This is a film that allows Danish art-rock collective Efterklang to shrug off the sterilizing influences of studio professionalism. Created in collaboration with the independent filmmaker Vincent Moon, An Island is beautifully smeared through with patches of found sound and gently pulsating images — a powerful counterpart to some very intricate chamber music. Moon has an incredible history of capturing music-making on film, best known for his ‘Take-Away Shows’ — one-take session recordings from Arcade Fire to Phoenix — for the website La Blogothèque. A similar aesthetic is present throughout An Island.

 Opening with the amplified ambient wash of the Baltic Sea, the music eventually emerges from the natural soundscape as Efterklang deliver an acoustic rendition of ‘Raincoats’ from the back of a truck. The song fades away on an improvisational tangent — all meandering percussion suspended over loose vocals. At the film’s heart is a nighttime performance of ‘Alike’, finding a concentrated intimacy in the musicians’ old rehearsal shed amidst fragile violin lines and singer Casper Clausen’s agile shading. Certainly the pop stylings of Efterklang’s latest record Magic Chairs, which provides much of the music in this film, are a step down from the classically-structured fragments of 2007’s Parades, but they haven’t lost their propensity for incredible harmonic sense. Towards the end of An Island, the musicians return to their old school to perform ‘Me Me Me The Brick House’, underlining the great sense of community running through the band’s musical projects.

 Efterklang’s early musical steps quickly drew comparison to Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós, presumably on the strength of the Nordic connection and the latter’s pretensions to the experimental. Sigur Rós successfully navigated their way to mainstream banality on the basis of their own 2007 film, Heima — one and a half hours of Icelandic landscape-porn. I did worry that Efterklang were facing their own Heima-moment this year, so it’s a relief to see that all their maverick tendencies have been preserved. What Efterklang have always excelled in is their attention to timbre. In a wonderful scene early on in the film, the band run wild in an abandoned barn, making field recordings by throwing together logs and beating wooden fencing together with scrap metal. Glorious.

5 STARS

My favourite films of the year are of a predominantly dark and twisted nature: Tyrannosaur begins with a rage-consumed alcoholic kicking his pet dog to death; Miss Bala follows the exploits of a beauty pageant contestant who becomes embroiled in gangland warfare; Snowtown delves deep into the sadistic affairs of Australia’s most notorious serial killer; and We Need To Talk About Kevin explores the repercussions of a maternal nightmare so heinous that even Polanski couldn’t fully embrace it. After leaving the screening of each one, I was forced to watch back-to-back Disney films for the next 24 hours to avoid a catatonic breakdown. 

But my fifth favourite film, starring a middle-aged ice curling champion with a debilitating case of OCD, seems disproportionally more gleeful by comparison. And yet it never received anywhere near the level of acclaim the previous four attained. Maybe that’s because it’s not the style of ‘misery porn’ so adored by the vast majority of film critics who wish to seek assurance that their own solitary lives do not resemble such harrowing portraits of poverty and despair. Fortunately for me, this Norwegian tale of misadventure (King Curling) does not try to spoon-feed any profound moral lessons or emotional epiphanies, but instead boasts a series of vignettes which include father-and-son Rod Stewart impersonators, a permanently harassed Pepsi deliveryman, a set of poorly executed karate kicks directed at a group of bird watchers, and the most cringe-inducing pole dance in cinematic history. It’s certainly a film that requires a positive suspension of your critical faculties, but there is a strong focus on loyalty and friendship buried beneath such farce.

The plot follows Truls Paulsen (Atle Antonsen) and his eccentric friends on a mission to overcome adversity and win the curling championships – and more importantly the prize money – so they can pay for their childhood hero’s lung operation. So, it’s somewhere between Dodgeball and The Full Monty… on ice (and steroids). I admit that it’s a well-worm formula – a group of men pulling together to compete in a tournament – so no points to Ole Endresen for a screenplay that wholly conforms to the traditional loser-to-winner template, but structural originality is never the point when it comes to slapstick comedy. Instead, the film’s humour relies on bathetic excess, the characters intoning sentiments with immensely earnest gravitas about the inherently funny-looking sport they worship. Consequently, few of the lines are funny on paper; instead, it’s the way in which the thesps deliver them with such severely straight faces that puts the material across so well. The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent; Atle Antonsen, exhibiting a deep Jack Nicholson-esque disquiet, as the menacing Trul is a standout performance, along with Linn Skaber, who shines as his frustrated, slightly demented spouse.

Reminiscent of directors like Bent Hamer and Roy Andersson, the film is full of bizarre encounters and inanely happy colours, giving the whole flavour a bubblegum perkiness which befits the story and its characters. At one point I did get the overriding feeling that Endresen was trying to didactically convey a message about drug taking – specifically, that mood enhancing pills are society’s method of unnecessary, short-term comfort… but I swiftly eschewed this attempt at moral commentary in favour of laughing at a fat man being chased down a corridor.

In this comic sense alone, it is the perfect antidote to the trying-desperately-hard-to-be-profound Oscar fodder you’ll find in almost every cinema over the coming months. So let the film critics sneer all they like: King Curling may be shallow, outrageous and essentially Dodgeball’s freak of a cousin, but my god will it make you laugh. 

Nothing appealed to me more this summer than the thought of soon seeing Michelle Williams acting as Marilyn Monroe, strolling the streets of Mayfair. What a thought, what a sight, and what a treat that this film turns out to be full of such moments! For all its mildly frustrating narrative simplicities, nothing calls for such tedious flaws to be tossed aside quite like Williams’ take on Marilyn’s adorable, irresistible laugh and smile, both of which are here in abundance.

Like most, I only know the ‘legend’ of Miss Monroe at the cost of knowing little of the woman, and I suspect My Week With Marilyn stays firmly in the former territory. This isn’t so much a biopic as a dreamy snapshot of an enigma, helped by the fact our perspective is that of a posh-boy intern called Colin who can’t quite believe his luck. There’s a dash of truth here insofar as a young boy did indeed make it onto the set for the filming of Marilyn’s only British film, his father happening to be friends with Sir Laurence Olivier (who directed and costarred in the film in question, The Prince and the Showgirl). And the film is, roughly, based on his diaries. You can’t help but feel, however, that for the sake of the pure joy of the moments it provides, there will have been an exaggeration of the extent Colin got to know her. Or, if it isn’t the filmmakers doing the truth-inflation, it will surely be the boy himself who makes up the nude swimming scene in a sun-kissed lake.

The queerness of their friendship is the reason for reservations about the film as a whole here. It starts off appearing as a clear source of humour that won’t go too far. The focus seems to be Olivier’s inability to grasp the fragile Marilyn’s insistence on using Method acting to take time to ‘feel’ her character, and the tension on set that results. But before long this becomes the backdrop, and we go from laughing at casual, flirtatious conversations between the world’s greatest sex symbol and a boy, to surprise that she is suddenly confessing all to him and demanding comfort-spooning in her bedroom. It is here that we start to doubt the film’s opening claim to be a true story. Most of its key scenes are all too conveniently between two people in private.

But perhaps the costs of this approach — namely, story-skepticism and boring-boy comments on the events unfolding around him — are made worthwhile by what they allow. Without it, maintaining the mystery surrounding Marilyn would have been harder to justify, and with the loss of that take on her we would also miss out on some delightful scenes we are willing to suspend our doubts about. If Williams wins Best Actress, it won’t be for any stand-out climactic moment in which she gets to pour her heart out. It’ll be for a sustained, quiet performance in which she has mastered all the mannerisms and perfected the posture, before capturing the cultural image of a sensitive, vulnerable, but ultimately playful soul.

3 STARS

I expected the sell-out gig to be packed with throngs of keeno teeny boppers. To my surprise, the crowd was mostly middle aged and balding. The very same bunch who get their hip-tips from the national media – not the ideal demographic.

The Vaccines swaggered on stage, like boxers to a ring: classic rock entrance song blaring out accompanied by epileptic flashing blue lights. They were very faithful to their studio album, which is an all too rare thing. But it felt a tad clinical. All had in-ear monitors, all played in perfect time and all looked like they had dollar signs in their eyes. The lead singer, Justin Young, shamelessly wore a varsity jacket with a large ‘V’ on the front and an even larger ‘THE VACCINES’ on the back. Really?

Their songs have a definite punk aesthetic: short and effective. ‘Wolf Pack’ and ‘Norgaard’ were the stand out songs from their otherwise homogenous catalogue. The reaction from the crowd was immediate, which would have been exciting were it not for the three blonde 30-somethings standing in front of me, jumping demonically and (ooh, ooh) waving their water bottles in the air (ooh, ooh) like they just don’t care. 

Support band, Howler, played a competent, but bland set. Simple re-hashings of generic indie that has been done many times before. Overall I feel that The Vaccines are doing good things for mainstream music, but they still have a way to go if they are going to be a truly impressive and original band in the studio and on the road.