Control in the UK.

"Ian Curtis, the frontman of the beloved post-punk British band Joy Division, has been dead 27 years, longer than he was alive, but his moment in the film spotlight has only now arrived," writes Dennis Lim in a piece on Anton Corbijn's Control and Grant Gee's documentary, Joy Division, for the New York Times. Similarly (but without the exclusive email interview with Deborah Curtis), Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times: "But why Joy Division? Why now?"

Control, set to open at the Film Forum on Wednesday, is now out and about in the UK and reaction in British papers ranges from "pretty good, but..." to euphoric:

Updated through 10/7.

"It is the best film of the year," declares Peter Bradshaw. "It all looked so vividly real to my fortysomething eye that, frankly, I thought I'd died and gone to Q-magazine-reading 50-quid bloke heaven. And when John Cooper Clarke came on playing himself, a support act to Joy Division when they were called Warsaw, I pretty well levitated out of my seat with sheer happiness, and had to be tied back down with guy-ropes. What a fantastic film this is."

Also in the Guardian: "When I was writing Control I didn't have much hope of it getting made," blogs Matt Greenhaigh. "But I knew that if by some slim chance it did get made, I wanted it to be me who wrote it. I had the emotions in place to click into where Ian was coming from - after reading Debbie Curtis's book Touching From a Distance I knew I could become Ian."

Plus, Esther Addley profiles Samantha Morton and Jason Solomons talks with Morton and Sam Riley.

"Forced to account for itself on the big screen, and to conform to such conventions as narrative and motivation, pop can look petrified, like a butterfly under glass," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "Control... largely avoids these pitfalls. The picture is directed by Anton Corbijn, the photographer whose portraits of the band contributed to their austere, Mancunian-Teutonic iconography."

Anthony Quinn in his review for the Independent (like Bradshaw's, five out of five stars):

What's mysterious is how the band found a match for [Curtis's] words in their music. Early on we see Peter Hook (Joe Anderson), Stephen Morris (Harry Treadaway) and Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson) decide to form a band after watching the Sex Pistols in Manchester, but once their brief tuneless phase as Warsaw is over, the magnificently strange Gothic of Joy Division seems to derive not from punk - or even from Iggy Pop, David Bowie or Lou Reed - but from the very clangour of the post-industrial North itself. It was surely destiny that the Mancunian impresario Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) should have signed them to a label called Factory.

Corbijn honours this creative otherness without feeling compelled to explain it, and, considering the laconic, introverted nature of Morris and Sumner, and the Salford surliness of Hooky, you sense it's an explanation worth leaving alone.

"What Control offers... is a version of A Taste of Honey or Room at the Top, a Northern 1950s kitchen-sink drama, of the kind in which Laurence Harvey excelled, whose central story is that of a vaguely moody, vaguely arty teenager whose existential aspirations are checked by the daily realities of married life," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu, who finds that "it fails to lay enough emphasis on any of the issues that would capture the band's ability to trouble and disturb even their own fans."

"There are faults in Corbijn's film which, even considering its solemn pace, could do with a few minutes' cut," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "It takes a long time for Curtis to become a musician in the beginning and then to decide that he'd had enough at the end. In between, however, this is one of the most impressive, least pretentious films about rock that has been made."

"Control is all about yesterday; it is in black and white and it is, like any good vampire movie, spookily beguiling," writes Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times.

"Superb Ian Curtis biopic Control is surely, barring some miracle, the British film of the year - indeed, one of the decade's finest," writes Neil Young.

James Christopher in the London Times: "The camerawork is astonishing. The years really do roll back. The details are as sharp as the politics."

The Chicagoist's Rob Christopher highly recommends Control.

Earlier: "Toronto. Control and Joy Division" and reviews from Cannes.

Update, 10/7: "Listening to the band's two studio albums, Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), which will be reissued on Oct. 30 by Rhino, what's most striking is how harsh the music is," writes Simon Reynolds in the NYT. "This is a sound with the mettle to match the unflinching view of the human condition presented by Mr Curtis's lyrics."

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2007 4:14 AM