Sightseers
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“Someone Who’s Arrogant Who’s Being Killed:” Ben Wheatley on Sightseers
Ben Wheatley first gained attention with a nine-second video clip that went viral in the pre-YouTube era. In “Cunning Stunt,” a man successfully jumps over a moving car, celebrates, and is instantly wiped out by an unseen oncoming vehicle. It’s a funny, jolting gag restaged in Wheatley’s 2009 feature debut Down Terrace (a sick-funny look at a homicidal low-tier-criminal family bumping off everyone in their immediate circle). Death by vehicular homicide again makes for the first death in his latest film Sightseers. Chris (Steve Oram) just wants to take his girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) on a relaxing rural trip through […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 9, 2013 -
Parting Shot – Ben Wheatley
Since his 2009 debut Down Terrace, a pitch-black comedy about a Brighton crime family in decline, the fearless writer/director Ben Wheatley has gripped audiences with his brutally bleak take on British life. His follow-up, the hitman horror Kill List, entered even more terrifying territory, but Wheatley is now back to comedy with his third feature, Sightseers. After playing at Cannes, Toronto and Sundance, Sightseers hits U.S. screens this spring through IFC Films. It may be his lightest work yet, but Sightseers’ subject matter is still pretty grisly by normal standards: It’s a blood-soaked romcom about two vacationing 30-something lovers (co-writers […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 17, 2013 -
TRAILER WATCH: BEN WHEATLEY’S “SIGHTSEERS”
Over the past few years, Ben Wheatley has emerged as a distinctive and deliciously dark voice in British cinema, with his first two features, Down Terrace and Kill List, rightly getting excellent reviews. His third film, Sightseers, premiered at Cannes in May, where it was picked up for U.S. distribution by IFC Films, and I’m really looking forward to checking it out. I’m sadly not attending Toronto next month, where Sightseers will play, but look forward to hear the word on it from those attending. For now, this NSFW-ish trailer — via The Guardian‘s website — will have to sate my […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 28, 2012 -
LOCARNO CRITICS NOTEBOOK #2
Philosophical musings on the nature of time, an unlikely friendship between a sexy Cali chick and an elderly woman, a bizarrely fast-forwarded comical look at a very sad life, and an indictment of systemic oppression in China: these are the subjects of the four films from Locarno’s main competition (“Concorso internazionale”) that I’ve caught over the past few days. First on the docket is Peter Mettler’s intriguing but disappointing—relative to his other work, at least—The End of Time, an epic non-narrative film about the multitude of perspectives that render an objective definition of linear time meaningless. At times expressive and […]
by Adam Cook on Aug 8, 2012
