Film
Graham Fuller
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s semi-satirical thriller The Secret Agent looks back with sorrow and ambiguous nostalgia at the Wild West that Brazil became during the 1964-85 military dictatorship. Mendonça set the film during 1977, when he was eight, and he has filtered his own 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, Armando, a passive protagonist portrayed with disarming equanimity but an undertow of sorrow by Oscar nominee Wagner Moura. A 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 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 ...
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 ...
James Saynor
“We will sacrifice our souls for you!” yells out a class of kids in The President’s Cake, nominally addressing a leader hundreds of miles away – the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein. The slogan the children are forced to spew by their paranoid teachers is, on one level, mindless enough. On another, it goes to the heart of this exceedingly good movie: How much do you have to sell your soul in a dictatorship falling apart at the seams?Set in 1990, not long before the first Gulf War, the film follows frantic days in the life of nine-year-old Lamia, who lives in a one-room wicker house on a wicker Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Emerald Fennell’s latest film begins with a sly joke. As the production company credits roll, the sound of distinctive creaking overlays them, increasing in frequency and intensity, and joined by male groans that reach a climax. She's at it again, we are being led to think, the gratuitous graphic sex.Well, yes and no. When she cuts to the visuals of the scene we have been hearing, it’s a raucous public hanging, where, as an excitable youth informs the crowd, the rope wasn’t properly placed to break the man’s neck and his slow suffocation has produced “a stiffie” instead. (Close-up of man’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Straight Story is the slowest of road movies, its elderly protagonist crawling 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin at just five miles per hour. Screenwriters John Roach and Mary Sweeney based their script closely on a true story, that of 73-year-old Alvin Straight, who made his journey riding a lawnmower upon hearing that his estranged brother had suffered a stroke. Sweeney’s then-partner David Lynch was intrigued and took on directorial duties. This is a real outlier in his output, a colleague describing it as “the one Lynch film that isn’t perverse in some way”, the finished product deemed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sexual abuse and violence, self-harm and sadomasochism, piss and postpartum blood – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water doesn’t flinch from showing the indignities, the messiness, and the trauma-induced choices made by its everywoman protagonist during her rocky journey.A rewarding experimental art house indie adapted from the novelist Lidia Yuknavich’s transgressively visceral non-linear memoir, Stewart's first full-length feature as writer-director is filtered through the stream-of-consciousness of Imogen Poots’s Lidia.The mosaicked narrative moves forward from an unfixed perspective Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s a story being repeated the world over – apex predators such as lynx, wolves and bears hunted to extinction, followed by the gradual realisation that a healthy ecosystem requires their presence.Attempts to reintroduce them have met with varying degrees of success. In Yellowstone National Park, the grey wolves released 20 years ago have proved hugely beneficial, but whenever livestock are in the picture things get messy.Two years ago in Colorado, people voted to reintroduce wolves, but local ranchers were still angered by the loss of their cattle to the predators. And plans to reintroduce Read more ...