Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge

The Great Gatsby

‘Romeo + Juliet’ and ‘Moulin Rouge!’ showed us that Australian director Baz Luhrmann can throw a hell of a party. Now, after the epic drabness of ‘Australia’ he pulls the stereo out of storage and does it again. The best scene in this fast and furiou...

The Eye of the Storm

British-born writer Patrick White remains Australia’s only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet the country’s film industry has largely steered clear of his dense, challenging prose. This ambitiously faithful but turgid stab at his most cele...

Something in the Air

Olivier Assayas’s ‘Something in the Air’ is a swooning and swirling but always level-headed study of the lives of a small group of suburban Parisian teenagers in the years soon after 1968. An ensemble drama with a pleasingly light touch, it looks bac...

Beware of Mr Baker

It’s refreshing to watch a music doc, especially one with such intimate access to its subject, in which barely anyone is unreservedly polite about the person in question. By most accounts, Ginger Baker – celebrated Cream drummer, horse lover, polo pl...

My Neighbour Totoro

The film that first brought Miyazaki to international attention remains an animated achievement almost without parallel. The first half delicately captures both mystery and quietness as two little girls move with their father to a remote new home in...

Benjamin Britten: Peace and Conflict

The life of composer Benjamin Britten is such fascinating documentary material. A shame then that this blend of clunky dramatic reconstruction and earnest arts-TV assessment isn’t a whole lot better. Here was a hugely significant creative figure, who...

Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD

Best Of Kendal Mountain Film Festival

Grave Of The Fireflies

A janitor rifles through the possessions of a recently deceased boy and throws out some ashes and bones from a tin. These remnants spark to life as the spirits of 14-year-old Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, who were caught in the devastating at...

Timmy Time

Mud

The Beach Boys’ feelgood jukebox standard, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ is played twice in ‘Take Shelter’ director Jeff Nichols’s third feature, amplifying the sense of sunkissed nostalgia present throughout this amiable but over-familiar coming-of-age story –...

Dr Who And The Daleks

Point Blank

British director John Boorman’s 1967 Hollywood debut (he was hired off the back of Dave Clark Five vehicle ‘Catch us if you Can’, amazingly) is a slippery beast. The story – from Donald E Westlake’s frequently adapted novel ‘The Hunter’ – is magnific...

Royal Opera House: Donna Del Lago

I'm So Excited

One litmus test for auteurism could be whether a director is able to do his or her thing in a tightly confined space. ‘Stagecoach’ and ‘Lifeboat’ are unmistakably the work of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, despite being largely confined to, well, a...

Babette's Feast

One of the few foreign language films your unadventurous grandmother might enjoy, ‘Babette’s Feast’ is a cosy, appetising but ever-so-slightly complacent period tale from 1987. In remotest 19th-century Denmark, a pair of elderly, benevolent Protestan...

Bad Education (La Mala Educacion)

Sixteen years after they became childhood best buddies, film director Enrique Goded happens to cross paths with his first love, Ignacio Rodriguez, who is now an aspiring actor. The pair agree to collaborate on Ignacio's screenplay The Visit, a largel...

The Stone Roses: Made Of Stone

The King of Marvin Gardens

In 1972, two years after their generation-defining study of masculinity ‘Five Easy Pieces’, director Bob Rafelson and star Jack Nicholson reteamed for this thematically similar but artistically inferior follow-up. We’re in Atlantic City, where mob fi...

The Gruffalo

Solartaxi: Around The World With The Sun

Globe On Screen: Henry V

The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet)

Re-release of Ingmar Bergman's 1957 fantasy starring Max Von Sydow as knight Antonius Block, who returns from the Crusades with his squire Jons, and comes face-to-face with Death. Surrounded by horrific reminders of the plague and memories of fallen...

Volver

In one of the most gorgeous images in ‘Volver’, white blossoms into crimson as a sheet of kitchen towel saturates with blood. Housework here is murder and a woman’s work is never done – not after killing, not even after dying. Almodóvar has long been...