Film
Tom Baily
Alexander Tolotukhin’s debut film places the viewer into a microcosm of the first world war and frames the experience with a peculiar musical device. Spliced between grainy images of trenches, artillery strikes and field hospitals are shots of a contemporary orchestra preparing and then performing the soundtrack to the film. It is as though the tragedy of war is being dramatised and memorialised at the same time.The narrative follows a small Russian regiment as they prepare defensive strongholds against an oncoming German battalion. During an early gas attack, the main character Alexey ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Harvey Weinstein is never mentioned in The Assistant, but the former movie mogul and convicted rapist looms large over this savagely relevant drama, which offers a vivid picture of what life might have been like for every one of the employees – male as well as female, victim or no – trapped in Weinstein’s evil little world. Kitty Green’s film could be viewed as the indie counterpart to the recent Bombshell, which was first out of the blocks in the aftermath of #MeToo. Where Bombshell was a glossily-packaged, all-star satire, The Assistant is low-budget, low- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The great Chilean director Pablo Larraín specialises in dark psychological reflections on the past, notably his trilogy of Chilean dictatorship dramas – Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No – and his English-language debut about the personal aftermath of the JFK assassination, Jackie.So Ema is a departure, a contemporary story, focused primarily on young people and with a familiar topic: parenthood. It’s looser, sexier, more playful than his other films. What remains, though, is the narrative invention, Larraín’s penchant for the diabolical twist, and the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Justice and the truth run on parallel lines in Anatomy of a Murder. If they converge at all, which is debatable, it's not because the moral order demands it, but because the workings of the law allow for that possibility. The outcome of Otto Preminger’s noir-tinged 1959 courtroom drama depends on which of two opposing attorneys has the pragmatism and cunning to prevail: James Stewart’s Paul Biegler, a former district attorney who favours fly-fishing over maintaining his practice in fictitious Iron City in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or George C Scott’s Claude Dancer, a slick operator Read more ...
David Nice
There are bad times just around the corner for the characters of Babylon Berlin, though 1929 is grim enough. Focusing on the moment to take away the easy option of hindsight for the viewer and making its vast line-up, played by actors of supreme skill and nuance, deeply sympathetic or obnoxious according to the role, this extravaganza is much more about the gritty reality than the glamour of all those dances on the volcano. Not that there aren't glittering, decadent club sequences, but the harsh facts behind them never escape the directors' eyes."Directors", because there are three of them, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is what Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame co-creator Joe Russo and his Thor, Chris Hemsworth, did next. It’s a gritty solo project after the Avengers band broke up, attempting to recreate the lean ethos of a Steve McQueen action pic in contemporary Bangladesh.Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) is a burnt-out, maybe suicidal mercenary, haunted by his dead son, and happiest drunkenly lazing with mates in his (and Hemsworth’s) native Oz. When an assignment to retrieve an Indian drug dealer’s kidnapped son from a Dhaka rival goes disastrously wrong, he has to extract the boy past a city full of corrupt Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When Sea Fever premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, no one could have guessed its story about an Irish fishing trawler attacked by a giant jellyfish would in one respect prove prophetic. Toward the end of writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s low-key horror movie, self-quarantining becomes a bone of contention for what’s left of the crew. The creature latches on to the boat with its ghostly white limbs, turning patches of the hull into mush with its slime and spreading a lethal parasitic infection that plays havoc with victims’ eyes.However, no blame Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Oliver Hermanus’ potent fourth feature Moffie certainly has a controversial film title. A homophobic slur, it can be translated from Afrikaans as "faggot". If you were to see buses with film posters emblazoned with the title in translation, there might rightly be cries of outrage.But the charged choice of title is not unwarranted. The word rings throughout the script, but without the viewer becoming desensitised to its poisonous quality. It lashes like a whip every time. The power of Hermanus’ film comes through a drama that is charged with fear and hatred. Rendered as a tense Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Early in The Scar (1976), the opening film in Arrow Academy’s Cinema of Conflict limited edition quartet, Stefan Bednarz (Franciszek Pieczka) requests a partial reshoot of what is to be his first interview as the newly appointed director of a large chemical factory, built in his hometown of Olechów. “This is not a feature film … no second takes”, comes the reply, unheard by Bednarz, from the journalist and filmmaker behind the camera. The Scar is, of course, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s very first feature-length film, this ultimately inconsequential scene a telling precursor of what would emerge as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“They always try to break you down when you’re 17,” says queen bee Selah (Lovie Simone) in Tayarisha Poe’s impressive directorial debut. As leader of the Spades, one of the five Mafia-style ruling factions in the exclusive Haldwell boarding-school in Pennsylvania, Selah, with her waist-long braids and inscrutably cool managerial style, seems unbreakable. But not so fast. Here comes new girl Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), her sweet-faced nemesis.As a high-school movie, this is some way from Lady Bird, Waves or Mean Girls, though perhaps elements of those are at play, as are shades of Donna Tartt’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are quite a few good things to be said for Julien Leclerc’s Earth and Blood. It’s a terse and uncluttered thriller which makes full use of its main location, a battered old sawmill in the midst of a dank expanse of forest, and Leclerc has rustled up a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of gangsters led by the intimidating Adama (Ériq Ebouaney). Best of all is his leading man Saïd, played as the acme of strong and silent by Sami Bouajila, a Leclerc regular who also appeared in the director’s recent pieces The Crew and The Bouncer.In fact Leclerc’s opening scene might be a little too good, since Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Deep from the heart of Trumpland comes Cuck, a deeply unpleasant film about a totally repellent character. Directed and co-written by Rob Lambert, the film opened simultaneously last autumn in the States with Joker, with which it shares an overlapping interest in societal outsiders pushed to the brink and beyond by their pathologies. Weirdly, too, both movies feature ailing mums who demand to be bathed by their emasculated, increasingly unhinged sons – parts taken by Frances Conroy in Joker and a take-no-prisoners Sally Kirkland this time out. (Onetime Oscar nominee Kirkland also gets a Read more ...