Film
Jill Chuah Masters
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and was nominated for an Oscar. Satrapi adapted and co-directed both films. She also wrote and illustrated the comic books on which they were based. Over the past ten years, Satrapi has parlayed her success as a cartoonist into a formidable career as a filmmaker. Her latest film is her biggest. Radioactive is a wide-ranging biopic about the life of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme d’Or at Cannes two years ago, has made a distinctive move away from his native environment – and, no less importantly, language: apart from a few scenes played in English, this is a French-language piece – in a film that catches the tone and nuances of French cinema with a finesse that’s as delightful as it is convincing.Occasionally it feels Read more ...
graham.rickson
Humphrey Bogart. John Huston. Gina Lollobrigida. Peter Lorre. Truman Capote! What could possibly go wrong? There’s the screenplay for starters: Capote gets top billing, and I’d long understood that he and Huston together wrote 1953's Beat the Devil on the hoof, script pages being typed up only minutes before they were handed to the cast. Huston adapted a novel by journalist Claude Cockburn, whose late son Alexander later complained that fans of the film “professed to find evidence of Capote’s mastery in every interstice of the dialogue… but his contribution was limited to some concluding Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Run is the story of disgruntled 36-ish Finnie (Mark Stanley), a big, dour worker in a fish processing plant in the Aberdeenshire port of Fraserburgh – writer-director Scott Graham’s hometown. Long married to his onetime high-school sweetheart Katie (Amy Manson), and the father of twentyish Kid (Anders Hayward) and adolescent Stevie (Scott Murray), Finnie wants to get the hell out – or he thinks he does. At its core, Run is about being mature enough to recognize your glass is half full.The film completes Graham’s trilogy about ordinary people yearning to escape their constricted lives. Like Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal, autistic five-year-old son and the kinds of friends who get him into trouble. Chief among them is Dympna (Barry Keoghan, in a wholly chilling performance), the heir apparent to the local drug-dealing Devers clan. Dympna exploits Arm’s pugilism to add muscle to his verbal threats. Violence is the Devers’ modus operandi and Calm with Horses veers Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
When the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison died last year, it was a chance to celebrate the remarkable life of a storyteller who shook the literary establishment. Her work, including her debut novel The Bluest Eye, broke radical new ground in depicting African American life. Now her life is the subject of a new documentary directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.This is a documentary that brims with love and admiration for Morrison’s work and life. All the critical biographical details are correct and present. Still, Greenfield-Sanders’ film is much more than a tick box Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Created in the mould of Made in Dagenham and Pride, Philippa Lowthrope offers up a cheery, kitschy British comedy centred around the 1970 Miss World Contest that was disrupted by feminist protests. Leading this crowd-pleaser are Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jesse Buckley. Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe divide their screenplay across the trio, but the central perspective is that of Knightley’s character Sally Alexander. As a young mum trying to make it as a mature student, her battles with the prevailing patriarchy are given a stiff kick when she meets Buckley’s Jo Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final sequence of Levan Akin’s coming-of-age drama And Then We Danced is as gloriously defiant a piece of dance action as anything you’ll remember falling for in Billy Elliot.Merab, the film’s youthful dancer protagonist (played by Levan Gelbakhiani, pictured below, in his first screen role) has been through a lot by then – the trials of first love, exacerbated by the realisation that he’s gay – and those closing minutes see him asserting his right to be who he is at an audition that pits him against his highly conservative surroundings.It’s a clash of values in every sense. The Georgian Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a scarily prescient scene at the start of Henry Cass’s 1950 black comedy Last Holiday, a village surgery’s waiting room crammed with coughers and wheezers. Poor George Bird (Alec Guinness) is a tad under the weather too, but being mistakenly diagnosed with the fatal Lampington's Disease by an overworked GP proves to be a life-changer.Bird gleefully resigns from his job selling farming machinery, cashes in his savings, buys a second-hand Saville Row suit and heads off to an upmarket seaside hotel to enjoy his final few weeks in comfort. Under threat of death, Bird at last feels alive. Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Welcome to New Mushroomton: a fantasy land that’s forgotten itself. This is how we’re introduced to Pixar’s Onward, which is set in a Dungeons & Dragons daydream of suburbia. Director Dan Scanlon’s film is a tribute to his late father, but it begins with a separate elegy. “Long ago,” we’re told, “the world was full of wonder.” Until the day that convenience killed magic — electricity was invented, spells cast aside. Today’s mythical creatures have become ordinary: trolls run tollbooths, gnomes are garden-variety.Such is life for Onward’s heroes, the elven Lightfoot family. There’s meek Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
The Photograph, from writer-director Stella Meghie, tells twin tales. The first is all flashback and follows Christine (Chanté Adams, pictured below with Y'lan Noel), a young photographer balancing love and ambition. The second follows Christine’s daughter Mae (Issa Rae), who’s getting to grips with Christine’s death when Michael (Lakeith Stanfield) approaches her about her mother’s work. Soon, the narratives weave together: two love stories are set in train.The Photograph gives you its moral in the opening clip. “I wish I was as good at love as I am at working,” says Christina, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a lot of plucky British charm to Military Wives, from Peter Cattaneo, the director who won the nation's heart with his debut film The Full Monty over two decades ago. His latest offering, starring Kristen Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, has much in common with his first film - a rise-and-fall tale with plenty of comedy - but this time round features a predominantly female cast and is based on a true story.Many will remember the Military Wives Choir, who had a number one hit in 2011 with ‘Wherever You Are’. Cattaneo uses their story as a springboard for his own fictional Read more ...