Jackie Chan's Dragon Blade(Tian jiang xiong shi) Set For Early 2016 Release Watch Trailer

BFI To Release Feng Xiaogang's Back To 1942 Starring Adrien Brody, Tim Robbins, Watch UK Trailer

From acclaimed director Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock, Assembly) comes this breathtaking war epic which revisits one of the most catastrophic periods of 20th-century Chinese history – the famine in Back to 1942 will be released by the BFI on 23 February 2014 on both DVD and Blu-ray with additional special features.

Henan Province during the 1942 Sino-Japanese War. Previously unavailable in the UK,

Zhang Guoli stars as Master Fan, a wealthy landlord who loses everything when he and his family flee their famine-stricken hometown. Academy Award-winner Adrien Brody (The Pianist) co-stars as a courageous American journalist who encounters the horrors of the famine first-hand and endeavours to enlist relief-aid from the Chinese government and expose the plight of the Henan refugees.

Awe-inspiring action and intelligent characterisation combine to masterful effect in this explosive blockbuster.

Back to 1942 was screened at BFI Southbank last February, attended by director Feng Xiaogang, ahead of the major BFI season A Century of Chinese Cinema.



Back To 1942 will arrive in UK on DVD&Blu-ray on 23rd February and we hope to review this closer to release. The film Guoli Zhang, Hanyu Zhang, Wei Fan and of course Hollywood Stars Adrien Brody, Tim Robbins.

Pre-Order/Buy Back To 1942 (Blu-ray Edition which comes a host of extras  which include original trailers, promoreel, a couple of short features. The blu-ray also exclusively have 2 extra features which give a running time of  80 minutes  between them.

Film Review - The Grand Budapest Hotel

Genre:
Comedy, Drama
Distributor:
Fox Searchlight
Rating: 15
Release Date:
7th March 2014 (UK)
Director:
Wes Anderson
Cast:
Tony Revolori, Ralph Fiennes, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe
A writer does not find their story, instead the story finds its writer. A fresh concept for Wes Anderson's new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but ultimately his most ambitious.

The complex structure starts off with a young girl opening up a novel – in the cemetery where its author is buried- named after the eponymous hotel. Cut to 1985, where the acclaimed writer, played by Tom Wilkinson, recalls his stay within the hotel of the film/novel in 1968. Now performed by Jude Law, the nameless writer meets and dines with the establishment owner, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who shares his personal memories of being a lobby boy during the hotel's heyday before Communism led to its demise. Cue 1932, Moustafa's tale conjures up a pink mansion, nestled within the snow-capped hills of the fictional European country of Zubrowka. From there, a young Moustafa- known as Zero (newcomer Tony Revolori)- is trained under the efficient and titular concierge, Gustave (Ralph Fiennes). With an admiration of the very elderly and wealthy Madame D (Tilda Swinton), her sudden and curious death (murder?) and bequeathing of the priceless painting, Boy With Apple, snowballs into a caper consisting of heists, screwball set-pieces, prison breaks and shootouts.

Immense in its staging, the film packages all of Anderson's recognisable directorial flourishes on a remarkable scale. Although part of Anderson's recognition comes from the use of meticulous framing devices and distinctive colour schemes being combined with lead characters who are in some way fractured or grieving, it is obvious that the intricate design of the fictional doll-house setting of 1930s Zubrowka totally engulfs these characters and any sense of their development. With the intense pink and red colour scheme of the hotel itself, alongside layered and skilful choreography throughout, the huge cast of characters can't help but become mere paper-thin caricatures, within an extraordinarily detailed picture-book fantasy. Although many detractors of Anderson would argue this has been standard practice throughout the director's career, he actually uses this to his advantage. Unlike previous works within his writing and directing canon, Anderson abandons his particular motif of opening a book to a cast of characters, opting to focus on the process of how they are found. It's this idea which makes the moments within the hotel's decaying walls in 1968 particularly interesting and thoughtful. The dinner which the nameless writer and older Zero share injects the film with the appropriate thematic weight which could have gone un-noticed within the melee of the 30s set action. With the idea of how memories and recollections can dissolve with the passage of time, Anderson's typical use of nostalgia looms over the film. Within the walls of this once fine hotel there are now only ceiling cracks and scattered memories.

This section of the film allows Anderson to get away with being caught up in constructing lavish set-pieces, rather than actually developing his characters. Made up of a humongous cast of regulars and new faces alike, what ultimately separates them from each other is brief screen-time and an amusing mannerism. Ralph Fiennes's performance of Gustave may be entertaining with his equally eloquent and filthy world view, however, his character holds no sense of memorable depth when compared to Anderson's previous creations, such as Max Fisher (Rushmore) or Steve Zissou (The Life Aquatic). Yet, this is why the film could be Anderson's most ambitious work. Though a tad slight, the madcap qualities of the characters make for charming creations. A scene in which all concierges from adjoining Grand Hotels assemble to save Zero and Gustave is not only humorous in its presentation of hospitality being an institution, but one of the film's most memorable uses of screwball comedy with an ensemble cast (helped by Bill Murray and other Anderson veterans making an appearance). Combined with the fast pacing and tone of the overall story, the excessive quaintness and imaginative presentation does make moments of melancholy surprisingly effective. With the murmer and slight reminders of the war behind all the action, it brings a chilling sobriety into the story. Although Anderson has always created worlds which are not of our own – Zubrowka is no exception – he handles the barbaric nature of war by saying nothing about it, only showing the destruction it left behind.
Within the amusement of the re-counting of these memories, the barbaric notion of war does introduce a thoughtfully heartfelt sensibility. Like an old shoebox filled with various mementoes, Anderson uses this relic of a hotel hotel to establish how certain surprises within an individual's lifetime can go un-noticed. It's only with the recollection of conflict on a much grander scale that you understand the senseless grief and bitter life-lessons that it could bestow on somebody as apparently insignificant as a lobby-boy.

Similar to the old ruin of the Grand Budapest, Anderson's eighth feature may not be completely perfect at first glance. However, the tales buried within it unveil a timeless joy, completely enthralling you before dragging you back into reality.

★★★☆☆

David Darley

Detachment DVD Review

Rarely does a film attack nuanced and complex institutions like America’s educatory system with such brazen, cursory detail and still get away with it. But with justified vitriol, attitude and a certain amount of first-hand authority, director Tony Kaye together with former public school teacher-now-writer Carl Lund find the right kind of brittle, agitated tone to carry through their sweeping messages and moral outrage.

Kaye, whose last widely-released work was the 2006 abortion documentary Lake of Fire, presents his argument this time around not merely through a convincing display of facts. Detachment instead stabs at an ill-defined place somewhere between case study and crucible, mashing up complementary elements of (presumably) first hand accounts, stories heard through the grapevine, and highly sensationalised fictions in order to create a scatterbrained launching pad for discussion, interrogation and reflection.

This obtuse handling of artifice is immediately realised from the opening, as slices of talking-head interviews with real teachers, mostly focusing on those who fell into the profession as opposed to worked towards it, are intercut with the fictional interjections of Adrien Brody, who may or may not be in character as English substitute teacher Henry Barthes (a possible nod to French social theorist Roland Barthes?). Both an affront to the fourth-wall and harbouring little narrative connectivity to the rest of the plot — other than to get the analytical ball rolling: why do we teach? — it’s the first highfalutin tic in a film full of stylised asides and visual experimentations: hand-drawn chalkboard animations, flashy montage cuts and hallucinatory flashbacks filmed in Super 8 weave in and out of Henry’s reality, mirroring the fractured and volatile state of his existence.

A belaboured point is made that his profession as a substitute teacher is in fact a manifestation of the emotional conflict that defines him, with his innate desire to educate and heal being sullied by an unwillingness to form any meaningful long-term connections — something which is eventually challenged by a chance meeting with an underage prostitute (Sami Gayle), who inadvertently talks Henry into a surrogate father/daughter relationship. Lund also attempts, through Camus-quoting epigraph, to position Henry as a character cursed with inconsolable pain and boundless empathy, and consequently he drifts throughout the film like a lost messiah.

Charting a three week teaching assignment at a bottom-of-the-barrel public school in Queens, home to the district’s ineducable cast-offs, Detachment pits Henry against a hellish gauntlet of violent students, inattentive classrooms, suicidal outcasts, and hilariously unhinged co-workers, each demanding of a particular subset of Henry’s skills (of which he doles out with almost superhuman patience). Though when the working day is done, his personal life is revealed to be just as strenuous, with episodic visits to an ailing grandfather becoming a major source of backstory for his embattled psychology.

Henry Barthes is a testament to the high-strung duties of the profession; his perpetually sorrowful brow is but a small sign of the overwhelming tax on humanity for which the daily grind demands. Brody, as always, plays the part with a physical vulnerability and personable softness. When battling profanity-spitting bullies with charismatic cool in his disobedient classroom, it’s easy to see why students such as the lonely Meredith (Betty Kaye) would find him so appealing.

The curiously one-dimensional, worst-case-scenario depiction of the school, however, as well as the constant threat of violence, death and suicide bubbling away in the undercurrent, smacks of dramatic exaggeration, and it will undoubtedly be up to the viewer to decide whether Kaye errs too much on the side of hyperbole to get his point across. However, in a world where the life and death consequences of abused and neglected teenagers are all-too-often, tragically literal, Kaye’s uncompromising approach feels all the more due.

Not simply relegated to the issues that arise within classroom walls, Detachment also takes more general shots at generational malaise, parental failings, bureaucracy, bullying and the grand notion of what it means to advance as a human species, often leaving many more troubling questions than answers in its wake. Culpability and responsibility are tantamount concerns, and neither writer nor director is shy to place blame on profit-driven advisory boards, or the occasional buck-passing parent; one memorable sequence involving a fruitless Parent-Teacher Night sees exactly zero parental attendees throughout the whole school, which seems like a comically unrealistic exaggeration, even for this film. But whether you lament its sometimes reductive nature, it’s hard to fault the anger from which it stems, nor the sheer ambition upon which it’s built.

Though many may take issue with the way Kaye strikes viscerally and unrelentingly — his vision of a filth-ridden, after hours Brooklyn may bring to mind Travis Bickle’s repulsive vision of ‘70s Manhattan, and you start to wonder if Henry will, too, wish for a Biblical flood to wash it all away — Detachment feels like the result of years of righteous, pent-up anguish, spilling from the gut.


—Pierre Badiola

★★★½☆

Rating: 15
DVD/BD Release Date: 21 January 2013 (UK)
Director: Tony Kaye
Writer: Carl Lund
Cast: Adrien Brody, Sami Gayle, Christina Hendricks, Marcia Gay Harden, James Caan, Lucy Liu

Buy Deteachment: DVD/ Blu-ray

REVIEW: Detachment

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