We Need to Talk About Kevin; The Greatest Movie Ever Sold; A Useful Life; In Time; Jack Goes Boating
Whatever happens at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood tonight, you can be sure of one thing: there won't be any statuettes handed out to the very best film of the year. While the board-sweeping success of a near-silent B&W beauty is a reason to be cheerful, not even the rule-breaking brilliance of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist can outshine the excellence of my favourite film of 2011, which saw the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay making a triumphant return to our screens after a nine-year absence. Welcome back!
Superbly adapted (by screenwriters Ramsay and Rory Kinnear) from Lionel Shriver's supposedly unfilmable bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) inhabits a painterly netherworld pitched somewhere between the subtle hues of European psychodrama and the bolder strokes of populist paedophobic horror.
Whatever happens at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood tonight, you can be sure of one thing: there won't be any statuettes handed out to the very best film of the year. While the board-sweeping success of a near-silent B&W beauty is a reason to be cheerful, not even the rule-breaking brilliance of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist can outshine the excellence of my favourite film of 2011, which saw the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay making a triumphant return to our screens after a nine-year absence. Welcome back!
Superbly adapted (by screenwriters Ramsay and Rory Kinnear) from Lionel Shriver's supposedly unfilmable bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) inhabits a painterly netherworld pitched somewhere between the subtle hues of European psychodrama and the bolder strokes of populist paedophobic horror.
- 2/26/2012
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
War Horse (12A)
(Steven Spielberg, 2011, Us) Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch. 146 mins
You can see why the hit boy-and-his-horse book/play appealed to Spielberg, in a sort of Et-meets-Saving Private Ryan way. It brings out the best and worst of him. There's some brazen old-school tear-jerking and rosy rural farming hardship, but there's also the first world war, thank God. Epic action frequently comes to the rescue, in what becomes a stirring, gruelling steeplechase across wartime Europe, towards an ending that's pure Hollywood.
Shame (18)
(Steve McQueen, 2011, UK) Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale. 101 mins
McQueen's follow-up to Hunger tackles an equally risky topic (sex addiction) with a similarly sparse and frank approach, though this is arguably more conventional. Fassbender is magnetic as usual, playing a terminally horny Manhattan man whose lone-wolf existence is disrupted by the arrival of his needy sister.
(Steven Spielberg, 2011, Us) Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch. 146 mins
You can see why the hit boy-and-his-horse book/play appealed to Spielberg, in a sort of Et-meets-Saving Private Ryan way. It brings out the best and worst of him. There's some brazen old-school tear-jerking and rosy rural farming hardship, but there's also the first world war, thank God. Epic action frequently comes to the rescue, in what becomes a stirring, gruelling steeplechase across wartime Europe, towards an ending that's pure Hollywood.
Shame (18)
(Steve McQueen, 2011, UK) Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale. 101 mins
McQueen's follow-up to Hunger tackles an equally risky topic (sex addiction) with a similarly sparse and frank approach, though this is arguably more conventional. Fassbender is magnetic as usual, playing a terminally horny Manhattan man whose lone-wolf existence is disrupted by the arrival of his needy sister.
- 1/14/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
The 16th annual Festivalissimo, the Ibero-Latin-American film festival of Montreal, opens May 18th and runs until June 5 with a selection of thirty films culled from the international festival circuit. The competition for the El Sol prize for best feature film, best actor and actress will open with Matías Bize’s La Vida De Los Peces (The Life of Fish, and closes with Federico Vieroj’s La Vida Util (A Useful Life). In addition to the Official Selection films in competition, Festivalissimo also presents a series of films out of competition which represent Latin-American society of the past and present, and a selection of the most commercially successful films at the Latin American box office.
A few must-see films from this year’s lineup:
La Vida Util (A Useful Life) Federico Vieroj, Uruguay-Spain, 2010
-
Synopsis:
After twenty-five years, Cinemateca Uruguaya’s most devoted employee, Jorge (real-life Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek...
A few must-see films from this year’s lineup:
La Vida Util (A Useful Life) Federico Vieroj, Uruguay-Spain, 2010
-
Synopsis:
After twenty-five years, Cinemateca Uruguaya’s most devoted employee, Jorge (real-life Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek...
- 5/9/2011
- by Lindsay Peters
- SoundOnSight
In "A Useful Life," director Federico Veiroj assembles a patient character study around the impact of curatorial work on individual experience. Shot in expressive black-and-white and using the Academy ratio, this is a movie about movies that could seem awkwardly familiar to some devout cinephiles. Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek plays a middle-aged film buff whose world is defined by movies. The reclusive programmer of a struggling cinematheque, Jorge inhabits ...
- 1/12/2011
- Indiewire
Introducing Jorge, the film-obsessed hero of “A Useful Life” (2010), part of the “Global Lens 2011” series at the Museum of Modern Art. He’s 45 and still lives with his parents. For a quarter of a century he’s been a programmer — and devoted employee — at Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo, the kind of theater I’d frequent. He also has a radio show devoted to movies. Clearly, his life is obsessed with cinema — the good stuff, not Hollywood junk. Then the unthinkable happens. The art house loses its sponsor and shuts down (in the middle of a Manoel de Oliveira retro,...
- 1/9/2011
- by By V.A. MUSETTO
- NYPost.com
Uruguayan filmmaker Federico Veiroj was born in Montevideo in 1976. In 2000 he obtained a Degree in Social Communication at the Catholic University in Montevideo, coursing one semester at Vcu (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA). He has been directing and producing short-films since 1996. He has also worked as an actor in many Uruguayan short-films and as script supervisor in Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's features 25 Watts and Whisky. He has followed up his first feature film Acné with the cinephilic valentine A Useful Life (La vida útil, 2010).
A Useful Life was the first film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival I heard applauded at its press screening, confirming as Diana Sanchez had written in her program capsule that "for anyone who loves cinema in its purest form, this film will be a revelation." As Sanchez synopsized: "Federico Veiroj's thoughtful and delicate second feature contemplates the value of outmoded occupations with this evocative (and alarming!
A Useful Life was the first film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival I heard applauded at its press screening, confirming as Diana Sanchez had written in her program capsule that "for anyone who loves cinema in its purest form, this film will be a revelation." As Sanchez synopsized: "Federico Veiroj's thoughtful and delicate second feature contemplates the value of outmoded occupations with this evocative (and alarming!
- 10/1/2010
- MUBI
0204 A Useful Life (Federico Veiroj, Uruguay)
Should we be worried, or at the very least troubled and sad, that the amount of melancholy homages to dying film theaters keep coming? (Or perhaps even sadder, the films either die at the box office or aren’t even picked up for distribution, some kind of horrible irony.) Federico Veiroj’s wonderfully trim and sensitive record of working at a place—and that place happens to be a cinema—is another elegiac entry in a micro-genre being slowly carved out by such filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and Lisandro Alonso (Fantomas) which explore the soon-to-be-abandoned spaces that will soon be inhabited only by the ghosts of cinema. Distinctly ungeeky in its cinephilia, A Useful Life, like the aforementioned films, upends the sentimental nostalgia of so many homage a cinema by being itself rather than a love letter to something else. The director’s personality is felt,...
Should we be worried, or at the very least troubled and sad, that the amount of melancholy homages to dying film theaters keep coming? (Or perhaps even sadder, the films either die at the box office or aren’t even picked up for distribution, some kind of horrible irony.) Federico Veiroj’s wonderfully trim and sensitive record of working at a place—and that place happens to be a cinema—is another elegiac entry in a micro-genre being slowly carved out by such filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and Lisandro Alonso (Fantomas) which explore the soon-to-be-abandoned spaces that will soon be inhabited only by the ghosts of cinema. Distinctly ungeeky in its cinephilia, A Useful Life, like the aforementioned films, upends the sentimental nostalgia of so many homage a cinema by being itself rather than a love letter to something else. The director’s personality is felt,...
- 9/13/2010
- MUBI
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