Film
Joseph Walsh
Every year the Cannes Film Festival is a swirl of chaos, excitement, and controversy. Last year, the festival had a markedly different feel. Gone were the big starry names. Replacing them were less glitzy films that were given a chance to shine.There were delights like the monochrome wonder that was Cold War from Paweł Pawlikowski, and the magical-realist fable Happy as Lazarro from Alice Rohrwacher. Both directors are back again this year, sitting on the competition jury headed up by The Revenant director Alejandro González Iñárritu, alongside Elle Fanning, Yorgos Lanthimos, Enki Bilal, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a touch of Fellini’s 8 ½ in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. It’s a forlorn, confessional tale, with Antonio Banderas starring as Salvador Mallo, a director in the latter stages of his career. His character acts as a cypher for Almodóvar, allowing him to wrestle with themes of love, loss, and addiction.Mallo is in a rut, unable to write or direct due to numerous ailments that plague him, from migraines to back pain. He’s been asked to attend a retrospective screening of his one of his films. This event leads to him being reunited with the film’s star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia). They had Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It would be great to herald this low-budget drama about an elderly drag queen and his friendship with a young gay singer-songwriter as a little gem of British indie cinema. But Tucked, which aims to be an odd-couple tale of heart-warming redemption, is pretty dispiriting with its slow pace and predictable plot. We first meet Jackie belting out ‘I Will Survive’ wearing inch thick make-up and heels. He's telling tired, misanthropic jokes about sex in a nightclub. He's the oldest tranny in town and even before the titles appear, he's being told that he has terminal cancer and weeks to Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ken Loach could make a film more heart-wrenching than I, Daniel Blake? His new feature, co-written with his long-standing collaborator Paul Laverty, is a raw, angry and utterly uncompromising drama, showing that, for all the appeal of the gig-economy, the reality is much grimmer.Loach insightfully captures British working-class life with his own brand of politically charged righteousness, waking us up to the suffering and exploitation of an invisible workforce. As has been the case with many of his latter-day features, Loach crafts rounded characters, making them Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Do you know why I’m respected?” demands Ursula (Carmiña Martinez), a Wayuu matriarch in La Guajira in northern Colombia, of Rapayet (José Acosta), who wants to marry her daughter Zaida (Natalia Reyes, soon to star in James Cameron’s Terminator reboot). “Because I’m capable of anything for my family and my clan.”Directed by Ciro Guerra and his ex-wife Cristina Gallego – their Embrace of the Serpent, in which he directed and she produced, was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 – the mesmerisingly beautiful Birds of Passage covers the decades between 1960 and 1980 and the bonanza marimbera era of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.The narrative picks up where 2017’s John Wick: Chapter 2 left off, with Wick declared “excommunicado” by the crime lords of the High Table and running for his life through New York City as massed assassins queue up to kill him and collect the $14m reward. Drolly, the killers Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Publishable, but worth it?” EM Forster’s hesitations about the value of Maurice, his novel of Edwardian homosexuality – written in 1913-14, it was published only posthumously, in 1971 – were certainly redeemed by James Ivory’s 1987 film of the book. Even if, typically, the only place where it wasn’t really well received was in its home territory, the UK: reactions elsewhere, from the Venice Film Festival where stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant shared the Best Actor award, through to distribution in France, where it apparently played for a year, were far more enthusiastic. But if any doubts Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Achingly nostalgic for rave culture, Beats will likely appeal to anyone whose formative experience of ardent friendships and communal joy peaked in a transcendent musical setting with or without the help of Ecstasy.Director Brian Welsh’s Scottish film, larky though it is in places, packs a greater social punch than such previous rave movies as Human Traffic (1999), Groove (2000), and Eden (2014). It was expanded by Welsh and Kieron Hurley from the latter’s 2012 play. Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and his best mate Spanner (Lorn MacDonald), techno-obsessed 15-year-olds living in a dying industrial Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“The world is perfect. Appreciate the details” says a WU-PS driver played by RZA, in Jim Jarmusch’s gleefully meta zombie-comedy that has just opened the Cannes Film Festival. It’s good advice. Jarmusch’s latest work is a finely tuned, deadpan comedy that pulls no punches in sending up the clichés of the horror genre.At the centre of the story are three bespectacled small-town cops, played by Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny. Their dull daily routine of managing minor local disputes is interrupted by news that the earth has shifted on its axis (due to polar fracking). A local wild Read more ...
graham.rickson
Life in rural 19th century Estonia looks hard. The ice and the squalor are tough enough, but then you’ve the kratts to contend with. We see one in the eye-popping opening sequence of Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 epic November, an unsettling creature cobbled from bits of wood, random tools and an animal skull. Resembling something thrown together by the Brothers Quay, this one’s on a mission, capturing a terrified cow and taking flight like a steampunk drone. In Estonian folklore, kratts can be given life if you offer three drops of blood to the Devil; the snag being that he now owns your soul.This is Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Imagine Cristiano Ronaldo, virtuosity intact, as buffed, blinged, and coiffed as ever, but with the sophistication and sexual maturity of an average seven-year-old, and you have a fair idea of Diamantino’s protagonist.If that sounds like this barmy Portuguese satire trashes the nation’s sleek football idol, it’s not quite the case. Yes, Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta, main picture) sees giant fluffy puppies frolicking in pink clouds when he dribbles toward the opposition goal, plus his duvet cover bears his image, but he dotes on both his old dad and his black kitten Mittens, and he has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This third version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ yarn of rival, class-warring con artists on the French Riviera is just something for Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson to do till a better gig comes along. The concept goes no higher than teaming them up, the execution considerably lower.The plot slavishly follows Michael Caine and Steve Martin’s 1988 Scoundrels duel, as crude Aussie Penny (Wilson) elbows into the well-appointed hunting-ground of sophisticated, English Josephine (Hathaway, pictured below). Josephine nonsensically attempts to oust the interloper by inviting her in, and seeing who can Read more ...