Film
Helen Hawkins
The latest brainwave of director Richard Linklater is wonderfully simple: don’t do another remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film, A bout de souffle (1959), make a movie about the making of the film that nails what the movement he helped launch, the nouvelle vague, stood for. And make it with a French cast and crew.The result is a film that’s a must-see for all lovers of the original. This isn’t pastiche, it’s an academically sound love letter to the nouvelle vague and all who sustained it. Linklater carefully captions these contributors on their first appearance. The resemblances in some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The typical Jason Statham character is a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, maybe as a hitman, a safe-cracker or a former member of some special forces unit. Statham knows what he’s good at, and it’s provided him with a modest living (he’s said to be worth $100m, and can command fees of $20m per film).His latest, Shelter, is a chip off the old block. Statham plays Michael Mason, a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, who lives in frugal isolation in a derelict lighthouse on a barren lump of rock in the Hebrides. He has an Alsatian dog for company, and amuses himself in a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Kangaroo has promising ingredients: a Sydney TV weather reporter accustomed to soft city life is forced to reconsider his priorities (what, no sparkling Icelandic water or spa treatments?) when stranded in the Outback.Cuddly joeys abound and there’s plenty of silliness and slapstick – a boat race in the desert, for example – as well as a muscular boxing kangaroo called Roger (CGI is involved here).Chris Masterman (Ryan Corr; House of the Dragon) is desperate to find fame and host his own show. His moment comes when he rescues a baby dolphin that’s languishing in the shallows on Bondi beach. Read more ...
Miriam Figueras
The British film industry of the 1950s underwent intense financial pressure. Audiences were changing and diminishing, and earlier attempts to protect domestic production had often backfired, exposing just how fragile local filmmaking had become and how increasingly dependent it was on American money.To slow the drain of dollars overseas, US studios were encouraged to reinvest their UK profits locally. Columbia arrived later than most but, once established, the studio built a web of partnerships that fused Hollywood star power and production methods with British locations, writers, directors, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a tasteful but somewhat unmoving adaptation of writer Helen MacDonald’s memoir, which in 2014 won the Samuel Johnson and Costa book prizes. MacDonald was an academic lecturing in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, when their father, Alisdair MacDonald the press photographer, died suddenly. Grieving and inspired by their shared love of observing birds, MacDonald bought a wild goshawk and brought it home. The writer named the bird Mabel and painstakingly trained it to fly to the hand and hunt. The resulting book elegantly interweaves a meditation on loss Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lionel (Paul Mescal; played as a child by Leo Cocovinis) has perfect pitch and is able to name the note his mother coughs each morning. He can harmonise with the barking of the dog across the field. “Early on I thought everyone could see sound.” Sounds bring shapes, colours, tastes too: “B minor and my mouth turned bitter.”Directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie; Living), The History of Sound, adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story about a gay couple in the 1920s, starts promisingly but its tone is too tasteful and restrained and its faded painterly palette of brown and white, though Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
To the rich but faintly melancholy strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 23, the latest release from Korean director Park Chan-wook sets up its protagonists for us, a carefree family enjoying a barbecue in their garden, with a mischievous ironic tone from the outset.The music suggests refined, portentous emotions, far from the mundane domesticity of the scene before us. The father, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun, pictured below right), is almost blissed out with happiness at his good fortune: he has a sexy wife, two photogenic children, a house that once belonged to his farmer grandparents, a long Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab caused an international outcry at last year's Venice film festival – a fact that the Oscar-nominated Tunisian director prefers to play down. "I'm a director. I don't usually like to talk about my films," she said. But this time was different. There was an unusually heavy burden of responsibility.Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, the film was inspired by tragic real events. On 29 January 2024, Palestinian Red Crescent staff received an emergency call from Gaza. A five-year-old girl called Hind Rajab was trapped in her aunt and uncle's car, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Juraj Herz’s acclaimed dark comedy The Cremator proved too much for post-1968 censors, the film withdrawn from circulation in 1973 and banned until 1990. While several prominent Czech directors left the country after Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague, Herz stayed put, shrewdly realising that making "genre" films allowed him to tackle challenging subjects without much state interference. Released in 1971 and adapted from a novel by Jaroslav Havlícek, Oil Lamps opens in a cosy theatre on the very cusp of the 20th century, one affluent audience member confidently predicting that the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last GP in Britain tries to heal his Rage virus-ravaged country in this sequel not only to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later but his Olympics NHS tribute. Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is civilisation’s softly spoken but ferociously principled keeper, stoking its embers even in the monstrous Infected, while confronting evil people visually and morally modelled on Jimmy Savile. We begin with 28 Years Later's flawed Scottish island redoubt behind us and only its boy Spike (Alfie Williams) going on. He’s now in the clutches of fake Satanist messiah Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Brendan Fraser’s mournful, basset-hound face finds a loving home in this affecting fable from director/writer Hikari. Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor struggling to make a niche for himself in Tokyo. He’s the definitive stranger in a strange land – though at least he can speak Japanese – and parts are few and far between (a career highlight was his flying superhero who advertises toothpaste). A solitary Phillip can often be found drowning his sorrows in local bars.But all is not quite lost. Phillip gets an offer he can’t afford to refuse when he’s approached by Rental Read more ...