Film
Joseph Walsh
Midway through John Crowley’s The Goldfinch, a character compares a reproduction antique with the real deal. “The new one is flat dead,” he says. He might as well be talking about the movie.On paper, John Crowley’s adaption of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has all the right ingredients to be an early awards contender. Firstly, there’s the novel. It may have divided snootier critics, but is adored by legions of readers. A Dickensian tale that stretches nearly 800 pages, it tackles grief, terrorism and drug addiction, all set within the romance of the art world. Then there’s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like recent films about the Anders Breivik terror attacks in Norway, Hotel Mumbai unavoidably raises questions of taste. Do audiences really need to be subjected to harrowing recreations of real-life suffering, when the events themselves are still fresh? However it does offer one very moving justification, which is to honour the courage that invariably surfaces during such carnage.The 2008 assault on Mumbai lasted three nights and involved a number of targets. After covering the first, devastating attacks on a train station and a restaurant, director Anthony Maras enters the doors Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With The Laundromat Steven Soderbergh is trying to do for the Panama Papers what The Big Short did for the 2008 financial crash, namely offer an entertaining mix of explanation, exposé, black comedy and righteous anger. Sadly, it doesn’t come close. Soderbergh is an intelligent filmmaker, adept at tackling complicated, global issues (Traffik) and righting wrongs (Erin Brockovich). He’d seem a perfect fit for the whistle-blowing scandal in 2015 that blew the lid off billions of dollars of tax evasion, conducted on behalf of the rich and powerful through the use of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Proxima is a very special, very beautiful space movie, one of those that are more concerned with the bread-and-butter reality of getting people into space – practically, emotionally, psychologically – than with the starry shenanigans themselves. Think The Right Stuff, the Eighties classic charting the dawn of America's space programme, only this time with a female astronaut battling both sexism and the emotional ties of motherhood on the way to the launchpad. Written and directed by France's Alice Winocour and with Eva Green giving an Oscar-worthy performance in the lead, this Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The canonical town-taming Western High Noon brought Gary Cooper the 1952 Academy Award for Best Actor (his second). It also won Oscars for Best Editing, Best Score, and Best Song, Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’” – throbbingly sung by Tex Ritter, whose voice combines with ticking clocks and real-time pacing to make Fred Zinnemann’s film unbearably tense.But for the rabid anti-Communist campaigning of Hollywood hawks like John Wayne and columnist Hedda Hopper, High Noon might have also claimed Oscars for nominees Zinnemann, producer Stanley Kramer (Best Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The cancer weepie is knocked off its tear-jerking axis by Lulu Wang’s sly and heartfelt autobiographical tale. Drawing on the first-generation immigrant, internal culture-clash she experienced after her Chinese grandmother’s terminal diagnosis, and the absurdly elaborate lengths their family went to hide it from her, The Farewell is a funeral-com with a fable-like structure, and a highly personal tone. Billi (rapper-actor Awkwafina) is Wang’s alter ego, a 30-year-old, Chinese-American scuffling writer, who we first see on the phone telling relentless, reassuring white lies about her New Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been a number of excellent science fiction films of late – Gravity, The Martian, Annihilation among them. But Ad Astra may be the most complete and profound addition to the genre since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s masterwork has set the bar for 50 years now and its proposition – from prehistoric ape to star child – remains in a league of its own for imaginative bravura. So it’s striking to what extent the new film, directed by indie stalwart James Gray and starring a scintillating Brad Pitt, has similar ambitions and narrative trajectory Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Three women decide to take over their husbands’ criminal activities, proving more than a match for the men who dominate the underworld. If this outline of The Kitchen sounds familiar, it’s because it was just last year that Steve McQueen’s lauded crime thriller Widows had much the same premise. That said, screenwriter Andrea Berloff’s first film as a director is a very different animal, far less polished but an entertaining thriller in its own right.The differences are instructive. Widows was based on a highly regarded British TV series, relocated to contemporary Read more ...
Graham Fuller
People who idly use the phrase “it’s like living in a war zone” when considering their domestic mess should see Waad al-Kateab’s documentary For Sama.Everyone should see it, in fact. Waad lived in a terrifying war zone – besieged East Aleppo in Syria – and saw babies, children, and adults killed daily as she, her doctor husband Hamza, and their neighbours attempted to go on with their lives as part of the rebel population opposed to Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship. They were inches from death every second. Among friends who perished were the paediatrician who delivered Waad’s first Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You’re so meticulous,” says Astrid (Maria Bonnevie) to her teenage daughter Jill (impressive newcomer Yvla Bjørkaas Thedin) as they create a batik artwork together at the kitchen table. Little son Bo (Casper Falck-Løvås) looks on as he munches a jam sandwich. A happy domestic scene? Anything but. “Meticulous” isn’t even really a compliment, coming from this chaotic, mentally fragile mother.This is Norwegian writer/director Camilla Strøm Henriksen’s first feature film (she’s working now on episodes of the TV series Occupied) and she has extracted remarkable performances from these young Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Shock of the Future is for anyone who's watched a music biopic and thought "that's not how it works!" Directed and co-written by Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague fame, it's perhaps the most realisitic film about recording music ever made. But as anyone who's ever been in the studio will tell you, the legends are much more exciting than the reality.Alma Jodorwsky plays Ana, an aspiring synth wave sensation. She spends her day (which takes up the entire length of the film) in a friend's flat that she's sitting, along with his huge collection of synthesisers, keyboards and recording equipment. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When did Dorothy (Constance Wu) really want to be a stripper? Maybe it’s when she looks with love at Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) during her strutting set piece dance, as she descends to a carpet of cash. If that’s the equivalent of Ray Liotta’s gangster gliding to the best table in Goodfellas, Hustlers is more accurately the Casino of stripper films, sociological and historical, but never salacious, in its depiction of an outré life. Set around the 2008 financial crash, Lorene Scafaria’s film shows how the women’s “side-hustles” with Wall Street clients slipped into drugging them and directly Read more ...