for his work on the critically acclaimed TV series Downton Abbey, and has a score by the legendary John Williams. Read more…
IN EINEM WILDEN LAND/STRIVING FOR FREEDOM – Karim Sebastian Elias
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Germany has a surprisingly rich heritage of making films set in the American wild west – not so much spaghetti westerns as sauerkraut westerns – many of them adaptations of novels by Karl May about the adventures of Apache Winnetou, starring Pierre Brice and scored by Martin Böttcher. In Einem Wilden Land is a big-budget TV movie directed by Rainer Matsutani, starring Benno Fürmann, Darron Mayer and Nadja Uhl, which premiered on the German network SAT-1 in November. It follows the adventures of a family of German immigrants making a new life for themselves in the American West in the mid-19th century. Read more…
ENDER’S GAME – Steve Jablonsky
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ender’s Game is a science fiction drama based on the highly acclaimed, hugely influential 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card. In the years after a devastating attack on Earth by an alien race known as the Formics, the human race has devised a strategy to prevent future attacks: a battle school designed to discover and train massively talented children to control the Earth’s defenses – children apparently have the capacity to learn and adapt to new situations and technological advances better than adults. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is one of these talented children, and the film follows him after he is chosen to take part in the elite military program by Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford), as the threat of a second attack by the Formics looms ever larger. The film, which is directed by Gavin Hood and also stars Ben Kingsley, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis and Abigail Breslin, has some important points to make about the nature of war, manipulation and propaganda, and is visually stunning, but prior to its release became embroiled in controversy following the revelation about some of Card’s political beliefs, and may have suffered slightly at the box office as a result, leaving the possibility of an ongoing franchise doubtful. Read more…
QUAI D’ORSAY – Philippe Sarde
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Quai d’Orsay is a French satirical comedy from director Bertrand Tavernier, based on a comic book by Abel Lanzac and starring Thierry Lhermitte as Alexandre de Vorms, a fictional French foreign minister who is a thinly-veiled charicature of the real-life politician Dominique de Villepin. It portrays de Vorms as a pretentious, shallow buffoon, whose political career is continually saved via the intervention of his aide and lead speech-writer Arthur (Raphaël Personnaz), who continually steps in to stop his boss from making a fool of himself at official functions. Quai d’Orsay represents the ninth collaboration between director Tavernier and composer Philippe Sarde. The ironic and rhythmic score was recorded in Paris, orchestrated and conducted by Dominic Spagnolo, and features a number of local musicians including Ridardo Del Fra (bass), Jean Pierlot (percussion), Fréderic Couderd (saxophone) and Raphaël Didjaman (didgeridoo). Read more…
FREE BIRDS – Dominic Lewis
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There aren’t many films about Thanksgiving, that most peculiar of American holidays where families gather together to show how thankful they are for everything they have in life by eating enormous meals and watching American football on TV. For those who don’t know, the holiday originated with the original pilgrims who emigrated to the continent from Europe, and who were so inadequately prepared for life on a new continent that they almost starved to death in their first winter, until they were saved by the local natives, who basically showed them how to hunt and plant crops and not die. The pilgrims were so thankful that they almost immediately began a 200-year systematic eradication of Native American life and culture, but that’s another matter entirely; nowadays, the holiday is most closely associated with mass consumption of the humble turkey, which were plentiful during pilgrim times. Free Birds is most likely the first film to feature a cast of anthropomorphic animated turkeys, but you can’t have a Thanksgiving film without those tasty tryptophan-enhanced morsels, and so here we are… Read more…
LA VÉNUS À LA FOURRURE/VENUS IN FUR – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Venus in Fur, a French-Polish co-production, is Roman Polanski’s big-screen adaptation of David Ives’s play, an erotic comedy-drama about the unusual relationship that develops between a theater director and a needy, manipulative actress during the audition process for a production of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic story of sexuality, desire and masochism, Venus in Furs. The film, which stars Mathieu Almaric as the director and Emmanuelle Seigner as the actress, explores the shifts in power between the pair as the relationship between those creating the play begins to mirror the one between the characters in the story itself. Read more…
MA MAMAN EST EN AMÉRIQUE, ELLE A RENCONTRÉ BUFFALO BILL/MY MUMMY IS IN AMERICA AND SHE MET BUFFALO BILL – Fabrice Aboulker
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ma Maman Est En Amérique, Elle a Rencontré Buffalo Bill is an animated French film directed by Marc Boreal and Thibaud Catel, based on the graphic novel of the same name by Jean Regnaud and Émile Bravo. It tells the story of Jean, a six year old boy starting a new school. Having grown up without a mother, and not knowing who or where she is, he begins to make up tall tales about her and her adventurous life in order to impress his new school friends – even going so far as to create fake postcards and letters from her from Africa and the United States. However, his neighbor Michele, knows the truth about Jean’s real life, and the young friends bond over their unusual, imaginary family. The score for Ma Maman Est En Amérique, Elle a Rencontré Buffalo Bill is by the French composer and songwriter Fabrice Aboulker, and is yet another unexpected delight. Light, playful, thematic, and with some lovely passages for piano, strings and woodwinds, the score belies its children’s cartoon roots almost entirely by containing surprisingly sophisticated writing, all performed superbly by the Macedonian Radio Symphonic Orchestra, recorded in Skopje. Read more…
THE WIND RISES – Joe Hisaishi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
If the rumors are true, it seems as though The Wind Rises will be the last feature film directed by the acclaimed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. His is a career that stretches back 50 years, during which he has been largely responsible for the popularization of the anime genre in the West, through films such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, all of which were produced by his production company, Studio Ghibli. His emotional, sensitive films tackle weighty issues to do with the environment, pacifism, dreams, and destiny, often presented through a series of fantastical and magical stories, nearly all of which feature a strong female protagonist. Read more…
AMBASSADA – Bartosz Chajdecki
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ambassada is a Polish science fiction comedy film written and directed by Juliusz Machulski, about a young couple who move into a new apartment building, only to find that the building’s elevator is actually a time machine; using the machine, the couple find themselves going back in time to the 1940s and coming face-to-face with none other than Adolf Hitler! Yes, it is a comedy – it stars Magdalena Grąziowska, Bartosz Porczyk and Robert Więckiewicz, and has a score by one of the young rising stars of Polish film music, Bartosz Chajdecki.
The score is an interesting mix of contemporary jazz and large-scale science fiction action, which sounds like it shouldn’t work at all, but actually does. The opening cue, “Kosmopolityczny-Wood” introduces the Cosmopolitan theme, a fun piece of jazz, with a bouncy trumpet line offset by an accordion, piano and stand-up bass, which introduces the main characters and their deft comedic natures. “Żydowski Szybki” brings a hint of Jewish-Polish folk music into the score with a whirligig dance for harpsichord and strings, while “Woln Spokój”, “Holly” and the flamboyant finale “Nalewki Zmontowane“ return later in the score to revisit the jazz flavors of the opening cue. Read more…
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