Film
Tom Birchenough
“Every cliché about Hollywood is true,” director Bernard Rose remarked in 2018, at the screening Q&A of the restored version of his 1999 Ivansxtc that appears as an extra on this Arrow release – and, post-#MeToo, the film’s satire of that milieu and all its associated excesses feels as savage as ever. Its story of a talent agent felled at the height of his career by rapidly progressing cancer offered a corrosive view of the studio system seen very much from the inside, the trajectory of its protagonist seen by many at the time to have mirrored the burnt-out self-destruction of feted CAA Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Set on February 25 1964, Kemp Powers’s 2013 play One Night in Miami put newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay in a motel room with soul singer Sam Cooke, superstar NFL footballer Jim Brown and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X. The four men were real-life friends, but Powers’s account was heavily fictionalised, depicting the foursome engaged in sometimes furious debate over issues of racism, black power, politics and personal responsibility.Putting it on film (showing at the BFI London Film Festival) was a big ask for first-time feature director Regina King, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Moral reckonings don't come much more serious than the one that propels The Lie, in which a family must deal with a murder perpetrated by their daughter. Will Jay (a weary-looking Peter Sarsgaard) and Rebecca (the wonderful Mireille Enos) hand 15-year-old Kayla (Joey King) over to the authorities? Not bloody likely, and their decision leads all three down an abyss which makes for grimly compelling watching, at least until a twist ending that threatens to undo what has come before.Until that time, writer-director Veena Sud's Canadian-shot film, first seen on the festival circuit in 2018, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Hats off to the BFI London Film Festival for producing an edition – slimmed down but lip-smacking – in this most terrible, uncertain of years. And it couldn’t have opened with a better film than this blisteringly powerful, viscerally topical drama by Steve McQueen. With the Black Lives Matter movement in full voice, spurred on by another wave of police brutality against African Americans, McQueen reminds us of the UK’s own torrid record in that regard, by returning to a true story that is, thankfully, as inspiring as it is appalling.Mangrove is the first of five films the director has Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Old Dolio, the oddly named central character played, wonderfully, by Evan Rachel Wood in Miranda July’s third feature film, learned to forge signatures before she could write. “In fact that’s how she learned to write,” says her father Robert (the great Richard Jenkins) proudly.She and her parents – Debra Winger, long-haired, gaunt and limping, is Theresa, the mother – are small-time scam artists, without any outside influences or friends. They live, off-the-grid style, in a disused office in LA, sleeping among the cubicles. The office is next to a pink bubble factory, which leaks, so twice a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It only takes a few seconds of Saint Maud – dripping blood, a dead body contorted on a gurney, a young woman’s deranged face staring at an insect on the ceiling, an industrial clamour more likely to score the gates of hell than the pearly ones – to make us realise that the film’s title is a tad ironic. That irony will become even sharper, and mordantly witty, when we find that for the eponymous hospital nurse turned private carer (references no doubt fudged for the private sector), sainthood would be most welcome. “What’s the plan?” she asks of God, with whom she Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
At 93-years-old and with a career that spans nearly 60 years, David Attenborough has spent a lifetime transporting audiences from the comfort of their sofas to the dazzling, often bewildering, majesty of the natural world. Now, he offers what he calls his ‘witness statement’, a Netflix documentary that not only charts Attenborough’s remarkable career, but also how the world has changed for the worse over those years. Biodiversity is dwindling, and with it goes humanity’s future prospects. Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey for Netflix, we go from seeing Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On the Rocks has an unusual premise. Laura (Rashida Jones), a New York City novelist and mother of two young daughters, suspects her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is having an affair with a co-worker, Fiona (Jessica Henwick). Laura confides her fears to Felix (Bill Murray) and they’re soon zipping around Manhattan at night pursuing Dean and Fiona in Felix’s dyspeptic Alfa Romeo. But Felix isn’t a seedy detective who does divorce work like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown – he’s a well-off, semi-retired art dealer and, what’s more, he’s Laura’s feckless father. The seventh feature written and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much of Vitalina Varela takes place in near darkness, the lack of movement in several scenes enough to make you think you’re watching a succession of still images. Pedro Costa’s protagonists may wrestle with a multitude of intractable issues, but the warmth and humanity with which they’re portrayed is humbling. Costa’s starting point was a sequence in his previous film Horse Money, a monologue from a woman recently arrived in Lisbon from Cape Verde to attend the funeral of the husband she has not seen for several years.Here, the titular Vitalina Varela gets to tell her own story at greater Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are films to meet every taste in theartsdesk's guide to the best movies currently on release. In our considered opinion, any of the titles below is well worth your attention.Enola Holmes ★★★★ Millie Bobby Brown gives the patriarchy what-for in a new Sherlock-related franchiseEternal Beauty ★★★★ Craig Roberts's fantasy conjurs surreal images and magnetic performancesI'm Thinking of Ending Things ★★★★ Charlie Kaufman's eerie road trip through love and lossLes Misérables ★★★★★ An immersive, morally complex thriller set in the troubled suburbs of present day ParisMax Richter's Sleep ★★★★ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
An aerial shot gliding over red-streaked buttes in the Southwestern American desert picks out a man striding across the blasted terrain some miles away. He halts and the camera comes close for a montage. We see that he is middle-aged, bony, and unshaven and wears a jacket, tie and red baseball cap.He drains his water bottle and a hungry hawk settles on a rock nearby. Each unforgiving twang of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar on the soundtrack signals a crisis, but the man has only a vaguely worried expression on his face. He hasn’t realized that tramping across this death valley is bringing him no Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What news on the rialto? Not much of particular buoyancy or light in the Peter Mackie Burns film Rialto, which takes a grimly focused view of a married Irishman's struggle with his same-sex leanings. Adapted by Mark O'Halloran from his 2011 stage two-hander Trade, the movie is anchored by superb performances from a trio of talents who will be known to theatre devotees. Even so, the result feels a bit of a slog by the time this story of feelings too-long inheld and then released has reached its nicely open-ended conclusion: a bit more tonal variety here and there wouldn't have gone amiss. Read more ...