Film
James Saynor
Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more successful examples of such retrofitting of the past.Filmmakers usually try to frame someone back then as a modern protagonist with a modern agenda, even though few of those old-timers can be photoshopped into that. So here comes Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, presented as something of a pre-potato feminist icon in Firebrand, a movie from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Though among the most successful film comedians of the early sound era, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s cinematic partnership had actually started in the early 1920s. It’s easy to overlook their silent short films, 15 of which are collected here.The oldest, 1921’s Lucky Dog, is an entertaining curio, a starring vehicle for Laurel’s Keatonesque naif with Ollie in a subordinate role as a hapless thug. Stan’s athleticism is impressive, whether he’s being struck by a streetcar or sneaking into a dog show on all fours, and there’s a winning turn from the titular canine. Both actors signed contracts Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Paradise Is Burning is one of those films that appears to be designed to convince the outside world that Sweden isn’t all IKEA interiors and ABBA sing-alongs. There are blissful long summer days spent in pine forests and plenty of lithe-limbed girls, but the focus here is on a social underclass that Ingmar Bergman rarely filmed.Set in a suburban town near Gothenberg, the movie is the story of three sisters with an absentee mother. Laura (Bianca Delbravo), the oldest at 16, knows that the local authorities will take 12-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and six-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg) into Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Every actor has their own take on what acting means to them, which will include the chance to occupy personalities more interesting than their own, or to shed their inhibitions, or simply the pleasure of ‘play’. A character in Sing Sing, an inmate who has joined the high security prison’s acting group, puts it more profoundly: “We’re here to become human again,” he cries, “to put on nice clothes and dance around and enjoy the things that [are] not in our reality.” This stirringly atypical addition to the prison genre is largely about the power of art to change lives, in this Read more ...
James Saynor
We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops in on.But the dusty badlands where the Eastwoodian protagonist touches down in Black Dog is in the north-west of China in 2008, and this is a Chinese film from director Guan Hu, maker of patriotic action movies like The Eight Hundred (2020). So how far will his new film go in showing a backwater of his modernising country as a bad-ass dead zone? Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'
Adam Sweeting
Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre in his home town of Liverpool (where he was born in June 1964), Morrissey has amassed a huge list of credits on stage and in TV and film, and if you can judge an actor by the writers, directors and fellow-thesps he’s worked with, Morrissey has achieved triple-A status. Mind you, one of his proudest achievements was being invited by his beloved Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.This is unnerving to those of us brought up on old-school public broadcast TV where the rule was that even when what the director had put on screen was obviously a reenactment, a caption indicating "dramatic reconstruction" was obligatory. Not only did that mealy-mouthed phrase clutter the image, no matter which arty font was used, it also broke the viewer’s full engagement with the moment, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The book by Tilar Mazzeo on which Thomas Napper's film is based is subtitled “The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled it”, though one suspects that the life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was a little less Mills & Boon-ish than the version seen here.Nonetheless, the film is an enjoyable romp through the picturesque vineyards around Reims during the turbulent days of the Napoleonic wars, as Barbe marries François Clicquot and finds herself faced with a historic choice.Barbe is played by Haley Bennett (also one of the producers) as a woman who gradually reveals hidden depths and Read more ...
Justine Elias
Strange noises fill the crisp nighttime air in a small Alpine village: Avian shrieks and some wild beast a-rustling in the hedgerows – or are those the screams of a desperate woman?Into the strange, scary, funny world of Cuckoo comes a British-American family that has upped sticks and packed the entire household – dad, stepmom, and little daughter – to rural Bavaria, where the father will be renovating the local spa-resort.Dragged along is the dad’s elder daughter from a previous marriage. That’s Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a gangly punk rocker, yearning for her California home and her old Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An old woman, inexplicably known as Granny Four, is murdered by a river on the outskirts of a Chinese rural town. A respected detective is put in charge of the investigation, with the weight of his department’s reputation on his shoulders. But this a murky, twisty case that opens and closes with such regularity that it begins to threaten the man’s sanity. Adapted from a short story, on the surface Wei Shujun’s film is a combination of police procedural with film noir, shot with flair and imagination, and imbued with an offbeat sense of humour and appropriately downbeat sensibility. Yet Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In space no one can hear you scream, but they usually can in a cinema. Wednesday night’s gala launch of Alien: Romulus was awash with the gussied-up cast and writer-director Fede Álvarez, alongside assorted Olympians and influencers walking the red carpet.A more enthusiastic audience would have been hard to find, but apart from an auditorium-wide laugh at the reprise of a beloved line from Aliens, there weren’t a lot of gasps, and there were no screams at all. Touted as a return to the original film’s grunge aesthetic and practical effects, Alien: Romulus set itself up for comparison and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Nash’at is either very brave or slightly unhinged. His debut full-length documentary is an account of a year he spent in Afghanistan with the Taliban, after they’d taken control of the country at the end of August 2021, following the catastrophically inept evacuation of US and NATO forces.Nash’at described his pitch to the Taliban like this: “I went in and I said, ‘I would like to show the world your image without putting my own point of view on it. Whatever I will see, I will try to show’.” It’s a fascinating premise, but the film is ultimately frustrating because Read more ...