Film
Saskia Baron
It’s a brave film distributor who releases a documentary about an American journalist in the UK at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic, so first salute goes to Eve Gabereau at Modern Films for giving Raise Hell a proper launch. The late Molly Ivins was a hugely popular figure in the US, her witty, acerbic political columns were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, but she’s practically unknown in Britain. It’s impossible to think of an equivalent figure here, unless you imagine The Guardian’s Marina Hyde crossed with Jo Brand.Janice Engel’s highly enjoyable Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Towards the end of this new documentary, an account of how he recorded his new album Letter to You at his home studio in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen delivers a eulogy to the E Street Band. “The greatest thrill in my life is standing behind that microphone with you guys behind me,” he tells his gnarled old troupe, as they near the completion of the album (it took them four days, all of them playing live in the studio).Then, over a snowy winter landscape shot from a slow-flying drone in the rich monochrome that’s the movie’s trademark, Bruce adds a kind of valediction to life itself, mulling Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider was a film of rare honesty and beauty. Who would have thought she’d be able to top the power of that majestic docudrama? But with Nomadland she has.To call it a loose adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, isn’t quite right. That book profiled many eccentric characters who have rejected capitalist America and hit the road to live a freer and perhaps more noble way of life. Free from the constraints of modern living they’ve adopted something that echoes the spirit of the first pioneers. In the film, Zhao mixes fact with Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Shot across a period of five years, David Lynch’s creepy debut feature Eraserhead (1977) follows the story of Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, an employee at a print factory in a quiet, unnamed town. Henry arrives home one evening to a missed telephone call from a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house. Once he arrives, Mary’s mother breaks the news that her daughter has given birth to a baby, and Henry is the father.“They’re still not sure it is a baby!” If the premise sounds innocuous enough, Mary’s tortured reply sets the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Ronnie Scott was a remarkable man: “Jazz Musician, Club Proprietor, Raconteur and Wit, he was the leader of our generation,” reads the memorial to him at Golders Green Crematorium. Oliver Murray’s documentary film Ronnie’s is an affectionate and portrait of him and of the jazz club he founded.It was Ronnie Scott’s trips to New York as a member of the dance bands on the transatlantic liners (the musicians known as “Geraldo’s Navy”) that crystallised the idea in his mind to start a club run by the instrumentalists themselves, to play the bebop music they had heard on 52nd Street. An ill-starred Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1956, J. Lee Thompson’s Yield to the Night is remembered by many for what it isn’t, namely a fictional retelling of the events leading to Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955. Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger told that story in 1985 with Miranda Richardson in the lead role. Thompson’s star, Diana Dors, stated that the film "wasn’t about Ruth Ellis at all. Everybody thinks it was but the script was written two years before she committed the murder.” The screenplay was co-written by Thompson’s wife Joan Henry, a former debutante who had spent eight months in Holloway Prison for fraud. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Thank you, Shepherd, for allowing us to be your wives. Come down upon me and fill me with yourself.” Collective ecstasy – and a lot of wool – is the order of the day in this cult led by Michael, aka Shepherd (Michiel Huisman; Game of Thrones; The Haunting of Hill House), a handsome, bearded chap who looks soft and likeable but has a sadistic Jesus complex. He is surrounded by adoring women (there’s a whiff of The Handmaid’s Tale in evidence) wearing coloured robes: red for wives, blue for daughters. If he’s the father of these daughters, things are even darker than they seem.Polish director Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl was brilliantly explored in last years’s HBO series, but here, prolific Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska finds an alternative purpose for the disaster. As a child Zhenia, the Ukrainian protagonist of Never Gonna Snow Again, fell under the shadow of the doomed reactor, as we see in bleak, colour-drained flashbacks. The film’s title refers, in part, to the pervasively swirling radioactive dust particles created by the catastrophe.The adult Zhenia has transported himself to Warsaw, where he works as a freelance masseur gifted with extraordinarily Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In 2012, two great Danes, director Thomas Vinterberg and actor Mads Mikkelsen, teamed up for the powerhouse drama The Hunt, about a teacher victimised by his community when wrongly accused of abusing a pupil. For their reprise, Mikkelsen again plays a teacher and is again phenomenal; though this time the film fails to deliver on its premise. Four male, middle-aged school teachers and friends are stuck in a rut: Martin (Mikkelsen) is the worst, so overcome by ennui that he barely speaks to his wife and kids, and has completely lost the trust of his history students; sports master Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s fair to say that the idiosyncratic, surrealist films of Roy Andersson are not everyone’s cup of tea. Whether you find his films impregnable or incisive, it’s impossible to argue with the artistic imprint the Swedish auteur has had on European cinema. Now at the age of 77, he has made his last film, About Endlessness. Accompanying this apparent final feature is an insightful documentary from Fred Scott, which examines the artistic process of the director as he moves towards retirement. The danger of such projects is that they can feel like a tagged-on "making-of’" featurette. This is Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had watching Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a mature couple pootling around the UK in their humble camper van. They bicker about the satnav voice, argue the merits of the shipping forecast, and both give such convincing performances that you’d think they’d been together for decades. While this might all sound as comfy as an old sweater, director/writer Harry Macqueen’s (Hinterland) sophomore feature is anything but, being a tender, heartfelt drama concerning love and loss, and tackling the tough subject of dementia. Tucci is Tusker, a Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sometimes in fictional cinema, a character can seem so strong, so righteous, that you begin to doubt the reality of the piece. How can anyone be that good when faced with such hardship? Perhaps these thoughts make us feel better about ourselves, and what we do with our lives. But we can make no excuses with Time, a documentary about a woman so remarkable that it could only be true.In 1997, married couple Fox and Rob Rich had a family and a failing business. In desperation, they attempted armed robbery of a bank. Fox was incarcerated for three and a half years, and her husband was sentenced to Read more ...