The fog of war … Vladimir Svirskiy (centre) and Vladislav Abashin (right). Photograph: EPA The Ukrainian director and former documentary-maker Sergei Loznitsa scored a succès d'éstime with his first fiction feature My Joy, which was in competition in Cannes two years ago. Now he has returned with a mysterious, compelling and grim story from the Nazi-Occupied Soviet Union in 1942, shrouded in the fog of war, the fog of fear and the fathomless fog of European history – comparable, perhaps, to Elem Klimov's 1985 film Come and See.It is a second world war story about something with which few war movies concern themselves: the banal and poisonous disgrace of collaboration that the Nazis visited on every corner of the Reich. Here former Soviet commanders put ... Continue reading →
Immobile semi-sneer … Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis. Photograph: Caitlin Cronenberg/EPA David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, adapted by the director from the Don DeLillo novella, is stilted, self-important and dismayingly shallow, featuring an egg-laying cameo from Juliette Binoche, among others — although Paul Giamatti and Mathieu Amalric put some recognisable human life into theirs. As the star, Robert Pattinson's face is set in an immobile semi-sneer of super-cool unshockability. He plays Packer, a twentysomething multi-billionaire Wall Street trader, who we see riding across Manhattan in his stretch limo, having conceived a whimsical desire to get a haircut way over the other side of town. This may be an allusion to the slang for a fierce market correction — a "haircut" — because Packer's massive wager on Chinese currency ... Continue reading →
A lonely, haunted, brilliant man … John Healy of Barbaric Genius. Barbaric Genius Production year: 2010 Country: Rest of the world Runtime: 72 mins Directors: Paul Duane More on this film In 1986, Faber published The Grass Arena, a stunning memoir of life on the streets by John Healy, a former vagrant, violent criminal and tournament chess player who'd been taught the game in prison: it was a bestseller that became a film. Healy was unprepared for the whirl of celebrity, and for the letdown afterwards when Faber didn't want any more books. He began showing up at the publisher's offices and in an explosion of temper, threatened to attack everyone with an axe. Terrified executives severed relations, and Healy remained out in the cold ... Continue reading →
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