Kailey is in Toronto, Dan is in rainy Wellington and between them they review Kelly Reichardt’s “thriller” Night Moves and the dystopian nightmare of The Giver starring Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges and some kids, plus Robin Wright playing several versions of herself in Ari Folman’s The Congress.
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Has any rock group inspired – and paid for – as much cinema as the Rolling Stones? From Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil to Scorsese’s gilded concert footage for Shine a Light in 2009, the Stones have woven themselves into film history at the same time as they became rock legends. The Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter is even in the Criterion Collection and footage from it informs a central chapter in Brett Morgen’s documentary (auto)biography of the band, Crossfire Hurricane.
As the 1969 Altamont free concert deteriorates into murderous anarchy, the still-living Stones provide their own 40-year-on perspective in croaky voiceover and it’s these audio-only reminiscences that provide the main novelty of a film that – at only two hours – struggles to contain the full majesty of “the greatest rock and roll band in the world”. There’s plenty of unseen (by me at any rate) new backstage and behind-the-scenes footage too, in an intricately edited portrait which is as honest as any band-authorised and Jagger-produced documentary is likely to be.
Twickenham in 1961 might well have been the most boring place on Earth. The 60s haven’t started yet (according to Philip Larkin the decade wouldn’t start until 1963 “between the end of the Chatterley Ban/and The Beatles first LP”) but the train was already on the tracks and could be heard approaching from a distance if you listened closely enough. Middle-class teenager Jenny is studying hard for Oxford but longing for something else – freedom and French cigarettes, love and liberation.
In Lone Scherfig’s An Education (from a script by Nick Hornby; adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir), Jenny is luminously portrayed by newcomer Carey Mulligan (so adorable that if she’s ever in a film with Juno’s Ellen Page we’ll have to recalibrate the cuteness scale to accommodate them both) and she gets a hint of a way out of suburban English drudgery when she meets cool businessman David (Peter Sarsgaard) and he whisks her off her feet, to the West End and to Paris.
