Film
Adam Sweeting
Based on the book by former political prisoner Tim Jenkin, Escape from Pretoria is an intermittently engaging jailbreak tale set in South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1970s, as well as further evidence of Daniel Radcliffe’s determination to run as far as possible in the opposite direction from his past life as Harry Potter. Its only problem is a troubling case of schizophrenia, since it’s not sure whether to be a pared-down thriller or a political statement.Radcliffe plays Jenkin, who with his fellow African National Congress-supporting comrade Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber) gets arrested Read more ...
mark.kidel
King Hu is the original master of wuxia or martial arts films – visual feasts of balletic conflict and near-slapstick humour – and this 1979 film is one of his best, though perhaps less well-known than Dragon Inn (1967), A Touch of Zen (1971) and Legend of the Mountain (1979). The director's trailblazing and stylish work inspired the later renaissance of wuxia films, with Ang Lee’s masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004)The action, overflowing with complex and unfolding intrigue, takes place in 16th century Ming dynasty China, in a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Nothing you’re about to see is true,” this adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel about Australia’s iron-clad Victorian outlaw Ned Kelly declares. Justin Kurzel’s wild investigation of the Kelly myth, Australian manhood and nationhood carves out its own truths anyway.Kelly grows up in an impoverished, outback Irish family led by necessarily feral mother Ellen (The Babadook’s Essie Davis, pictured below left). This maternal Lady Macbeth is glamorous, cunning, hopelessly defiant and fearsomely vicious. First recalled by Ned pragmatically giving a blowjob to the local policeman, she later violently Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders contains many mysteries, the main one being exactly how such a strange and subversive film could have been released in 1970, so soon after the Prague Spring. That the author on whose 1935 novel the film was based was a loyal member of the Communist Party helped, avant-garde poet Vítězslav Nezval even heading the Czechoslovak government’s Film Unit in the 1950s. Splashes of blood seen dripping onto daisies signal the start of 13-year old Valerie’s transition to adulthood; what follows is a deeply peculiar, visually sumptuous fantasy.That we’re Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s hard to believe that Jesse Armstrong (Succession, Veep) co-wrote the screenplay for this feeble American remake of Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure (2014). Where Force Majeure is subtle, dark and original (never have electric toothbrushes seemed so significant) Downhill is an unfunny flop in spite of comedy stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (she’s also a co-producer) as leads.It might have been more successful, perhaps, if directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants, The Way, Way Back) hadn’t stuck so slavishly to the original storyline about family Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is windblown, spare, taut, and sensual – a haunted seaside romantic drama, set in the 18th century, that makes most recent films and series dressed in period costumes seem like party-line effusions of empty style and social conservatism (Gentleman Jack excepted).Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s fiercely adult follow-up to her coming-of-age trilogy – Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), Girlhood (2014) – can be enjoyed simply as the story of two women falling torturously in love just before one of them enters an arranged marriage in pre-Revolutionary France. In terms Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2017, writer-director Eliza Hittman won over audiences with her beautiful coming-of-age drama Beach Rats. Her latest film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, is a more quietly devastating drama, shifting the focus away from sexual awakenings to a more politically charged arena.Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan) first appears as your average sullen 17-year-old of few words, living in a tightknit Pennsylvania town. Then we realise that her silence might have a reason. Jocks at a school talent show taunt her with cries of ‘slut!’ Her parents ignore this, just as they ignore her. Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Watching Dark Waters, the latest film from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven), I kept thinking — what’s the opposite of a love letter? The film is based on the work of Rob Bilott, a real-life lawyer who uncovered a corruption scandal so toxic that it was literally poisoning us. Dark Waters stars Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, and it functions as a dignified takedown of DuPont: the chemical giant responsible for the poison.This is a legal procedural that reads like a horror story. It’s Frankenstein-ish in its terrors. It opens with Bilott — partner at a corporate law firm — lured to his Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought us his 15-hour television opus. Both kept to the story’s original setting, focusing on a recently released convict caught in the swirl of the criminal underground and the groundswell of Nazism and Hitler’s ascent to power. Director Burhan Qurbani, who is of Afghan heritage and born in Germany, eschews the historical setting Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Italian journalist Roberto Saviano still lives in fear of his life 11 years after writing Gomorrah, which explores how criminal gangs use tax havens to launder money. “You make 100 million euros from trafficking cocaine or migrants,” he explains, “and you buy restaurants, hotels and houses legally, sell them to your offshore company then buy them back at a much higher price.” No-one else, it seems, has been willing to risk delving into the underlying causes of the housing crisis – until now, that is. Swedish director, Fredrik Gertten has achieved the almost impossible, making an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Lest anyone believe that Parasite was the only ground-breaking foreign language film of the past year, Céline Sciamma’s fourth feature, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, arrives to remind us otherwise. Like Parasite, it debuted in Cannes in 2019, where Sciamma won the Palme d’Or for best screenplay and the Queer Palm, a major award on the festival circuit honouring films for their treatment of LGBT themes. Sciamma’s first venture into period drama is set in 18th century Brittany and follows the love affair between a female artist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) Read more ...
graham.rickson
Though set in a handsomely-realised 1912, many of The Winslow Boy’s period details seem disconcertingly contemporary, from aggressive tabloid journalists doorstepping an unfortunate family to boorish behaviour in the Commons. There’s a very funny rant early on from patriarch Arthur Winslow (Cedric Hardwicke), complaining about his elder son Dickie’s insufferable musical tastes, in this case 78rpm records played on a huge wind-up gramophone. However this is a commendably sombre, serious film, adapted in 1948 from Terence Rattigan’s then-recent stage play and based, fairly faithfully, on an Read more ...