Film
Owen Richards
There were some early warning signs that A Faithful Man might be another box-ticking French romcom. The poster of two women kissing one man, his bemused look in the middle. The lethargic narration referencing childhood and the mysteries of the female mind. Here we go again. But director, writer and star Louis Garrel (pictured above left) subverts expectations just enough to make this French fancy stand out from the pack.Abel (Garrel) is caught off guard by his girlfriend Marianne (Laetitia Casta, pictured below right) when she announces she’s pregnant. For you see, it’s not his. It’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Guillermo del Toro considered directing this adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s bestselling campfire tales, and his sensibility can still be discerned in its kind sort of fantasy and concern with outsiders. He finally settled for producing, and turning Schwartz’s beloved, gory stories into incidents within a wider saga about the sort of American high school kids who read them, rather than an anthology film (a horror format with rotten box-office form).It’s Halloween, 1968, with Vietnam at its height, Nixon about to be elected, and "Season of the Witch" on the radio. The screenplay tries to tie a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Almodovar who made his name as an all-out provocateur in the Eighties considers that wild art’s becalmed far side, in this quietly wonderful meditation on where it’s left him. Antonio Banderas leads familiar faces from throughout his career with an atypically quiet, Cannes prize-winning performance as Salvador Mallo, a world-famous, gay Spanish director who’s seemingly washed up. Where the template for such films, Fellini’s 8½, was a pyrotechnic investigation of a stalled auteur at work, Pain and Glory is about the rest of a filmmaker’s life: the silences and stasis between films, when Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) was the Australian New Wave film that most rigorously confronted the cataclysmic effect of British and Irish colonisation on the country’s Aboriginal people. It helped pave the way for such 21st century racial dramas as indigenous director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.Schepisi adapted it from Thomas Keneally’s 1972 novel, which looked beyond the Aboriginal genocide to the tragedy of attempted black assimilation in the whitefellas’ culture. Jimmie was based by Keneally on Jimmy Read more ...
Saskia Baron
If you’re looking for escapism from anxieties about Brexit, the worldwide refugee crisis and rising authoritarianism, Christian Petzold’s Transit is not going to provide comfort. Adapted from Anna Segher’s 1944 novel about a Jewish writer fleeing incarceration in Germany and trying to get passage to Mexico, this is a wholly original take on the Holocaust genre.Eschewing period costumes and art direction, Transit is an existential thriller filmed in present day France with Nazi uniforms replaced by police body armour. Georg (a mesmeric Franz Rogowski) sees a way to flee by taking on the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Quentin Tarantino’s made a big deal of this being his ninth film, while heralding his retirement after number 10 with the sort of nostalgic fandom he’s always ladled over his favourite directors and stars. Such self-consciousness (if not self-aggrandisement) is risky, because you’ve really got to deliver. Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood isn’t the masterpiece that some are claiming; it’s too rambling, self-indulgent and – despite a typically grand guignol ending – anti-climactic for that. But it is an evocative and entertaining paean to the Los Angeles of the filmmaker’s youth, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I became JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film skims the surface of the sensational literary hoax of the early 2000s, that far-off time before avatars, gender fluidity and fake online identity were part of everyday life.Kristen Stewart, with her own queer identity as a background hum, is a fine, understated match for the role of the androgynous Knoop, who was roped in by her sister-in-law, 40-year-old author Laura Albert (a harsh, one-note Laura Dern) to play LeRoy at literary events and parties. This is Knoop's side of the story, set in San Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ashley Joiner’s expansive documentary Are You Proud? opens with the testament of a redoubtable nonagenarian remembering his experiences as a gay man in World War II. Though followed by the admission that he had to live his later life as a lie, it’s told with considerable humour and concludes with a question – “How can you be criminalised for being born the way you are?” – to which the larger part of UK society would surely today reply with a degree of understanding.Whether it’s such tentative early moves towards reform – how good Fergus O’Brien’s 2017 film Against the Law was in bringing that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Modern children’s films wink knowingly over kids’ heads at their paying parents, as with the Lego movies’ rapid-fire pop-culture salvos. Lino DiSalvo (Disney’s Head of Animation for Frozen) could have sulked upon receiving the apparent short straw of rival Playmobil’s toys for his directorial debut. Instead, he finds modest charm in a simpler childhood world. The live-action opening sees 18-year-old Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy) break into Disney-style song while delighting her 6-year-old brother Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) with adventurous possibilities, only for an especially perfunctory Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Filmmakers have an obsession with the music world that is beginning to seem unhealthy. In quick succession we’ve had two Abba musicals, biopics of Freddie Mercury and Elton John, A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and the Beatles fantasy Yesterday, most of which feel pretty B-side. Blinded by the Light does deserve a pressing, even if it pushes its luck. Directed by Gurindha Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), it’s a strange animal, a hybrid of coming-of age drama, comedy and musical, with a novel way of appropriating a music icon – in that the biography isn’t of the star Read more ...
Tom Baily
First-time collaborators Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell have tried to divert from the standard media narrative by looking at Gaza from the viewpoint of its inhabitants. The result is an observant documentary that attempts to avoid politics by collecting first-hand portraits, or what the directors call a “tapestry of characters”. Honesty, candour and hope abound, but hostility is never far away.There is a free-floating and casual mood to this film. The creators’ mission is clear: to sit back and let the people speak. For most of the film, we witness the ordinary, often mundane details of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Don’t Look Now is beautiful in its dankness – an eldritch psychological thriller that follows a grieving father’s stream-of-consciousness as it flows into deadly waters. Time Out 's critics have been magnanimous in twice voting Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Britain's greatest, but it sustains its power as a modernist conundrum. Spiffed up in 4K and Ultra HD for the four-disc set, it's one of 2019's homevideo treats.Allan Scott and Chris Bryant adapted the screenplay from a short story published as part of a Daphne du Maurier collection in 1971. Wearing a shiny red plastic mac, Christine, the Read more ...