A crazy week in the life of fictional folk musician Llewyn Davis as he struggles to make it in the heady 1961 Greenwich Village folk scene.

A bildungsroman about beat era poet Allen Ginsberg in his formative college years.

Hugh Laurie stars as inspirational teacher turning on his pupils to the joys of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

This brave, mind-bogglingly horrific documentary has had jaws dropping at various film festivals around the globe.

True to its title, this film is a masterclass in storytelling.

Cate Blanchett is a force of nature in Woody Allen’s latest, which leaves viewers not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

A charming and visually appealing tale filled with energy, humour and heart - yet without a hint of sentimentality.

This latest from independent US filmmaker Noah Baumbach is a joy, which is something I never thought I’d find myself writing. Baumbach’s turf has been angsty dramas about New York intellectuals like The Squid and the Whale. His debut, Kicking and Screaming, has been his only comedy to date and that was nearly 20 years ago and more acerbically droll than infectious. This time, though, he’s teamed up with actor Greta Gerwig, his current belle, and it’s a creative marriage forged in heaven or at least the Manhattan equivalent. Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach, plays the eponymous Frances, an adorably klutzy, late 20s girl-women and aspiring ballerina, caught at that difficult moment where her career and romantic life should be taking off but just aren’t going anywhere. That doesn’t stop her from moments of giddy, child- like pleasure with best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Baumbach has made a female answer to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall as if directed by Truffaut or the Godard of Breathless, an insouciant film that blends lightness and spontaneity with everyday frustration and heartache. It may seem nobody had to work too hard to make this happy-sad soufflé, but I bet you they did. Continue reading…

  In Sofia Coppola’s based-on-a-true-story The Bling Ring, well-off LA teens obsessed with celebrities and fashion break into the homes of their tawdry idols to steal their clothes, jewellery and loose cash, and are then dumb enough to boast about it to their schoolmates. Talk about a Zeitgeist-defining tale. Had these events not really occurred, Coppola would no doubt have been accused of creating thin and unbelievably shallow characters. Adapting her script from a feature in Vanity Fair, she has however created a vividly believable Instagram shot of contemporary pop culture at its lowest ebb, her jabs at the vacuousness and narcissism of these spoilt kids’ lives coming across as sharply chiseled satire where they could easily have appeared as cheap shots. There isn’t a whole lot of plotting here, beyond a few character sketches interspersed by a series of robberies (the kids get into Paris Hilton’s home by correctly assuming she’d be stupid enough to leave a key under the mat), so at times it feels a little thin. But aided by a lively young cast (headed by ex-Harry Potter star Emma Watson), the writer-director creates a film that entertains as much as it appalls. Continue reading Get unlimited…

I knew nothing about this French drawing room farce before seeing it, yet walking out I was certain it had to be based on a successful play – and indeed it is. Making its stage origins obvious is the restricted setting, a bourgeois Parisian apartment during a calamitous dinner party, while the clue to its popularity (the film was also a big domestic hit) lies in the sheer polish of its construction, which locates it in a tradition reaching back through The Dinner Game and La Cage aux Folles to farceur Georges Feydeau. Stressed-out hosts Elisabeth (Valérie Benguigui) and Pierre (Charles Berling) find their intimate soirée going wrong the moment her crass brother Vincent (Patrick Bruel) reveals the shocking name chosen for the baby his wife Anna (Judith El Zein) is carrying. Issues of good taste and responsibility gradually give way to class prejudice and shocking revelation. Adapting their own material, directors Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patelliere keep it all moving at breakneck speed while adding necessary moments of repose, and the actors (who, with the exception of Berling, reprise their stage roles) give it their all. But while it’s always engaging and often amusing, I can’t say…

This latest from the prolific Oscar- winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) is a great primer for those who haven’t closely followed the travails of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The trouble is, they’re the people unlikely to want to see it, while those who have followed the story may find there’s too little new here to fully satisfy. There’s so much in this story – the ongoing Swedish rape case against Assange could take up an entire film on its own – that filmmakers brave enough to tackle it need to be judicious about where they focus. Gibney not only covers pretty much all of the ground, he also shoehorns in a huge amount of material on Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of the US diplomatic leaks hosted by the website to world headlines, undermining the narrative logic and pushing the duration to 130 minutes. Did we need to know about Manning’s gender identity issues in such detail? That said, the film has access to some fascinating expert witnesses and commentators, with journalists Mark Davis (SBS TV) and Nick Davies (The Guardian) and ex-CIA……

Most love stories chart the start of a relationship, but in this Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Michael Haneke charts the power of love near the end of a married couple’s lives. The film is as much about ageing and death as it is about love, and many will find it uncomfortably close to home. But the Austrian auteur (The Piano Teacher; The White Ribbon) has never been interested in giving his audience an easy ride. His concern is the excavation of difficult emotional truths, few of which have been as deep yet commonly experienced as those examined here. Veteran French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play an initially sprightly Paris couple (Isabelle Huppert makes an appearance as their daughter), retired music teachers seen near the start enjoying a classical piano recital before arriving home to discover they’ve had intruders. That’s a typical Haneke plot device, but this time more portent than threat. The couple’s true antagonist is already within: one of them is about to suffer a minor stroke. It will be the beginning of the end. Even for Haneke this is astringent stuff, light on visual flourish or narrative surprise, but driving it all are magnificent performances that cut…