Film
Joseph Walsh
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s new documentary, Honeyland, is a lament for a vanishing world. Captured with the delicacy of honeycomb, it focuses on the last wild beekeeper in Europe. Hatidze Muratova lives in rural Macedonia on a craggy farm without running water or electricity. Her ailing, aged mother, Nazife, is her only company. They may bicker, but there’s a great deal of love, shown in the way Hatidze spoon-feeds her yoghurt and honeycomb, or washes her hair over a basin. Despite the hardships of her lifestyle, Hatidze is content. She is the wild bee’s caretaker. As Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the fact that the Downton Abbey 2015 Christmas special wrapped the series up with a seemingly watertight bow, a cinema offering of Julian Fellowes’ much-loved creation was perhaps inevitable. And so virtually all of the series cast and a few new ones descend upon the fictitious Yorkshire pile for more misadventures upstairs and down. With no loose ends, Fellowes needed to devise a new dilemma to unite the Crawleys and the many staff who keep their privileged lives on track in 1927. Cue a letter from Buckingham Palace that heralds the imminent visit to Downton of King Read more ...
mark.kidel
Over two days in 1972, the great Aretha Franklin, undoubtedly one of the greatest American voices of the 20th century, performed and recorded gospel classics in Los Angeles, with a predominantly African-American audience, the red-hot Los Angeles Community Gospel Choir and the support of Rev James Cleveland. She was generally known for her soul classics, including “Say a Little Prayer”, “Think”, “Respect”, “I Never Loved a Man”, “Natural Woman” and many others, but she had grown up in the church under the tutelage of her father the Rev CL Franklin, one of Detroit’s most fiery preachers.Warners Read more ...
Owen Richards
Whoever thought of crossing the social conscience of Pride with the sporting acumen of Dodgeball? Out of this unlikely union comes The Shiny Shrimps, a joyous dive into the world of gay water polo. Though it follows your typical obscure sports underdog story, the layered characters and unflinching topics make the Shrimps a surprise package.After making homophobic remarks to a gay reporter, the national swimming team is making an example of Matthias Le Goff. If he wants to go to the World Championships, he must pay penance by coaching a gay sporting team. His chosen charges are the titular Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just two years after It Chapter One became the most successful horror film ever made, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is once again giving the American town of Derry absolutely nothing to laugh about. But this time around it’s audiences who may feel unable to enjoy the irony of a killer clown. For Chapter Two feels like a pointless, nay horrific case of déjà vu. Andy Muschietti’s decision to divide his adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel into two – the first part dealing with the characters as children, the second with their adult selves – initially seemed a strong Read more ...
graham.rickson
Seeing post-war London in vibrant colour is a delicious surprise, and the opening seconds of A Kid for Two Farthings follow a pigeon flying east from Trafalgar Square, eventually settling on a pub sign in Petticoat Lane. The location footage in Carol Reed’s first colour film, from 1955, is eye-popping, his cast mixing seamlessly with everyday market folk. Matthew Coniam’s booklet notes to this handsome BFI reissue reveal that a fake camera crew was deployed to distract from the real shooting. Reed mixes reality with nicely stylised studio sets: look out for the miniature tube train trundling Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The high, crackhead days of James Frey (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are over in five adrenalized minutes, as he dances naked to the Smashing Pumpkins, then tumbles insensibly backwards from a ledge. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s adaptation of Frey’s controversially fictionalised addiction memoir then focuses unsensationally on his recovery.“I’ve never seen this degree of degradation in someone so young,” a doctor intones. James’s battered face is further, outward testament that any backsliding will be fatal. Taylor-Johnson emphasises redemption over that degradation, in the sunlit corridors of a rehab Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear (Ucho) begins innocently enough with an affluent couple’s petty squabbles after a boozy night out. He can’t find the house keys and she’s desperate for the toilet. He’s distracted, and she accuses him of having neglected her. Josef Illík’s sharp monochrome photography gleams, recalling classic noir thrillers. The mood darkens once Radoslav Brzobohatý’s Ludvik shimmies over the garden wall and discovers that the couple’s home has been broken into: spare keys are missing, there’s no power, and the phone is dead. That Ludvik and Anna (Jirina Bohdalová, pictured below with Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Forty years after Alien made a star out of Sigourney Weaver, comes a documentary that goes into forensic detail about the movie’s original writer and monstrous imagery but barely mentions its lead actor despite the fact that her portrayal of Ripley broke all the stereotypes of women in sci-fi. The omission is a little baffling, but for superfans of Alien, the kind who pore over its different iterations (it’s probably the only film that runs shorter in its director’s cut) and delight in spotting every visual reference, there are plenty of pleasures to be had in Memory: the Origins of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Joanna Hogg’s melancholy autobiographical drama The Souvenir cuts too close to the bone. That’s a compliment: like Sally Rooney’s equally unsettling first novel Conversations With Friends, Hogg’s movie almost forces the viewer to relive that shattering early romance, founded on collusion and self-delusion, that reordered her or his universe for all time.Like Conversations With Friends, too, The Souvenir, set in the first half of the 1980s, depicts a young woman’s affair with a withholding older man. Whereas Rooney’s protagonist Frances is a poor Dublin undergraduate enmeshed with a married Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If it wasn’t for bad luck, Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) wouldn’t have any luck at all. Being an Iraq special forces veteran jailed for protecting his wife in a bar fight seems wretched karma enough. Released as an undercover informant on the Polish mob for FBI handler Wilcox (Rosamund Pike), his bid to secure real freedom with his family is then kiboshed when a similarly clandestine New York cop is killed by his gangster partner.In return for such unwanted heat, both Polish kingpin the General (Eugene Lipinski) and Wilcox insist that Koslow re-enter his brutally corrupt alma mater, Bale Hill Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the occult is nothing new. But, as Hail Satan? demonstrates, today’s worshippers of Lucifer are closer to being humanist activists involved in performance art and fighting for religious pluralism than they are the black robed, goat sacrificing clichés that are populated in the media. At the not-so-black heart of the documentary is Lucien Greeves, who Read more ...