Film
James Saynor
Do we really care what Hitler liked to eat? Well, here’s a film that does, so I can reveal an answer. Typical meals might have included chick pea salad with marinated courgette, pea soup with mint, or “cabbage fantasy” with cheese béchamel, followed by “his beloved apricot cake”. Of course, as every quiz expert knows, the Führer – along with having one testicle – became at some point a committed vegetarian.We watch the above dishes being queasily consumed in The Tasters, a movie about women dragooned by the Nazis into sampling Hitler’s food to protect him from poison plots and paranoia. It Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason follows up Godland with an equally striking film, this one about a moribund marriage. It’s a living album of impressions and memories, small incidents and fragmented snapshots, with no conventional narrative shape. Yet there’s a coherence and weight lent to all these disparate elements by the teasing affection of the director’s lens.The family preparing for the break-up are parents Anna (Saga Gartharsdóttir), an artist, and Magnus, known as Maggi (Sverrir Guthnason), a trawlerman, with their young family: two boys (Thorgils and Grímur Hlynsson, Pálmason’ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What a strange little film, uncertain if it’s a Hitchcockian thriller or a comedic poke at the shibboleths of psychoanalysis, A Private Life is definitively a vehicle for Jodie Foster, comèdienne. The American pulls off an impeccable accent in her first French-speaking role, playing Dr Lillian Steiner, an expat psychiatrist who treats patients from her elegant Parisian home. Unmoored by the suicide of Paula, a patient whose husband blames Steiner for prescribing the fatal pills, the doctor becomes convinced that in fact murder was the cause of death.A Private Life looks lovely, Paris Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature is a punkish, gothic, genre-dancing, feminist riot, whose verve, imagination and serious intent don’t really need the enforcement of an exclamation mark. If an extremely enjoyable film suffers from anything, it might be a tendency to overegg.This is a rare and atypically fulsome outing for The Bride herself, a macabre mate for the lonely monster, who was literally never completed in Mary Shelley’s novel, and was a mere cameo in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Here, as manifested by the astronomically ascendant Jessie Buckley, she’s front Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Scream’s commentary on and sly revival of the slasher genre was a phenomenon in the ironic Nineties. If any franchise is alive to the absurdity of six sequels it’s this one, where self-aware characters eagerly annotate evolving horror cliché. The latest “meta-slasher whodunnit”, though, as Scream (2022) handily had it, hasn’t put the requisite thought into justifying its existence.Wes Craven's original trilogy boasted bravura comic-horrific opening scenes in Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997) and confidently opened out a sleazy Hollywood back-story in the Weinstein-produced Scream 3 (2000), Read more ...
James Saynor
Cinema has a deep distrust of the devout. Even though many movie types are tied up in all sorts of personal spiritual pursuits, organised religion often gets a rough ride in Hollywood and beyond. Lately, though, characters of faith have been getting better PR. In the recent Argentine film Belén, the protagonist – a battler against abortion injustice – nods repeatedly to God. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery endorses the deep grace of a young priest as virtually its controlling idea, while even Avatar: Fire and Ash has its own woo-woo supreme being.And now there’s The Testament of Ann Read more ...
James Saynor
We’ve heard of dad rock, but how about dad techno? This Spanish movie, directed by the French-born Oliver Laxe, immerses us in one of Europe’s more curious subcultures – ravers who decamp by the horde to North Africa to party day and night in the desert. But these are not a familiar Ibiza crowd: most are 30-plus, and one or two look as though they might go back to the Second Summer of Love of the late 1980s.We’re invited to join their generous vibe, backed by a battered sound system, the odd laser and enough deep bass pulsing to rattle the roof of your local Odeon. You might feel the odd curl Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s semi-satirical new thriller looks back with sorrow and ambiguous nostalgia at the Wild West that Brazil became during the 1964-85 military dictatorship. Mendonça set The Secret Agent during 1977, when he was eight, and he has filtered his memories into its world of casual killings and endemic corruption.Fatalistic in tone, despite its leisurely pace and a gonzo horror interlude, it follows the progress of a fugitive from injustice. Widowed former university professor Armando, a passive protagonist, is portrayed with disarming equanimity but an undertow of sorrow by Read more ...
Justine Elias
When the protagonist of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You hears herself described as "stretchable, like putty”, her whole body stiffens in protest. Driven to near insanity by the demands of her mental health counselling job and her young daughter's mysterious illness, Linda is all raw nerves and quick recoil – a mother on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And who can blame her? Barely a few minutes into the movie, the ceiling of her small flat collapses in a flood of water and plaster, and that's just the start of her travails.In her first feature since Yeast (2007), writer-director Mary Bronstein Read more ...
Justine Elias
There's little reason to arrive early at the cinema these days, now that filmgoers are forced to endure as many advertisements as movie trailers. Once upon a time, though, the animated Looney Tunes were essential viewing before the main movie event. Now, 90 years after the first Looney Tunes short appeared, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig star in the franchise's first full-length feature.Surprisingly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is neither an exercise in nostalgia nor a cynical reboot, but an anarchic blast of 2D cartoon mayhem that will please adults and their kids. Even without Looney Tunes' biggest Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut plunges two young country brothers into Nineties Lagos’s joyous energy and febrile politics, as they seize a unique chance to bond with their loving but largely absent dad. Often shot at the low angles of a child’s worldview and in intimate close-ups only dimly apprehending the full picture, it is a requiem for both Nigerian hope as the 1993 election is stolen and fleeting paternal ties, and a fervent celebration of Lagos and fatherhood.We first meet 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) playing with 8-year-old Aki (real brother Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bart Layton’s class-conscious pulp fiction gives Chris Hemsworth his most convincing lead role since Thor as Mike Davis, an LA jewel thief on one last job while tentatively facing his hollow life. An all-star cast including Marvel compadre Mark Ruffalo, pictured bottom right, and Halle Berry happily sink into character parts to give the familiar heist set-up flesh and bone.Mike’s ice cool hijacking of high-end diamonds along LA's 101 freeway almost gets him a bullet right at the start. His empty, expensive apartment, glum servicing by a prostitute and hand-wringing discomfort on an actual Read more ...