Film
Demetrios Matheou
Marriage Story, shown at the London Film Festival, feels like an instant classic, that intimate, tangible, resonant kind of classic that touches a chord with almost anyone. It’s not just a film about a divorce, but that added nightmare of a divorce with kids involved, and the yet more despairing experience of separating when there is still love. And it’s heart-breaking.It’s also funny, smart and, perhaps most significantly, balanced. As accomplished as the Oscar-laden Kramer v Kramer was, in 1979, one couldn’t help feeling that the cards were unfairly stacked against Meryl Streep’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sienna Miller’s career has been short on leading roles, though she excelled in the TV drama The Girl and has notched up some memorable supporting roles. However, if there’s any justice, her commanding and deeply-felt performance in American Woman should move her career up a gear.She plays Deb, a single mother in blue-collar Pennsylvania struggling to pay the bills by working as a waitress, while bringing up her teenage daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira). Her relationship with a married man gives her nothing except lurid sexual gratification and horrifies her deeply religious mother (Amy Madigan Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There used to be this myth that we knew nothing about the concentration camps until the victors opened their gates in 1945, and that the survivors were then nursed back to health. The Russians put out newsreels filmed weeks later of nurses tending to the children of Auschwitz, but the reality was that many had already been marched by the Nazis in the final stages of the war to camps like Gross-Rosen in south western Poland. And often when they were liberated, those children became just more human flotsam in the displaced persons camps that scarred Poland and Germany for years after the war Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A labour of love for its co-writer, producer and star Joel Edgerton, The King (showing at London Film Festival) is derived from Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V plays, but isn’t slavishly bound to them. If it were, Edgerton would have lost a major chunk of his role as Falstaff, who, rather than having his death reported by Mistress Quickly in Eastcheap, accompanies Henry V on his expedition to France as his trusted confidant.The screenplay, by Edgerton and director David Michôd, is determined not to be Shakespearean, though contrives to smuggle in some antique-sounding heft while not Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dolly Wells’ directorial debut employs her best friend Emily Mortimer as reclusive writer Julia Price, having paired up previously in a TV satire of their professionally uneven relationship, Doll and Em. Mortimer cameos this time, as posh twentysomething slacker Lilian (Grace Van Patten) comes to stay at her Brooklyn brownstone and, undeterred by never having opened a Price book or watched a documentary, surreptitiously begins a film about her enigmatic host.Frosty Julia and the tenant she calls a “lazy, entitled oaf” gradually soften each other’s edges. In a conceit happily forced on Wells Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“She sang from her soul,” Judy Garland’s youngest daughter, Lorna Luft, once said of her world-renowned mum. So it’s right to give the role of this legendary entertainer to Renée Zellweger, an actress who, in the new biopic Judy, acts from her soul. There may be people out there (Tracie Bennett for one, who played Garland in the London and Broadway stage play by Peter Quilter on which this film is based), who approximate those singular vocals more precisely, but it’s difficult to imagine a more empathic meeting of modern-day screen star and ongoing icon. The early Oscar buzz in this instance Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Joker won the Golden Lion in Venice in September, it was an unprecedented achievement, the first time a comic book-related film had won such a prestigious prize. But then, isn’t your typical comic book film. Starring a phenomenal Joaquin Phoenix, it’s seriously themed, brilliantly executed and quite extraordinary. We’ve seen many Jokers, including memorable turns by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, so it’s not unreasonable to wonder why we’d need another. One reason is that this is a Joker without his Batman, or any superhero trappings; another, that the ‘origin story’ is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown label in Detroit in 1959, borrowed his star-maker machinery from the car assembly line. When he worked at the Lincoln-Mercury plant he was inspired by how a bare metal frame would emerge as brand new car. “What a great idea! Maybe I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.”That process worked. Motown became the largest black-owned business in America. This joyful 60th anniversary documentary by British directors Ben and Gabe Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Putting a radical spin on a fish-out-of-water story, The Last Tree explores troubling aspects of the African diaspora experience in an England riddled with xenophobia and black-on-black racism. Shola Amoo’s semi-autobiographical second feature is distanced from Brexit by its early 2000s time frame, but its young protagonist’s identity issues speak to the current moment.The film begins with a sunlit idyll in the Lincolnshire countryside. An 11-year-old British Nigerian, Femi (Tai Golding) runs around outdoors and gets “all over mud” with his three schoolmates – but for the colour of his skin Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Ever since Latin American cinema re-emerged in the 1990s from years in the shadow of dictatorships, films have been distinguished by a number of trends, including dramas about the dictatorship years and the social and psychological consequences; social and family dramas; the experience of young people; the quirks and characters of everyday life. All of these themes were represented – still fresh, relevant and exciting – in San Sebastian, that preeminent annual shop window for the region’s films. Among the very best was the drama Pacified. Directed by Paxton Winters, this follows in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When cinema isn’t revering the greats of the art world, it’s usually debunking the superficiality and immorality of the power brokers of the business. On the one hand Eternity’s Gate, on the other, The Square.The Burnt Orange Heresy falls into the latter category. Adapted from the novel by Charles Willeford, it relates the ruthless ends to which an art critic will go to keep his career afloat, while debating such broad stroke notions as truth, artistic integrity, the validity of criticism and its power – for good or ill – to shape people’s opinions. It also happens to star Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Equal measures class system satire and Scream or Saw genre knockoff, Ready or Not is entirely appalling, except perhaps to those forgiving hipsters in the crowd who will view its ineptitude as some deliberate "meta" statement all its own. Nonsensical on virtually every level and as badly acted as it is written and directed, this celluloid amalgam of comedy and horror wears its coolness on a distinctly blood-spattered sleeve: my sympathies go out to all involved. The fast-rising Australian actress-model Samara Weaving (pictured below) stars as the about-to-be-married Grace, who has Read more ...