Film
Joseph Walsh
Recently, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder have found themselves in a career renaissance. Reeves has made a remarkable comeback as the dog-loving action-hero John Wick, while Ryder won audiences over as the grief-stricken mother, Joyce Byers, in Netflix’s 80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things.The prospect of the duo being reunited following their past on-screen appearances in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Scanner Darkly and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is more than enough to trigger audience interest. After all, for a time they were two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, who wouldn’t want to see them Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of the Pokémon franchise, bringing the video game’s cute critters into a live-action, film noir world, as Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) turns Holmes-hatted detective to help teenage human Tim (Justice Smith) find his apparently murdered dad. Their quest takes them through Ryme City, a utopia where Pokémon and people exist in perfect harmony, thanks to the beneficence of corporate chief Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy, whose Blofeld-like cat makes you doubt his motives early). The ensuing fight against corporate corruption of Pokémon-human relations is helped by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“You are not the cat. You are inside the cat.” This has to be one of the most memorable first lines you’ll hear this year, and it belongs to one of the most singular films, an American indie drama that charts a teenage girl’s efforts to navigate mental illness, troublesome adults and a burgeoning talent as an actress – all through a theatre process in which reality and fiction become dangerously interlinked. An initially puzzling title is, therefore, perfectly precise, as the young Madeline attempts to find her voice – to be her own person – amid the frantic demands of others. And Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Claire Denis's High Life is science fiction as a fever dream rather than a frenzy of ray guns and aliens. Our first contact is Monte (played by a gaunt Robert Pattinson); he’s alone on a rickety space ship, fixing the leaks in the hull, nurturing both the crops in the biosphere and his baby daughter, Willow. Pattinson is a mesmerising screen presence with his close-cropped skull and sharp-angled jaw; there’s real tenderness in the opening scenes where he interacts with the infant as her sole parent. But that idyll doesn’t last; Monte is the last survivor of a crew of murderers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the first feature film by Brazil-born director Joe Penna (previously best known for his hit YouTube channel MysteryGuitarMan), but you’d never have guessed. Clocking in at a crisp and chilly 98 minutes, Arctic is an immaculately controlled exploration of the theme of man versus the elements, assisted immeasurably by having Mads Mikkelsen as its protagonist, Overgård.In a largely dialogue-free movie, it’s actions and landscape which define the development of character and story. We first see Overgård as he scrapes and shovels heaps of snow and ice to create a giant SOS signal which he Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benedikt Erlingsson (b.1969) was already an established theatre director and actor in Iceland when he directed his debut film, Of Horses And Men, an uncategorisable blend of humour, romance and horror, set away from Reykjavik amongst stubbornly individual, isolated farmers. Its indelible first scene, when a proud horse-breeder parades his prize steed to his neighbours, only for another horny horse to leap a fence for a shag with the mortified owner still on board, making him then shoot his horse in the head, shows Erlingsson’s talent for tackling radical shifts in tone with dry nonchalance. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Why make a feature film about Ted Bundy, the notorious 1970s serial killer when you’ve already made Conversations with a Killer, a four-part factual series for Netflix about him? A charitable explanation would be that it offered documentarian Joe Berlinger a chance to explore aspects of the story that could only be told with drama. A more cynical explanation would be that features outsell documentaries at the box office. Zac Efron plays the law student turned rapist and murderer who became as infamous in America as Jack the Ripper in the UK. It's thought that he killed at least thirty Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Common to the recent spate of films about aspiring singers, the theme of fame’s corrupting influence is hardly new. However, actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux daringly freights this biographical sub-genre with cosmic significance, as he did the history movie with his 2015 directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader. Corbet gambles in likening celebrity crises with real-world catastrophes, but the implication that they stem from the same universal malaise strikes a chord.Vox Lux visits Celeste Montgomery in her early teens, when she is played by English actress Raffey Cassidy, and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
What is it about Nordic women and the environment? Hot on the heels of the London visit by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg – the most inspiring climate change campaigner since Al Gore – comes this timely, singular, enormously enjoyable comedy-drama from Iceland, whose heroine is another no-nonsense Nordic eco-warrior, albeit one with a very different modus operandi than young Greta. Halla (Halldóra Geirharosdóttir) is a middle-aged choir conductor, with a double life as an environmental activist whose exploits win her the moniker, ‘the mountain woman’. We first see her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who would have known that the word “Kubrickian” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year? You’d have thought that one of the great film directors of the 20th century would have earned his own epithet long ago. It’s taken a long time, too, for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition to reach his adopted homeland, and its current berth at London’s Design Museum – so long, in fact, that you might almost begin to wonder about prophets unhonoured and all that: the show opened originally in Frankfurt in 2004 and has been travelling the world, in one iteration or another, more or less ever since Read more ...
graham.rickson
The packaging suggests that Radu Jude’s Everybody In Our Family (Toată lumea din familia noastră) is a dark romp, one source describing it as a “chaotic yet endearing comedy chamber piece”. And no one would dispute the sheer craft on display, Jude’s hand-held camera capturing in real time a seismic family breakdown. The performances are magnificent, the direction brilliant, but watching this 2012 film is a gruelling experience. It was the third feature from the Romanian director, whose most recent work, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), brought him considerable Read more ...